Service ditches ‘Army Strong’ for new branding strategy

Posted 2015-04-30 16:31 by Grunt Report with 0 comments

Can you sum up your service, your commitment, your strength in a marketing slogan, five words or less, encapsulating everything the Army has and ever hopes to stand for?

Don’t sweat it. Army officials didn’t think so, either.

The service’s latest 60-second commercial debuted Monday, featuring black-and-white photos over stirring narration and music, offering glimpses of many aspects of service and sacrifice, and extolling the virtues of joining “the Army team.”

It ended without the “Army Strong” tagline — a phrase soldiers will continue to see in internal Army communications, but one that’s ended a nine-year run as the familiar face of Army branding after research showed civilians didn’t buy in.

“Our job is to market the Army [to the public],” Mark Davis, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for marketing and the director of the Army Marketing and Research Group, said in a Wednesday interview. ” ‘Army Strong’ just didn’t resonate with them. You’d either get an ‘eh’ sort of response, or you’d get an, ‘Of course you’re strong. You’re supposed to be. You’re in the Army. …’

“Everybody in the Army understands [‘Army Strong’] intuitively, because they’re a stronger human being for their experiences. People outside the Army didn’t get it.”

The tagline won’t be replaced, Davis said.

AMRG teamed with New York-based marketing firm McCann Worldgroup to create the spot, aiming to impress the civilian audience by presenting the Army as an elite team seeking new members because, as the narrator puts it, “there is important work to be done.” The message also played well internally, and with a group that may have been underserved by past Army marketing efforts.

“Veterans absolutely love it,” said Davis, a retired officer who left active duty in 2006 after a 25-year career that included a 2003 Iraq deployment and a Bronze Star Medal. “That’s a group of folks that have been a little disaffected from the Army, and we’re trying to bring them back into the fold.”

Keeping vets and active soldiers on board with the message holds greater importance in the age of social media, Davis said, as a disconnect likely would lead to those groups ripping any offending ad campaign to shreds on Reddit, Facebook or other social-media outlets, in full view of the target audience.