What Non-Violent Revolutions Can Teach Us About Marketing
Nonviolent resistance campaigns are nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts, so we might benefit from learning their strategies.
Srdja Popovic was a self-proclaimed too-cool-to-care bass guitarist who was bar-hopping Belgrade before he became an unlikely leader of Otpor! the non-violent movement that toppled Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Popovic has since led a life training other non-violent revolutionaries from around the world through his organization CANVAS. His life mission is to equip non-violent revolutionaries in pursuit of democracy with a strategy to overthrow oppressive regimes.
Not to sell things.
But, when reading his book, Blueprint For Revolution, I admired the marketing tactics that his organization, Otpor! deployed to activate the mighty force of “people power.”
It is completely insensitive to compare a non-violent revolution to a marketing campaign, I will not do that. What I will do is extract the principles of marketing that Otpor! and other successful nonviolent movements from history have used.
“Believing that change…
