Moved by Bombs
A small plaque on the back of a statue in my mother's childhood hometown of Royal Leamington Spa states: A German bomb moved this statue one inch on its plinth on the 14th November 1940. My mother, misreading it, always wondered who Agerman Bob was, why he chose to move the statue such a small amount, and why the town felt the need to memorialize this act in some way. The retelling of her now admitted reading error was always so bewildering and foreign to my brother and me growing up in the relative peace of suburban Connecticut in the 80s.
Who dropped bombs on towns anyway? We understood the strategic importance of industrial centers and ports, but why bomb a small village in the English countryside? And what sort of result could come from such tools of destruction?
I hadn't thought about Agerman Bob and the statue he moved in Warwickshire for many years, until reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell in quick succession of one another this past week. Both appear on the opposite ends of the literary spectrum - the former dealing with a (slightly) fictionalized antiwar and sci-fi-infused account of the Bombing of Dresden, while the latter explores the morality of aerial bombardment during warfare and how different tactical ideologies ran up against each other during WWII.
In other words, bombing has been on my mind lately. But not just the use of bombs, but why they were used, to what ends, and the long-lasting implications of their use. This lead to a curious realization as to how the lessons taught in both of these books can be applied to a marketing setting.
I'd like to get one thing out of the way upfront: the pure comparison between bombing strategies - where actual human beings died and cities were destroyed - and marketing - where the only casualties can be loss of revenue or a decline in brand appreciation - is asinine at best. It reminds me of the eye-roll-inducing act of walking into executives' offices and seeing copies of Sun Tzu's Art of War sitting quietly on their bookshelves. Comparisons between business and war theory have become not only cumbersome but trite. And so, my goal with this article is not to diminish the atrocities of battle nor the sacrifices made during the war, but to prove how strategies employed by aerial bombers in World War II can inform us about how best to deploy marketing strategies in the present day.
I'm currently working on developing my firm's outbound marketing initiatives. Specifically, how to build awareness of our company while ensuring that press releases and articles reach the exact right people. I'm torn between casting a wide net (quantity) versus a more targeted approach (quality). One might, theoretically, get more impressions by sending out a marketing blitz to every conceivable newspaper, magazine, and online channel in the world, but would our efforts be better spent dialing in our targets and concentrating our marketing firepower on them? In other words, what is the best tactic to force potential partners to take notice of us, rather than simply moving a statue one inch?
The Bomber Mafia asks these same questions, albeit with much darker and much more serious results. General Curtis LeMay sought all-out destruction during WWII. Firebombing Japan indiscriminately, without care for civilian casualties. His goal: to end the war in Japan as fast as possible. General Haywood Hansell wanted to use specific targeted attacks that focused on war industries and carefully avoided civilian centers. His goal: to disrupt Japan's wartime output but not at the expense of innocent lives. Ultimately, LeMay won out, and his repeated bombings and use of napalm on mainland Japan combined with the two atomic bombs helped bring about the end of the war much quicker than Hansell's plan.
But which General was right? Who ultimately cost more lives? Who, given the benefit of time, is regarded higher?
When building an awareness campaign, my strategy has always been to market to the widest audience possible. Simply: get your name out there. Show up on people's radars, and hope that, due to the sheer volume, customers seek you out. From there, you can see what's working, what needs to be refined, and you'll start to develop a more targeted approach based on those results.
But what do you sacrifice with that method? Time and resources, sure. But, perhaps most significantly, brand credibility. After all, consumers generally hate being marketed to, but especially by brands they have zero interest in. And when this happens repeatedly, it drives brand appreciation significantly down - even among brand evangelicals. Additionally, as a wide swath of potential customers enter the sales funnel, you'll run the risk of sending them to your competitors. Indeed, broad marketing will get you the numbers you may seek, but at what cost?
Conversely, I've utilized narrow marketing when creating campaigns for specific items. Deals, launches, or initiatives that appeal to a certain demographic. Admittedly, this demographic will already have some awareness of the brand, most likely the result of word-of-mouth or an earlier marketing blitz. These are fine-tuned campaigns, utilizing a focus down the bombsite to hit just the right people at just the right time.
The drawback of this approach is a significant reduction in results. You'll see fewer conversions, and you won't get a bigger picture of how the campaign is working. You'll also risk missing niche markets you hadn't considered in the preliminary plans. And what if you miss the mark entirely with a particular segment? What are your options then?
Billy Pilgrim sat in a veteran's hospital suffering from PTSD. The central character of Slaughterhouse-Five, Pilgrim survived the firebombing of Dresden by the allies but finds the futility of war and the catastrophes it creates almost laughable. While it's never explicitly stated in Vonnegut's book one way or the other, Pilgrim is either abducted by aliens or chooses to invent an alternate reality to make sense of the death and destruction he's witnessed.
The plight of Billy Pilgrim is what happens when your marketing goes awry. You lose not only customers but potential customers. They are turned off from your brand. They shut out everything you have to say, and it would be easier to take a trip to Tralfamadore than to win them back. And that, frankly, isn't worth it.
LeMay may have, in some small part, helped to win the war. Hell, he was even controversially honored by the Japanese a few decades later with the highest honor they can bestow upon a foreigner. But the negative ripple effects of his methods were used in Vietnam and other wars since. Hansell and his precision air bombing, on the other hand, have been relegated to the annals of history. His tactics were much more humane, but would have extended the war, perhaps, into 1946. That said, echoes of Hansell's precision bombing have become adopted over and over again in the past 20 years due to their ease and effectiveness of deployment.
I choose to side with Hansell's approach, both as a wartime tactic and as a marketing strategy. Sure, LeMay may have brought awareness of the superior firepower of the allies to the Japanese, but at a cost that's difficult to comprehend. And so, outside of sending out awareness campaign press releases, commercials, and posts, always air on the side of precision. Get enough data on your target, zero in on what they want, and strike while the iron is hot. Otherwise, you might just end up moving a statue one inch.
