By Isabella Lamberson, Marketing Intern

Walking into my first military trade show, West 2026, at the San Diego Convention Center, a jumble of thoughts swarmed my mind. Would many people show up? Did I look the part, or did I seem out of my depth? Would I be asked questions I didn’t know the answer to? Standing outside Hall B a few minutes later, crowded by confident men and women in business attire and military uniform alike—all older than me—it seemed everyone knew the people around them in a five-foot radius. How many years did it take to grow a network like that? My five-foot radius included brand new colleagues.

A couple of deep breaths later, I walked into a brand-new world. The West 2026 event, run by the Armed Forces Communication Electronics Association (AFCEA), was the first trade show I’d ever attended since starting my position as the Marketing Intern at One Stop Systems (OSS) in January. With a writing—rather than technology—background, the learning curve felt steep at first, but I have spent my working days slowly scaling that hill by asking questions and observing.

My time at the booth was spent listening to my colleagues interacting with partners and potential customers. Watching these exchanges, I recognized what was at the heart of West—the real reason why hundreds of people had shown up during the work week to surround themselves with others in the defense industry. The obvious explanations come to mind: to meet customers, establish connections, solidify a brand’s image, and feel out competitors. But when I took a step back to study the messaging on the booths and walk the floor, I saw what I had studied for years as a marketing student come to life. Every conversation and display was geared toward answering one two-part question:

“What do my customers want, and how can my product(s) solve their problem?”

A deceptively simple question but recognizing its value and putting it into practice are two different skills. I decided to spend my time at the trade show discovering how businesses determined their customers’ pain points and developed solutions that addressed them. One lesson I learned in school that applies not only to the workplace, but to personal development, is that the best way to truly understand something is to first see how others have been applying it, and from there figure out how you ought to implement what they have taught you. A combination of observational and experiential learning.

After conducting several interviews, I determined two elements of successful marketing within the defense industry, specifically: collaboration and adaptability.

Collaboration & Communication in Defense Marketing

Speaking with a Field Marketing Manager (FMM) from Iron Bow Technologies, which supplies IT solutions for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, I learned how she determined her customers’ pain points through communication and collaboration.

During the conversation, which took place at West 2026 in San Diego, she shared how surveying her teams about the issues facing their customers enabled her to effectively communicate potential solutions within her company. In a similar vein, she expressed, the follow-up with customers is what differentiates marketing from other departments. A marketer can simultaneously strengthen their relationship with a customer and discover new ways to improve the product by following up with them after a marketing campaign, thus ensuring a product’s relevance and solidifying a brand’s reputation in terms of adaptability.

Regarding communication and collaboration, experts at Fiddler, an AI security and observability company, solved a problem for the Navy by improving the technology it used to detect threats under the sea. Autonomous AI Agents were making incorrect decisions, and in the context of the maritime environment, those decisions could be the difference between mission success and failure. When it comes to machine learning models, there needed to be a way to track the changes within models as they learned. Without observability and explainability, there was no way to determine why AI systems arrived at incorrect conclusions. The solution to what seemed like a strong pain point hadn’t occurred to me before when considering AI, and I recognized that it wouldn’t have come to anyone without collaboration and communication. Those who used the AI systems—in this case, the Navy—would have discovered this problem immediately when they ran into the AI Agent making poor decisions. But the solution? Without getting the right information into the right hands, Fiddler and the Navy may never have realized their compatibility.

Like Iron Bow, Fiddler recognized that collaboration could lead to breakthroughs in technology, shifting the market on its axis. Defense industry marketing successes will be defined by how well companies communicate internally and with their customers. Collaboration enables a strategic approach to how a brand portrays itself to customers; it goes hand in hand with how well a company can adapt to an ever-changing market, which I’ll cover in my next post.