Marketing Week

We continue our new podcast series by looking into the British Army's controversial recruitment campaign, 'This is Belonging'. Launched in 2017, the campaign, which showed the camaraderie of army life, had a simple objective – widen the recruitment pool by moving the message away from guns and tanks to images of more human experiences. Even if it drew scepticism from the media for its emotional tone, it was an instant success, propelling applications to record levels and winning a number of awards, notably gold at the IPA effectiveness awards in 2018. It was followed in 2018 and 2019 with campaigns aimed at attracting recruits from all walks of life – people of all faiths, 'snowflakes' and 'selfie addicts', to quote the latest advertising copy. To tell the story, Marketing Week editor Russell Parsons is joined by Nick Terry, chief marketing officer at Recruiting Group, part of Capita and the firm responsible for British Army recruitment; Rhonwen Lally, senior planner at Karmarama; and Rob Fullerton Batten,