Ready. Aim. Fire!
As the story goes, during the late 18th century, English military officers would sometimes, in letters home to their families, refer to a rough day shooting was like “going sniping”. You see, there’s a bird called a Snipe. These birds are apparently well camouflaged, fast, and have an erratic flight pattern that makes them enormously difficult to hunt. It took a skilled marksman to shoot a snipe in flight with a flintlock rifle and such an accomplishment was highly regarded as a well-above-average skill.
During the American Revolutionary War, Colonists would hide in the woods and shoot British officers from a considerable distance and without detection (though I’m not sure how the loud, percussive, “BANG” from a flintlock rifle could go undetected for long). This was sometimes likened to hunting snipe or…you guessed it, sniping. But the term “sniper” didn’t really catch on until the press published it during the early months of the first World War.
Today, military snipers are among the most revered and feared operators on the battlefield with a broad set of highly honed skills that make them a force multiplier. Superior marksmen, today’s snipers are highly trained at stealth, stalking, camouflage, reconnaissance, target acquisition, and more. They are frequently deployed only with what they can carry and their survival depends on their training, ingenuity, decision making, patience, nerves of steel, and their ability to make every shot count.
For us, as marketers, we must frequently operate like snipers. We must make the most of the sometimes limited resources we have, use the tools and landscape around us to our advantage, and quickly adjust to changing conditions. We must be able to quickly and accurately identify our targets and position ourselves for the best chance at success. We have to understand inherent challenges, barriers and other influences like military snipers calculate for windage, elevation, distance, humidity, the Coriolis Effect, and other factors. We need to remain creative, curious, nimble and must be able to reload quickly and fire again if we’ve missed our mark.
