Sitting through a commercial break in Asia tends to inspire déjà vu. Whether you’re watching a property ad or a beer commercial, it’s not unusual to find the same elements featured in one TVC to the next: the slender pan-Asian model, the luxury condo and the fancy car.
Welcome to the insipid world of aspirational lifestyle ads. For the purpose of this article, aspirational lifestyle ads refer to a spot where the product is promoted as part of an opulent, modern lifestyle, even when there’s obvious disconnect.
FMCGs are the obvious culprits. Take a recent commercial for Nescafe China, which depicts well-groomed white-collared executives breaking into song and dance once they drink the instant java. Or Tiger Beer’s expensive ‘Unravel the secret’ global TVC that tried to turn a local, mass-market drink into a foreign premium brand. A recent ad, meanwhile, featured an improbably happy and affluent Singaporean family extolling the virtues of Australia’s Star Butter.
“Look at any mass drink in China and it probably portrays a millionaire drinking it, rather than any real target,” quips Eddie Booth, Leo Burnett Greater China ECD.
But the practice is not limited to FMCGs alone. Culprits come from categories as widely varied as telephony - witness some of SingTel or StarHub’s work - to fastfood to cigarettes. Even HSBC, ‘The world’s local bank’, has gone defiantly upmarket for its recent ad campaign in Vietnam, a country where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line.
Rob Campbell, regional creative planner at Y&R Brands, says this is a common result of brands seeking instant, easy solutions. “People are packaging little snippets of life that say ‘buy this and get that (lifestyle)’. Aesthetics are important but too many ads focus on the aesthetics. True aspiration can go way beyond aesthetics.”
David Smail, ECD of BBDO Vietnam argues that in emerging markets, aspirational lifestyle advertising often happens by default. “Once you get past a certain socio-economic class, pretty much everything is aspirational as a lot of the products that are advertised exist beyond the means of most of the viewers here. Because of this wide chasm, you can’t really blame an advertiser for wanting to portray the Nguyens,” says Smail.
Campbell says Apple and Nike are examples of rather uninspiring objects (“IT and rubber-soled footwear”) that have created a culture by leveraging the emotional aspirations, such as self-confidence and creativity, of their audience.
When every brand across every segment inserts the same picture-perfect, wealth-driven aspiration into their ad, this creates two problems, Campbell adds. One, it stops competitive differentiation because “brands are trading external aesthetics”. And two, “It treats the population of Asia with disrespect because it says they don’t care about anything other than its appearance.”
But the ubiquity of irrelevant, aspirational lifestyle advertising varies by market. Booth says Hong Kong has improved but “China is still going down that surreal trap”. Meanwhile, Y&R planner Hari Ramanathan says this is less of a problem in India and Thailand where the middle class is older and consumer insights easier to spot.
“Aspirations are fine, but what is represented as aspiration has become generic,” explains Ramanathan.
“Clients are constantly trying to be associated with a higher lifestyle or a better brand. They’re more of a client insight than a consumer insight.”
