Militarizing Marketing

The new Converse—recently bought out by Nike—is pinning its hopes for brand-name rebirth on the Loaded Weapon basketball shoe. MTV Europe will be conquering teen minds with a military strategist and four-times decorated Vietnam veteran Bill Roedy at the helm. And marketing experts are again talking about branding in terms of empire building. The trend prompts a question: has the Bush Doctrine leaked into marketing?

In September, the online journal MarketingProfs.com put an American imperial twist to an old theme—giving the oldest military treatise in the world, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (already repurposed in The Art of War for Executives by D.G. Krause and The Six Principles from Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Principles for Managers by Mark McNeilly), a Bush-style revisiting. "How can you reconfigure your marketing strategy to be more deceptive, agile and pre-emptive?," writes Michael Perla. Like the Bush administration ditching international law in the Iraq war, The Business Standard likewise urges marketing strategists to consider "who is making the rules—and imposing them onto their competitors? Making the rules makes you master of the game."

But achieving "market capture" means more than account planners fancying themselves five-star generals or bullet-ducking GIs. Brand strategists (strategy, by the way, comes from the Greek strategos for general) Wolfram Wordemann and Andreas Buchholz urge a rethinking of how consumers are perceived: "put yourself in the shoes of a conqueror and go for that territory in the consumer’s mind that will sustain your empire." And, just as in military propaganda campaigns, that means dehumanizing the enemy—only, in this case, the enemy and the coveted turf are one and the same.

Speaking at an American Association of Advertising Agencies conference in September, Olgilvy & Mather Worldwide’s Mark Earls urged account planners to stop thinking of consumers as individuals. He showed video clips of soldiers at war, soccer hooligans, and street riots to illustrate that humans should be treated like herds. As Ad Age reports, "Mr. Earls said that just as cats only swim when they have to, most people only think when they have to. Survival as part of the herd is a question of 'keeping up, not bumping into people and going vaguely in same direction as everyone else.'"

Perhaps this is old news: hasn’t advertising long been the realm where "brand battles" take place and "guerrilla marketing" is employed? Hasn’t the account executive always been the macho, no-holds-barred field marshall? Indeed. In the context of preemptive war, terrorism, and a US administration wielding a $396.1 billion military budget, it simply becomes more clear. But it’s also more effective: armored vehicle sales have soared among the ultra-rich, up 20 percent in 2001. SUV sales, powered by ignore-the-rules marketing campaigns, have exploded like bombs bursting in air (Gregg Easterbrook, in the New Republic, wrote that "The whole point of the Hummer is a total--and aggressive--disregard for what anyone else thinks. The Hummer broadcasts such a blatant 'fuck you' to the rest of the world that it ought to be considered a new vehicle class, the FUV."). The real question is how do we, the enemy, establish a beachhead in our minds.