What We Can Learn About Successful PR from ISIS
Image courtesy of ABC News
When talking about successful branding ISIS isn’t the group most people would think of first. But, ISIS is a group that has learned to promote itself using well-planned marketing and public relations. They have learned to present themselves using very sophisticated PR approaches and methods. While there cause may not be acceptable to us, they use it in the way that increases their brand with their target market and PR specialists can learn from their tactics. ISIS may want to re-emerge the world in a less enlightened time, and they are doing it with the full force and power of the digital age.
Know Your Demographics
ISIS has managed to fine-tune video on social media to target specific groups and demographics. Videos feature more gore and blood are used to target groups and areas of the middle east, but edited to present a more cleaned up and refined version to the western world. This makes it easier to target groups for recruiting purposes. The PR of recruiting is all over social media, not only working to convert teen and pre-teen impressionable youth through live chats allowing them to debate and present their version of a reasonable ideology.
ISIS has also managed to imbed their PR in children’s games, making reprehensible forays into the western culture by brainwashing youth. This allows them to vent their grievances about how misunderstood they are. This fanatical following has even been targeting specific groups among the well-educated by going after doctors, lawyers, even public relations specialists – so beware.
Build Tolerance
Looking at the many PR lessons that can be learned about marketing and branding, such as keeping your “product” front and center through social media publications, exaggerating, and taking credit for more horrific deeds than were actually done. Like the Nazis, their efforts strive to make viewers and followers numb to their violent acts, so they seem more acceptable by keeping them first and foremost, front and center through PR.
The attacks on Paris are a prime example of making sure we know who they are. Those attacks provided a way to let the world see them and their “crusade.”, allowing them to market and brand their cause and objectives, a masterful bit of Public Relations.
Branding can be dismissed, but when your brand is front and center internationally from a PR perspective, it can jump your views and intentions allowing the masses to instantly know, and maybe identify with, your brand.
