Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Challenges of Corporate Anthropology

Harvard Business Tip of the Day: "Use Anthropology to Get to Know Your Customers"

It's always a bit amusing to me when anthropology and ethnography are presented as a novel and straightforward way to learn more about consumers. The blog posting (http://tinyurl.com/c5hf3f) goes on to say that P&G and Google are using anthropology to learn more about new customers and new markets.

Shouldn't we be using anthropology for ALL customers and ALL markets? The basic premise is understanding the world from your customer's point of view, which informs everything from strategy to product development - something that is useful for every project we work on.

The conversation starter provided by Harvard asks where else people have seen anthropology applied successfully and where it has fallen short. I’d like to argue that where anthropology falls short is where it is not applied appropriately. It is not as though “applying anthropology” is an easy thing to do. There are practitioners out there with advanced degrees and years of experience who are still trying to figure it out, so I dislike anthropology being presented as something that corporations can just pick up and turn on, subsequently producing great insights.

In the business world we are faced with tight deadlines and budgets. Ethnography is not something that you can do overnight and get right. The challenge for anthropologists and other market researchers is to find ways of satisfying both sides of the puzzle.

The conversation in my mind should be more about how we conduct ethnography within the constraints of the corporate world. What methods have worked for people, and what have fallen short?

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Local Marketing in a Global World

Global marketing is a tricky feat. For years we’ve been trying to figure out “glocalization” or the concept of global marketing on a local level. While there are hundreds of case studies where local translations have gone wrong and missed the point culturally, we’re now seeing the reverse issue where local campaigns are receiving global backlash.

Last week there was outrage against Burger King’s Texican Whopper, "the taste of Texas with a little spicy Mexican." The commercial featured a tall cowboy with a short and round Mexican wrestler clad in an outfit resembling the Mexican flag. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwpNQWrD8PY&feature=player_embedded)

While this commercial might have been successful on the local level (I’m not sure locally what the impact was), what marketers did not expect was that the commercial would be heard about in Latin America. Almost immediately there was an uproar from Mexico and other Latin American countries. The Mexican ambassador to Spain, Jorge Zemeno, immediately publicly denounced the commercial.

What marketers and anthropologists alike are learning from case studies such as this, is that as consumers become more interconnected through social media and global brands, the reach of our work grows larger and larger. So how do we balance both sides of the global/local equation making sure that our campaigns are locally relevant but globally sensitive?

Crispen Porter in Europe created this commercial. I’d bet that had they consulted with their U.S. or Latin American counter parts, they probably would have been forewarned on the cultural sensitivities they might upset with this content. It’s a clear sign that Crispen Porter, a leader in ad creativity, is not a single global brand, but rather a collection of regional brands sharing the same name.

Sure, having anthropologists or other cross-cultural experts working with your teams is helpful, but co-operation is the name of the game in this global world. As global marketing brands, we must unify the delta between our regional affiliates. While this gets complicated in terms of P&Ls and they way each country’s office is run, brands that don’t form strong partnerships between their global offices are going to face blunders like this.

In the very least, when creating campaigns with references to other cultures, contact someone with some local expertise or run the concept by your colleagues in that country – hopefully they can tell you if you are going to hit a soft spot or not.