Advertising’s Culture Lesson - Pay Attention
We spend a lot of time examining how different industries approach culture. One industry that has lessons for media and entertainment is advertising. Like film, advertising tells stories, albeit 30-90 seconds versus 30-90 minutes. Still, advertising’s long history of initially getting culture wrong, learning from those mistakes, making relevant changes, and winning market share are valuable lessons for content creators.
Hundreds of trade journal articles and academic research papers have been written examining cultural advertising failures. One of the classic examples is Proctor & Gamble’s (P&G) 1976 introduction of Pampers disposable diapers in Japan. When first introduced, P&G localized a U.S.-centric ad that showed a stork delivering Pampers to a Japanese family. This failed miserably.
Americans wouldn’t think twice about the baby/stork metaphor, but in Japanese culture, storks are wild animals, and they wouldn’t deliver babies because they could be dropped in flight and killed. In Japanese folklore, babies are gently delivered by giant peaches floating down a river. P&G learned this story only after market research into the launch failure. When they changed the imagery to a peach, the product took off.
It would be great if P&G had learned its cultural lesson from this single event, but it did not. During the 80s and 90s, P&G repeated the mistake when launching pink and blue diapers in Asia (China has a one-child policy and buying pink diapers meant you had a girl, which at the time, was not the “preferred” child), all-temperature detergent in Japan (laundry is done in tap water temperature, not hot/warm/cold), and using ads with side-by-side product comparisons, which are considered rude in Asia.
We’re not singling out P&G for its failure to recognize the importance of culture when launching new products worldwide. Hundreds of other companies have and continue to make the same mistakes. Instead, we acknowledge the company’s willingness to find out where it went wrong, fix the problem, and successfully increase brand awareness and market share in critical international markets. We’re here to commend their incorporating cultural understanding into their product design, marketing, and advertising strategies. This is a crucial lesson for content creators.
The advent of and explosive growth of streaming presents content creators with global opportunities that would have been extremely difficult, impractical, or impossible a decade ago. The dramatic surge in the number of available platforms, the increasing number of released titles, and the resulting competition for viewer’s attention mean that to be competitive companies must think differently.
The adage “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity” applies here. Advertising provides valuable insights into why and how avoiding or denying the importance of culture has when introducing new content and products into new markets. Culture matters, and market success relies on understanding it. The goal is to get it right the first time, and learning these lessons is a step in the right direction.
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