Marketing in theaters of operation.

A friend sent me this Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung outlining a Rand Corporation study commissioned by the United States Joint Forces Command. Titled “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation,” the report considers the U.S. military and even U.S. foreign policy in a branding context. For your light bedtime reading and to facilitate the emptying of your printer cartridge, here’s the 241-page PDF.

The management of perception, the struggle for “hearts and minds,” is nothing new, though I didn’t consider the broad cultural context of these efforts in modern times until I watched “Century of the Self,” the BBC documentary cited a few weeks back at Hee-hawMarketing. In it we learn about Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, and his role as the father of public relations (and many persuasion tactics still in use today) in the twentieth century.

Despite this history, there is still something a little unexpected when the word “brand” is applied to a country, a military effort or any similar grand institution.

In the popular title The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Reis and Jack Trout, which a good friend sent to me lately, there are several quotes that might explain an instinctual uneasiness with marketing practices applied to such grand concepts as democracy or international armed conflict. Here’s one:

More money is wasted in marketing than in any other human activity (outside of government activities, of course.)

But it’s not fair to take this out of context. The authors were simply pointing out that throwing money at a problem is no guarantee that it will be solved. (Yet some elected figures still think they’re making headway on an issue when they announce “We’re spending [insert gigantic sum here] on [insert important issue here.])

First I suspected that my vague apprehension stemmed from the perception-versus-reality argument of who is in control of what’s in our heads. Most of us are more comfortable with the idea that we’re in control of forming our own opinions.

Again from The 22 Immutable Laws:

People cling firmly to the belief that reality is the world outside of the mind and that the individual is one small speck on the global spaceship. Actually, it’s the opposite. The only reality you can be sure about is in your own perceptions. If the universe exists, it exists inside your own mind and the minds of others. That’s the reality marketing programs must deal with…Marketing is a manipulation of these perceptions.

Thousands of marketing efforts constantly strive  to manipulate our perceptions of brands. and we  may even appreciate them if they entertain us or provide us with information we think is valuable in making a decision. But a toothbrush or multi-bladed razor are not in the same class as an armed conflict or a system of government, where consequences are of more profound significance. But there is no ethical absolute here either. If managing perceptions saves lives and prevents conflicts, doesn’t it seem to serve the greater good? Maybe marketing practices should have a place outside the marketplace of consumer goods and services.
Maybe the burr under my saddle is the application of marketing terms, to a nation or a military enterprise because it can create a perception that the government is more corporation than democracy, regardless of the reality. I think that’s why I have a reflexive bias against the term “brand America.” Ironically, Bernays actually honed his skills selling democracy in war time and later applied his techniques to help corporations sell products and services in times of peace.

Incidentally, so much of what I’ve been reading branches from the key issue of perception-versus-reality. If you believe the product determines the perception, you might think like Fred Kaplan in Slate.

If you buy into The 22 Immutable Laws, perception is king. Because my head hurts, the best I can come up with is that truth is relative,so it’s probably somewhere between.