Zakazukha likes the concept of propaganda – heck, we like it so much we’ve even used the word on our business cards.

But don’t get us wrong – the propaganda we like is in its purest sense – to influence attitudes. And isn’t this what all businesses strive to achieve? Influence attitudes so people will engage with their goods or services?

Unfortunately the contemporary concept of propaganda is oft misunderstood, and the word has been given a bad name over the years by a few over zealous practitioners.

Its origin is from the Congregatio pro Gentium Evangelizatione (Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples) founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV’s Inscrutabili Divinae, a body charged with fostering the spread of Catholicism and with the regulation of Catholic ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries.

In reality it was the church’s marketing department ensuring the spread of Catholicism over the spread of Protestantism through the globalisation of the Dutch and English during the 17th century.

However it’s war in the 19th and 20th centuries that really put propaganda to the test.

Depending on which side of the fence you were, propaganda was viewed as either a god thing or a bad thing.

Posters encouraging people to sign up to fight for their country or invest in war bonds were seen as an effective way of immobilizing the masses. On the same token spreading horrific tales about the enemy and their insatiable appetite to kill and eat children fueled the hatred between warring sides.

But it was Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, during World War II that really cemented the decline of the word’s reputation (lets not forget the British Political Warfare Executive as well as the United States Office of War Information used the same techniques).

Communist propaganda (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese) has since become pop art to hang on your wall, and more recently its become fashionable to think anything that smacks of new world order to be the propaganda instrument of the US, World Bank, G20 or G8, but the word’s central tenant –  influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position – is as relevant in today’s business world than ever.

Call it marketing, call it advertising, heck, even call it social media marketing, but when it comes down to it what we are all doing is propaganda.

So lets propagate!