Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

Consider principles of marketing as a tool in the Persuasion War to change the way people think, feel, and act.  A great source for discussion is this RAND report and the conversation it generated at BlingCycle, Matthew Yglesias’s blog, MountainRunner, and SocialMarketing.  We’re not limiting our ideas to just this one report, but using it as a recent exemplar.

While certainly useful, like any tool, marketing has limits and we must understand these limits to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness from the tool.

Marketing is classically defined as any activity that enhances the exchange between buyers and sellers.  It presumes these buyers and sellers meet in a marketplace to trade goods and services through a medium of exchange.  Modern marketing evolved into the powerful force it is today within this definition and these assumptions.  Thus, when you apply marketing principles in a situation that has buyers and sellers, a marketplace, good and services, and a medium of exchange, then you are efficiently and effectively applying the tool.  However, as your situation departs from these elements, modern marketing becomes less a tool and more a metaphor.  To illustrate, the next time you need a gun, but don’t have one, when you point your finger and go,”Bang!” you demonstrate how a tool has become a metaphor.

How in the Persuasion War do we see buyers and sellers, a marketplace, goods and services, and a medium of exchange as anything other than metaphors?

One can argue that America is “selling” and Iraq or Afghanistan is “buying” a “service,” democracy, through the “exchange” of our blood and money for legitimate access to their sovereignty and while this sounds reasonable, it is still metaphorical thinking.  We are closer to pointing fingers and saying, “Bang!” than actually shooting guns in a fire fight.

When the reality is war fighting, marketing democracy attracts few takers.  We are not prosecuting the Kinetic War in a marketplace, even of ideas.  We don’t have buyers and sellers, we have Good Guys and Bad Guys; we don’t have a marketplace, we have theaters; we don’t have a symbolic medium of exchange like cash or credit cards, we kill or be killed.  War changes everything and reduces many conceptual tools to shadows, caricatures, and cartoons no matter how interesting they are as metaphors.

Realize that the Persuasion War is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kinetic War.  We cannot fight the Persuasion War as something independent, uniquely different, and separate from the Kinetic War.  The Persuasion War is defined by the Kinetic War.  Certainly, the result of the Persuasion War can make a difference in the result of the Kinetic War, but as long as we are killing and being killed, the Kinetic War is the container and the Persuasion War is a content.  Or, more poetically and ironically, the Kinetic War is the sea and the Persuasion War is the fish.

Test this claim of “marketing as metaphor in war” against the commonplace standards of marketing success.  Effective marketing rarely makes things worse, usually makes things a little better, and when it excels, it goes Boom!

Consider, now, the results of Marketing Within War.  What have been the amazingly obvious Boom marketing successes?  Where’s the steady accumulation of small advantages?  Any failures come to mind?

Just on a common sense level, marketing is not working as advertised within the Kinetic War.  It is not because marketing doesn’t work or the people doing it are incompetent.  Here it is a metaphor and we’re pointing our fingers.

This is not to say that principles of modern marketing have no role in the Persuasion War.  It is, rather, to focus our minds on what works and why, to determine the limits and seek additions.

The addition I propose is persuasion, the theory and research of how words change the way people think, feel, and act.  Persuasion works with marketing and does not compete against it.  Persuasion and marketing are like the arguments from the famous Miller Lite Beer ads that pitted “Tastes Great” against “Less Filling.”  Hey, you can buy the beer for both reasons.

More importantly, persuasion operates as a tool and not as a metaphor within the Kinetic War.  Persuasion does not require dictionary defined buyers and sellers, marketplaces, goods and services, and a medium of exchange.  It requires only people and language as the fundamental elements.

In later posts, I’ll develop the complimenting roles of persuasion and marketing, but for now, I point to the Communication Cascade as an integrating scheme.  Marketing is the tool of eminence for delivering Reception in the Cascade and it can moderate the impact of persuasion in the Processing and Response stages.

Properly combined, persuasion and marketing don’t just point fingers and say, “Bang!”  They win Persuasion Battles in the Kinetic War.