Obstructive Marketing: Restricting Distribution of Products and Services in the Age of Asymmetric Warfare

In Obstructive Marketing, Maitland Hyslop deals with a very negative kind of activity which embraces activities, legal or otherwise, designed to prevent or restrict the distribution of a product or service, temporarily or permanently, against the wishes of the product manufacturer, service provider or customer. When the author defined this phenomenon as Obstructive Marketing and started to research it more than a decade ago, it was seen as a valid concept that was perhaps ahead of its time. The World has moved on and in the era of globalization a study of this negative aspect of marketing is now required. Obstructive Marketing is now seen as the business equivalent of asymmetric warfare, which is increasingly understood because the rise of the South and East at the expense of the North and West has brought some Obstructive Marketing stratagems into sharp focus. Using the author's own research, this book explains what Obstructive Marketing is and why it is not called Anti-Marketing. The author explains who practises Obstructive Marketing, where, when and how; and why businesses are particularly vulnerable when entering new markets and engaging in change and innovation. Intriguing concepts such as cultural risk are illuminated along with formal links between Obstructive Marketing, asymmetric warfare and terrorism. This all leads to identification of the need for a strong Government/Business partnership to counter the effects of this darkest kind of marketing.

Maitland Hyslop is Chief Executive of Microdat Limited, Executive Director of the Disaster and Development Centre Online, a Non-Executive Director of EPX Technical Services Limited, Managing Director of Durham Consulting Group, Director of Reiver Marketing Limited and Northumbria Publishing Limited. He has held other senior positions in the public and private sectors and was an Army officer; a paratrooper and logistician with combat and anti-terrorism experience. Maitland has a PhD in Organisational Security, an MSc in International Marketing, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies (Durham) and a BA in Geography (Durham). He is author of Springer’s ’Critical Information Infrastructure: Resilience and Protection’; was a Telecommunications Security Research Fellow at Northumbria University, a Charter Member of Institute of Information Protection (Homeland Security) at Dartmouth, USA and a working group member for the European Network Information and Security Agency.