What does the tactical adjective mean in 2022? For some companies in the space, the term is still closely tied to its historical roots. From Active Lifestyle to Active Duty, and Back Again The consequences of this confusion have already arguably impacted our world in divisive ways, and there’s little reason to believe things will change anytime soon. Unfortunately, few self identified tactical gear brands appear to agree on what the adjective implies, or more importantly, whether ordinary civilians should be considered as customers. For others, it's a direct reference to its intended customer base. For some, it describes the company’s ethos or approach to product development. These companies, in some cases self-proclaimed leaders in the tactical space, and in other cases focused on wider market segments, have each co-opted tactical as a short-hand term to serve their own distinct ends. It’s a linguistic development that traces back to the same market phenomenon: the birth and rapid evolution of a new product positioning strategy, seeded and defined by a set of companies following different pages from the same marketing playbook. It’s also crept into headlines and stories scattered across a wide range of consumer media outlets, including our own website. On the contrary, the adjective now seems to litter the blurbs of millions of increasingly benign products - think sneakers, T-shirts and pants, - targeted at similarly benign civilian activities. Yet strangely, the rise in prevalence of tactical descriptors isn’t correlated to an explosion in new military-grade products. Twenty years later, invocations of the term are now both far more complex and far more common, at least in the context of manufactured goods. It was a term applied to gear designed exclusively and intentionally for military and law enforcement use, often epitomized by features like pockets for pistols, knives, armored plates and bullets.
The inclusion of the adjective was once equally clear and reserved for a singular purpose in the realm of product marketing. Succinctly defined as “of or related to combat tactics occurring at the battlefront," the only minor wiggle room regarding its meaning concerns the specific type of warfare it describes. Unlike many words found in Merriam-Webster, the primary definition for “tactical” is precise and explicit.
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