New client: the Alliance for Peacebuilding asks Buena to rebrand peace
Three years of research found Americans see peace as passive and out of reach. The Alliance for Peacebuilding asked us to change that. The work became the Peace Force.
Instead of enlisting in the armed forces, what if young Americans could enlist in a force for peace? Today, on the final day of PeaceCon 2023 in Washington, the Alliance for Peacebuilding unveiled the Peace Force, the brand Buena built with its board chair Julia Roig. The first T-shirts sold out before everyone in the room could get one.1
A recruiting office for peace
PeaceCon is the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s annual conference, and this year was its 11th. Co-hosted with the United States Institute of Peace, it ran from May 3 to 5 under the title Beyond Fragile Ground, opening at USIP and moving to Trinity Washington University for its last two days.2 It was the first time since 2019 that the conference met even partly in person, and more than 1,000 people joined at least one session on site or online.1
The Peace Force went on stage on the third and final day, in what one board member called a nerdy fashion show of dueling T-shirts. The pitch was short. Conflict has a recruiting office, uniforms, a badge and a budget. Peace has a dove. So the Peace Force borrows every tool the military uses to recruit and turns it toward peace: you enlist, you get your gear, and you get deployed on acts of peace.
Launch week
- 1,000+people at PeaceCon 2023, on site or onlineAttendance at at least one session of the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s three-day conference in Washington.
- 11thannual PeaceConThe Alliance for Peacebuilding’s yearly gathering of the peacebuilding field, co-hosted with the US Institute of Peace.
- Sold outthe first run of Peace Force shirtsThe initial drop of tees went in the room, before every attendee who wanted one could get one.
- 77people told us what hate smells likeAnswers to a survey that became the ingredient list for The Smell of Hate, one of the first prototype drops.
Instead of asking young people to enlist in the armed forces, we are asking them join the Peace Force instead.
Why peace needed teeth
The brief behind it started 18 months earlier, with research the Alliance and PartnersGlobal commissioned from the FrameWorks Institute. It found that Americans think of peace in passive terms, as the absence of conflict or a state of inner calm, and widely see violent conflict as an inevitable part of human nature.3
At the same time, worry was everywhere. In August 2022, 43% of Americans told YouGov a civil war was at least somewhat likely within ten years.4 People weren’t short on fear. They were short on something to join.
In June 2022, Buena answered with a creative brief built on one flip: repurpose the tools of conflict to make propaganda for peace. The message was three words long. Enlist in peace.
Conflict had a recruiting office. Now peace does too.
Built in Chicago, shipped in Washington
The brand took shape at a two-day creative summit in Chicago in late October 2022, where Buena brought a team of creatives together with Roig and the Alliance’s Nick Zuroski. What came out of the room looked less like a nonprofit and more like a new branch of the service.
It has a wing-and-chevron badge, a condensed stencil typeface, and a palette of field green and gold. The call to action reads like a recruiting poster: Commit an act of peace. The line underneath says what the Peace Force is: the non-violent, non-partisan force boldly fighting for peace in America.
The style guide was done in January. A beta site at thepeaceforce.org went up in April with enlistment memberships, and a store sold the gear at cost, so a shirt was a way to sign up, not a fundraiser.
The first drops: pills, a perfume and a sneaker
Every recruit gets deployed, so the Peace Force needed missions: acts of peace provocative enough that people would talk about them and pass them on. The first prototypes were ready in time for launch.
Peace Pills
A mock supplement line for the side effects of hate, with a 34-second promo. Hate causes impotence. Peace makes you hard. Take one daily.
The Smell of Hate
A matte-black perfume “designed to never be worn.” Its tagline: Hate stinks. Don’t wear it.
Peace Force 1
A custom green-and-gold sneaker, so you can walk the walk.
Peace Pills borrow the grammar of every supplement ad you’ve ever skipped. The promo opens on symbols of hate drooping like a bad night, then announces, deadpan, that studies show hate causes impotence. The cure arrives bottle by bottle: hard, hot, hairy, happy. It ends on the Peace Force card.
The Smell of Hate took a little research. We asked 77 people what hate smells like, and each picked three answers. Rotten eggs and rotten fish tied for the lead. The top five became the ingredient list on the label.
“The shirts literally flew out the door”
In the room at Trinity, the reaction was immediate. Hauss, writing about the conference afterwards, described “lots of delighted gasps” as Roig and her team presented the visuals. By the end of the session, the shirts were gone.1
Julia and the team developed some initial t-shirts which sold out so quickly that I couldn’t get one.
The panel on the other side of the fashion show argued for peace as a verb, built from the grassroots up. Hauss sat on that side, and conceded the point that mattered on the day: “they had the better t shirts.”1
Doug Burnett put it more simply when he looked back on launch week: “People went bonkers for the shirts.” A month later he was introducing the Peace Force at the Oslo Freedom Forum as the organization we had just launched.
What comes next
The Alliance said its other members would design their own drops, so the Peace Force can grow as a platform rather than a single campaign.1 The whole journey, from the first “rebrand peace” brief to the first shirt, is being filmed for Rebranding Peace, a feature documentary by CJ Crim that follows Roig and Burnett as they build it.5
Peace finally has a badge, a uniform and a place to sign up. Commit an act of peace.
Sources
- Charles Hauss, The Dot Connecters, “PeaceCon 2023,” May 16, 2023
- Alliance for Peacebuilding, “PeaceCon 2023: Beyond Fragile Ground: New Peacebuilding Architectures for Today and the Future,” May 3–5, 2023
- FrameWorks Institute, “Building the Bridge to Peace: Reframing Peace and Peacebuilding,” April 2022
- YouGov, poll on the likelihood of a US civil war in the next decade, August 2022
- Film Fatales, “Rebranding Peace,” a documentary by CJ Crim
