Book Excerpt: Culture Clashes

An excerpt from an Adweek book by Simon Anholt How do you create effective global advertising? Ask Simon Anholt. As the founder of the London-based World Writers, the world's first and only centralized global creative facility, Anholt is one of the leading consultants to companies and agencies that wish to build global brands. A consultant on many of the best international campaigns, including Nike, Coca-Cola, Levi's, IBM and British Airways, Anholt has codified his approach to international marketing and advertising in a new book: Another One Bites the Grass. Anholt details the problems and pitfalls advertisers and their agencies confront in worldwide branding efforts. He addresses the linguistic and cultural dilemmas that international advertising raises and the many myths and misunderstandings that result from a failure to understand the local culture. Another One Bites the Grass suggests that the best advertising in the world won't serve you in the global arena unless your brand is fit to travel. It explains that language, word play and imagery are often specific to each country's culture. Despite the best intentions, generic labeling doesn't always translate abroad. To strengthen a global campaign, it is imperative, Anholt contends, that companies understand the cultures they market to. Indeed, the inability to appreciate the intricacies of various cultures can prove costly. In his book, Anholt outlines a concept he calls "smart centralization": a new way to create real international communication for traveler brands. Another One Bites the Grass also discusses the fact that the traditional network system isn't working. Thus, Anholt proposes new approaches to planning, creative development, account management and production to ensure success in the world of global branding. THE TROUBLE WITH CULTURE This is my favorite international marketing disaster story of all time: the famous and ancient Gerber story. Who knows if it's really true--but, true or not, it's a wonderful parable about the mystery of culture, and it's so good, I retold it in the first house ad we produced for World Writers. It goes something like this: Gerber once decided to sell their brand of baby food in a West African country. They exported the product and ran the same copy that had been selling jars for them by the billions since 1926. They put the famous label on the jar, with the baby boy wearing a big smile which, over the years, had helped them become a household name back home. Reports soon came back from the distributor, announcing zero sales. Later, reports came back on the national news, telling of rioting in the streets and casualties. Worried company chiefs watching television back home in the U.S. thought they glimpsed people burning copies of their poster in the background. Much later, it transpired that in many African countries, there was a very real but hitherto undocumented assumption that what you see on the label is what's in the jar. This came over to consumers as a coarse hint that the little boy, far from endorsing the product, was the product. People thought they were expected to feed their black babies with a white baby. Sensibilities were naturally offended by this immodest proposal, and outrage soon gave way to violence. The wonderful moral of the story is that you can get into big trouble even without opening your mouth. SO WHAT IS THIS CULTURE THING? Whatever structure you use to create it, creating proper international advertising and marketing communications is the hardest challenge any of us ever face in this industry. The whole issue is a labyrinth of administrative, financial, creative, client service and logistical problems--even moral problems--once you start looking at the bigger picture. In the next few chapters, I will continue to analyze some of these problems and start to propose some solutions. But the problem I wish to talk about in this chapter is really the toughest one of all, and it's what the Gerber story is all about: getting to grips with culture. It seems clear to me that the marketing and advertising industries' persistent failure to see culture as their biggest challenge--or a failure to understand that culture has anything to do with international marketing or advertising, or even a failure to acknowledge that cultural differences actually exist--is the main reason why, historically, there have been so more successes than failures in international marketing programs, and why international advertising campaigns are so often disappointing. Exporters have known for years that culture is a factor worthy of consideration--at least in principle. Way back in 1960, the year before I was born, Edward T. Hall published a now-famous article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "The Silent Language in Overseas Business," which powerfully described the influence of this apparently invisible dimension on international business. The article was truly seminal. Today, even the dullest government information manuals for exporters always have a little paragraph in them describing what goes wrong when you clean your nails with your Japanese colleague's business card (it's usually the only bit of light relief in the whole book). Exporters are now beset from all sides by dire warnings about culture. There are scores of books on the subject, some of which are very serious, very academic and very heavy going, whilst many of the more popular titles aren't much more than endless lists of second- and third-hand scare stories. Some of these stories are so bizarre one can only assume they are wild products of the author's fantasy, or perhaps the result of certain "informers" in certain countries having a little joke at the American researchers' expense. The more sensational titles seem to be designed for the sole purpose of proving how weird and touchy foreigners are, and putting people off international marketing for life. Despite their tone of politically correct tolerance and their constant hectoring of the parochial reader, many of the them are little more than cultural freak shows, the marketing equivalent of Ripley's Believe it or Not. In order to prosper and thrive in different cultures, our brands have to learn, or at least to glimpse, the source code of these behaviors. Simply learning endless manifestations of them will merely paralyze us with fear. However, most sensible people agree that nobody can ever really learn about another culture. If you spend many years in another country, and most importantly, if you learn the language to a very high degree of proficiency, you can at least learn how to interact in a friendly and productive way with people from that culture. But one thing is abundantly clear: There's no way on earth that any individual with a corporation will ever be able to know, with any degree of breadth or depth, the cultures of all the countries where his or her product is sold. One could argue that a more practical solution is for the corporation simply to hire marketing directors in each export market who are natives of those markets and who also happen to be fluent in the culture of the home market of the corporation. At least this way, cultural exchange can actually take place, even if it's slightly one-way. In effect, this is exactly what happens in most international companies. At best, those local managers are fluent enough in the "lead" culture to be sensitive to the real, underlying needs of the brand owners and able to "culturally interpret" their instructions back into the context of the overseas market. In fact, there is an important middle ground between the very common state of total ignorance and the purely theoretical state of total global understanding: simply knowing, and feeling, deep down, that culture does exist and what it is in general terms, is an extremely worthwhile position to aim for, both for the corporation as a whole and for the individuals within that corporation. WHY IS CULTURE INVISIBLE? For most exporters, culture remains frustratingly difficult to understand, or even to perceive, even after many skirmishes with it, and even if one has been on the losing side every time--or perhaps as a result of this fact. The mere fact of belonging to a culture (and we all do, much as we might wish to resist it) blinds us to the notion that other, fundamentally different cultures and world views might actually exist. This is partly because our own culture is so essential a part of our identity and because we've never experienced a moment of our lives without it, we don't even realize we have one. It's a little like the point about language which I raised in Chapter 1: Since most people are brought up speaking their own language, and they've acquired it by an undetectable process of osmosis throughout their early lives, they don't actually perceive it as a single, artificial construct in the way that they perceive other people's (unfamiliar) languages. This is why the whole concept of grammar comes as a bit of a surprise to most people when they first try to learn another language, and why children are often heard to observe that their own language is much simpler and far superior, because it doesn't have all that stuff. Incidentally, this phenomenon also gives a clue as to why some nations tend to produce better linguists than others. In some countries, children are taught their own language at school, exactly as if it were a foreign language, even though they are already learning it "directly" as they interact with other people. This prepares them with a whole raft of concepts connected with the nature, existence and structure of language, which later on will make the concept of learning second and subsequent languages much simpler. It's exactly the reason why I was taught Latin at school, and it stood me in extremely good stead. It's another way of learning what a language is, in the purest and most abstract form, without the issue becoming clouded with other concerns. It's a way of building the structure independently of its content, which is a very good practice. I was about to say that one day, perhaps children will be taught culture in the same way. But of course this is, at least in theory, one of the main purposes of learning history and geography. However, because learning how to live in the global village is now such a necessary part of learning how to live, perhaps we will start to see some of the pure theory of intercultural relations taught to our children. Because our culture is as much a means of perception as it is a system of behaviors and attitudes, we can only observe other cultures though our own. I think like this, therefore I am like this, as Descartes didn't say, and in order to view another culture objectively, we would first have to abandon our own. And this is something which most of us, most of the time, just cannot do. Sometimes, we are vouchsafed with a little glimpse of what culture actually is. And very often, it happens because we are suddenly confronted with an objective, external view of our own. For me, the first time it happened was the first time I met someone who had never heard of England. I was in the north of Thailand, trying to get somewhere, and as I don't speak Thai, I was adopted by a girl who spoke some English. After she'd shown me the way to the station, she asked me which part of America I came from. "I'm not American," I replied. "I'm English." "Yes, I hear you speak English. But where you from in America?" "I don't come from America. I come from England." "What's that?" There was a pause, and I began to explain. "England is part of a small island kingdom off the northwestern tip of the European continent, with a long and interesting colonial past " I stopped, struck by a hideous thought: England is just another country. Like Latvia or Paraguay or America. I'm aware of how comical this anecdote must sound to most people--not least to Americans, Latvians and Paraguayans. But to me it was a turning pint because I suddenly realized that my view of the world was fundamentally distorted. Like people who are born with monochromatic vision, I had been simply incapable of grasping the concept of different colors. This was the filtering effect of looking at reality through the culture to which I belonged. But because I didn't realize the filter was there, I had never realized that what I was looking at wasn't the only possible reality. Naturally, there is a good deal of political bias in my culture. Like many races which have had an international influence at some stage in their past, the way we're taught history and geography and politics and everything else in England is designed to make us believe that we are somehow central in the world, special, better. But of course, we're not. And neither are you, wherever you come from. True, the world's second-most widely spoken language originated here. True, we once conquered a lot of other countries and rushed around the planet killing and stealing and subjugating as we went. But Latvia and Paraguay and America have histories and curiosities that make them special places, too. Everyone is special, everyone is different, but nobody is ever much more important than anybody else, except during tiny, brief moments of notoriety. The other lesson in all this is that learning how to understand other cultures also teaches sensitivity, humility and objectivity, which, contrary to much management teaching during the last couple of decades, is just about the most valuable quality any individual or corporation in international business can possess in the modern world. CULTURE AND ADVERTISING? Ask somebody who doesn't work in advertising or marketing (I can give you some names if you're stuck) to think of their favorite advertising campaign. I bet it's a domestic one. Now ask them for their favorite international ad--one they've seen in at least three countries. See? They think you're joking. Personally, if I have to look at one more global ad where some loathsome international executive with round glasses is reading his child a bedtime story from a mobile phone in his Hong Kong hotel room, I may start to scream and break things. It's trying so hard to say something to everybody, which ensures that this kind of globaldegook says nothing to anybody. People don't like it because it's a blunt instrument. Really good advertising, on the other hand, is distinguished by its sharpness: It speaks your culture as well as your language. A creative director of mine once taught me a simple trick for writing effective advertising copy. As you sat down to write (according to his theory), you just needed to think of a friend or relative who corresponded to your target market and imagine you were talking to them. "So, Simon, me old mate," he would say, "let's pretend you're writing an ad for Gordon's gin. Now just imagine that your mum is sitting in front of your typewriter, and tell 'er why she's going to like it." Naturally, I was a bit offended at the suggestion that my mother might be the core target for such a product, but I let it pass. After all, when you're being given precious advice by a creative guru which you'll treasure for the rest of your professional life, you don't fuss over details. The idea is that if you do it properly, every woman in the country who's even a little bit like your mum will instantly sense that she's finally being spoken to by a brand that understands her, understands her needs, her ambitions, her dreams, and knows exactly how she likes to be spoken to. That fine silver thread of sympathy and understanding will magically string itself out and attach its brand to consumers. And all those women will phone up their friends and tell them about that nice young brand they've just met. But that's domestic advertising. What do you do if the target group is businessmen in Turkey or teenage girls in India? Summon up an image of your dad in a fez or your sister in a sari in front of your desk? Hardly. There seems to be something fundamentally flawed in the whole notion of "lead agency." How can a bunch of British or American or French or German creatives possibly claim to be able to create messages--or even message templates--which would actually mean anything relevant or interesting or comprehensible to people in countries where they couldn't order a beer?the culture basket? It seems to me that finding a good gag, theme or look for an advertisement is all about picking the right toys out of the basket of popular culture and playing with them until you find a combination which people will find arresting and memorable. Advertising, as I have said before, is actually made out of popular culture. Every time something happens in the press or on TV, a scandal takes place, a new personality emerges, an old one does something newsworthy, or the movie business or the music business provide us with new stimulus, an item of popular culture has been forged and the creative department has a new toy to play with. Advertising very rarely initiates anything. Sometimes it can draw our attention to something we hadn't noticed before, and sometimes it can remind us of something we'd forgotten, but its best trick is following so hard on the heels of changes in popular culture that you can hardly tell which came first. Domestic ads work because their authors enjoy the luxury of being able to choose toys from a capacious, exciting and constantly replenished domestic culture basket. But when faced with a brief for a campaign which has to run abroad, the assumption of most creative teams is that they must look for their toys in some kind of common international culture basket. And, frankly, this global basket looks pretty small, containing a very limited number of boring, broken and over-used toys--no Barbies or Playstations here. These are old, painted wooden trains, the kind of toys you probably tell your children you were perfectly satisfied with when you were their age. In any case, most of the international toys seem to have been previously used in Gillette advertisements: shirtless yuppies tenderly holding babies, more yuppies with round glasses punching the air outside the world's stock exchanges, impossibly good-looking girls standing around a scooter, discussing their shopping in some impossibly good-looking Italian piazza, and so on ad nauseam. It seems obvious that when we're charged with creating an international advertising campaign, we badly need to find a way of building in the cultural needs of our overseas consumers at the start of the process, rather than clumsily attempting to bolt them on during the post-production phase, using the highly inadequate tool of translation. It's clear that they drop off as fast as we can bolt them on. Somehow, we need to bake that stuff into the pie. Without even thinking about it too much, most of us still lazily subscribe to that hierarchical, top-down view of global marketing. We're constantly trying to sell American pie to the Germans by pouring German sauce over it just before we serve it. Of course, that's a disgusting idea, and no German in her right mind would eat it. Naturally, an ad agency of average intelligent will use market research to tell it something of the demographics of its overseas consumers and attempt to extract certain "key truths" about those consumers from the data and from its limited and inevitably prejudiced notions about the countries they live in. It may even speak to the local clients and listen to their views about the correct way to sell the product in their market. But most of the time, it really isn't listening because coming up with great ideas for ads is hard enough without worrying about this great mass of additional and contradictory information. In any case, when you consider how profoundly fluent in the culture of your own country you need to be in order to do advertising in it, what difference can some consumer data and a couple of tourist's anecdotes possibly make? The fact is that it's not your country, and you can't begin to compete in cultural fluency or sure-footedness with somebody who was born and raised there, who speaks the language and knows the landscape, who is quite possibly a blood relation of several perfect examples of the very people that the message needs to reach. While developing the first Coca-Cola ads specifically designed for the Russian market, creative teams from Publicis in London traveled to Russia and spent time trying to get under the skin of Russians. This must have been a very valuable experience, and I applaud their serious-mindedness. In fact, the campaign they eventually devised was based on a Russian folk tale, which was a brilliant piece of intercultural behavior. One can't help wondering how much nearer it actually brought them to making more appropriate advertising than a local agency could do. I know Russians who have lived for decades in Britain and still admit that they find our mentality, our way of life and our culture almost impenetrable mysteries--and one presumes that the Publicis teams had some kind of deadline to meet, so they can't have spent more than a few days in Moscow. And Moscow, as any Russian will tell you, is even less representative of the "real" Russia than New York is of America. The other point, of course, is that unless they spoke fluent Russian, the team would have made their study via the imperfect medium of an interpreter, and language always seems to bring us back to a no-win situation. You can't access a culture except through its language, but you can't access its language except through its culture. We should never forget that consumers give international advertisements no special allowance for being international. They have to compete for mind share on equal terms with the best-loved domestic advertising in every single market they appear in. That's the bottom line, and unless their ads stand a realistic chance of achieving this aim, both client and agency should seriously question their rationale for running international work in the first place. Very often, agencies respond to the puzzling problem of targeting foreigners by inserting some kind of "local" reference into the advertising in a half-baked attempt to show that they realize who they're talking to. American agencies, for example, when asked to create a campaign for Europe, will often insert visual or verbal references to European cities or languages or lifestyles. But this is completely senseless. After all, people in those countries already know who they are and where they live. By pointing out that he is aware of this, the advertiser is merely underlining the fact that he is a foreigner. The spread of international brands and the subsequent adoption of international advertising campaigns has created an entirely new and very interesting cultural phenomenon: the creation of national acts of written and visual communication by non-nationals. It has almost always been possible for nationals of one culture to access the acts of communication of other cultures. (For example, an Indian can read an American novel.) But as a result of the behavior of international brands, an American might now be creating an advertisement for Indians, in India. In other words, rather than people voluntarily reaching outside their own country to access expressions of foreign culture, foreign brands are now reaching in to other cultures and attempting to create their own expressions of that national culture. The only parallel I can think of in previous centuries is the figure of the writer in exile: Joseph Conrad, for example, one of the finest writers in the English language, was actually a French-educated Pole who wrote in English for an English public. (Just to make things really polycultural, Heart of Darkness is a story of Belgian colonists in West Africa.) But in order to achieve this level of acculturation, Conrad had to live and work in England for many years and immerse himself utterly in English culture (he even changed his name). A far cry from a couple of days in Moscow, of course, but that was definitely a step in the right direction. PLANNING WITH CULTURE? Advertising and communications strategy is conventionally informed by observing and analyzing consumers: their needs, behavior, buying patterns, disposable income, lifestyle, aspirations and the rest. The sum of these observations creates a set of parameters which we use to devise a communications strategy and define our messages. At best, it can give us a valuable and motivating insight into where and how our product can most dramatically and effectively be presented in the context of the consumer's life. (For the best book on planning I've ever read, see Jon Steel's Truth, Lies and Advertising in this series. Although this kind of preparatory work is essential for any agency attempting to create a communications platform that's going to work in a large number of countries, global data has a tendency to become overwhelming. In order to reach any kind of manageable conclusions, it is often necessary for the planner to simplify and refine it all down by such orders of magnitude that one begins to wonder whether it was worth generating all that raw data in the first place. In any case, as I've already pointed out, that data is fairly inaccessible--even useless or actually misleading--to people from a different culture because they cannot, by definition, read the data in the context of the culture that it comes from. So much difference has to be overlooked, so many factors have to be ignored because they simply won't fit the overall pattern, so many fascinating observations about the peculiarities of individual markets need to be sidelines for the benefit of giving the creative team a clear, single direction, that the exercise can easily become self-defeating. This is, at heart, a navigation problem. We are trying to map a route through complex and unknown terrain, yet we only have two points of reference: the marketplace and the brand itself. In order to get our bearings, just like any explorer, we need a third point in order to triangulate. Actually, what we really need is an extremely broad, yet robust and reliable aerial view of the consumer terrain. In the same way that modern cartography has been completely revolutionized by the ability to photograph entire continents from a satellite in addition to exploring the ground on foot, we need help in seeing the big picture. I'm certainly not the first person in the world to have discovered that there is a satellite up there; it's called culture mapping. At least I call it culture mapping, but in fact, this whole branch of study appears not to have a name by which everybody knows it--is it Sociology? Anthropology? Ethnopsychology? Ethnosociodemographics? At least culture mapping isn't an-ology, so it sounds like something you can can use rather than just study. Some of the most important works on culture mapping have been written by Geert Hofstede, a Dutch academic who has devised and encoded a very thorough and robust system of cultural analysis, the 5-D model, which for the first time, sheds much light on the mystery of diversity and Fons Trompenaars, another Dutchman, who with his colleague, Charles Hampden-Turner, a British academic, have developed a somewhat different seven-dimensional culture map, together with a very complete methodology for actively and creatively resolving the cultural dilemmas which diversity brings. The study of cultures is complex, it's academic and much as everybody would like it, these are not systems which can be simplified down into a slim airport-bookstall bestseller called The Ten Golden Rules of Cultural Difference. If you want to use and understand these techniques, you have to study them in-depth, or else you have to hire somebody who has. Now the interesting thing is that much of the actual business that's done in the area of culture mapping takes the form of organizational consultancy and management theory: how to help employees from different cultures understand each other better and work together productively without their fundamentally different backgrounds getting in the way or causing irreparable misunderstandings. For example, if you're a German auto manufacturer that's just merged with an American manufacturer, a transcultural consultancy will help to prepare your people and your systems to ensure that the two cultures merge effectively, productively and harmoniously withing the newly merged corporation. But because you're dealing with individual human beings, the usefulness of culture-based management theory is inevitably limited by the fact that individuals each have their own culture, too. It's called personality, and this will affect their behavior and attributes just as profoundly as their national culture. So you could easily spend months in your Detroit office getting to grips with the cultural models which define the mentality, approach to work, relationship to authority, negotiation techniques, habits of communication and social behavior of the German people, only to discover that it's next to useless when you're actually confronted by Herr Schmidt because his particularly aggressive form of confrontation is just as likely to be caused by the fact that he's Herr Schmidt, and not because he happens to be German. Using culture mapping in this way is little more than respectable astrology: a useful framework for discussing people's differences, certainly, but nobody would ever pretend that it's a reliable means for predicting or even interpreting every aspect of their behavior. After all, Groucho Marx, Bruce Springsteen and Oliver North are white American males, and that fact does tell you something about how their behaviors, actions, attitudes and motivations might differ from those of three male Koreans of the same generation, but it's not incredibly helpful. In fact, it's about as helpful as knowing that all three of them are Librans. The techniques of culture mapping are extremely helpful, however, in understanding your own behavior, values and actions and those of your corporation. This reason alone is sufficient to make it a valuable and worthwhile process for marketing managers to go through. You, it is supposed, know your personality. Consequently, you are able to perceive which parts of your attitudes and behaviors are modeled by your cultural background and which parts are more the result of you simply being a different person from the people around you. And for advertising agencies and their clients, culture mapping really comes into its own. It's absolutely made for mass marketing, an area where individual personality is of very secondary importance. What you really want is reliable, true, but gross generalizations. You need to know what most people in a country are like, and how most of them will behave in response to certain stimuli. And because brands have personalities, so those personalities have a cultural fingerprint (nine times out of ten, it's identical to the cultural map of that brand's country of origin). Culture mapping helps you to see how that culture can interface and interact with the cultures of its consumers around the world. ON BEING AMERICAN Whilst we're on the subject of culture, a word about being American--because the fact is that most international companies are American (eight of the top ten global brands are American-owned at this point in time), so this is the culture which, more than any other, has to learn how to adapt to the usage of others. It is the success of the encounter between the culture of the brand and the culture of the overseas consumer which, perhaps more than any other factor, determines whether the brand will prosper abroad or not. And it's natural that many of these encounters will be indirect, via local representation, distribution, agency, and so forth. So the selection of these intermediaries is of crucial importance in determining the ultimate success of the encounter. It's no accident that the Netherlands (the home of Geert Hofstede, Marieke de Mooij, Fons Trompenaars and various other leading lights in the culture business) is being selected more than ever as the principal intermediary for American and Asian multinational corporations as they move into Europe and beyond. International-mindedness is one of this country's chief exports--and since one of its main historical barriers to being considered a neutral stopping-off place, its difficult language, has become systematically and efficiently eroded by making the entire country bilingual, the Netherlands is now a serious challenger to the United Kingdom as "the marketer's Guam"--a strategically located airstrip where American corporations can park their bombers before invading the Continent. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from "Another One Bites the Grass: Creating International Ad Campaigns That Make Sense." Copyright (c) 2000 by Simon Anholt. To be published in February 2000, this book may be ordered from www.wiley.com or 1-800-CALLWILEY.

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Book Excerpt: Culture Clashes

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