Another One Bites the Grass – Making Sense of International Advertising

Citation

Paswan, A.K. (2001), "Another One Bites the Grass – Making Sense of International Advertising", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 276-288. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2001.18.3.276.2

Another One Bites the Grass has been written with passion, deep conviction, and feeling. It was an absolute delight to read and may even prove to be useful. It is not every day that one comes across an author who does not believe in being politically correct and debunks everything (almost) that we take for granted. In this book, Anholt does just that, and does it well. It is also extremely funny. In addition, he raises fundamental questions about international advertising that have serious implications for practitioners (both clients and advertising agencies) and academicians alike. These questions take on a more serious tone in today’s day and age with Internet making virtually every dot.com firm global with the click of a mouse.

The contents of the book can be broadly grouped into three clusters. The first one (Chapters 1 and 2) focuses on language and culture in the context of international communication. The next two chapters (Chapters 3 and 4) deal with global brand management and its interface with the advertising agency. Chapters 5 through 8 detail the structural and practical side of both extant and proposed global advertising management. Apart from contrasting current favorites such as network advertising agency structure and highly centralized one agency structure against the proposed smart centralization (the underlying philosophy behind World Writers, an advertising firm founded by Anholt specializing in international strategy, creative, and culture), this section also discusses their relevance to direct marketing, event marketing, public relations, integrated communication, and Internet marketing, to name a few. In the last chapter, Anholt takes on an introspective role and questions some of the advertising and brand management doctrines taken for granted.

The ball is set rolling with a discussion on common practices regarding usage of language and the practice of translation in global advertising. A common practice is to create an advertising campaign in the language of the home country, typically in English, and translate this into different languages, often using the cumbersome process of back‐translation or bilingual copywriters. Anholt argues that advertising is about culture and not words, and culture can’t be translated and/or back translated – “The only way to produce effective, distinctive and creative copy for any market is to brief a skilled copywriter from that market to write the thing from brief in his or her own language, ideally with no reference whatsoever to existing copy in other languages” (p. 11). This does not mean fundamentally different ads for different markets. On the contrary, adherence to this philosophy results in more effective advertising through consistency in brief, idea, writing tone, and brand image across different cultures. Several examples, e.g. “Come alive with Pepsi,” Mitsubishi’s Pajero, Toyota’s MR2, and Alfa Romeo 164, are provided to demonstrate the point.

If words and language can be so confounding, dealing with culture as a whole is likely to be chaos. Anholt suggests that being cognizant of the existence of cultures is invaluable for marketing executives. Culture acts as a filter which distorts our vision of others (from different cultures) and this understanding itself teaches “sensitivity, humility, and objectivity, which contrary to much management teaching … are just about the most valuable qualities any individual or corporation in international business can posses in the modern world” (p. 57). Drawing on the works of Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Charles Hampden‐Turner, F. Kluckhohn, F.L. Strodtbeck, Marieke de Mooij, and Jean‐Claude Usunier’s culture mapping is suggested as a useful tool for understanding behavior, values and actions of individuals and firms. It is especially true for mass marketing where gross generalizations are key to effective advertising. Taking this discussion further, four stages of increasing cultural sensitivity are proposed:

1. Ignorance and intolerance – I hate you and everything about you because you are a foreigner; 2. Political correctness – I have been programmed to respect you (a local country individual), and irrespective of my personal feelings about you we will celebrate our differences, whether you like it or not (second worst form of cultural insensitivity based on ignorance and condescension, bordering on racism and fascism); 3. Tolerance – we’re different from each other because we were brought up differently, but that’s okay, because we’re both human beings; and 4. Cultural sensitivity I want to find out more about you, and tell you more about me, so that we can understand each other better (pp. 81‐2).

Anholt suggests that cultural sensitivity is the Holy Grail of global marketing. He acknowledges the fear of westernization and cultural imperialism, but counters that the omnilateral and polycultural mixing will only enhance the richness and beauty of the emergent cultural. The notion of racial and cultural purity creating lasting beauty is bemoaned, and instead it is suggested that true beauty lies in complexity and diversity. Another argument forwarded is that people like being exposed to other cultures and normally welcome foreign visitors. And, as long as these foreign visitors are “pleasantly exotic, respectful and well behaved … they are granted privileges and viewed with envy” (p. 86) and even considered wiser. It is precisely because of this, international brands are posited to eventually succeed, if done right.

Unfortunately, most global organizations produce brands and communications for local consumption and are fundamentally unsuitable for travel across cultures. To get the communication to be culturally sensitive, the brand has to be made culturally sensitive. Surprisingly, cultural sensitivity comes from richness and not simplicity in meaning of the brand and communication, and it needs to be created from ground up. The problem is that all brand managers try to define their brand’s personality, positioning statements, or USPs in such simple terms that they become bland and uninteresting. Why would consumers in other cultures be interested in befriending brands that are not rich in personality? Rich brands can take liberties with language and culture and still be forgiven, but a bland and narrowly defined brand runs the risk of being offensive with the slightest of deviation from their true self when traveling across culture. Eventually, the final result resides in the minds of consumers, e.g. brands outsource part of the company value.

A prerequisite to doing this effectively in global context is a clear self‐concept (e.g. who or what it really is as a corporation, brand or a citizen of home country), and a hierarchical model from the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) can be a useful tool. At the highest level of this hierarchy lies the notion of identity, followed by beliefs and values (missions and visions for firms), skills and talents, behaviors, and finally the context. Anholt also discusses the notion of provenance (sounds a lot like country brand equity or country of origin image) and suggests that it is a very powerful element of a global brand.

Then there is the issue of consistency – given the constancy of a brand as against divergence amongst global audience, should the communication be constant or inconstant across the globe? The answer may rest with the drivers of consistency, e.g. internal drivers – corporate philosophy towards centralization and standardization, external drivers – mobile and global consumers and the Internet. Irrespective of the reasons, consistency (not necessarily identical execution) seems to always benefit firms rather than consumers. This debate can be viewed from another perspective – “trueness to the culture of the brand versus trueness to the culture of the market or consistency of input versus control of output” (p. 123), with a hope of achieving a perfect marriage between the two. Global managers normally rely on a network of trusted colleagues, research in the host markets, and benchmarking foreign communication against home country advertising, none of which are satisfactory solutions to this debate. An alternative is to assemble elements of the marketing and promotional mix into two groups – elements sensitive to the culture of the brand and elements sensitive to the culture of the market, and then deliberately deal with them early enough in the planning and creative cycle. This helps achieve a balance between the demands of brand culture and consumer culture, without an initial bias towards either standardization or localization. As an example, Anholt argues that images lend themselves to consistency across cultures whereas words do not – “Images are the feathers on the shaft of the global marketer’s arrow, but words are the point” (p. 129), thus leading us into the world of creativity and advertising agency.

In today’s advertising‐dominant world, creativity is taken for granted and the emphasis placed on it is constantly increasing, and consumers will part with their precious attention only for genuine information, pure emotional arousal, and real entertainment. Unfortunately, most marketing professionals get fixated with the product information, more so because it is so dear and familiar to them, and ignore the reality of information overload, and that most brands in the category do more or less the same thing. Consequently, a product‐feature‐oriented communication is as interesting and informative as a one‐page brochure. Emotions then become the obvious focus of attention. However, there are pitfalls – reliable decoding of emotions in each market, credibly linking emotion to the brand, consumer happiness with emotional rather than rational benefit focus, and whether it will be effective, distinctive, legal, and create a competitive advantage. Entertainment is the third peg and humor has been closely associated with effective and often award winning advertising. The problem is that most people don’t see the difference between the comedy (a response of ha ha) and true humor (a response of aha). Anholt argues that creativity has “very little to do with inventing new things, finding unexpected angles on familiar things” (p. 149), and the ideas that transcend cultural and language barriers are typically conceptual, rather than executional. However, most advertising agencies get stuck at the executional creativity and thus make their brand and communication ill equipped to travel across cultural barriers.

One obvious choice is a network agency. They attract the brightest people and are a bulk buy for the marketers. The coordination by a lead office ensures conformity and consistency and it has extensive geographic coverage. Drawing from his own international agency experience, Anholt concludes that the global network type of advertising agencies are dysfunctional for international advertising. Some drawbacks are: only the lead agency gets to do the exciting and creative stuff while others are left to simply follow blindly; networks are slow, time consuming and require frequent follow up; and lack of clear motivation to work together results in a feeling that “This will never work in my market.” Networks are designed for imposing the lead agency’s ideas and not really listening to other markets’ views. These adverse circumstances result in most global advertising created through a process of compromise and ends up very boring because nobody minds the final product. Other variants of network agencies, e.g. pretend single office, defensive networks, and one‐stop shops are discussed, but eventually only two basic type of agencies – networks and domestic, currently exist. It is not surprising that according to Anholt “smaller, faster, strategically‐minded, business‐aware, creative, responsive, cost‐effective, culturally sensitive international brand communication agencies (p. 158)” are what the global marketers need, but have little to choose from. He next introduces the Smart Centralization concept of global advertising, posited to preserve a balance between sensitivity to the culture of the brand and its consumers.

The intricacies of smart centralization (based on Anholt’s experiences with World Writers), are discussed in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of the book. The core of it runs counter to the conventional wisdom of creating a brief and initial communication by a lead team which is followed by host teams by merely providing translations and taking care of operation details. Smart centralization literally throws open the brief to a diverse group of cultures, minus the notion of political correctness, and through a chaotic process a true global communication is supposed to emerge. Some of the nuances of smart centralization are:

1. 1.

   (1) A permanent international creative team, representing both east and west, is a prerequisite. Often two cultural directors working with six or seven creative people from divergent cultures (e.g. South America, Eastern Europe, South Asia, South‐East Asia, Southern Europe, and Northern Europe) is a favorite. The multicultural cauldron yields richer stock of ideas by eliminating the superficial. Talking about culture openly, not hiding behind political correctness, avoiding compromises and happy mediums is actively encouraged. Consensus is not considered a desirable outcome. According to Anholt, “Democracy isn’t an awfully good principle for creating global advertising” (p. 202). This multicultural environment has a potential for misunderstandings and disagreements, however, it does not lend itself to office politics.

2. 2.

   (2) Constant flow of new multicultural ideas keeps the team alive and closer to the pulse of international consumers. Structured programs such as international student internships, exposure to their (member’s) native country’s culture, and sabbaticals are also used. Sociocultural groupings of societies based on religion are found to be more useful than groupings based on political or geographic locations.

3. 3.

   (3) Creatives and the country managers jointly prepare creative briefs, and the process relies on stories, fables, projective techniques, fantasies into the future, and differences more so than similarities, in addition to hard research data. The emergent brief consists of two sections:

• •

  the common ground and the leap of the imagination forming the basis for core creative ideas and the picture;

• •

  the differences and uniqueness of each market and leads to words and the media.

At this stage Anholt starts to sound like a wooly‐headed creative type, but it seems to make sense and creates a feeling of excitement, an anticipation of unknown.

1. 1.

   (4) In terms of creativity, the goal is to find ideas that shake and rattle the core of people in different cultures, and touch their raw nerve. Ideas that are smooth, non‐controversial, politically correct, and acceptable to everyone just do not have this ability. The ideas with rough, jagged edges, and sometimes jarring are the ones that really get to people. This is not to say that smoothness and softness are not beautiful. On the contrary, but it must withstand the test of multicultural scrutiny. The strength of reaction passionate, chaotic, conflicting and visceral is considered a good indicator of global creative idea. The process embodied in smart centralization is not for someone who likes all his ducks in a row. It is fraught with chaos and uncertainties, and sometimes it seems like madness, but for anyone who has worked with an advertising agency it has the ring of “oh, so true” and “aha”.

2. 2.

   (5) As regards the activities and processes beyond the creative, Anholt acknowledges them to be a gigantic technical and logistical challenge. They are determined by several factors, e.g. developing a global and multicultural brief is more demanding and challenging, the creative process may be lengthier, approval phases are more complex, testing of creative concepts and executions could be more complicated and expensive, management of pre‐production and production phases is more complicated, and finally, trafficking of multiple executions in multiple countries itself is a major logistical nightmare. Given today’s proliferation of intranet, extranet, and Internet, a lot of logistics can be simplified. Smart centralization helps because of its inherent structure. Other issues impacting this process are accuracy, reliability, and creative integrity. Anholt suggests that a lot of these issues can be linked to the stake agencies have in their accounts or client’s business. Vertical integration is another solution suggested.

3. 3.

   (6) For client service, I like what Anholt has to say: “One could aim to combine the informality and self confidence of the English with the efficiency and reliability of the Germans, the warmth and flexibility of Italians, the dedication of Koreans, the courtesy of Indians, the creativity of the Brazilians, and the precision of the Swiss” (p. 247). Anholt also acknowledges the possibility of a disconnect between marketing and agency people and suggests: having a member of the client’s staff permanently on the agency team throughout the planning and creative process, employing an independent business strategist, and finally, hiring strategists, planners, creative and client service people from client as well as agency side. The key lies in selecting the team members of the smart centralization system.

As regards the question which half of the marketing expenditure is going to waste, Anholt states that companies are no longer competing for market share, but for share of consumer. The key criteria for evaluating whether a communication element should be used in a market should be based on “how effective, distinctive, and competitive it is in the context of the market where it appears” (p. 241). However, to start with one must accept the fact that advertising is a knowledge business – strategic brand communication, creative idea generation and execution. It is not a manufacturing business.

The relevance of smart centralization is next discussed in the context of direct marketing. More often than not direct marketers try to sell a product and end up as junk mail – the moment consumers recognize it as direct mail, it turns into junk mail. Direct mail should be written like a letter addressed to a stranger. “In order to write to a stranger, you need something to say” (p. 268). Marketers must create a content or event, e.g. sponsorships, special programs, content‐based Web sites, and customer magazines, which revolve around the consumers and their lives. These compliment direct marketing, because it gives marketers something to write about, and counters consumer’s feeling of opportunism – marketers write only when they want to sell something. The firm should come across as caring for consumers and not just interested in selling. This becomes even more relevant in the context of Internet marketing where marketers have to get people to come to their site or channel in the first place.

Needless to say, the concept of smart centralization is being posited as a more effective alternative to the traditional network advertising agencies. The reasons provided are it costs less, it is good for smaller emerging global organizations, it provides speed, the multicultural nature of message, and it is especially relevant for youth marketing. It even offers advantages for new product development, business‐to‐business and services (non‐physical products). Anholt acknowledges that network agencies do offer the benefit of physical presence in different geographic markets, but he argues whether market presence is synonymous with market expertise.

In the last chapter Anholt, lets go of all structure, and provides his views of the future and a glimpse into his ideals about branding, communication and their social implications at a global level. He truly believes that culture is not a barrier for global marketing, but a resource for creating effective communication. Anholt further argues that international advertising, if done properly and for the right reasons results in the best advertising. He believes that smart centralization would benefit the firms and countries from emerging economies, and the notion of provenance (e.g. country of origin image) is revisited to provide support for this argument. The traditional argument of “adding value” by industrial countries is questioned and labeled as “a grotesque piece of doublespeak”. In fact, he suggests that what the industrialized countries really add are valueless stuff – packaging, advertising, brand values, etc., and then have the audacity to charge more for it. An interesting perspective is forwarded – “Branding, if you want to be cynical about it, is a little more than creating a distortion field in the mind of the consumer which enables the brand owner to charge more money than the product is actually worth: it’s a technique for corrupting one’s sense of value. Branding, from the consumer’s point of view, is detracting value, not adding it.” (p. 305). He further contends that rich nations have expertise in handling the tools and techniques of mass communication, which they have used to build provenance or country brand equity. The emerging nations and consumers in such markets have little protection against it. The only way for the emerging markets and the firms from such markets is to learn to use these and create their own provenance. He proposes that global brands could be seen as instruments of change and the ultimate distributors of wealth. The idea sounds crazy enough to be believable.

In conclusion, despite its seemingly meandering style, I loved Anholt’s book. I guess it probably has something to do with the fact that I was part of the advertising industry (HTA – JWT and Clarion – McCann) in India and can relate to the chaos Anholt talks about. The book is written with feeling and passion, and most important, Anholt does not believe in being politically correct, but who cares? Another One Bites the Grass is informative, delightful, thought provoking and hilarious. What more can one want from a book?