The Six Ps of the Military Recruiting Mix

The Defence Secretary recently announced he intends to “scrap 100 outdated policies that block people from joining” the Army¹ and both the Defence Select Committee and Reserve Forces External Scrutiny Team have just noted that military recruitung targets are still not being met. ^{2 3} Recruiting is back on the agenda, so let’s talk about it. 

Unfortunately, the Army has no recruiting doctrine to shape that conversation. The Common Workforce Lexicon doesn’t even have a definition for the word “recruiting”. Worse, documents like ‘Tri Service Regulations for Recruiting’ are at pains to point out that some things that look like recruiting are “not a recruiting activity”.⁴ It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that both public and internal debate about recruiting can be frustratingly confused.

This article suggests a framework for understanding military recruiting based on a similar format to the well-known ‘4 Ps of the marketing mix’.⁵ Those are the key process variables or ‘ingredients’ of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion that marketing professionals ‘mix’ appropriately to ensure successful outcomes. Although simple, the 4 Ps have transformed marketing theory and practice.

The military recruiting equivalent proposed here is six Ps: Policy, Package and Process, which shape Population, Propensity, and Persuasion. Like the marketing version, Army recruiters themselves are not necessarily responsible for delivering every element, but they must do their best to ensure the mix is optimal for the environment in which they operate.

Policy, Package, and Process

All six Ps interact with and influence each other, but the first three remain under the direct control of the military itself – although not necessarily a single service, nor its recruiting department. That’s significant because changes are often made by other branches, albeit for other good reasons, with little thought to how they might affect recruiting. Since internal factors can be controlled, they should be, and constantly monitored and modified to mitigate external factors which can’t. Often, however, this is a slow and change-resistant process.

Policy

Policy is the most important element of the mix because at some level every decision affecting every other factor is a policy choice. However, policy is often hidden or wrongly assumed to be constant over time so its impact remains invisible.

Until the 1990s, for example, policy allowed officer candidates to join the Army with no A Levels if they passed a rigorous selection board. Now candidates must have a minimum of 3 “Ds” at A Level just to attend that board,⁶ even if they hold a degree.⁷ This policy was raised to 3 “C” grades for a while, and in each case the number of officers recruited fell. Medical, as another example, has seen required standards creep up year on year, while policy on how much medical proof needs to be provided leapt up in 2004⁸ and has continued to climb ever since.

Defence policy sets the size of the Army and workforce policy calculates the number of recruits needed to fill it. Eligibility policy shrinks the recruitable population by dictating who can join, even during conscription. Disagreeable policies might reduce the population’s propensity to enlist, whilst funding policies can impact recruiting activities, or soldiers’ real-life experience of the package during training and service. Mouldy walls in army housing, for example, are there because “accommodation has been a low policy priority for the MoD”.⁹

Process and Package are almost entirely made of policies, from primary legislation like Queen’s Regulations,¹⁰ through remuneration and benefits policies, recruiting SOPs, and down to local unit instructions and unwritten rules that impact soldiers’ everyday lives. Training policy also affects recruiting, preventing many candidates from joining until their trade training can be aligned with the end of their basic training. This can delay start dates for months, even when earlier basic training places are available.

Policy change is thus the most influential lever in delivering Army recruiting. Think of any “why don’t they just…?” scenario you like, and the solution will require changing policy somewhere. However, it is often overlooked, remaining unchallenged and unchanged long after its original logic is unhelpful or irrelevant. Often conflated with immutable military tradition, it embodies Liddel Hart’s maxim that “the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out”.¹¹

Package

Package, or Haythornthwaite’s “People-Value-Proposition” (PVP),¹² is all the elements of the recruiting “offer”. It includes extrinsic rewards like pay, benefits, accommodation, trade training opportunities, and career progression, as well as intrinsic ones like purpose, value, culture, and quality of life. The PVP encourages Propensity and is promised during Persuasion, but must be authentically delivered, both during initial training (which can last years for some trades) and into service. Package is thus also vital for retention, in turn reducing pressure to recruit.

Package must be balanced, and sufficiently competitive for the size of the available population and prevailing job market, a tricky thing to pull off in practice and highly dependent on Policy. Compared to the straightforward salary comparisons between civilian jobs with similar conditions and benefits, the military package is complex and, as Haythornthwaite observed, not well understood even by the Army. Explaining it to a civilian audience that is impatient, time-poor, and has no background knowledge of the forces is therefore not easy, particularly in the face of often more high-profile negative messages.¹³

The Army Reserve package is also poorly understood and not helped by pay rates that start below the minimum wage, or “less than if they were stacking shelves”.¹⁴ Neither did the loss of brand equity when the Territorial Army (TA) was abruptly renamed ten years ago, leaving candidates, their families, and employers confused about the new PVP. Even now, recruiters still find themselves explaining the package as being “like the TA”, a concept the public still understands. FR20’s statement that Reservists might spend one year mobilised in every five¹⁵ was not popular with employers at the time, nor wives and partners, which may have reduced the propensity to join, or stay. Eight years later, FR30¹⁶ noted that mobilisation is still not well understood, internally or externally.

As well as clearly defining the PVP, Haythornthwaite advocates a “properly resourced effort to communicate” it. For recruiting this must inform the public, so the simpler and more compelling the proposition can be made, and the earlier and more often it can reach them, the better. Otherwise, recruiters face the almost impossible task of trying to explain a complex package from first principles during a fleeting encounter at a job fair, or during a 30-second TV advert.

Process

Process is the dull but necessary business of moving an applicant through all the steps required by policy to enlist. In many ways, this “is” recruiting, as most businesses understand it, the tedious job of checking that a potential new hire is eligible to work for the organisation and is suitably qualified for the roles available. 

Process usually involves some form of sift and assessment, plus making candidates fully aware of the package they are being offered, employment policies, and the recruiting process itself. It requires gathering and managing data, collating then verifying documentation, booking and re-booking events, conducting background checks, booking and re-booking tests and re-tests, onboarding new joiners, and so on.

When senior figures say “it takes a soldier to recruit a soldier” they don’t mean this.¹⁷ Other than some assessments, this is deeply boring stuff that most soldiers joined the Army to get well away from. They are also less efficient than civilians, as annual training requirements and more generous leave pulls them away from their candidates for longer. Process is, therefore, something militaries might consider civilianising and most do.¹⁸ However, Process must still be underpinned by sensible policies and an attractive package, both of which remain the Army’s responsibility. 

Frustratingly, for the Army, its recruiters, and its candidates, most processes also involve verifying things the state already knows about its citizens, checking paper evidence obtained from other government branches, and then digitising it again. Compared to modern online credit checks or instant mortgages, it’s hardly 21st century. Better cross-ministry data sharing could shorten the process by weeks.

Population, Propensity and Persuasion

The remaining three Ps are beyond direct military control but can all be influenced, both by the Army itself and by other bodies with a stake in maintaining a properly functioning state. National defence is often touted as the “first duty of government”^{19 20} whose various Offices and Departments, particularly for education, skills, and work, could all do more to support and enable Defence recruiting. War in Europe has reminded states of their responsibility to ensure Defence is underpinned by strategic industrial resilience. The government should similarly seek to ensure resilience within its Defence human resources pipeline.

Population

Population is the number of citizens available to be recruited, so in economic terms the supply to the Army’s demand. Total population size is determined by demography, but the recruitable population is defined by policy.

Modern Western nations have huge populations and tiny armies, so there should be no shortage of candidates. However, only a fraction of the population meets recruiting policies for a range of demographic requirements, such as nationality, age, education, tattoos, medical health, physical fitness, immigration status, and security or criminal background.

Ageing and often highly medicated Western citizens exacerbate this, and modern electronic record-keeping makes it harder to ignore undesirable traits, especially medical issues. Sweden has recently reported that two-thirds of its conscripts are medically unfit to enlist,²¹ while as many as 90% of British Army recruiting rejections are for not meeting medical policy.²²

This reduces the recruitable population, particularly during peacetime when policy tends to set higher entry standards to make training and retention easier, cheaper, and lower risk.²³ In economics, when supply is constrained goods become more expensive. This might be reflected in having to spend more on a better package, more on persuasion, or more on training less capable candidates. The US Army is currently offering recruiting bonuses of up to $50,000,²⁴ and has doubled its investment in training programmes for less able recruits.²⁵

Most Western armies have sought to increase their recruitable populations through policy changes that allow foreign recruiting, wider age ranges, and both sexes to join all Army roles.²⁶ Population changes themselves also matter, however. Although the UK is just coming out of a 15-year low of 15-25-year-olds, the West’s demographic collapse²⁷ means that recruiting older candidates will become an issue of necessity, not diversity, especially to support larger Armies. The average age of a front-line Ukrainian soldier is 44 largely because they are so short of 18-30-year-olds.²⁸

Propensity

Propensity also reduces the recruiting population because not everyone who can join the Army wants to. Policies like conscription help overcome this but individuals may still choose not to comply. Falling propensity is a major problem for volunteer forces in all Western nations, with even the relatively martial USA estimating only 9% of its youth is inclined to serve.²⁹ This may affect young men disproportionately too, who, like it or not, are still the mainstay of Army recruiting.³⁰

Improving Propensity is difficult because it requires influence during early adolescence, ages 10 to 14, when most young people develop their personal “self-concept”. This coalesces their ideal vision of themselves and shapes their propensity for careers that align with that self-image. It is hard to change these attitudes later in life, tacitly recognised by the Defence and Security Industrial Strategy encouraging the “national security sector to be more visible… at secondary education”.³¹ GCHQ, for example, starts building propensity for its roles with 10-year-olds, in Year 6.³²

However, to comply with the 1992 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,³³ the Army’s policy is that it must not conduct “recruiting” activities with anyone under 15. Consequently, recruiters must rely on other influences to encourage propensity within this critical age group, mainly from schools, family, society, and the media. 

Reduced military presence in everyday life has been a concern since the 1980s³⁴ since when the Army has shrunk repeatedly, and its visibility and influence dwindled. Vastly fewer teachers, parents, politicians, celebrities, or other aspirational role models now have any personal experience of the Services to represent to young adolescents, encouraging their propensity to serve.

Cadets offer some uniformed influence from the age of 12 but are not part of the Army. Many adult volunteers, although excellent, also have no Services background, and the syllabus gives little insight into Army careers beyond generic basic training activities. The Cadet Expansion Programme³⁵ is focused on improving student behaviour and attainment at school, not propensity to join the forces. It is thus Defence supporting the Department for Education, rather than the reverse, and it is likely to reduce.³⁶

Military events, news items, documentaries, and even museums, can all help influence propensity. However, they, particularly Remembrance events, tend to frame military service as a tragic hangover from a brutal past, not a modern, aspirational career, essential to safeguard a progressive and democratic future. The one thing most young adolescents learn about the British Army is the carnage on the first day of the Somme, not the quality of its modern technical schools and colleges.

Brand management remains a legitimate way for the Army to influence young people’s propensity, projecting itself as a “force for good”³⁷ with excellent opportunities for social mobility.³⁸ Army brand is much more important to Propensity now than before 1992 but is not owned by recruiting. Although better managed in recent years, it still struggles in the face of frequent negative messages and the Army’s tribal complexity compared to the simplicity of the other Services.³⁹

Visiting schools to deliver Gatsby career guidance⁴⁰ is another legitimate opportunity for employers like the Army to raise propensity. Soldiers – particularly young, relevant, ones – are good at this but when recruiting staff do it, it is hard to argue they are not “recruiting” so contravening international law. Thus, the wider Army has an essential role in encouraging propensity by visiting schools during Key Stage 3 (Scottish S1-3). Such visits include contributions from “old-boys/girls”, “satisfied soldiers”, “KAPE tours”,⁴¹ and Regimental or Corps promotional activities. 

This is where “it takes a soldier to recruit a soldier” makes sense, but these activities are not “recruiting” and are generically termed “engagement” by the Army. They are frequently misunderstood, however, and assumed to be solely the responsibility of recruiting personnel.⁴² 

Nevertheless, even the whole Army cannot attend all 6,500 secondary schools, or regularly speak to 4 million students across all four national education systems.⁴³ This again emphasises the importance of Army brand activities via digital channels, including credible testimony from young serving influencers, something the Army struggles with for cultural and security reasons.

It also highlights the importance of appropriate education within those four education systems. Schools are where young people are, and where they develop their sense of self. Arguably, our state education could and should do more to support Propensity where possible, backing that “first duty” of the government that funds them, as happens in other Western democracies.⁴⁴

Persuasion

Persuasion builds on Propensity, within Policy, to convince the eligible population to start the Process and obtain Package. Simplistically, Persuasion seeks to move potential candidates through a purchasing model known as ‘AIDA’; from Awareness that the Army exists and what it is, to Interest in the opportunities it offers, to a Decision to join, and finally take Action to do so.⁴⁵

Research often identifies lack of awareness as the biggest problem in attracting candidates because the Army is simply not on their radar. Propensity, education, and engagement activities all contribute to awareness and interest – and often look very similar to Persuasion in practice. However, Persuasion also seeks to secure a decision and action to join, not just provide information or build interest. Persuasion is about recruiting Millennials and Gen Z, not raising the propensity of Gen Alpha.

Television and radio advertising remain the highest-profile persuasion media, but their effect is diluted across dozens of modern channels and individual on-demand options, often segmented by age. This means that each message reaches fewer people fewer times, so more are needed to contribute to marketing’s ‘Rule of 7’, the (at least) seven prompts thought necessary to drive action.⁴⁶ A complex decision like joining the Forces might need many more, although propensity or engagement activities can also contribute. Either way, these nudges must start early enough for some candidates to join the Army’s Foundation College at 16 or apply for a scholarship at age 15.

Persuasion is essentially marketing, so follows the traditional marketing mix and is almost always outsourced to professional civilian agencies. Credible representation by real soldiers is still needed though, both from Army recruiting professionals visiting schools from Key Stage 4 (Scottish S4) onwards, and from the wider force, as with Propensity. 

This is especially important when promoting specialist knowledge, facilities, diversity, or equipment, for example, at STEM recruiting fairs. It is also Army policy to only use images of real soldiers in its promotional media. This can be challenging, as many don’t want to be “the face of the Army” for understandable security reasons. Plus, there is always a risk that today’s “hero image” becomes tomorrow’s controversy.⁴⁷

Money talks in marketing, and scale and repetition usually count more than the advertisement itself. People might not like Go.Compare or We Buy Any Car ads, but they’ve seen them and remember the product because those companies have paid enough to make sure that happens. Commentators usually focus on disliking the content of Army advertising⁴⁸ but miss the point that the budget for how often they are shown remains stubbornly low.

The Royal Navy and the RAF each routinely spend about three times more per head on advertising than the Army, and sometimes more in total.⁴⁹

Conclusion

Definitions may not solve problems, but they are a useful and necessary starting point for mutual understanding.⁵⁰ The 6 Ps of the Military Recruiting Mix don’t themselves offer a recruiting solution, but they do provide a framework for discussion that could help move us towards one. 

Imagining the 6 Ps as a mixer or graphic equaliser, ideally Policy and Process should be turned down as low as possible, while Package, Population, Propensity and Persuasion would all be turned up high. Go too far, though, and that might be unaffordable, or mean getting more recruits than you need at lower quality than you want. More realistically, you need a balance across the board, just as any mixture needs the right amount of each ingredient.

Some dials are easier to move than others or deliver more immediate effects. For over 30 years, though, they have all been steadily turning in the wrong directions. Policy now goes up to 11, driving a tiny eligible population and a huge amount of Process. Package has steadily and publicly declined, damaging Propensity and Persuasion, which has been underfunded and increasingly attenuated across multiple media platforms and channels. Propensity is probably the most neglected area and the one that the Army struggles most to influence itself, for legal and practical reasons.

The 6 Ps offer a structure for debate on how to reverse this and highlights that three, if not four of the major factors are within the direct control of Defence, while Propensity could be best influenced by the state itself. John Healey’s recent announcement focused on Policy, which is the right place to start, with relatively low cost and potential for rapid impact. It will increase the recruitable population and should reduce Process, if deeds follow his words. The signs are not encouraging.⁵¹

To further reduce Process, perhaps to enable his other pledge to “make a conditional offer within 10 days”, the Minister could encourage other Ministries to share electronic data with the MoD. To improve Propensity, he could engage with the Department for Education to include more information about public sector career options in their syllabuses. Perhaps this could even go as far as liberal Sweden’s “Total Defence”⁵² approach, which educates all its young people they must support their country’s civil or military defence in some capacity as adults. 

Improving Package or Persuasion will require financial investment that is unlikely to be available in the short term, but improvements to other elements of the mix could help to compensate. A big movement on one or two dials might potentially be balanced by smaller turns on several others. Which dials to turn, how far, and how feasible or affordable that is, are all subjects for debate, however. 

Nevertheless, we need this debate because every other aspiration for improving the Army starts with recruiting enough people in the first place: if you can’t force-generate, you can’t operate. 

The 6 Ps offer a common framework to optimise that debate.

1. Sky News (2024). Politics latest: Starmer giving first Labour conference speech as PM | Politics News | Sky News
2. UK Parliament (2024). https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/60ed6a33-9a93-4f6e-96e8-ccf637c42738
3. CRFCA (2024). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/676046971857548bccbcfabf/Council_of_Reserve_Forces__and_Cadets__Associations_Scrutiny_Team_annual_statutory_report_2024.pdf
4. MOD (2021). JSP545 – Tri Service Regulations for Recruiting.
5. McCarthy, E. J., (1960) Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. #7 – Basic marketing, a managerial approach – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library
6. Requirement is 72 UCAS points, which averages to 3 “D” Grades at A Level. Other combinations of Level 3 academic qualifications totalling 72 UCAS Points are also accepted. Qualifications (mod.uk)
7. See, for example, The Daily Telegraph (2024). The Navy is turning away people who are ready and willing to fight for Britain (telegraph.co.uk). Although a Royal Navy example, the Army has the same policy.
8. HM Government (2006). The Government’s Response to the Deepcut Review Presented to Parliament by The Secretary of State for Defence By Command of Her Majesty CM 6851 (publishing.service.gov.uk)
9. The King’s Fund (2024). “Homes Unfit for Heroes” – The Kerslake Report, key findings. homes-unfit-for-heroes.pdf (kcl.ac.uk)
10. UK Government (2019). The Queen’s regulations for the army 1975 (amendment number 37) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). Queen’s Regulations Amdt 37 remains the published policy two years after the coronation of King Charles III, demonstrating the tendency for policy amendments to lag behind events.
11. Liddell Hart, B. H., (1944) Thoughts on War, London, Faber and Faber.
12. Haythornthwaite, R. (2023) Agency and Agility: Incentivising people in a new era. Agency and agility: Incentivising people in a new era (publishing.service.gov.uk)
13. See, for example, Kerslake (2024) homes-unfit-for-heroes.pdf (kcl.ac.uk), Atherton (2021) and (2023) Women in the Armed Forces: From Recruitment to Civilian Life (parliament.uk) and committees.parliament.uk/publications/40845/documents/199001/default/; Gray (2020) Unacceptable behaviours-progress review 2020 (publishing.service.gov.uk), Wigston (2019) Wigston review (publishing.service.gov.uk), and FYBUK (2024) https://m.facebook.com/Fillyourbootsmilitarybanter/
14. CRFCA (2024). The United Kingdom Reserve Forces EST Report. Reserve soldier pay has just been raised to £7.91 per hour for an 8-hour Reserve Service Day (RSD), still below the £8.60 per hour minimum wage for 18–20-year-olds and £11.44 for 21 and over. First year bounty of £558, if earned, adds a maximum £2.58 per hour. Bounty is tax free, so may raise the hourly rate above minimum wage for 18–20-year-olds paying tax, but not older recruits, as many Reservists are. Sources: Pay & Benefits in the Army Reserves (mod.uk) and Low Pay Commission – The National Minimum Wage in 2024 (publishing.service.gov.uk). The length of this explanation highlights the issue of trying to communicate a complex offer, compared to the power of a simple trope like ‘below minimum wage’ or ‘less than stacking shelves’. It also illustrates the power of policy change: when the EST report was drafted, the hourly rate for Army Reserve recruits was £5.86, and £6.55 for trained soldiers, a substantially less attractive offer.
15. Ministry of Defence (2013). FR20: Reserves in the Future Force, Valuable and Valued. Reserves in the Future Force 2020: valuable and valued (publishing.service.gov.uk)
16. Ministry of Defence (2021). FR30: Unlocking the reserves’ potential to strengthen a resilient and global Britain. MoD: Reserve Forces Review 2030 – May 2021 (publishing.service.gov.uk)
17. E.g. UK Parliament Committees (2024). 16 January 2024 – Army Recruiting Contract – Oral evidence – Committees – UK Parliament
18. For example, both the Royal Navy and RAF recruiting systems that are often described as being ‘fully in house’ make extensive use of civilian contractors to deliver process elements, particularly in the early sift stages and to deliver medical examinations and fitness assessments.
19. E.g. UK Government (2024). Defending Britain (HTML) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
20. E.g Minister for Armed Forces (2024). Minister for the Armed Forces speech at Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference 2024 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
21. Aftenposten (2024). Two out of three Swedes too sick for initial service (aftenposten.no)
22. Francois, M. (2017). [Page 6]. Filling the Ranks – Report on the State of Recruiting into the United Kingdom Armed Forces – by the Rt Hon Mark Francois MP 26.07.17.pdf
23. Arlo Guthrie’s famous protest song “Alice’s Restaurant” recounts him being rejected for the US draft in 1965 because of his criminal record for littering. When the song came out two years later, policy changes to bolster recruiting for the Vietnam War meant he would have been accepted.
24. US Army (2024). Military Bonuses | U.S. Army (goarmy.com)
25. Military.com (2024). Army Expanding Pre-Basic Training Prep Courses to Bring in More Soldiers and Curb Recruiting Crisis | Military.com
26. E.g. British Army (2018) All British Armed Forces roles now open to women | The British Army (mod.uk); The Daily Telegraph (2023) Army retirement age may be raised to boost numbers (telegraph.co.uk); BBC (2024) Australian Defence Force to allow recruits from foreign countries – BBC News
27. I.e. their population ‘pyramids’ are beginning to look more like columns, or even inverted pyramids, narrower at the bottom than further up.
28. Fortune.com (2024). The average age of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is 43-45, while the youngest troops remain exempt from front-line combat | Fortune and Wikpedia.com (2024) Demographics of Ukraine – Wikipedia
29. Military.com (2022). Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth’s Remarks to the 2022 AUSA Opening Ceremony (October 10, 2022)(As Prepared) | Article | The United States Army
30. Military.com (2024). The Army’s Recruiting Problem Is Male | Military.com
31. HM Government (2021). Defence and Security Industrial Strategy (publishing.service.gov.uk)
32. National Cyber Security Centre (2024) CyberFirst overview – NCSC.GOV.UK
33. UN HCHR (1992). Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict | OHCHR. Internal Army policy allows its Recruiting Group to engage with young people from Year 10 / S4 onwards, so can potentially influence from the lowest age of 14. However, no element of the recruiting process can start until candidates are aged 15.
34. The Marilyn Report (1988). “the youngest national serviceman is now 47 years old and public has scant knowledge of the Army”. Request copy of the Manning and Recruiting in the Lean Years of the Nineties report (publishing.service.gov.uk)
35. CCFA (2024). The Cadet Expansion Programme. Combined Cadet Force | Cadet Expansion Programme
36. See, for example, The Sun (2024). https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/31613282/army-cadet-cuts-remembrance/
37. MOD (2021). Defence in a Competitive Age. Defence in a competitive age (publishing.service.gov.uk)
38. CGS RUSI Keynote Speech (2023) citing The Times Education Commission report “Bringing Out the Best”. “…in Britain it typically takes five generations for someone to go from the bottom to the middle of income distribution. In Denmark it takes two. But if you serve a career in the Army you can do it in one”. Recording: RUSI Land Warfare Conference 2023 | Royal United Services Institute
39. Readers may disagree, but the Royal Navy brand can be summed up as “boats and planes” and the RAF’s as “planes and airports”. Most civilians have some direct experience of these, so understand that to keep a vessel, plane, or airport running you need catering, engineering, medical, security, shore staff, ground staff, air or sea crew, etc. The Army’s brand is more opaque and defaults towards combat activities to represent what the Army “is” or “does”, even for supporting Arms. The multiplicity of badges, uniforms, Regiments and Corps, and even differences in basic roles like “driver”, makes it much harder to present modern civilians with a coherent brand image that simply expresses the many different roles and opportunities the Army offers.
40. Gatsby (2014). Good Career Guidance. 6144_Gatsby_career_2014_AW.indd
41. KAPE is “Keeping the Army in the Public Eye”. Satisfied Soldiers are recently qualified recruits who act as Army ambassadors to support recruiting and engagement activities. Old Boys / Girls are Army personnel returning to their schools to give talks or assemblies about their experiences.
42. For example, see: BFBS Forces News (2024) Putting uniformed soldiers back into frontline recruiting credited with boosting applications (forcesnews.com). The article assumes increased levels of Field Army engagement activity to support propensity and promote the Army means “recruiting offices have been reopened” and more “recruiting sergeants” must have been appointed, which was not the case.
43. Gov.UK (2023). Education and training statistics for the UK, Reporting year 2023 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK (explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk)
44. France, for example, has included a mandatory Journée Défense et Citoyenneté (Defence and Citizenship Day) in its national curriculum since 1998, and is phasing in a longer Service National Universel (General National Service) by 2026. US Local Educational Agencies are required to provide military recruiters schools and student access when requested, and US Army recruiters are less bound by the 1992 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the US has not yet fully ratified. Poland, with Russia on its doorstep, launched its ‘Edukacja z Wojskiem’ (Education with the Military) scheme in May 2024, with soldiers teaching children about civil and military defence from primary school age; and reportedly compulsory firearms lessons from December (e.g. Deutsche Welle (2024) Poland’s schoolchildren take mandatory firearms lessons – DW – 12/12/2024).
45. Attributed to Lewis, E. St E, (1903). E.g. AIDA – Oxford Reference. Some versions of the model show “D” as “Desire” not “Decision” but the concept remains unchanged.
46. For example, see: Forbes (2023). Why Marketers Should Follow The Rule Of Seven (forbes.com)
47. For example, see: Daily Mail (2019). Guardsman to resign in disgust after his picture was used in a controversial recruitment campaign  | Daily Mail Online
48. For example, see: BFBS (2023). Latest British Army advert at risk of not reflecting ‘what an army really is’, experts say (forcesnews.com)
49. BFBS (2020). Navy Spends More Than Army And RAF On Recruitment Campaigns (forcesnews.com) In 2019 the Royal Navy spent more in total than the Army on recruitment advertising, not just per head. Recruiting demand for each Service in that year was RN c.5,000, Army c. 13,000 and RAF c. 3,500.
50. RAND Organisation (2019). Will to Fight: Returning to the Human Fundamentals of War (rand.org)
51. See, for example, UK Parliament (2024) Written questions and answers – Written questions, answers and statements – UK Parliament.
52. Swedish Government (2024). Total defence – Government.se