Army Fights to Sell Itself to the Parents of America
WASHINGTON — Success in advertising usually means getting people to part with their hard-earned cash. Ray DeThorne's success is measured by how many people he can get to let go of their sons and daughters.
As brand manager for the Army's advertising account at Leo Burnett Inc., a Chicago ad agency, DeThorne's job is to sell the Army. And these days, it's a difficult product to sell.
In marketing terms, the Army is a troubled brand. The daily images of violence from Iraq are scaring away potential recruits for the service that has shouldered the largest burden there.
The Army does not expect to meet any of its 2005 recruiting goals for the active, Reserve and National Guard ranks, and Army officials have said that next year the gap is likely to be greater.
This year, DeThorne will spend more than $200 million of the Army's money -- the U.S. government's largest advertising contract -- to try to reverse that trend and sell the nation on the benefits of military service.
It is a job that gets more difficult each morning, when Americans read over breakfast about the latest roadside bomb or insurgent ambush that killed another handful of U.S. solders.
"This is the most complicated, multilayered thing I have ever worked on," said DeThorne, who slips in and out of marketing jargon when discussing the challenge. "Every day you pick up the paper and there is a story reframing the product you are trying to sell."
Yet the problem for DeThorne and the Army goes deeper than the headlines from Iraq. As the percentage of adult Americans with military experience plummets -- about 11% today, compared with 20% in 1970 -- the young men and women sought by the Army are increasingly being raised by parents who didn't serve in the armed forces. Today's parents are likely to be more skeptical of military life than were their parents or grandparents, Army market research says.
It is the parents -- or "influencers," as the Pentagon calls them -- who are proving the most formidable obstacle to the Army's ability to meet its recruiting goals.
The problem is compounded in the middle of a protracted war, as already-skeptical parents are fearful that their child's decision to join the Army means he or she is bound to end up in Iraq.
"It's very different from folks who grew up with communism and the 'Red Menace,' " said DeThorne, 46, who was raised in a military family but has not served in the armed forces. The military is "just not something that is on people's radar screen."
