Marketing Peace

Book excerpt: Religious terrorism accounted for 66% of all deaths from terror attacks in 2013. Using religion as a trump-card for justification of violence has increased sharply since 2000, significantly overtaking political and nationalist separatist movements. There has, however, been no serious attempt to understand how peace can be offered as an alternative product to violence, if it was handled by commercial marketers. If a presidential candidate, sportsperson, detergents or banking services can be marketed, can peace be marketed too? This book argues that social marketing, which uses commercial marketing principles for social good, may make a significant contribution to encouraging peace. The book unearths the subconscious metaphorical frames utilised by Christians in their conceptualisations of Muslims in the US, and vice versa, through a two-fold approach. Firstly, ethnographic field-work is used to gain the trust of the community and to understand the lived-in experience of community members in their natural social setting. Secondly, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is adopted as a tool to discern the metaphorical lens that Christians and Muslims use to view each other. The study suggests how this metaphorical lens of framing may help in designing more effective interventions that would fundamentally alter the mechanism of ‘contact’ between rival majority and minority religious groups in conflict.