Protests in support of Palestine have driven significant social changes around the world. These movements hold great potential to further shift public opinion and policy. How can they leverage marketing techniques to amplify their message and build stronger, more inclusive support?

Despite 10 months of Israeli slaughter of women and children in Gaza, pro-peace protests in Sweden have struggled to gain widespread support. One reason for this challenge is the absence of a clear, strategic plan to achieve concrete outcomes.

Although marketing as a discipline often faces criticism for its broader societal impact, it can still offer valuable insights for pro-peace movements that aim to build legitimacy and support through their collective expression of dissent.

Instrumentalism and Clearly Defined Objectives

The first thing to consider is that marketing is an instrumental endeavor. The fundamental objective of corporations is profits and marketing, whether practitioners realize it or not, is a means to achieve that end. Similarly, protest movements have goals to achieve, and protests are the means used to achieve those ends. Put differently, protesting resembles marketing in that it is an instrumental endeavor to affect the order of things.

People may, however, be motivated to attend protests for different reasons, and emotions play an important role. Some protest to let off steam and to feel better about themselves, while some do it to signal virtue to social peers. Emotions such as rage, grief, and empathy stemming from great suffering and injustice are the most effective motivators for action. Without moral indignation, getting people to act on perceived injustices that occur far away would be much harder, as opposed to situations where such indignation reflects broadly across society, as for instance, the recent success of the student protests in Bangladesh.

When emotions trigger the actions of a small minority of people, the emotive driver must reasonably be paired with a conscious strategy to effect change. Without a conscious strategy, more impactful ways of supporting the struggle may be lost. The effectiveness of public

relations and marketing in creating sympathy or demand depends on carefully thought-out strategies with a clear focus. Marketing strategies do not try to capture all potential opportunities in a market. Instead, they discriminate between them through methods of positioning and segmentation in order to achieve successful outcomes.

From my own experience of the Swedish context, participating in street rallies and online protest groups, I’ve noticed that such a strategy seems to be missing. The protests accurately criticize Israel, Netanyahu, the US, the EU, the Swedish government, the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, McDonald’s, Burger King, and more. But their show of dissent lacks clear and credibly attainable demands. For instance, beyond the calls to stop targeting Gaza’s children, boycott Israel, and free Palestine from the river to the sea, there is no clear purpose. Of course, the main message is clear and, in the best of worlds, should suffice: opposing the genocide in Palestine. But since it doesn’t suffice, the potential power of the protest movements is allowed to be eroded by unfeasible, misdirected demands (Israel won’t listen) and the vast number of complicit actors, each one of them facing accusations without suffering any real consequences. With such diffusion of accountability, specific demands will not be formulated against them, let alone successfully achieved. Here I believe, there is a need to be clear about the instrumental value of protests to obtain concrete objectives.

Consider the Perceptions of the Target Group to Avoid Ambiguity

Marketing is the guarantee of the bridge between the product and the potential market. While forming strong and differentiated corporate and product brand identities is fundamental to marketing, its primary focus is not the objective qualities of the product, but how they will be perceived in the eyes of the consumer. Related to this is the elementary rule in marketing: know your customer!

Protests can be more successful when they consider the fact that what is communicated is in the end defined not only by what you say, but how it will be perceived by the audience. In relation to this, protesters would be wise to consider which audience to target and how their message will be perceived by it.

The target audience for inducing political change is the broader public opinion. Political scientist and leading scholar on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Norman Finkelstein, once

criticized the BDS movement on this point saying they will never reach a broad public who is constantly fed Israeli propaganda saying “they want to destroy us.”

Again, this shows how important clearly distinguishable and focused objectives are because it helps avoid ambiguity and unnecessary friction between the intended message and how it is perceived. Ambiguity about the purpose and ambition of protests might counteract active support from people who actually have concerns and passively support peace and equal rights for Palestinians. One reason could be that they may consider it to be futile and a waste of time, another reason might be skepticism and fear of being associated with a message that contains ambiguity. In Sweden, protesters are widely treated by the media with suspicion. On the day of the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, dozens of people in a Swedish city took to the streets to celebrate. Those apparent expressions of support for the attackers effectively delegitimized the subsequent pro-peace protests in the eyes of many. False accusations in the press of anti-semitism and support for terrorism were further facilitated by the ambiguity regarding objectives, even though none of the pro-peace protests involved expressions of antisemitism or direct support for terrorism.

Seasoned pro-peace activists are familiar with how accusations of antisemitism can be weaponized and diluted, but for passive supporters, the fear of being labeled in this way can be a significant deterrent. It might be easy—and even satisfying—to dismiss these hesitant supporters as uninformed or unconscionable outsiders. However, if the aim is to build a broad base of support to create meaningful change for the victims, dismissing them is like a marketer ignoring a potential customer—an approach that rarely leads to success.