Communicating the Opportunities of Military Service to the Youth Market

The war on terror began on October 7^th, 2001 and has cost over 3,000 soldiers their lives. The perceived promise of a "long war" along with casualties creates a significant enlistment barrier. The army recently launched a new brand, "Army Strong," which appeals to the markets\´ value system and counters war related barriers to enlistment. Currently, the army doesn\´t possess a system for modeling new recruiting campaigns. Using the United States Military Academy\´s System Design Process: problem definition, solution design, decision making, and solution implementation; we created an army opportunities communication model (AOCM). The AOCM modifies the bass diffusion model by adding value parameters to existing advertising effectiveness and word of mouth parameters. Specifically, we model values in national advertising, recruiter effectiveness, and word of mouth advertising (hype). The recruiting effectiveness parameters measure how recruiters, money, college funds, length of service contract, location, and the availability of different military occupational specialties affects recruiting. Bass Diffusion models typically model and describe how new products are adopted into the market. Frank Bass introduced the Bass Diffusion Model in 1969 when he published his paper "A new product growth for model consumer durables," and it has been widely influential in marketing and management science since its\´ introduction. The AOCM allows stakeholders to analyze the effectiveness of each parameter. This data can be used to modify the current or future recruiting campaigns to achieve better performance. Modeling results are pending. Contributions include the use of value parameters within the bass diffusion model and a new army system for modeling new recruiting campaigns.