Slogan Power

May 18, 2009 by Jerry 

slogan_powerIn a prior blog about my presentation at the Commonwealth Club, you met Bill Peacock, a member of board of the club’s Advisory Council. At the event, Bill shared an anecdote about his days as a classmate of Elizabeth “Liddy” Dole at Harvard Law School. But Bill has other noteworthy aspects of his career; one of the most significant being his position as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, where he helped spearhead the Army’s “Be All That You Can Be” campaign. That slogan, which ran for over twenty years—until it was replaced by the far less memorable successor, “Army of One”—became as well known as any commercial brand.

“Be All That You Can Be” has a back story that offers a lesson for any communication medium. In the late Seventies, the Army was experiencing serious defections from its ranks and was having trouble attracting replacements. Almost half of those ranks were populated by high school drop-outs, a demographic most likely to drop out of the Army as well. The churn was costing the government almost two billion dollars a year. Still worse, the other services, first the Air Force, the Marines, and then the Navy were experiencing much less churn because their ranks were filled with higher percentages of the more stable population of high school graduates. Under Bill’s leadership, the Army decided to create an enlistment campaign to attract more of that demographic group. They considered many aspects of importance to the target group of 18-year olds, and eventually focused mainly on three central themes:

  • Patriotism
  • Manliness
  • Personal aspiration

The Army proceeded to do market research to see which of the three themes resonated with their target audience. After testing in hundreds of shopping malls around the country, the latter theme won hands down. “Be All That You Can Be” was expressed in a full multimedia suite, using real soldiers rather than actors, complete with repeated catchy theme music, as you can see in one of the Army’s video spots.

The Army then engaged the N.W. Ayer advertising agency to roll out the campaign in many media outlets, mostly television. Within about six months after the launch, the percentage of high school graduates in the Army rose from under fifty percent to over seventy, an astonishing success.

An important byproduct of the campaign was improved morale within the ranks as evidenced by a significant uptick in re-enlistment rates.

There is a double lesson in this story: the “Be All That You Can Be” theme succeeded because it provided the best benefit to the target audience—those market survey respondents who aspired to improve their position in life—and it used the word “you” to express the benefit directly to them.

In the Power Presentations program, we apply a concept called “Audience Advocacy” to every aspect of every presentation; it prompts the presenter to focus as much on the audience’s objectives as on the presenter’s own.

To create Audience Advocacy, we provide an important tool called WIIFY. WIIFY is an acronym of “What’s in it for you?” and is based on the common axiom, “What’s in it for me?” The shift of the last word from “me” to “you” is deliberate, because it shifts the focus from the presenter to the audience. WIIFY shifts the focus from features to benefits.

If you search the Internet, you’ll find tens of thousands of references to a Yale University study (unsubstantiated by Yale) ranking the 12 most persuasive words in the English language. “You” leads the list. Unsubstantiated or not, “you” addresses the audience directly.

The reason “Be All That You Can Be” worked so well for the Army is that it provided the best WIIFY for its target audience, and it incorporated “you.”

Whenever you present, offer your audience a WIIFY or multiple WIIFYs, and say “you” frequently. Then you can be all that you can be.

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