The British Army Needs You To Fail...

The British Army has launched the latest in its series of annual recruitment campaigns, aimed at trying to convince modern youth to join up. Over the last few years these campaigns have caused an outcry as people moan about ‘snowflakes’ and ‘PC gone mad’.

This is because they’ve tried to adopt entirely new messaging that reaches to modern audiences. Who’d have thought that the idea of perhaps doing some market research, understanding your audience and realising that posters of tanks or saying ‘be the best’ doesn’t always work would be a winner?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The campaigns have, without exception, been extremely clever – they have tapped into the hopes, dreams and fears of a new generation of recruits. These recruits see the world in a totally different way to their predecessors, in no small part due to the way that they’ve grown up almost organically fused with their smartphones and web access.

Understanding that a new approach was needed was crucial. The Army was seeing a decline in numbers joining, and also in retention as a whole. Without serious action there would have been a longer term crisis as the Army found itself without enough people, and without the right skills.

To that end the ‘this is belonging’ campaign was launched. It took a radically different approach to recruitment, trying to step away from previously tried and tested tropes, to better understand what really drives modern youth. It then delivered messaging that spoke to them directly, and tried to tap into this.

For example, the focus on ‘snowflakes’ and making clear that people of all walks are wanted helped. The focus on gaining confidence and being able to recruit people who are not necessarily going to turn up at basic training with the assurance that they could pass SF selection, but who with a bit of nurturing could have the confidence to give it a shot.

The campaigns excel because they tap into a youth that feels under pressures that many of us cannot imagine. Our youths are exposed to a constant world of messaging, examination, scrutiny and judgement. The ability of social media to unite people, but also put them under unrelenting pressure – be it school whatsapp groups sharing minor hiccups across hundreds of people, or Instagram follower totals mattering is incredible.

By saying to younger people that actually ‘its okay to fail because that’s how you learn’, the Army is sending a message that it is somewhere that gives people a chance to become themselves.

You only have to look at how basic training is a series of tests that will result in inevitable failure. Be it room inspection, first nights in the field or those first faltering steps on a parade square under the tender mercy of a drill instructor. The early weeks of basic training is not about turning up and smashing it, its about making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and becoming better in the process.

Watch any documentary about military basic training, and compare the first and last episodes. Each is identical – you’ll see a ragged group of individuals making some pretty basic mistakes, over time fuse into a competent and cohesive team. They wouldn’t get there without failing along the way.

To a recruiting pool who have spent their lives being exposed to a world of perceived perfection, this is probably a refreshing message. Look at things like the way that social media only presents the ‘perfect image’, be it face shots, makeup application or body image. Everything people are exposed to represents the perfect shot, without any hint of what had to be done to get there.

This can put enormous pressure on people to deliver first time, and then not feel capable when they don’t get it right. Wider society is relentless at making people feel failures if they don’t smash it out of the park at the first attempt. Yet the reality is lots of people making mistakes day in , day out trying to get better – but this isn’t recognised or accepted.

This latest campaign then will help reinforce the message that the British Army is an organisation of very high standards, but it also is prepared to give people a chance to reach those standards. It wants people who make mistakes to come and join, precisely because its an organisation where mistakes are seen as part of the training process.

                                                        

There will be many out there who see this as the latest effort to turn the Army into a bunch of bleeding heart liberal snowflakes. They will see it as sign that the Army is getting soft, and that its attracting the wrong people, all of whom will naturally fail miserably and leave us at the mercy of a ‘real’ Army in due course.

They will say that the Army should rely on recruiting posters from the ‘good old days’ as a sign of how recruiting should be done properly. At least one MP has responded to the latest campaign by saying to the Daily Express:

“Our armed services are one of the many things that makes people proud to be British but they must avoid embracing all of the snowflake occupations that have poisoned so many other institutions.

"We've seen charities and other organisations suffer as a result of a lot of politically correct clap-trap."

"I'd say to Army bosses, they shouldn't be too influenced by liberal bourgeois sentiments at the Ministry of Defence, civil servants and others to depart from well-established practice which is that the Army offers excellence.

"Our Army is the envy of the world and they will remain so as they emphasise quality, excellence, and driving people to do their best and be their best."

While this is a view that some will subscribe to, its also utter nonsense.

The recruiting campaign has been running for some years now and has turned around what was a turgid effort into something that has seen applications soar. In 2020 the Army saw its best ever recruitment figures in years, as a direct result of campaigns like this, which suddenly tapped into a new market of people who had quite probably not previously thought about joining the Army.

It is easy to look wistfully at recruiting campaigns from the past and assume that this is the answer. That may have been the case in the early 20^th century, offering a vague promise of travel or escape from drudgery. But that’s not what the modern recruit needs to hear now.

The target demographic for the Army to tap into is full of people who are young, well educated and with a good grasp of the world around them. Some are looking to escape from difficult circumstances, but there are plenty of others looking for training, education and experience at the start of their career.

The Army is in a battle for talent with lots of other employers, all of whom want to tap into a generation of people who see the world differently. It has to stand out and explain why it is worth taking a look. Putting pictures of tanks, guns and marching bands up will appeal to a very small demographic in this pool of recruits.

But, if you can instead step away from this, and tap into what drives and motivates people, and make the Army sound like somewhere that a person could feel wanted, then suddenly everything changes.

For all the moaning about ‘PC gone mad’ the simple fact is that these campaigns have generated a level of interest and attention among recruits that is unparalleled in recent times. Simply put – they work, and they work very well. The proof is that not only has interest levels risen, but so too have applications being turned into recruits.

It is easy to knock these campaigns and call them silly or ‘PC gone mad’ – a quick search for British Army recruitment shows all manner of articles in recent years where anger and scepticism was expressed about the wisdom of the approach taken. But this year there seems to have been a notable change.

Rather than getting retired Colonels to angrily bash a column out before their first snifter of the day, usually decrying standards falling and how the Army has given way to those bloody liberal civil servants, this year the media reaction has been far more muted. The coverage was more positive and accepting that the campaigns were getting results.

There will continue to be opposition, including from serving soldiers, who dislike the themes of the campaigns. But those opposing the campaigns forget that they are not the target audience for them – of course the adverts are unlikely to appeal to them, in the same way that advertising for pension providers is of little interest to teenagers.

These adverts should be welcomed as a sign that the Army really gets it. Rather than relying on tired tropes and not particularly informative posters as a way of hoping that people will sign up, it is taking positive steps to try and get the message out about Army life to the masses.

In a land where few people will know anyone who is currently serving in the armed forces, which at barely 140,000 regulars are an extremely small percentage of the population, it makes sense to want to try and find new ways to reach out.

Previous generations may have joined based on tales of what Dad or Grandad did in the war, or grown up as ‘forces brats’ in the days when the military was far larger and people served longer. But the modern military, smaller and with people often serving for shorter periods, is unlikely to have the same mass to draw on.

Instead people will know practically nothing beyond what they see on tv, be it war movies or ‘bad lads army’. Little of this will really explain the vast range of careers or opportunities on offer to the modern soldier, and it is likely that many good recruits have been lost through an inability to explain what Army life is really like.

By working on a series of campaigns that much more effectively explain to a youth that has, to many extents, been cut off from its armed forces, how the Army works, what its values are, and how the values, ethos and mindset on display is something that chimes with what the potential recruit is looking for in their life, the Army can try to tap into an audience that would otherwise never have come calling.

It is easy to want to go back to the old and familiar ways. To some the idea of a bunch of white male soldiers carrying guns with some line about ‘join the professionals’ will seem to be all that is needed. But it really isn’t, and it would end in failure. The modern recruit sees the world in an utterly different way – and that means capturing them in a different way too.

Paradoxically perhaps the biggest risk to Army recruitment is not its excellent series of recruiting campaigns, which do such a good job of explaining the ethos of the Army, but those who have long since left ranting on social media about the modern Army.

One only has to look at the abuse given to a female soldier, awarded the Queens Commendation for Valuable Service (QCVS) for her service in Afghanistan, by an online audience of retired soldiers grumpy about her beret positioning to realise that there is a real problem here.

Much as the Army is able to reach out on social media and tap into the youth of today, so too those who have gone before can do likewise. To watch former soldiers abusing a serving soldier on the Soldier magazine Facebook page, simply because they disapproved of her beret was a genuine disgrace. It highlights a growing gap between yesterday’s Army and the modern Army.

The risk is that the more abuse these former soldiers throw online, the more likely it is that people will walk away from expressing an interest in joining. Not because they lack the values and skills needed, but because they have no desire to serve alongside people who seem as utterly obnoxious as those posting angrily on Facebook.

This may lead to the next big challenge – how does the Army tap into its diaspora in a way that welcomes their experience, but prevents them from being recruitment blockers? This could become an increasing issue as the number of veterans active on the internet grows over time.

In the short term though, its important to focus on the positives. These campaigns are working extremely well – they are generating new recruits, widening the talent pool and increasing the awareness of the Army in places it would not traditionally reach.

The British Army, and the UK as a whole, is much better off as a result of these campaigns, and their clear success is a super good news story. The biggest challenge is surely, ‘what’s next’ and how to keep up both the momentum, and reflect the changes to society as we move into a post COVID world where recruiting may look very different indeed.