Dave McCaughan
The last time I went to Dhaka, I was introduced to the president of BSRM. He told me business had been growing so well that he had had to build a second factory to cope.
Like all Bangladeshi businessmen, he liked to point out that the economy had, in recent years, consistently grown at a rate that was a good one GDP percentage point higher than India, and you only had to look around to see that the city has those familiar indicators of growth – building sites and cranes everywhere. So it made sense that a maker of construction supplies was doing well. What surprised me was his tale of where that sales growth was coming from.
BSRM stands for Bangladesh Steel Re-rolling Mills, and they make rebar, the iron rods that are used to frame and reinforce concrete. Rebar forms the literal backbone of any high-rise building or any smaller building that you want to ensure will stand tall and last over time. And while the brand was certainly getting lots of commercial construction orders, the surprising growth came via much poorer Bangladeshis working as labourers on the construction sites of the Middle East, where they form one of the largest sources of cheap labour. Like the hundreds of millions of guest workers who have left their own countries to take the lowest of service, factory and construction jobs around world – often volunteering to spend years or decades away from their families – these Bangladeshi laborers send home money to their relatives in villages all over the country. And a good deal of that remitted income is used to build bigger, better and sturdier family homes out of bricks and concrete, with rebar supporting it all.
It’s the way you say it
Our McCann office in Dhaka had, over a few years, developed an advertising campaign suggesting that “if it’s about safety it has to be BSRM … the ultimate steel” and using images of rebar twisted into the shapes of objects that are globally recognised symbols of strength and safety, like safety pins, helmets and padlocks. Simple, effective communication of trust. What quickly became evident to the client, beyond the planned business growth among building companies, was villagers ordering rebar to build those family homes. Apparently the father, brother or uncle who was spending years away from home working in the Middle East was seeing the advertising in print media circulated in their workers’ quarters and messages seen on their communal televisions that were picking up Bangla broadcasts. And, as is common in much of the developing world, when a family in Bangladesh builds a home, it does not trust or allow someone else to buy the materials needed. So these foreign workers were calling home and saying, “When I send the money home for the concrete and brick to build our new home, make sure you buy BSRM steel rods for all the form work.”
It was a great story about a group of people who seem overlooked by many marketers and researchers. Call them OFWs (overseas foreign workers), guest workers or remittance workers, at no time in history have more people lived in a country other than their own with the sole purpose of supplementing or providing the family income. Separate from immigrants, definitely different from expatriate professionals or internal migrant workers, these are people who live in a foreign country, working legally but with little or no social net. Their one focus is to remit money back home.
Sending money home
OFW or remittance workers now provide significant shares of the national income in many countries. In nations like Bangladesh, India and the Philippines, remittance ranks among the most important industries, with estimates of billions of dollars being remitted home to Asian countries every year. Naturally, banks, money transfer companies like Western Union and, increasingly, credit card and telecommunication companies are focused on understanding these people. What is interesting is to realise that remittance workers and their families are, well, people, and as such have a whole range of desires and needs that brands of all kinds can address. You might have seen the OFW campaign Coca-Cola launched in the Philippines – a great feel-good project that brought some of these workers home to see their families for Christmas. It was not only a great public service; it reminded us all that brands of all kinds have a place in this very large market.
Sacrifice vs reward
Of course, all that dislocation and separation is undertaken for good reasons. Amidst the many admittedly sad stories, there is evidence that for many the reward is indeed a better life for families left at home. Perhaps, not surprisingly, those families tend to just have more. Research undertaken by Synergy in the Philippines in 2010 found that the typical family of a remittance worker was considerably more likely than the national average to own everything from television sets and mobile phones to iPods. They were also more likely to eat out at fast-food restaurants and read magazines. In separate research McCann carried out in the Philippines in 2012, we discovered that families of overseas workers not only were much more likely to complete minimal education levels, they were also more likely to graduate high school and (although still a small percentage) more likely to enter college than the national average. And with that higher standard of living, the children of these families had become more upwardly mobile and outgoing than their peers across a range of attitudes and issues:
- I consider myself to be a trendsetter (teens in overseas worker families index 150 against national average )
- I spend a lot of money on looking fashionable (150)
They were more likely to participate in social media, use a mobile phone to upload photos or videos to Facebook and browse for information before buying products. And they feel competitive: 52% of teens from overseas worker families felt they were as talented as youth in other countries (compared to a national average of 47%). They also ranked higher in their belief in their intelligence, creativity and competitiveness compared to teens overseas.
Where to?
It is only a decade ago that we seriously started looking at “the bottom of the pyramid” as a euphemism for marketing to the world’s poorer communities. What has become evident is that there are many opportunities for understanding the changing and varied nature of various segments in the lower end of that pyramid, including immigrants moving their families permanently across borders, internal migrants such as those driving the urbanisation of China, India and many other Asian countries – and remittance workers. There is a lot of work to be done to understand their potential to affect the markets for all kinds of products and services, including, it turns out, rebar manufacturing.
Dave McCaughan is Director at Truth Central, McCann Worldgroup in Japan
