East vs .West, good vs. bad: Dissecting ‘glocalisation’ in branding

SHANGHAI:At the 2012 Asian Marketing Effectiveness Festival, Tom Doctoroff, Mythili Chandrasekar, and Jordan Price from JWT sat down with the agency’s clients Leanne Cutts from Kraft Foods and Rex Wong from Anheuser-Busch InBev to ask how much gravitas the cultural gap between the East and West has on branding.

As the centre of gravity of markets shifts eastward, the time has come for global brands to step back and look at the impact of local culture on their products, positioning and brand identity, said panel moderator Doctoroff, also JWT’s North Asia CEO.

On the surface, Asian consumers may share much in common with their Western counterparts. They listen to the same pop bands, play the same games on the same iPad, wear the same clothing brands and drive the same cars.

However, there are deep cultural differences that global brands ignore at their peril: local differences in taste, outlooks and perspectives. Brands benefit from taking a different approach to Asian consumers in terms of research, product positioning, and creative imagery, the panelists agreed.

Price, senior strategic planning partner of JWT Tokyo, who helps global brands understand Japan, began with a case study of the ‘Dove Campaign for Real Beauty’ that employed various communications vehicles to feature ‘real women with real bodies and real curves’.

“Everyone knows this campaign, it was successful globally,” he said. “But it didn’t work very well in Japan. The faithful adaptation of the global idea, even with a localised tagline ‘I won’t hide my skin anymore’, never really made a difference for Dove,” Price admitted.

The problem was how Dove interpreted global research that does not necessarily have the same meaning in Japan. Even though Japanese women said they had the same fundamental issues as global women, there is still a sense that ‘real bodies and real curves’ are not okay, because they have certain basic ideals of beauty and body image they want to strive for and achieve, Price explained.

One global campaign that did a good job in Japan, on the other hand, was the McDonald’s ‘I’m lovin it’ campaign. Its success was based on strong marketing and clear positioning of fast food as a snack and the restaurant a place to hang out.

“Making the concept of fast food fit within the Japanese food context is a tough thing for foreigners, so by not competing with real food, that worked,” Price said.

Still in the F&B sector, what would not have worked in China was Budweiser’s global ‘Whassup?’ campaign, unless it was localised. Wong, Asia Pacific vice president of marketing at Anheuser-Busch InBev, made it plain: “What the Chinese see in the global commercial is this: A group of all the wrong characters, who are homeless and jobless people not going to work, having a Bud in all the wrong locations. It doesn’t trigger the motivation to have a beer or inspire the Chinese consumers. It doesn’t work in China because it doesn’t present the same values that the Chinese want.”

China’s adaptation of the commercial used ants that depicted the national spirit of diligence and solidarity. “Ants work as a team towards a goal, and are always moving forward together,” Wong said. “The way we connected with beer-drinkers in China was different, even though the core idea of sharing and male bonding is the same, just because beer is the most culturally-driven product in any category.”

Another effort that did not strike a chord was Indonesia’s localisation of Oreo’s twist-lick-dunk ritual. In the ad, the kid tells Dad not to tell Mum that he broke the cookie. “This secrecy in the transaction between father and son got a little too complicated,” said Cutts, Kraft’s Asia Pacific vice president of marketing for gum, candy & powdered beverages. “It should be simpler. Indonesian mothers gave feedback that’s not what their children would do. They didn’t like that.”

The idea of the purity and innocence of children was diluted, so the execution was a departure from the core brand message, Cutts added.

 In the East, the individual does not exist independently of society, so brands must be very careful to be sensitive to local cultural and social contexts. “It’s easy to make mistakes when you localise a global brand because you may end up altering it,” Doctoroff pointed out.

Chandrasekar, senior vice president and executive planning director of JWT India, mentioned advertising around the topic of arranged marriages that is sensitive to the Indian culture but still focused on the core brand message.

In the West, diamonds are about enduring love and romance, but in India, gold dominates the wedding market, Chandrasekar said. “We did work for De Beers that contrasted a ‘gold bride’ who is more married than happy, with a ‘diamond bride’ who is more happy than married”, so wearing diamonds has made women literally sparkle and more expressive, she said.

Chandrasekar is the creator of ‘Brand Chakras’, a research tool that leverages the 2,000-year-old Indian form of physiology-based psychology. “We have a feeling that a lot of market research is Euro-centric,” she said. “But Indians believe that seven major energy centres shape our responses to the world: survival, pleasure, power, love, creative expression, transcendence, spirituality.”

This framework may be an Indian version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but helps in deeper understanding of consumer insights in all stratas of society in India, she said.

As for Japan, Price pointed out that the unique market needs brand ideas that fit into its receiver-oriented and collective culture.

From a business persceptive, Doctoroff then asked the panelists why they think global brands are useful. “Why can’t we just do everything locally?”

To that, Wong’s answer was efficiency. “Firstly, when you have the same campaign all over the world, you have brand efficiency. Secondly, when you use the same raw materials in packaging, you have cost efficiency.” Cutts added, “

Our energy and time is finite, so having global consistency helps us focus on doing a number of things really well.”  (Campaign Asia)