Some Considerations in Developing Effective Messaging: The SUCCESs Framework and Military Influence Activities

摘要

This Contract Report is intended to provide some applied methods to support the training of information operations (Info Ops) and psychological operations (PsyOps) personnel. It is meant to accompany a similarly titled presentation developed for the Peace Support Training Centre at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Kingston. While there are limitations to the framework suggested here, it can at least serve as a starting point for the improvement of training material provided students at CF schools. This field emphasizes messaging and how messages target audiences to remember a product, and act upon that memory in a desirable fashion. Although this approach does not pretend to solve all of the theoretical weaknesses in current Influence Activities (IA) related doctrine and training, it does provide a departure point for improving messaging in this area. The consumer psychology literature is both broad and well-established. It should be noted that the fundamentals of the framework are not entirely original. In fact, much of the material reflects previous longstanding work in other fields of research, including the voluminous body of literature on propaganda. However, the simplicity of the framework described below is ideally suited to the short instructional timeframes available in current CF training courses. This Contract Report will explore a newly proposed framework for effective messaging in consumer psychology, adapt it to be suitable to an IA perspective, and apply it through the use of examples drawn from operational experiences in Afghanistan and Bosnia.