Time to give peace a chance in marketing language?

At a time when the world has many genuine horrors, it seems trivial to write a post about the violence of marketing language. Recently though, I couldn’t help noticing just how many of the marketing terms we use every day are related to warfare – and wondering what that says about our industry.

What do I mean? Ask yourself how often today you’ll talk about ‘targeting’ a particular audience and ‘engaging’ them, ‘launching a campaign’, ‘capturing’ attention or market share, ‘positioning’ yourself to ‘outflank’ the competition. Perhaps you’re operating on limited budgets and developing a ‘guerrilla’ marketing strategy as a result. Come to think of it, even terms like ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’ have military roots if you go back far enough (the original Greek term ‘strategia’ means ‘generalship’).

My colleague Christina O’Connor wrote a fascinating post last year about how the different metaphors that we use in marketing can shape the way we actually think about our audiences and the task of gaining their interest and persuading them to buy a brand or product. She’s right – but there was one omission from her post that’s suddenly struck me. The most pervasive metaphor in marketing isn’t that we’re hunting prey, catching fish or growing plants; it’s that we’re conducting a never-ending war.

Out of interest, I wrote that last paragraph to try and avoid using any military terminology (apart from in the last sentence of course). It was very, very difficult. Military language is so embedded within marketing as to be almost impossible to separate from the way that we talk and think about it. It’s become so intrinsic to our conversations that we’re not even consciously aware of it most of the time. It doesn’t make us aggressive or violent people – but I can’t help thinking that it must influence our marketing strategies. Language matters. The terms and concepts that we use shape our way of seeing the world – and have a direct influence on the types of ideas we come up with. If we encourage ourselves, no matter how subtly, to see the world as generals and soldiers would, then surely that affects our ideas?

The question of where the military metaphors come from is an interesting one – I read an interesting thought from Greg Allum, Head of Social Media and Creative Strategy at Sony, who suggested it’s down to the rapid growth in advertising in the years following the Second World War – and there could well be something in that. However, I suspect that there are deeper forces  at work. Western society, let’s face it, has an enduring fascination with the military. It runs throughout the way we talk about sport and business, as well as the way we talk about marketing. The military is held in great respect – and there are many walks of life eager to learn from it. Just think how many professional development courses are run by ex-soldiers – or how often we pack our department off to one form of ‘boot camp’ or another.

We’re not the only industry that seems to have an unconscious instinct to make professional life more authoritative and exciting by playing soldiers with our terminology. However, the implications for marketing are arguably greater than elsewhere. It’s our role to find new sources of growth and build relationships with potential customers that can make both them and us better off. We do this by anticipating people’s needs and developing propositions to meet them. There’s absolutely no parallel here with the task of defeating and destroying an enemy, decimating morale or sapping another country’s will to fight you. For this reason, many of the military terms that we use in marketing end up steering us down narrow ways of thinking that don’t actually reflect what we’re trying to achieve.

Here are some of the assumptions that can seep into our strategy as a result of the military language that marketers use. Some of them are conscious, some of them are subconscious, and lots of them, lots of the time, are wide of the mark:

Military conflict is a zero-sum game: one side wins when the other side loses. Marketing doesn’t necessarily work that way. Our goal is to find growth, but the most sustainable forms of growth often come through expanding a market, anticipating and meeting needs that people were previously unaware of. If you’re operating in a mature or declining market where the only way to grow is by taking share from others, then a self-consciously military strategy where you focus on weakening the opposition might make sense. However, very few businesses would choose to be operating in that way. When we think in terms of a zero-sum game, we’re limiting our approach to what marketing can do.