A different brand of brand: The brand idea in Asia

James Parsons

Organisations are pinning significant hopes on Asia for growth and are striving to deploy their brands optimally in these markets

Now, as growth in many key Asian markets seems sustained and durable, is a good time to think about some of the key received wisdom about how brands can best work to achieve growth and how this wisdom – and its accompanying models – looks in Asian contexts. 

Love in the West
First, let’s turn to the Western context. Investment experts celebrate the high price/earnings ratios of successful brands; many talk up the mystical power of brands to deliver such rewards by developing longer term consumer relationships. In this, they echo many brand experts who talk passionately about the loyalty that brands can elicit. Indeed, much of the received wisdom revolves  around  precisely that concept – loyalty. Kevin Roberts’ Lovemarks suggests that the kind of nirvana to which all brands must aspire is loyalty beyond reason.

There’s a whole school of marketing thought which claims that building ever deeper relationships of love for and loyalty to a specific franchise is the central aim of brands. It even has its own laws, like the Pareto principle, which states that typically 80% of a brand’s volume comes from 20% of its buyers. This thinking is pervasive in marketing, communications and qualitative research, perhaps because it seems intuitively true – everyone can think of a brand they’re loyal to. But it also seems odd because, as Byron Sharp argues in his book How Brands Grow, most brands in most categories show growth in a given period through increasing penetration, not increasing loyalty. He argues that there is relatively little divergence in terms of average purchase frequency between lead brands and even distant followers. The brand with a relatively low share is more likely to catch up with the lead brand by getting more people to try it at least once than by getting its existing customers to develop even greater loyalty to it. Further, Sharp shows that the Pareto share rarely accounts for 80% of a brand’s value; it is nearer the 50% mark in most cases.

Clearly, those heavy 20% are of huge importance to a brand, not least as advocates, and the idea of a core franchise surely helps develop a sense of purpose and focus within organisations. But have they become fetishised, such that adding to the rest gets overlooked?    The idea that the 20% are all heavy, loyal and loved-up is also not necessarily true. It sounds true, though logically, in a relatively short period of observation and in many product categories, a frequency close to one could put an individual in that 20%.

The enduring, sometimes quasi-religious fixation on developing loyalty may suck organisational energy away from driving the penetration from which growth has invariably arisen.

We see this type of discourse in research paradigms, too. We talk of ‘lapsed users,’ when a lapse is a notion more befitting, say, Catholicism than purchase of a brand. In using the term, we presuppose that all users of a brand are dedicated and loyal. The evidence suggest that such loyalty is often the exception rather than the norm. The very term risks leading researchers down an analytical path focusing on loss of love, when other circumstantial factors might be in play. Just because an alternate finding is less sexy and psychological doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be delivering it.

Looking East
These reflexive notions about how brands work become even more problematic in Asian contexts. Available data on loyalty and penetration from Asia is less rich, though Asian scholars suggest that increasing loyalty is even less a factor of brand growth there than in the West.

Four other aspects should be borne in mind:

1. Consumerism: the propensity of individuals to conceive of the purchase of goods not merely in terms of functional necessity but in terms of the ability of those goods (and the specific choices they make among branded goods) to bring them “higher order” satisfactions.  What happens when consumers in markets with no longstanding tradition of consumerism are presented with advertising aiming to develop identification with abstract ideas that brands are supposed to represent? In 2005, Shelley Lazarus of Ogilvy Worldwide suggested that Haier and Lenovo were not really brands but rather brand names that aspire to be brands. She suggested that these organisations “must learn” that branding is about intellectual and emotional relationships with people. Whether or not the organisations have learned this, we can say that, since 2005, Lenovo has become the world’s biggest computer company and Haier the world’s leading white goods manufacturer. Did they achieve this by developing emotional and intellectual relationships with consumers? They may have done, but what’s beyond doubt is that they put huge energies into distribution (especially Lenovo) and innovation (especially Haier). They devoted their energies to making new stuff first, brand relationships (in Shelley Lazarus’ sense) second – and they’ve grown tremendously.

2. The notion of the abstract, on which much of the Western brand discourse is based, is  problematic in many Asian contexts. The Chinese philosophical tradition, for instance, has never shown quite the same fascination with the notion of essence as has the Greek philosophical tradition on which much of modern Western language and thought is based. Some argue that (East) Asians simply aren’t wired to think about abstracts in the same way that Westerners are. Yet marketers devote time and energy to developing such abstracts (values, philosophies and the like) in their brand planning and ensuing communications.  Nearly all brand models have an ‘essence’ box, and most have ‘personality’ and ‘values’ boxes too. Not to say that they shouldn’t have, it’s just that models tend to precondition what goes into the boxes, and we must ask ourselves if the kind of thing that’s likely to go into those boxes is always helpful.

Consumers in emerging markets (especially China) seem less preoccupied with the abstract values of brands and far more preoccupied with ideas that Western researchers would regard as mundane. During a recent study for a brand of luxury watches conducted in tier-two cities in China, personification exercises were met with insistent responses regarding the resale value of the watches. Western researchers are apt to look down from the peak of Maslow’s pyramid and declare such responses ‘overly literal.’ Such value judgements get in the way of good consumer insight.

3. Context and Content. The social psychologist Richard Nesbitt has argued, based on empirical evidence, that Asians tend to be more aware of contexts and the interrelationship of things with their contexts than the specificities of objects themselves. In the world of brands, this may well mean that an Asian consumer is likely to be more influenced by where she sees a brand, what it looks like on the shelf in relation to others, and what it has to show for itself in terms of innovation than by its inherent content or what it stands for.

4. Media environments. India and Indonesia stand out from other Asian markets in that TV spots tend to be 30 seconds or longer. In China and in many other Asian markets, most spots are 15 seconds. This has implications for the type of narrative that can be constructed. Yet the idea of quality 15-second narratives – stories designed to work against specific locally relevant objectives in 15 seconds, as opposed to stories designed to build love over 30 or 60 seconds, which are then squeezed into 15 – seems to be a relatively novel idea in some circles.

Brand new thinking?
The idea of brands as the beating hearts of organisations is not going to go away, nor should it. But one can’t help thinking that, especially in Asia, where context trumps content, where local competitors in many categories are growing by doing as opposed to saying, where tangibles seem to be more of a draw than narratives and abstracts, it’s time for a more nuanced understanding of how brands do what they do best – deliver growth.

James Parsons is Managing Director (Asia) at Flamingo Group in Japan