'Look at the cultural perspective'

MY BIGGEST STRATEGIC MISTAKE ... and what I learnt from it

recounts experiences of senior managers who have learnt valuable lessons from what seemed like blunders at the time.

This time, McCann Erickson President Santosh Desai speaks to Business Standard on how a lack of understanding of cultural issues can make the most detailed research pointless.

This happened in the early 1990s when I was with advertising agency Ulka. We were working on a social marketing project sponsored by the government and USAID, which aimed at trying to improve the nutritional levels of children in some tribal belts in Gujarat, specifically the Panchmahal tribe.

Studies indicated that infant mortality rate in the area was high because children were malnourished.

Being an intricate three-year project, it had a nutritional expert, John Snow, a marketing expert and Ulka as the advertising agency. I was responsible for the strategic planning of the project. We had about 60 radio spots, different messages for each segment, road charts, scales and so on.

The plan was to have the anganwadi worker give free food to the children who come to the anganwadi, and then monitor and plot their weight. The food to be distributed among the children "" soya flour "" was imported from the US.

We developed the whole programme without questioning the product, without asking anything about it. And guess what? Everyone just hated it!

It was a cultural mismatch "" they may have been poor tribals, but even they eat culturally conducive food. And here was this soya flour, unpalatable for them, something they had never tasted in their lives.

When I look back I can't believe how we unquestioningly accepted the product.

And the project was one of the most complicated, most comprehensively thought-through programmes I have done. We had 10-hour meetings and conferences, research, hundreds of field trips... And it was an absolute disaster.

Our mistake was that we were to market this product and we did not even ask the basic question as to what it was.

We were so caught up in our good intentions that we failed to see it from the affected parties' perspective. The tribals didn't believe their children were malnourished.

So why should a family send its two-year-olds to a strange place to eat something that is unacceptable to them? We should have understood their lives better and given them tailor-made answers instead of imposing a silver bullet kind of solution on them.

The experience taught me a few critical lessons. One, strategies work on the ground. So you should have a full understanding of what happens on the ground.

And the cliche that you should know the consumer is absolutely on target. We do so much research but is it culture-specific, does it factor in the belief systems?

For this project, we had people coming from all parts of the world to try to understand, in antiseptic terms, the attitudes of the people. That's not good enough.

You need to understand the cultural milieu and unless you go in depth and understand the frame of reference, however well-constructed and well researched your programme is "" like it was in our case "" you can get some basic things wrong.

In fact, if you were trying to sell that gook in the cities, you would probably have failed. Remember how badly Kentucky Fried Chicken was marketed in India?

Now we always look at the cultural perspective before we start on a project.

For instance, when we launched Kinley mineral water, we looked beyond the safety factor. Water in India means so much more "" it stands for hospitality; Indians believe that you shouldn't refuse water even to your enemy.

In India, water is trust. So we came out with a campaign for Kinley that said, boond boond mein vishwas (Trust in every drop of water). The campaign was a result of cultural understanding of water in India, instead of an antiseptic understanding of the product.

When the rest of the market was looking at safety, we gave a cultural view of water. The result: the brand did extremely well and it was a hugely successful campaign.

Another instance is the toothpaste brand Babool. Again, we used the culture-specific understanding that we brush our teeth in the morning not just for our teeth but more importantly, for the kulla (gargle) that we do to get rid of the stale breath.

Toothpaste sounds more about teeth but in India, we are more concerned about getting rid of the morning breath, the baasipan (staleness) of the breath.

That was the key for the brand campaign and it worked extremely well again. It is a simple, but crucial lesson: get a cultural view of the problem.