Gilead's Marketing Plan

The Handmaid’s Tale is a carefully arranged story. Everything in Gilead has been placed–positioned–for a purpose. The women, colors, rituals, and violence–even the language–position Gilead in power. It is tyranny masked as religious generosity that constructs a positive perception directing women to violence. It feels like grimm storytelling but it is a modern process. Gilead uses marketing to subjugate Handmaids into their new identities.

Marketing doesn't sell products, it arranges perceptions and shapes identities through story-telling. In the book, the Commander, with his background in market research, doesn’t need brute force to control women (Atwood 307). He only needs story-telling, strategy, and human emotions. Just like a successful marketing campaign, Gilead offers illusions of safety, belonging, and purpose through story-telling. The story is communicated through internal and external messaging.

Every message—internal or external—is designed to shift belief, reinforce identity, and maintain power. Like modern corporations, Gilead understands the difference between messaging to internal employees versus messaging to the external public. Internal leadership inspires compliance through structure and repetition; it sets tone, culture, and leadership. Internal messaging is transactional and participative—you need people who will show up, believe, and help build the brand. This messaging will shift to focus on motivation, alignment, and inspiration to maintain loyalty over time. Employees become team members, partners, thought leaders, “Googlers”, “Metamates”, or “Cast Members”. The identity of members are re-branded. In Gilead, internal messaging rallies the first members and maintains momentum. The “Sons of Jacob” (306), use transactional leadership to organize what they call “cleanups”, shutting down pornocarts, killing Congress, pausing the Constitution, and preparing for Gilead (174). It’s a glorified startup with lethal precision. Women—like the Aunts, Commanders’ Wives, and Handmaid’s—enter roles that become part of Gilead’s internal workforce. Women become the delivery system for their own oppression. Even the Historical Notes confirm it: “The best and most cost-effective way to control women… was through women themselves” (308). To keep the system running, Gilead launches a motivational internal campaign that includes Ceremonies, Prayvaganzas, Red Center trainings, and Birth Days (307). These are their staff meetings, their team huddles, their brand refreshers–repetition keeping everyone aligned. This internal messaging reinforces complicity, and those that are complicit bring in new members using external messaging.

External messaging sells the regime to consumers using image and appeal. Offred could be considered part of the “late majority” consumers—people who don’t want change but will accept it if it feels “safe or familiar enough.” Gilead uses comforting illusions, ripped out of context from a familiar and reassuring culture to name the positions of power within the regime (308). The Historical Notes confirm this was intentional: “a brilliant stroke” (308). Gilead positions itself as a safe enough or at least a better alternative to rape, poverty, and anarchy. “Consider the alternatives,” Aunt Lydia says (118). The Rachel & Leah Centre shows arranged videos of the past to make the future seem safer. “There is more than one kind of freedom… Freedom to and freedom from.” (24).  The Handmaids align themselves within the safety of Gilead, meaning freedom from the past. Offred believes she is making a choice for the better alternative. “There wasn’t a lot of choice, but there was some. And this is what I chose” (94). This better alternative, Gilead, is full of pleasurable imagery. “The lawns are tidy, the façades are gracious… like the pictures they used to print in the magazines.” (23). Offred eventually chooses to only see perceived benefits—emotional rewards that override reality.

 Perceived benefits are more effective than the truth. Consumers don’t buy products for what they are, they buy them for how they make them feel. Coca-Cola doesn’t sell soda–it sells friendship, celebration, and happiness. But a soda won’t give you friends—it gives you cavities—yet, people drink it. Just like Coca-cola drinkers, Offred ignores the “cavities” of Gilead and tells herself another story. She tells herself the Commander is sad and sheepish, that she’s helping Cora by getting pregnant, that being a Handmaid is her purpose, “She hopes, and I am the vehicle for her hope” (140, 135). She tells herself the fireplace is cozy, the strawberries are sweet, her room is hers (183, 164, 50). She tells herself all of this and she starts to believe it. She finds comfort in red shoes, rituals, gossip from the Marthas, even the sleepy silence of clean streets (79, 221,11, 23). The flowered bathrooms, papered walls, and garden symmetry all become part of the story Offred tells herself. (62, 153). She makes it romantic. Heroic. She becomes the protagonist of a survival story with her and her new friends. She invents a story where she isn’t a prisoner—she’s a survivor, a mother figure, a mistress, a rebel (8, 135, 163, 168). She rebrands herself like any good consumer and she starts to believe in the version of herself that feels best. She knows it’s false—and that’s the real story here. “This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction” (134). “The things I believe can’t all be true… This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything” (106).  She isn’t just complicit—she’s converted. She chooses belief over truth. Branding over reality. Pleasure over pain. Joy over sadness. Gilead relies on “perceived benefits” and like any effective marketing campaign, it’s just convincing enough to keep Offred moving forward within the regime.

Offred moves forward through the “customer journey” path. In marketing, the “Customer Journey” maps the stages of a consumer’s relationship with a brand: from awareness, to evaluation, to decision, and finally loyalty. Offred starts the customer journey, aware that the new regime is affecting her personal life (174). Though she tries to ignore the stories, she eventually watches tyranny unfold on live television (144, 178). When her circumstances change, her husband is killed, her daughter is taken, she reevaluates her options within Gilead (227, 39). Fertile women have the opportunity to become Handmaid’s instead of being sent to the Colonies, so she decides to become a Handmaid (220, 94). Offred follows the customer journey like a rat in a maze (165). She remains loyal by rearranging her thoughts into a story she wants to believe, letting Gilead guide her (9). Her initial resistance gives way to routine and the customer journey becomes a loop, spiraling herself deeper into Gilead.

Offred gets to this point because of banal marketing strategies. Gilead’s internal messaging rallies the workforce, perceived benefits attract outsiders, and Offred walks down the path and continues the cycle. The architects building this cycle didn’t need innovation, they followed a blueprint already proven effective in modern marketing. Gilead offered a story, and Offred accepted a role within it. Gilead’s marketing through story-telling is familiar, persistent, and dangerously effective. “I feel, for the first time, its true power” (286). Offred steps forward, not because she’s forced, but because the story Gilead tells, she tells herself. The potential for perceived benefits is easier than recognizing reality. That is Gilead’s Marketing Plan, to tell stories people want to believe.  

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. 1986. Vintage Books, 1998.