4 ms·

>So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with corpses, but you can persuade them that it's uncouth and old-fashioned

>So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with corpses, but you can persuade them that it's uncouth and old-fashioned using perfectly ordinary marketing techniques. The norms of a society can be changed with remarkable speed if you write a big cheque to people who change social norms for a living.

nostrademons 7y ago
Does this actually work cross-culturally? My understanding of advertising is that it relies very heavily on building associations between the product being advertised and existing positive social norms. The reason truck commercials in the U.S. always feature scruffy broad-chested men driving shiny vehicles across wide-open rugged terrain is because in the U.S. we have this cultural mythology about the frontier and conquering nature and we associate manliness with this (and with facial hair, muscles, etc.). And this works because there's already a shared cultural norm that's been built up over centuries, which most of the people who develop advertisements are familiar with and can mine for ideas. When I visit my in-laws in Taiwan, the advertisements look very different (although somehow the skinny-but-buxom-blonde has made its way over there too, despite representing basically 0% of the female population). In a past life, my primary job was getting people to click on search results faster, and my secondary job was making sure Google stayed in the press for positive reasons. A lot of this was data-driven, but when it came to adapting changes to individual countries, we'd always defer to the local teams. Google.kr looks different from Google.ru, both of which look different from Google.com, and in many cases these differences were simply because a competitor had gotten to the local country first and that's what the population had become accustomed to.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  > Does this actually work cross-culturally? With a degree of care, yes. Major marketing and advertising agencies are perfectly au fait with these challenges, because they're responsible for multinational brands. A company like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble is very used to selling products to consumers in radically different cultural contexts, as are the agencies they employ. Marketing within the US is meaningfully cross-cultural - the connotations that sell a Ford F150 will fail hopelessly if you apply them to a Toyota Prius. There are very few brands and messages that will work in every cultural context, which is why marketers are acutely aware of the importance of segmentation. Just telling people to change their behaviour is rarely successful; you need to surmount some very complex cognitive, emotional and social obstacles to change. The marketing industry has an extremely deep, sophisticated and powerful set of tools and skills in this respect. They spend all day, every day thinking about how to facilitate behavioural change. We're used to thinking of that practice as essentially amoral or evil - they persuade us to max out our credit cards, they convince us that smoking is cool, they peddle junk food - but the same skills could be used for good if only the right people decided to hire them.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    That sounds a bit like marketing for marketing. I do think marketing agencies actually did loose a lot of influence in recent years. 15 years ago nearly everyone could hum the latest jingle from the newest ads and influence was indeed profound. But these times are long gone. Today there are many channels for cutural exchange that don't transport marketing messages.
    - chrisweekly 7y ago
      15 years ago, western culture was substantially more monolithic, with much more centralized distribution channels, in comparison to the increasingly balkanized and fragmented niches that abound today.
  - amelius 7y ago
    marketing -> education
  - rjf72 7y ago
    To emphasize the flaws of this argument, flip it around. You are effectively arguing that you can change the views, values, and beliefs of an entire nation by marketing. This doesn't sound so unreasonable when it's an 'us vs them' because it's easy to underestimate others. So instead let's make it a 'them vs us' argument. If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views, values, and beliefs of America using marketing. Saudi Arabia has a surplus of money. They'd certainly love to spread their cultural values. Perhaps all they need to do to, for instance, get American women to start dressing 'modestly', as they define it, or American men to ostensibly abstain from alcohol and porn would be to spam Americans with advertising for such? I'm sure you'd agree such notions are quite absurd. Marketing appeals to cultural values, it doesn't define them. I think the one thing that can make this somewhat confusing is that in certain segments of society, consumerism is itself a cultural value. And as advertising feeds heavily off of this, it can blur the relationship. But this goes back to times before modern marketing even existed. For instance the connection between royalty across the world and the color purple was driven exclusively by the fact that purple dyes, Tyrian purple in particular, were extremely rare. There was no purple marketing agency, just people defining and displaying themselves in terms of having things that others could not.

nostrademons 7y ago

Does this actually work cross-culturally? My understanding of advertising is that it relies very heavily on building associations between the product being advertised and existing positive social norms. The reason truck commercials in the U.S. always feature scruffy broad-chested men driving shiny vehicles across wide-open rugged terrain is because in the U.S. we have this cultural mythology about the frontier and conquering nature and we associate manliness with this (and with facial hair, muscles, etc.). And this works because there's already a shared cultural norm that's been built up over centuries, which most of the people who develop advertisements are familiar with and can mine for ideas. When I visit my in-laws in Taiwan, the advertisements look very different (although somehow the skinny-but-buxom-blonde has made its way over there too, despite representing basically 0% of the female population). In a past life, my primary job was getting people to click on search results faster, and my secondary job was making sure Google stayed in the press for positive reasons. A lot of this was data-driven, but when it came to adapting changes to individual countries, we'd always defer to the local teams. Google.kr looks different from Google.ru, both of which look different from Google.com, and in many cases these differences were simply because a competitor had gotten to the local country first and that's what the population had become accustomed to.

jdietrich 7y ago
> Does this actually work cross-culturally? With a degree of care, yes. Major marketing and advertising agencies are perfectly au fait with these challenges, because they're responsible for multinational brands. A company like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble is very used to selling products to consumers in radically different cultural contexts, as are the agencies they employ. Marketing within the US is meaningfully cross-cultural - the connotations that sell a Ford F150 will fail hopelessly if you apply them to a Toyota Prius. There are very few brands and messages that will work in every cultural context, which is why marketers are acutely aware of the importance of segmentation. Just telling people to change their behaviour is rarely successful; you need to surmount some very complex cognitive, emotional and social obstacles to change. The marketing industry has an extremely deep, sophisticated and powerful set of tools and skills in this respect. They spend all day, every day thinking about how to facilitate behavioural change. We're used to thinking of that practice as essentially amoral or evil - they persuade us to max out our credit cards, they convince us that smoking is cool, they peddle junk food - but the same skills could be used for good if only the right people decided to hire them.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  That sounds a bit like marketing for marketing. I do think marketing agencies actually did loose a lot of influence in recent years. 15 years ago nearly everyone could hum the latest jingle from the newest ads and influence was indeed profound. But these times are long gone. Today there are many channels for cutural exchange that don't transport marketing messages.
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    15 years ago, western culture was substantially more monolithic, with much more centralized distribution channels, in comparison to the increasingly balkanized and fragmented niches that abound today.
- amelius 7y ago
  marketing -> education
- rjf72 7y ago
  To emphasize the flaws of this argument, flip it around. You are effectively arguing that you can change the views, values, and beliefs of an entire nation by marketing. This doesn't sound so unreasonable when it's an 'us vs them' because it's easy to underestimate others. So instead let's make it a 'them vs us' argument. If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views, values, and beliefs of America using marketing. Saudi Arabia has a surplus of money. They'd certainly love to spread their cultural values. Perhaps all they need to do to, for instance, get American women to start dressing 'modestly', as they define it, or American men to ostensibly abstain from alcohol and porn would be to spam Americans with advertising for such? I'm sure you'd agree such notions are quite absurd. Marketing appeals to cultural values, it doesn't define them. I think the one thing that can make this somewhat confusing is that in certain segments of society, consumerism is itself a cultural value. And as advertising feeds heavily off of this, it can blur the relationship. But this goes back to times before modern marketing even existed. For instance the connection between royalty across the world and the color purple was driven exclusively by the fact that purple dyes, Tyrian purple in particular, were extremely rare. There was no purple marketing agency, just people defining and displaying themselves in terms of having things that others could not.