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Beware the Cultural Outsider
By Graham Hall
Ambitious Brands
Email:[email protected]:www.ambitiousbrands.comBlog:
www.ministryofinsights.com
There are many benefits to being an outsider, especially when
working on culturally specific
brand development strategies.
An outsider has a more objective view. Seeing things for the
first time he can perceive the
issues at a simple and fundamental level because subconscious
conditioning and politics are
not brought into play. Free of the received wisdoms he has
greater chance of revealing newparadigms.
The same qualities, in fact, that allowed the little boy to see
the emperors underwear...
But if being on the outside of a
problem has its benefits, there is
also a strong argument that says
culturally sensitive projects should
be undertaken by experts with
local knowledge; that an outsiderwill miss the subtlety and
nuance
that you can only be achieve
through decades of immersion; that
an outsider will only deliver a
superficial analysis.
Which is right? Its a common
debate within the international
marketing community and its hard
to know exactly where the answerlies.
Ive worked in many markets, from Japan and Russia to Africa and
Brazil and Ive conducted
strategic marketing projects and run focus group and
ethnographic studies in all sorts of
unlikely locations, with varying degrees of success. The output
of some were indeed
superficial, whilst in others the insights and the strategies we
developed were revolutionary
and game changing.
So my take on the local versus outsider debate boils down to one
of horses for courses
with the quality of the outcome being determined less by the
nationality or immersion of theindividual as by the nature of the
project, the insights being sought and the type of
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consumers researched. Locally sourced experts generally cant
resist showcasing their
specialist knowledge but may be hopeless at identifying the
crucial insight. International
experts on the other hand can often pass over key issues in
their desire to aggregate their
findings across a number of markets. At the end of the day it
all comes down to the skill and
sensitivity of the individual conducting or supervising the
research and has far less to do with
their background or cultural orientation.
Eyebrows were raised when I became the first non-hispanic,
non-American planning director
of an hispanic / US ad agency. Some secretly (and others less
secretly) questioned my ability
to understand the peculiarities of such a unique cultural
situation. Given the different types of
audience that makes up the hispanic audience - from 1st
generation immigrants, through to
completely assimilated 4th generation Americans who cant speak
Spanish, yet still consider
themselves Hispanic - there was some reason to doubt my
hiring.
As Juanin Reid, then Associate Director of Strategic Planning
and Research, The Bravo
Group said when I first arrived at her agency:
When Graham first joined we all thought: "Oh no, here comes
another non Hispanic to tell us
how much he knows about Hispanics". To everyones surprise,
Graham was different. He
listened, he got to know and understand and applied his years of
insightful research to
unearth truths about the market which we all then applied
successfully to our client partners.
Sounds good? But then I always knew I could do the job. Id
previously found insights about
womens health issue without ever being a woman, or understood
the world of a young child
looking for help without being a child, or even decoded the
needs of Saudi soccer fans
without being a Saudi or particularly in to soccer, so I knew I
could empathize with Hispanicsin the US whatever their issues. In
fact, as a Brit in New York and something of an outsider
myself, I had more in common with my audience than many of the
Americans I worked with!
During my time in New York advertising I helped win the Wrigley
account with insights into
acculturated hispanic youth that we labelled Nuevo America,
steered Hellmans Real Food
campaign to be less about the general markets approach of good
simple food and more to
do with the culturally relevant celebration of eating, and, most
controversially, highlighted
and championed the heroic nature of the Hispanic migrant worker
for Tecate. Yet, despite all
this success, what I initially failed to factor in to my
analysis was not the complexity of the
cultural issues we were dealing with, but something more
prosaic; namely the inherentreluctance of clients to listen to
someone from outside their culture.
Call it pride if you want, or prejudice, or put it down to a
simple matter of not invented here.
the fact is, some clients find it hard to listen to someone they
perceived to be Not One Of
Us. Good ideas can be quickly dismissed through conscious or
unconscious prejudice
especially if they challenge, as they will tend to, the cultural
status quo. This isnt because the
ideas are wrong or invalid, but because of the
subtlerealpolitikgoverning the acceptance of
those ideas.
So whats the lesson? Simply that, when dealing with
cross-cultural projects its always wiseto be conscious of
therealpolitik. Its no coincidence that the role of the diplomat
in
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international relations is considered a high art. The same
skills are of equal importance when
developing cross-cultural marketing strategies.
If this situation rings bells with you, then I suggest you
beware, for, as the little boy discovered
on humiliating the emperor, you might end up in the dungeon. The
benefit of being the
outsider comes with a rather large caveat because, lets face it,
no-one likes an arrogant shit
taking a cursory look at your cherished culture and telling you
what it means!
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