The cost of war: How marketing strategies can impact world peace
September 25, 2024
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According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, the world spent $14.4 trillion on conflict in 2019. The estimate haunts Cliff Shultz, professor and Charles H. Kellstadt Chair of Marketing at the Quinlan School of Business.
“Think about what that might’ve been spent on instead,” he says, “like building libraries and hospitals, and developing vaccines.” For Shultz, investing in nonviolent solutions would serve countries so much better—with marketing playing an instrumental role in peacebuilding efforts. The use of marketing as an instrument for peace has been the driving force behind his most impactful research.
Shultz’s career could have easily gone down a different, more predictable path. His dissertation focused on the Machiavellian sales tactics on Wall Street, but as he explains it, “I just couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life figuring out ways to help millionaires become billionaires. I wanted to make a difference for vulnerable human beings on the ground.”
Instead, he accepted an invitation from the Vietnamese government in 1991 to lecture on marketing and consumer research, at a time when the country was transitioning away from a state-planned economy. He was, as it turned out, the first American marketing scholar to lecture on those topics in Vietnam since the U.S. withdrawal in 1975.
His experience in Vietnam inspired a series of epiphanies around the power of marketing and a deepening interest in postwar societies. Soon after, he traveled to Cambodia, Croatia, and Bosnia to study their reconstruction efforts, and the central thesis of his career began to take shape. “Markets and marketing are indispensable to the recovery after war and internecine conflict,” he says. “Where do you begin? What elements have to be put in place? How do you make amends with former enemies to cooperate and rebuild for win-win outcomes?”
The answer lies in thinking of “constructive engagement,” a macro-marketing concept that Shultz first introduced to the field in 2007. Unlike micromarketing, which focuses on advertising and sales of products, macro-marketing studies how marketing affects the politics, economics, and societies of a country or region. According to Shultz, marketing eases the tensions between countries or groups when parties set policies that allow them to exchange goods and services fairly, establish rules for collaboration, promote transparency, and seek to improve the living conditions of the greatest amount of people.
Markets and marketing are indispensable to the recovery after war and internecine conflict.
— Cliff Shultz, professor and Charles H. Kellstadt Chair of Marketing at the Quinlan School of Business
That kind of dynamic is what Shultz understands as constructive engagement. Trade blocs like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Economic Community of West African States are prime examples, with the European Union being a gold standard of how this concept plays out in the real world. “The idea of Germany and France ever going to war again is inconceivable,” he points out. “They now have this common unified government and market system that is seductive to people around the world.”
Constructive engagement also occurs at a smaller scale. For example, since the early 2000s, Nike has been hailed as a model for sustainable business practices and employee training, treatment, and development—particularly for female staff.
Shultz understands that large corporations, private investors, and international organizations are flawed. Governments are often seduced into choosing paths with short-term gains but long-term costs that affect large swaths of their populations. However, that is precisely why constructive engagement can help temper their worst impulses. “When countries or groups don’t play by the rule of law, they’re outed. If they agree to play by the rules, they can come back into the fold,” Shultz says.
At Loyola University Chicago, Shultz found a natural home for his pursuits and a launchpad to continue exploring constructive engagement around the world. “I realized all the opportunities that would open for me at Loyola because of the Jesuit global networks. I wasn’t thinking about working in Colombia, but Universidad Javeriana welcomed me there. I never thought about going to Lebanon, but it only took me a 35-minute Skype call with Saint Joseph University of Beirut. It’s made me a better scholar. I think I’ve had more impact.”
What is one of the impacts he’s most proud of? The classroom. Students in his Comparative Marketing and Consumer Behavior in Emerging Southeast Asia course travel to Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam every year. On their trip, they learn more about the political economy of each country, meet with survivors of war, and volunteer with local organizations. Shultz recounted discussions he’s had with his students who feel that there is so much do in that part of the world. He says, “I always tell them, you are welcome to go back to Cambodia. You also can do those kinds of things in Chicago.”
