Aristotle said it first. Neuroscience confirms it. Marketers know it in their bones. Great communication works on both an emotional and rational level. To motivate people to action, marketers need to speak to the whole brain: both the right (intuitive/emotional) side and the left (logical/functional) side. 

 Advertising that appeals to the heart works.  For proof, take a look at Brand 

Profitability of emotional vs. rational campaigns

Immortality, by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field[1]. They analyzed 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, comparing the profitability boost of campaigns relying on emotional appeals vs. those relying on rational appeals. The winner: emotional appeals. Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well as those with purely rational appeal. It’s a great statistic, but even Pringle and Field admit that creating ads that engage consumer emotions isn’t easy, while basing a campaign on a “killer fact” is comparatively simpler.

 In 2004, the AAAAs (American Association of Advertising Agencies) along with the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) united in an effort to explore some key questions regarding emotionally based advertising. They knew from neuroscience that emotions and instinct “rule” decision-making. The goal of their study was to find out if it is possible to understand the impact of emotion in advertising and to gain a clearer understanding of how storyline, metaphor and emotion drive engagement. It took 3 years to complete the study. In the end, the authors, Joe Plummer and Bill Cook, concluded that:

• It is possible to measure the emotional impact of advertising – both through physiological measures as well as through research techniques that incorporated more imagery and symbolism in its approach.
• Emotional response is nonlinear. So linear, language-based, research methods cannot capture the nuance and change that is inherent in emotional responses.
• Emotional experiences are co-created. That is, advertisers can’t inject emotion and meaning into a person’s mind. People bring their feelings and ideas to a brand just as the brand brings their ideas and benefits to people. It’s at the intersection of the two that stories are co-created and true emotional engagement happens.

 In order to be more effective at creating emotionally relevant communications, Plummer and Cook strongly urged advertisers to:

• Learn more about the emotional make-up of their consumers
• Integrate that learning into advertising briefs and executions
• Conduct developmental and evaluative research that ensures the emotional intent of the message is breaking through.

One of the key challenges that advertisers and agencies face, according to Plummer and Cook, is that current research and copy testing methods, while robust, are primarily linear, logical and language-based. They shine when evaluating awareness and functional benefits but are less robust in their ability to figure out how to engage people emotionally over multiple touch-points and platforms. 

 New approaches to communications research are needed.  And that’s where Drumcircle comes in. We have developed – and validated – both qualitative (face-to-face) and quantitative (online) tools and techniques to help advertisers and agencies plan, create and execute advertising based on engaging people both emotionally and practically, at every touch-point.

 Our process is:

• Visually based. In both our qualitative and online work, we use images and other sensory techniques to tap into the right/intuitive brain and align its needs with what the left/logical brain wants.
• Projective. Projective exercises help people forget they are talking about themselves. These exercises are experienced like a fun game, in a safe environment, where people can discover and reveal what is most important to them.
• Nonlinear. Emotional responses are messy and can’t always be captured in a linear, reductionist process.
• “Co-creative”. People interact with your stimulus and ideas and then make them their own. You see where and how your ideas resonate with people’s emotional make-up, inner stories and experiences and what kind of tweaks you need to make to make your story/communications more appealing to more people

 A summary of Drumcircle’s tools

 b.frank, is an online, visually based, emotion-centric research tool. It identifies what emotions drive your consumers, how well your brand delivers the kind of emotional experience consumers want, and (if desired) how well your advertising or product/service concepts deliver on these emotional experiences. It also diagnoses what you can do on a practical level to deliver on the type of experiences and meaning people want. You can go to this page of our website to “test-drive” b.frank. We have an ongoing study on the economy running there. By going through it, you’ll experience a sense of the line of questioning and the types of experiences people tap into when they take our survey.

 We call our qualitative process Create/Debate groups. The approach is an evolution of the traditional focus group. It’s designed to be less linear and more visually based, so you can go more deeply in to the head and heart of market.

 A traditional focus group is primarily an analytic, left-brain exercise done principally in a question and answer format. Create/Debate groups are designed to give people time and space to translate your ideas into their own world (i.e., co-create with you). We do this by giving groups an opportunity to create collages made up of specific visual and language-based stimuli (this is the “create” phase of the process) and then present and support their ideas to other groups (that’s the “debate” phase). That way, you can see for yourself what meaning people make of your ideas and how much passion they have for them, or not.

 An offer

If you’d like to see the kind of insights and ideas that emerge from our emotion-based research, shoot us an email and we’ll send you some cases. Better yet, ask us for a proposal on your next study.

In our business, we spend a lot of time talking about insights. We say they are a very important piece of marketing. Virtually every email I get from other market research and strategy firm talks about their insight tools. And client companies have whole departments called “Customer Insights”. Yet very view people have ever stopped to explore the nature about insight – what they are, why they are important. One of our recent blogs talked about how a classroom of students wisely defined insight. In this blog, we’d like to share 3 truths about finding fresh insights.

1. Insight comes from inspiration, not market research.

Insight-generation starts with a challenge or a problem that needs to be solved. And then it needs information (or data) to start the wheels churning. That’s where market research comes in. But that’s only the beginning to uncovering unique and useful insights.

Today, neuroscience has begun to unlock the mystery of insight. We now know that insight is not just the result of logical thinking. It requires deep intuition as well. We also know what type of experience to expect when it comes to identifying insights and how to raise the likelihood of actually finding insights that both enlighten and inspire. We want to share some of those tips with you.

2. You can’t just think your way to a real insight – but you have to try.

When you’re searching for a solution to a difficult problem, do you ever get frustrated? Do you think, re-think and then think again about the problem, get ever more data, and then want to throw your hands up into the air or reach for the solution that “sorta-kinda” worked in the past. If so, you’ll be happy to know that this is an inevitable part of coming to an insight.

You can’t avoid that feeling of entering the darkness and getting frustrated.

It turns out the only way to have a true insight is to reach that place of impasse, and then let your right (intuitive) brain take over and do its magical work.

3. So stop thinking and give your right brain a chance.

Many people say they have “aha” moments at certain times and during certain activities: when they are taking a shower, driving by themselves to work, or waking up on a Saturday morning. There’s a reason for that. They are not talking at those moments (talking comes primarily from the left brain).  They are not tense. They are not under pressure to get something done in a short amount of time. The cortex is relaxed and the left brain quiets down. The right brain is freed up; it’s allowed to wander; sometimes we don’t know where it goes. And it’s at those moments, when our right brain is free, that new ideas and penetrating insights emerge.

When a new insight emerges, we can literally feel it. On a physical level, it registers as a spike of gamma rhythm – the highest electrical frequency generated by the brain. It’s thought to happen when cells draw themselves together into a new network that can then enter our conscious brain. We feel it as a moment of success, unusual attentiveness, excitement.

The real question is: How can we access the right brain more deliberately to find insights more consistently?

Here are 4 tools that will help you tap into your right/intuitive brain. Guaranteed. (You just need a little practice)

Get out of your verbal brain and access your intuitive brain by:

1. Drawing. Draw a picture of the challenge and ideas for solutions. Artistic talent is not required. Be quick. Don’t be literal. See where it goes.
2. Using metaphors. This problem is like _______________ because__________
3. Using visual analogies. Look at a picture or something outside the window. A tree, for example. Describe the tree. See how it connects to your challenge. See if it suggests a solution.
4. Framing the challenge as a story that has a hero (you), a villain, and a quest or fight.

 A version of Drumcircle’s Insight workshop is available for individual company use. We use the workshop format to help your teams uncover business-driving insights from your data. For more information on the workshop or a research proposal, please contact a.manning@drumcircleco.com or b.mount@drumcircleco.com

If you haven’t already, read Switch, by Dan and Chip Heath.  The book dissects how to promote change – and what is marketing if not asking people to change: to stop doing what they are doing with your competitors and do it with you. To be successful changing someone’s behavior, they say, you need to motivate both the rational and emotional needs – and then remove all obstacles in the path.

The book uses the analogy of the elephant and the rider to explain the thesis. The analogy, developed by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book,  The Happiness Hypothesis,  says our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is the Rider. The Rider holds the reins and looks like the one in charge. But imagine what happens when the Rider and the Elephant disagree and want to go in different directions.

The Rider is the brains of the operation. The Rider takes in a lot of non-emotional information. The Rider analyses, sorts, compares, contrasts, and makes a plan.  The Rider might not want to change a direction, but can often understand that a change is necessary and so makes a plan to make sure the change is as simple and painless as possible.

The Elephant is the doer in this team. The Elephant is very big and very strong; he’s guided by feelings and instinct. The Elephant’s instinct is to feel safe, loyal, peaceful, comfortable. So imagine what happens when the Rider wants to take the Elephant in a new direction – one that feels uncomfortable, risky, potentially unsafe. Well, let’s say the Rider is at a disadvantage.

So no matter how good the plan, unless the Elephant is motivated – and the path is clear – it will be difficult for the Rider to get the job done.

The question is, then, in what ways can we, as marketers, motivate that Elephant? Drumcircle has got some tools and techniques to do just that. To get a copy of our whitepaper, “How to manage the elephant”, shoot us an email.

Last night I delivered a workshop called “What is an insight and how will I know when I have one” to an undergraduate marketing class at Tufts University. I have also delivered the workshop to a graduate marketing class at Harvard University, as well as to marketing and marketing research professionals at a variety of conferences and to members of the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation). The workshop uses a variety of left and right-brain exercises to explore the nature of insight, what it is, where it comes from, what it feels like, how we know when we have one, and how we know when one is good.

One module of the workshop asks people to define “insight”. People often go right to their computers and find definitions like this one:

 “Insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.”

 Then we do an exercise. We lay pictures out around the room and ask people to pick a picture that speaks to them. Then they fill in this sentence:  This picture of _____________ is like an insight because _____________.  The use of the picture helps us define insight in a whole new – and (dare I say it) transformational way. Here are some of the definitions that they produced. “An insight….

• “is a breath of fresh air that keeps you moving forward”
• “breaks tradition”
• “brings sense out of chaos”
• “is explosive in nature. It’s perfectly right.”
• “lifts you up and takes you to a new place.”
• “leads you to action and helps you accomplish your goals.”
• “can be messy but it’s always delicious.”
• “is that OMG moment.”
• “comes from failure.”
• “puts important things in focus.”

 The list goes on, but you get the point.

 If you’d like your teams to explore – and get truly excited about – the power of insight and how to unearth transformative ideas out of your current data of – shoot us an email or give us a call. We’d love to help!

 A version of Drumcircle’s Insight workshop is available for individual company use. We use the workshop format to help your teams uncover business-driving insights from your data. For more information on the workshop or a research proposal, please contact a.manning@drumcircleco.com or b.mount@drumcircleco.com

Aristotle said it first; neuroscience confirms it. To be effective, communications must work on an emotional and rational level. In fact, unless a message affects your customer emotionally, there is no way he or she can make a purchase decision. This is true no matter what you are selling: tractors, financial services, soda or cosmetics. Most marketers and agencies know this in their bones. The problem is that it’s hard to access emotions in either the strategy development or communications-testing phase.

 Lately we have done a lot of advertising testing work using Create/Debate groups, our version of focus groups. Both the marketers and agencies have found the process productive because:

• Participants have to capture their reactions in pictures, words and metaphors – which requires them to use their right and left brains.
• Participants have to stand up and present their ideas – and answer questions from other participants – which lets you see how strongly they believe in and defend their point of view
• Research participants are so engaged that their reactions naturally
  focus on major messaging and ideas, not details and personal preferences.
• It’s fun and takes less time overall.

 Based on these experiences, here are some tips you can use in your qualitative research to ensure your work is impacting your customers on both the emotional/intuitive and rationale/logical level.

1. Avoid left-brain only avenues of inquiry. Language is a left-brain form of communication. So if all you are doing in groups is talking, you are only tapping into one part of the brain.  You may also be picking up clues as to the person’s feelings and intentions via body language, tone and manner and that is helpful, of course. But there are tools (like collaging, drawing, music) that will help you tap into right brain insights more explicitly. That way, you will get deeper insights and your research participants will have more fun.

2. Whole brain thinking requires generating ideas (creative thinking) as well as evaluative/analytical thinking. Often in groups, we ask people what they think and why. It’s a great thing to do – but it only lets us in on part of the story, since their replies are mostly analytical in nature.

 Instead, ask them to create a response by brainstorming together and, in small teams, build a story that requires them to generate ideas – which makes the analytical phase that much more interesting.

If, for example, you are testing communications, let your groups see your work and then ask the smaller/sub teams to create collages that show how they feel about the work and what they will do as a result of it. The sheer act of working together and putting together a project that reflects their feelings helps them go beyond the obvious and dig deeper for how they truly feel and think.

 3. Presenting it to the rest of the group is the final piece of the puzzle. Ask the teams to present their ideas to the rest of the group and encourage the rest of the group to ask questions. It requires people to take a stand. And you can see for yourself how strong that stand is.

 This approach is designed to explicitly tap into the right brain (which works visually and metaphorically) as well as the left brain. It might sound a little “out there” but it results in deeper participant engagement, more authentic feedback and ultimately stronger creative work. Every time.

 Call us for references or more ideas about how you can dig deeper in your communication research projects.

Good marketing decisions are the result of intuition/feeling and reason. Think about the last time you were trying to make a complex business decision, like how to most effectively communicate your brand or even how to allocate your marketing dollars. You probably began with fact-finding. And you evaluated those facts carefully. But you probably didn’t make a decision to do something until it “felt” right. And sometimes you probably got lost in the facts and didn’t make a decision at all.

Feelings and intuition are important and most marketers know this in their bones. Yet, marketers and researchers tell us all the time that it is almost impossible to get people to talk about how they are feeling and how those feelings impact their behavior. More important, they tell us that emotions are an anathema in their organizations. One of our clients, a financial services organization, hired us on the basis of our ability to obtain emotional insights, and then told us that we couldn’t use the word “emotion” at meetings because the organization fundamentally believed that financial decision-making should be a totally rational process. A CPG client told us that they knew they needed emotional insights, but didn’t know how to do that systematically in their organization. A health care organization said, “if a recommendation can’t be presented with a spreadsheet, backed by numbers, our executives ignore it.”

If these barriers to decision-making exist in your organization, here are two simple ideas to help you get others to both recognize the value of the right brain thinking and start accessing the right brain more consistently and deliberately.

• Exercise your right brain more often. Our left brains are an over-used, bulked-up, dominant muscle. At all levels of education, from 1^st grade through graduate school, we have relied on our left/logical/analytical brains. We are good at and comfortable analysis. All that left-brain work has made us suspicious of our right/intuitive brain. But it’s never too late to start learning about the vital role emotions, intuition and creativity play in decision-making. Perhaps that could become the basis of a training program at your company. Perhaps some of your insights people could become advocates. Or make yourself an expert and an advocate on the subject. The first book to read is A Whole New Mind,  by the brilliant Daniel Pink. If you want on-going information and education, in small bites, sign up for our newsletter, “The Heartbeat of the Brand” at www.drumcirclec0.com.

• Use simple tools and exercises to help people access their right brains.  Using images and metaphor are a proven mechanism for accessing the right brain and giving people language that helps us them articulate their feelings and intuition on any given subject. Pictures help you cut to the chase on any given topic or question – quickly and easily. To see for yourself, experiment with using pictures more in focus groups first. For example, if you are testing advertising, ask people to pick from a picture pack the image that represents how the particular concept or idea makes them feel. Have them describe why they chose the picture, the feeling it elicits, and how it connects to the advertising. What people say will provide you with amazingly deep insights into the advertising and how it works.

• You can try the same process in an internal meeting when a group of people are debating a complex issue that has no easy answer. Once all the arguments are out on the table, bring out a pack of pictures and ask people to pick the picture that represents how they feel, bottom line, on the particular topic or decision to be made. You’ll be surprised and delighted how the process will help you make the final decision while creating good feelings amongst the meeting participants.

If you’d like a free pack of pictures to experiment with, please let me know at a.manning@drumcircleco.com and we’ll send you our ConnectDeck ™, a validated set of pictures we routinely use in our research projects. 

When you hang out in focus group facilities, you hear people laughing about how the main reason to go to focus groups is the food. They laugh about eating M&Ms as their hors’  d’oeurvres, followed by the ethnic food of the day. If you live on the wild side, there might even be wine.

So why all the laughing about food when the point is to listen to people talk about your brand? I think it’s because the process can be so painful – for the clients as well as the people participating in the groups. The clients sit in a small, dark room for way too many hours as the people participating in the research try to respond intelligently to questions that they might not even find relevant.. This assessment is somewhat harsh; at the same time, it embraces a fundamental truth. (Full disclosure: I have moderated somewhere close to 2000 focus groups and seen this up close and personal).

That’s what led us to explore how we might make focus groups more productive and more fun, for all parties. We put a lot of emphasis on the “fun” part because we know that a sense of fun makes people feel relaxed. And that sense of relaxation leads to more authenticity – from both the participants and the clients.

So in the spirit of that observation, here are five suggestions for improving your focus group experience and outcomes:

1)   Focus as much (if not more) on feelings as behavior. We are sentient beings. We make decisions emotionally as well as rationally. In fact, research suggests we are led by our emotions – not facts and reason. We feel first then we think.  And that means we have to create processes that elicit people’s true feelings on a topic. One thing we are always searching for is how people want to feel vs. how they do feel. This gap drives potent strategies. For example, we worked with an automotive service brand that strongly promoted price and convenience. We learned from our emotionally based research that people didn’t use the brand because the experience left them feeling stupid and taken advantage of (which is a category experience); they want to feel confident and in control. Understanding this emotional gap led us a marketing strategy that emphasized how we address service program attributes that make people feel confident and in control. An obvious approach, perhaps, but one that is not often used.

2)   Prepare participants for the experience they’ll have together. A prepared participant takes a stand, engages in deeper dialogue, is less superficial and swayed by others. Prepared participants explore your issue at home (where real decision-making takes place). We ask participants to do any number of activities before they come to talk with us; they might prepare collages, maintain diaries, visit stores and take pictures. In the groups, we begin by sharing the homework. As a result, participants can engage in more lively debate with others and you can observe significant similarities and differences that you know are less a product of group think and more a product of what is real. For a recent project relating to cell service providers, we ask participants to prepare collages that represent how they feel about their cell provider vs how they want to feel. Then, we they responded to various advertising campaigns, they could compare the campaign messaging to their ideal vs. current feelings. The result was a tremendously successful advertising campaign.

3)   As the client, be less prepared. This sounds like a heretical directive, but in the heresy lies real value. Less preparation gives you more opportunity to be surprised. Surprise leads to new insights, which we believe is the goal of any research (because why spend the money if you already know the answer.) Yes, it’s important to have an agenda, to know what you want feedback on. But going in with a series of very specific questions or multiple concepts that are different in minor ways means you only get answers to those questions – and not what’s really on the mind of your participants. Instead, we encourage clients to prepare stimulus that allow participants to “co-create” solutions.  For example, if you are in a concept development stage, deconstruct your concepts into small nuggets and present those nuggets to participants with a group of emotions you want to generate and pictures and let them construct the concept. In other words, you prepare the stimulus, participants put them together in a way that adds meaning and relevance to them. The emerging concepts will be less about you and more about your customers/potential customers, which is, after all, the goal of marketing.

4)   Use more activities, less discussion. Language comes from our left (rationalizing) brain. If you want to understand how people feel as well as how they think, you have to give them activities that unleash what’s in their right brains. That means activities based on images, drawing, even music, that allows them to express the more intuitive ideas and reactions that motivate behavior. It’s a pretty basic idea. And it works. In a recent workshop, we asked showed a piece of ethnography video a group of professionals. We asked one group to write their insights and the other group to draw their insights. The differences between the two were astonishing (yes, the drawings went deeper, faster.)

5)   Experiment, experiment, experiment. If new insights and ideas is your goal, then you have to keep yourself fresh and open. Doing things the same way, all or even most of the time, leads to the same results. If you are looking for new (and better), then try new approaches. If they fail, move on. If they work, congratulations on your courage and your new ideas!

The bottom line: a research event is a moment in time. A great new insight can drive business success. If it’s insights you are looking for, then try some of these ideas. If you want help with the process, call us!

Aww, that's just adorable. And not what we're talking about at all.

(Quite The Contrary, We’re Promoting Cold-Eyed Precision).

Over the past decade or so, scads of research has been conducted proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that advertising based on emotional content pulls better, converts better, sells better, sticks better and just slap performs better than advertising based solely on rational features and benefits. Just type “emotions in advertising” into a search engine (once you’ve finished reading this, of course) and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results (I just encountered a new “special report” on the subject and that’s what prompted me to write this).

Discarding the bottom 95% as general SEO gunk, you’ll still see a vast and deep array of information on this hot topic, all of which says pretty much the same two things:

1. Advertising built on emotional content outperforms advertising built on totally rational content in just about every way you can measure it.

2. As a marketer, you’re blowing it if you’re not building your marketing messages on a foundation of emotional appeal.

Unfortunately, very few of the books, reports, articles, commentaries, blogs and blurts that you’ll find in your search go on to explain just exactly what “emotional content” or “built on an emotional appeal” means.

“You want us to put puppies/kittens/babies in our ads? But we’re selling farm equipment/brokerage services/roofing nails!”

If you’re marketing pet food or baby clothes, then images of puppies, kittens and babies should probably have a significant role in your advertising. But, no, that’s not what we’re talking about when we at Drumcircle talk about emotions in advertising. What we’re talking about is using quantitative and qualitative research (our own, new, proprietary tools and techniques ) to gain an understanding of exactly what emotions motivate purchase decisions for your category, brand or product, and then using that insight to meticulously design advertising messages that will precisely tap those emotions.

Beyond emotion to Emotivation™

Most people who are up to date on the neuroscience of marketing accept the idea that peoples’ decisions are driven first by emotions and then post-rationalized with facts. A lot of people know this, but they’re not sure how to apply it to their own marketing challenges (this is especially true of marketers in “highly rational” business categories. A couple of years ago, a prospective client – a big financial services company – said to us “We’re going to hire you. But when you talk to our people outside the marketing team, please don’t talk about emotions. It just makes them tense”).

That’s one of the reasons we coined the term Emotivation; to draw a crystalline distinction between basic emotions (which can be sort of touchie-feelie, squishy and, frankly, a little scary) and the perceptual, intuitive forces that really motivate decisions and actions (which are, if you’re using our tools and techniques, clearly delineated, highly quantifiable and, when it comes to selling stuff, really, really useful).

At the risk of propagating more jargon, we call those perceptual, intuitive forces Emotivations.

Discovering and tapping Emotivations has helped Drumcircle’s clients, in both “rational “ categories (from farm equipment to pharmaceuticals) and more traditionally “emotional” ones (from soup to soda), to create more powerful, emotionally engaging advertising messages. And, so far, there’s not a puppy or a kittie in sight.

A client told me today that she liked working with me because I am smart. I said thank you. But the comment got me thinking.

I suppose I am smart enough. I got good grades in school. I graduated from college. I have two graduate degrees. I’ve been reasonably successful at work. That seems okay.

But some would say “who cares? You didn’t graduate from Harvard. In fact you didn’t even graduate from Yale, NYU or the current hot spot in the Northeast, Bowdoin. Nor did you go to law school, medical school or business school. And you haven’t made a fortune in hedge fund investing. Or even real estate. So you are not smart enough at all.”

And others would say “who cares because you are not street smart.” Take away my credit cards and dump me in a certain urban neighborhoods and I don’t think I would last long unless a cab came by to pick me up.

And forget about being smart enough to make it out of the deep, dark woods unscathed.

Some would say I am creatively smart – but many of those haven’t spent time nurturing their creative side. Side by side with a creative talent in any field, I am an untalented slob.

But I am smart enough – in fact very smart – in other ways. I am an unconventional thinker. I have a lot of curiosity. I listen hard and well. I try to find solutions that are different than the conventional wisdom, because I truly believe there is always room for innovation. I have an energy level that motivates people.

And sometimes that kind of smart is what it takes to spark – or at least support – positive change and growth in a community or organization.

So I would now say that I am a certain kind of smart. And so are you. We are all smart in our very individual ways. Our brains work in mysterious ways that are unique to us and reflect how we perceive, remember, and make decisions.

At Drumcircle, we talk a lot about how neuro-science has proven that decision-making is driven by initial, emotional, non-verbal perceptions – and not pure rationale thinking, as we believed in the past. But the point here is that there are different kinds of rationale thinking too. And as we go about making decisions in our daily lives, it makes sense to tap into different kinds of brains for insights. So we can take advantage of all the different types of smartness that are out there.

Is that an iPhone in your pocket or are you just happy to have me believe that it is?

There’s an article in the July 9th-15th 2011 issue of The Economist called The mystery of the Chinese consumer. It’s absolutely packed with fascinating facts. For example:

• Lily Li, a secretary living in Shanghai, uses Apple earphones for the cheap Chinese mobile phone in her pocket, so it appears to the outside world that she’s using an iPhone
• She drives to work, despite the fact that it takes four times longer than taking public transport, just to show off the fact that she owns a car.
• The middle-aged woman executive who drives a pristine new BMW circles the block for half an hour to avoid a 50-cent parking fee
• The same woman won’t invest much money on interior decoration, because only her family sees the inside of her home

At the risk of armchair quarterbacking (but, isn’t that the privilege of the blogger?), is any of the above surprising? Chinese people are emerging from a couple of generations of deprivation and conformity. Is it any wonder that they’re beginning to regard high-value consumer goods as badges of individual success?

Consumers and/or Culture. You have to understand both.

• Nestle is in talks to buy Hsu Fu Chi, China’s biggest confectioner, to acquire its “deep knowledge of Chinese consumers.”

Let’s take a minute to ponder the difference between understanding consumers (or, as we at Drumcircle prefer to put it, understanding people) and understanding the unique cultures in which people live, work, interact and consume.

Apparently, BMW translates into Chinese as "Bao Ma", which also means "treasured steed". The crew in Munich have got to love that.

• A globally successful cheese maker bombed in China because selling fermented dairy products to people who grew up eating fermented tofu is an uphill struggle.
• After a massive investment in China, a major USA-based home improvement retailer is shutting down and withdrawing because the concept of Do It Yourself is a nonstarter in a market where a vast horde of cheap labor stands by to paint, plumb, lay tile and hang sheetrock.

I’ll make the argument that the aforementioned challenges being faced by Western marketers in China are not due to a lack of understanding of Chinese consumers. They’re due to a lack of understanding of the culture in which those consumers are consuming. Cultures are unique. What drives peoples’ decisions about what brands to buy is not: all people are motivated by deep-seated emotions (what Drumcircle calls Emotivations). And when a culture has had those emotions bottled up and unsatisfied for over half a century, it’s not surprising that they’re gushing out everywhere now.

“Making others aware of my success is more important than having my success make me comfortable.”

Given where Chinese people are coming from, is it any wonder they’ve become “consumers on crack”? It may not be politically correct, but it’s humanly correct. As the song by Depeche Mode says (yeah, it was 1984 so I know I’m dating myself) People Are People long before they’re consumers.