Buy One Armed Intervention, Get the Second Free!

As if looking to get mocked on blogs, the RAND Corporation has released a study which, according to the accompanying press release, "RECOMMENDS U.S. MILITARY ADOPT CONSUMER MARKETING STRATEGIES TO REACH IRAQI AND AFGHAN CIVILIANS." My first thought was that we could start deploying brand loyalty cards like they have at CVS or the grocery store. By asking civilians in occupied countries to swipe their card each time US forces come to their assistance (in exchange for free MREs, maybe), we could learn more about the circumstances under which civilians feel threatened by insurgent attacks.

Alternatively, a colleague suggests we might let the Iraqis into the PXs, where they can redeem their bonus points from various transactions -- checkpoint searches, midnight interrogations, etc. -- thus softening the blow of humiliating foreign occupation. Soothing muzak could be used during operations. The jokes write themselves. Be that as it may, flipping randomly through the full document I hit upon a perfectly decent point, namely that we need to be more sensitive about how different messages play in different contexts.

One example was that this White House photo of Bush giving the "hook 'em horns" salute to the Texas marching band seems endearing in the United States. In Norway, however, Bush was taken to be a Satanist. What's more, people in Mediterranean and some Latin American countries "saw the President indicating that someone’s wife was unfaithful (that they were cuckolded and had 'grown horns')." As a more relevant example, to a Muslim, something that's "jihad" is by definition a good thing, so when US officials refer to adversaries as "jihadists" we're implicitly accepting their definition of the conflict as one pitting Muslim holy warriors against enemies of the faith. This doesn't, it seems to me, actually have a particularly tight relationship to consumer marketing practices (James Fallows mentioned it in a brilliant September 2006 article without bringing up consumer marketing), but it is true that these lessons need to be learned.

White House photo by Paul Morse

Comments

It would be nice if for decades we taught students the differences between greater and lesser jihad (with lesser jihad being the violent one we criticize) and didn't define "jihad" as "holy war," but opted for the better translation of "struggle."

Posted by Reality Man | July 17, 2007 6:53 PM

One example was that this White House photo of Bush giving the "hook 'em horns" salute to the Texas marching band seems endearing in the United States.

He's clearly in violation of the Supreme Metal Council's ruling that "If your head is neither banging nor thrashing, you should not be throwing the sign". There was also later photographic evidence that Bush claimed to have "too much metal for one hand", which no president has had since James K. Polk.

As always, Wikipedia has more.

Posted by Ken C. | July 17, 2007 7:15 PM

we need to be more sensitive about how different messages play in different contexts

Why is it our job to translate all our gestures into sundry foreign contexts (impossible on the face of it). Why isn't it the job of the foreign interpreters of W's hand gestures (for instance) to understand that he means it in the Texas manner? And likewise for language. "Jihad" and "Crusade" mean different things to "us" than to "them". You know it, and I know it; why can't they know it as well?

Posted by Craig Ewert | July 17, 2007 7:16 PM

Good god, move this post down the page. I can't look at that picture.

Posted by Kriston | July 17, 2007 7:21 PM

"Mocked on Blogs" is a great title for...something.

Sing it to "Girls on Film."

Posted by Jack | July 17, 2007 7:25 PM

Right. Fuck them and their nuanced jihads.

*gives what is hopefully the international sign for "fuck you"*

Posted by Bill | July 17, 2007 7:34 PM

FSM help me, I honestly can't tell whether Craig Ewert's comment is meant to be sarcastic.

I aspire to optimism, so I'll assume that it is.

Posted by Warren Terra | July 17, 2007 7:42 PM

Matt makes a good point but uses a very poor example to illustrate it. The Texas horns thing is pretty trivial. Plus, it's one thing when we talk about American stuff to other Americans -- then the burden is on folks in other countries to figure out what we mean. It's another thing when we're communicationg with or discussing non-Americans -- then the burden is on us to understand how our message will be interpreted.

Posted by Led | July 17, 2007 8:07 PM

The whole marketing thing reminds me of when GM tried to sell the Nova down in Mexico. I guess those marketing geniuses at GM never took high school Spanish. It pays to know your customer. This White House only knows one customer, the fundie Republican base.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | July 17, 2007 8:23 PM

RAND deserves plenty of mockery -- they're 5 years late to the party, and they forgot to bring beer.

The US occupation, public diplomacy and public affairs offices have been run by marketroids and PR flacks for years. See: Rendon Group, Karen (what happened to her?) Hughes, Charlotte Beers.

Then, see Fred Kaplan's excellent and splenetic articles on how this became yet another administration FUBAR fiasco.
http://www.slate.com/id/2114854/
http://www.slate.com/id/2127102/

Posted by theo | July 17, 2007 8:40 PM

I thought Karen Hughes already tried that brilliant and oh-so-subtle "I know -- let's do a marketing campaign!"

Bush is surrounded by idiots, the Republican "base" is nothing BUT idiots, but that doesn't mean that rest of the world is inhabited solely by idiots. No informed person believes anything coming out of this administration. Slicker PR isn't going to change that. It's what we DO that matters.

Posted by sglover | July 17, 2007 10:43 PM

this post is ridiculous.

Posted by thehova | July 17, 2007 10:48 PM

What, no credit for Ronnie James Dio?

Holy Diver!

Posted by blah | July 17, 2007 11:02 PM

The Norwegians would be right.

Posted by NotEvenThe RegularPseud | July 17, 2007 11:48 PM

The thing about Chevy Nova not selling well in Mexico is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Posted by fp | July 17, 2007 11:57 PM

Translating gestures is tricky business. Curiously, rousting people from their homes in the middle of the night, shouting, while pointing guns at them and scaring their women and children does NOT mean "Congratulations, we are bringing you freedom and democracy" in Arabic.

Who could have guessed?

Posted by biggerbox | July 18, 2007 12:38 AM

Who could have guessed?

Wow, you know I was going to write a parody post about training. Try and say "Well see, it's a training problem, I am untrained so I'd do X (X being the value of doing something wildly and massively inhuman and anti-social). They just need a class and this is going to fix all this."

The problem is I just read that long ass compilation of stories from Iraq War vets in The Nation and it's sort of hard to top what they have actually done over there. They had multiple stories from different people about guys having their pictures taken pretending to eat the brains out of Iraqi's (civilian and not) that had their heads blown off. Where do you go from there?

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 18, 2007 12:57 AM

@ Reality Man

On the same theme, it would be nice if the media translated God as "God" not "Allah" from Arabic. Given that this is commonplace between the other two Abrahamic religions, the distinction in practice is pointlessly alienating.

Posted by the blackbird is involved | July 18, 2007 7:17 AM

The universal symbol for double penetration.

Posted by serial castowner | July 18, 2007 7:32 AM

Why is it our job to translate all our gestures into sundry foreign contexts (impossible on the face of it). Why isn't it the job of the foreign interpreters of W's hand gestures (for instance) to understand that he means it in the Texas manner?

Considering that GWB didn't attend the University of Texas, and considering his foriegn policy, the notion that Bush is showing his fealty to Satan makes a hell of a lot more sense than the notion that he's saying something about the Longhorns.

Posted by rea | July 18, 2007 8:21 AM

This seems like example #1,024 of how a good idea will go wrong in our current government. In theory, this is no different from the "hearts and minds" thing. I remember reading some years ago about how coalition forces from other nations did the same basic stuff as us, but took a much more "velvet glove" approach. Sorry to be vague and not supply a link, it was a while ago. But that kind of thing, applied across the U.S. forces, might still be our best chance of mitigating the disaster.

What will actually happen is that marketing firms will get million-dollar contracts through, of course, cronyism. However, they will have no input on what we do, which is the actual problem, just on what we say. They'll recommend stuff like using more green in the army's publications, a greater budget for propaganda, and requiring soldiers to take classes to soften their accents (also outsourced, and not actually going as far as learning the local language). You can guess how effective that will be.

Posted by Cyrus | July 18, 2007 10:36 AM