Admittedly the average homeowner in Kobe, Kowloon or Kansas may not know it or consider using it. But there are millions whose lives have been touched by it in many countries.
But somehow that journalist, while reflecting the general puff of pride you could see across the room full of Bangladeshi marketers I was addressing, also looked like he wanted more. He wanted a brand this middle-class group could say they owned, had shared in its rise, felt like it had touched their lives. A brand that could be a national banner of ‘success’.
For all its global image as a natural disaster waiting to happen and a country that does not do well at all on most measures of success, you always get the feeling there that the people of the middle classes at least know they have a story worth telling. Real economic growth, real exports of its garments, natural attractions such as the world’s longest beach at Cox’s Bazaar. But they want more. They want to say they have a brand that others like them in other countries admire and emulate.
Later over dinner a senior client made a different point. He said to me that his team suffered from “distance”. They were the middle class, well educated and elite. They did not know how to “understand the ordinary person because they never really talked to them”. He explained that he was constantly facing resistance from his team when he wanted to focus on developing low-end cheap products aimed at the working masses. Why? Because such products lacked aspiration.
That’s a common enough fault of marketers everywhere. Whether in Australia, Hong Kong or Bangladesh, it’s true that people in marketing, and their agencies, are usually distanced from the regular ‘working man’. We get caught up in our worlds and somehow think the occasional focus group ‘keeps us in touch’.
But too often we fail to recognise a key, simple truth. Aspiration has many levels.
Years ago in Thailand I noticed the brands ordinary rural workers aspired to were not always those that their urban cousins had in mind. We saw brands try to jump onto the rising middle-class bandwagon and in the end lose credibility with people at all ends of the social spectrum. I guess that is no big learning. But why is it that marketers don’t learn from the lesson? Brands are not the right of the middle class. There is so much opportunity for good strong brands that reach out and serve the struggling ends of all societies.
In a world that in the last couple of months seems to be all about tougher times, higher costs and people struggling to survive, it makes sense that marketers will begin to offer more ‘small values’. Brands that have more options for the lower income levels. More thinking like Grameen Bank, a great Bangladeshi brand.
Dave McCaughan is director of strategic planning at McCann Worldgroup Asia-Pacific
Dave.McCaughan@japan.mccann.com
