Attention Marketers: Uncle Sam™ Wants You!

Here we go again. Via FrameShop, another marketing audit (PDF - 244pp) prepared for people who fail to respect message, history, and symbolism unless it's in aid of their motives, in their preferred language, leaving them highest on Maslow's Mountain. This is a wall of text sometimes surreal in its simplism and optimism. Other parts are sensible, however jarringly obvious. This is part of what $400,000 will get you:

Culture constitutes another piece of the context in which shaping takes place. We use culture as a shorthand way of referring to a group or people’s way of life or way of doing things that can vary across contexts or locales and can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or other “losses in translation” when different cultural assumptions come into contact.

Certain things do not translate well, and certain actions (or inactions) in the wrong cultural context can be confusing, funny, or highly offensive. What one should or should not do varies across cultural contexts. Danger lies behind assumptions of similarity. Two examples illustrate forms of cultural norm violation.

Figure 2.3 shows President Bush celebrating at his January 2005 inaugural parade by making the “hook ‘em horns” salute, familiar toall who attended the University of Texas. Unfortunately, that particular gesture is not unique to Texas, and it carries different meanings elsewhere in the world. Norwegians seeing the image were shocked to see the President of the United States making the “sign of the devil.”35

Mediterranean viewers and those in parts of Central and South America were shocked for different reasons: They saw the President indicating that someone’s wife was unfaithful (that they were cuckolded and had “grown horns”).36



This is a clear example of the way in which global media can spread a message beyond its target audience...

Yes, and it's important to know what the Right hand's doing and where the Left hand's been. (PDF-Army Training and Doctrine manual on Arab cultural differences).

So much for Emilaya al Post.

The document later delves into actual marketeese and MBA-buzzwordism. To be frank, most is as insulting as it is lame. A better product was produced 3 years ago: here's a synopsis from 2004's Defense Science Board's audit on our Military/Political Brand Challenges in the Greater War on Terror. (Written to a business-perspective, high snark factor, it still seems pretty on. Can I get a check too?)

Anyway, there is some decent stuff in here, "The Strategic Corporal" for instance, almost a nod to Tom Barnett's "sys-admin", civil liason-centric, DoEE (Dept of Everything Else) approach. Wise, if altogether drop dead obvious to those who want to see. The rest offers some sparks of frank self-awareness. Page 29-30...

Interactions Between U.S. Forces and Indigenous Personnel Have
Shaping Consequences

We often raided houses late at night, so people awakened to soldiers bursting through their bedroom doors. Women and children wailed, terrified. . . . I imagined what it would feel like if soldiers kicked down my door at midnight, if I could do nothing to protect my family. I would hate those soldiers.

—Brian Mockenhaupt [“I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War” - Esquire, March 07]46

You can’t win the hearts and minds when you’re driving people into a ditch.

—LTC Robert J. Duffy, U.S. Army47

The behavior of every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine in a theater of operations shapes the indigenous population. This section discusses the shaping challenges inherent in the “strategic corporal” phenomenon, the danger of differing cultural perspectives in personal interactions, and the importance of personal relationships in shaping.


“Strategic Corporal.” Because of the globalization of media, how a single soldier handles a tactical situation in an out-of-the-way location still has the potential to make global headlines and have strategic impact. The strategic corporal phenomenon has shaping implications that go beyond mass media; indigenous individuals with whom troops interact form favorable or unfavorable impressions from those interactions and spread those impressions by word of mouth throughout surprisingly large networks.

Prior to September 11, 2001, U.S. forces received no significant training for their future interactions with noncombatants. U.S. urban operations, particularly those early in OIF and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), proved troublesome. U.S. tactics involving wholesale round-ups and, at times, unnecessary aggressiveness were perceived as heavy-handed. Robert Jenks of the 4th PSYOP Group witnessed these tactics first hand. He was lodged in a traffic jam on Route Irish (the highway running between Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone–U.S. embassy compound) while U.S. soldiers investigated a possible improvised explosive device (IED). In the midst of this, Ambassador Richard Jones’ security detail, fearing for their charge, began yelling and pointing weapons at civilians, who were themselves
immobilized by the traffic. To extricate the ambassador, the security detail forced its way through by ramming civilian vehicles.48

Umm, yeahh. Ugly American is not an Iraqi-invented phrase. Even to our allies, we've been known to just not get our bull-in-a-chinashop nature. "Oversexed, overfed, over-bearing and over here" was a favorite of Britons during World War Two. My mom, a teen northern girl from Warrington, Cheshire, escaped from Singapore with her QM Rgmt Sgt-Major dad found herself redeposited into the middle of neighboring Burtonwood, the largest/longest USAAC ops support and repair base in the UK. The engines roared night and day, the pubs were full and yanks were everywhere--20,000 of em at the height of deployment, infused into a town of maybe 30,000.

The romantic memory is the warbride and the heroic GI saving old blighty. There were plenty of Warbrides. (Mom married a Yank she met at RAF Alcolnbury, where I tumbled along.) But, along with the Cinderella stories there were also plenty of rapes, arrests, cultural arrogance and condescension. And a subliminal love/hate, like/endure that lasted decades. As a Lakenheath Air Force brat attending Riverside Middle School, then Newmarket Upper between 68-74, even in those later days I was the "Yank Wanker. " And I learned to fight, sometimes not well enough.

I linked "I Was a Male Warbride", 1949, above, an easy, Pentagon-friendly flick. But I'm reminded of maybe rawer, more resonant ones, particularly since my Mom turned me on to them.

The Americanization of Emily, 1963 - Jameses Garner and Coburn, Julie Andrews. Funny and profound. Can't do it justice here, click the link.

Yanks, 1979 - Richard Gere, Lisa Eichorn, William Devane; notable for the seething race-anger that erupts in a club when English girls accept invitations to dance from African-American soldiers and their white brothers-in-arms don't exactly cotton.

Hope and Glory, 1986 - Sara Miles, Ian Bannen and 9-year old Sebastian Rice-Edwards who has the great line after an air raid destroys his school: "Rowan, it was a stray bomb! Thank you, Adolph!"

In hindsight, there's a lot that I now understand about resenting those who come to your rescue as we did for Britain. But the condescension and conflict between Yank and Brit weren't policy, rather just human complexity, boredom, fear of death, endorphins and adrenaline at work. So, imagine how, as Brian (two tours in Iraq) Mockenhaupt asks in the quote above, imagine how you would respond to the tough love of twitchy uninvited "liberators" kicking down your door, frightening your kids and shaming you in front of your wife and relatives. Afterward, 98% of the time they say "carry on" ("Sorry" is not optional but often forgotten when you're pumped up) -- and they leave you to clean up the mess, calm the kids and fix the furniture. That crystalization of what passes for many ops in this and previous "surges" carries a combination of two of the most powerful human enemy-makers -- powerlessness, and shame.

Needless to say, not too many "marketing" organizations are capable of rescuing a brand whose product-set features those attributes, that level of customer disdain, and that kind of delivery.

Bill Bernbach, co-parent of the 60s renaissance in American advertising, where we stopped insulting the consumer's attention (for a while at least) said: "Nothing kills a bad product fatser than good advertising." Simple truth. If your product or any aspect of its make or delivery is fundamenally broken, the last thing you want to do is invite more people to discover that reality. In this geopolitical bar of toxic soap, the problems lay in manufacturing and the executive suite. No amount of art directors, copywiters, Account planners and producers can "buff this turd" as they say. But given the tone-deafness of it's positioning and practice--its vice-over-virtue--there are plenty who could advertise against it, easily, given the space and the production money.




The endpages offer recommendations: PG 185

Linking Shaping Challenges with Recommendations

Chapter Two addressed the extensive challenges faced by the U.S. military in its efforts to shape the attitudes and behaviors of civilian populations residing in military theaters of operation. Chapters Three and Four provided recommendations to address these challenges and improve U.S. military relationships with foreign audiences. [*I've appended the 50 or so bullets below, you're not missing much]

Yeah, whatever. Too bad those that most need to read this won't. But it's moot. These guys already know Marketing, the dark-side of human motivations and hot-buttonry. They know what they want and how to ring the bell to get it. "Men of action," this group of "history's actors" don't ponder their navels, they derive meaning from poking a sword in somebody elses. God help us from these marketers, and from those who praise their product and vote for it and excuse its misapplication and tragic side effects.

Here's James Garner and Joyce Grenfell, (Julie Andrews' character's mother), from Americanization in a piece of screenwork that lays it bare better than I ever could...

Charlie: War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of … it’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us – it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

Mrs. Barham: That was exalting, Commander … after every war, you know, we always find out how unnecessary it was. And after this one, I’m sure all the generals will dash off and write books about the blunders made by other generals, and statesmen will publish their secret diaries, and it’ll show beyond any shadow of a doubt that war could easily have been avoided in the first place. And the rest of us, of course, will be left with the job of bandaging the wounded and baying the dead.

Charlie: I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades … we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio – an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.

Mrs. Barham: You’re very hard on your mother. It seems a harmless enough pretense to me.

Charlie: No, Mrs. Barham. No, you see, now my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.

-------