I was recently a guest on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur with Josh Elledge (a podcast reaching over 100,000 monthly listeners), where we spent the better part of 20 minutes doing something most marketing conversations never get around to: actually defining the problem.
The problem is that most businesses skip a step.
They go straight to marketing. They run ads, optimize copy, tweak their messaging, then wonder why none of it lands with the weight they expected. The layer beneath marketing is where the real work happens. Most businesses have never touched it.
That layer is propaganda.
Propaganda isn’t what you think it is.
In the United States, the word carries a particular stigma, and that stigma was itself the result of propaganda. Strip away the political baggage and the definition is straightforward: marketing is the organized effort to sell a product or service. Propaganda is the organized effort to sell an idea, a narrative, a belief system.
The question every business needs to answer, before they spend another dollar on marketing, is this:
What is the one thing my ideal customer must believe before they desperately want what I have to offer?
That belief has to stand completely independent of your name, your face, and your brand. It should be valid on its own, attributable to no one, and utterly irresistible to the right person. When you find it, you stop selling your product and start selling a worldview, one that makes your product the only logical next step.
I walked through two examples on the show. The first was a hyperbaric chamber facility in Florida. The owner wanted to market his chambers. I told him to stop talking about his chambers entirely and instead produce a documentary, The Oxygen Deficit Crisis, that sells the world on the idea, backed by data, that declining atmospheric oxygen levels are a root cause of chronic illness. Once the audience buys into that narrative, they come looking for solutions. His facility is the most credible one in the room.
The second was Edward Bernays in the 1920s. The tobacco industry needed women to feel comfortable smoking in public. Traditional marketing would have run more newspaper ads. Bernays latched onto a narrative that already had momentum (women’s rights) and staged a protest at the country’s largest parade where women lit cigarettes and called them “torches of freedom.” No brand names. No logos. Just an idea that rewired how an entire culture thought about women and cigarettes. Sales followed.
This is the architecture of a propaganda campaign: find the belief your market needs to hold, attach it to momentum that already exists, and let the idea do the selling. You don’t have to be the only one who benefits from that rising tide. You just have to be the one controlling it.
The full white paper is available here:
Download it. Feed it to your AI. Start with the one question and see where it takes you.
There’s no complete marketing strategy without a propaganda strategy underneath it. That’s been true the whole time.
Godspeed,
Jared T. Ross
Chief Propaganda Officer
Bureau of Propaganda Intelligence
