David Sarasohn: When recruiting is an uphill battle

09/30/2005

David Sarasohn,
Newhouse News Service
September 30, 2005

Nobody really wants to say—it doesn’t, after all, sound very good—that the problem with Army recruiting at the moment is that parents don’t want their kids to join. Family values, and all that.

So, Edward Boches, chief creative officer of the Mullen advertising agency, charged with designing ads to overcome the enlistment shortfall, told the New York Times that the new ads are aimed at “influencers.”

Meaning parents.

“One of our main goals,” explained Matt Boehmer, head of the Defense Department’s Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies program, “is to provide the services with actionable information that they can pass on to the influencers.”

That means, he says, dealing with the fact that parents now admire the military, but don’t want their children to join.

The numbers, as an ad agency’s marketing director would put it, are not good. Army enlistments have been steadily below quota, and even with a bump during the summer, seem likely to miss the target for the year. Army Reserve and National Guard numbers are lower still.

The people whose job it is to fill the Army’s recruitment quota, and the advertising agencies hired to help them do it, understandably see a marketing issue. The Army has produced new commercials, in English and Spanish, showing parents impressed by the opportunities and character changes produced by the Army.

Asked by the Washington Post about the strategy of the ads, Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins explained, “Clearly it was to talk to influencers.”

But the problem with changing their minds about the military is that they have nothing against the military; they admire it. Their problem is the war that the military is fighting, and the enthusiasm for that war has just about vanished.

Last weekend in Washington, D.C., something over 100,000 people demonstrated against the war in Iraq. A pro-war rally the next day totaled about 400, although some of them may have just been heading for the Smithsonian.

Bigger samplings look even worse.

The latest CNN/USA Today poll found that approval of the conduct of the war had taken another sharp drop; now, only 32 percent of Americans approve, while 67 percent disapprove. On the question of whether the whole war had been a mistake, 59 percent agreed, and only 39 percent disagreed.

So, for most Americans, the recruiting problem sounds a lot like one John Kerry identified 35 years ago: How do you persuade someone to die for a mistake?

“The Iraq war is the driving force behind the Army’s recruiting problem,” Charles Pena of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington told Bloomberg.com in June. “Working in the civilian economy doesn’t entail the risk of getting blown up by an IED in Iraq.”

There are, of course, those who consider the entire situation just a marketing problem. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., chairman of a Senate subcommittee on military personnel, proclaimed in June, “It is time to repackage this war.” Like New Coke.

“If we go into a draft, this will be one of the biggest marketing failures ever,” Clarke L. Caywood, a public relations professor and GOP consultant, warned in the Times, “because it would mean the government, the military, the ad agencies and society had failed to provide a compelling rationale to serve.”

For most Americans, the problem isn’t the military; it’s hard to talk to the people fighting this war without being awed, and without thinking that for role models—or maybe, figures of influence—kids could do a lot worse. Air Force and Navy recruitment levels reflect that feeling.

The problem is a war that most Americans no longer believe in, and casualty lists that are only too believable.