Multicultural Brand Is All about Culture

The Nature of Multicultural

Marc Gobe, the author of Emotional Branding, talks about branding for a multicultural brand in Chap 2 "Disconnection Alert: The U.S Melting Pot is Hot!". As more companies are earning profit overseas, a multicultural and multinational corporation has to realize that "People want to deal with corporations that are responsive and sensitive to their unique needs." In other words, branding a multicultural brand is about building a relationship with people's own culture. 

Case: KFC

• A leading multicultural brand in the global stage

                                                                     Source: Yum!

KFC in China

• A local Chinese name for KFC in China, with offering local taste of fish, shrimps, egg tarts, and etc.
• KFC is opening one new restaurant a day, on average with the intention of reaching 15,000 outlets.
• "Built a leading 40% share of the Chinese fast food market through patiently tailoring its product offering to local tastes and building a strong team of local managers." ---HBR
• "KFC would not be seen as a foreign presence but as part of the local community. Out opportunity was to take the best ideas from the U.S. fast food model and adapt them to serve the needs of the Chinese consumer." ---CEO Sam Sue of KFC China division
• Abandoning the dominant logic behind its growth in the U.S.: a limited menu, low prices, and an emphasis on takeout

Collection of Toys to Bond Relationships

Ad Clip 1

KFC in Chinese market usually provides gifts for purchasing combos. Those gifts are for collections, often for collections of a series of toys. Those reward activities increase intimacy with KFC brand, and bring more acticities for friends and family gathering.

Familiar Cooking Styles

Ad Clip 2

As Chinese people prefer cooked food, KFC made those fried coats with cooked food inside. The image above displaces the "Shrimp Hat," which grabs attention by its cute design and cooking style.

Meets People's Desire to Try Different Western Styles Food

Ad Clip 3

The image displays above is "New Orleans Series." Even though Chinese people are addicted to their cooking style food, they have the desire to try different Western Styles food. KFC China division caught this important insight and applied it in their marketing strategy for Chinese market. For "Orleans Wings," they named them directly after Orleans, the city in France, and made the wings seem similar to the real Orleans wings but adding a local taste into it. It turns out a huge success, and  "Orleans Wings" become the most popular wings among its Chinese consumers. 

KFC as A Multicultural Brand

• Western Fast Food
• Limited Choices
• Mainly Deep Fried
• Very Few Vegetables
• Encourages Overeating
• Fast and Cheap
• Chinese "New Fast Food"
• Abundant Selections with Chinese-Western Fusion Flavors 
• Cooking Styles
• Plenty of Vegetables
• Balance Food & Drink (e.g. soup)
• Changing Selections Always
• Family Gathering and Sharing
• Mostly College Students as Employees

For multicultural brands such as KFC, marketers should realize that in order for corporations to be successfully international and multicultural, they have to convert "international" into "local". Through localizing, marketers can understand the culture and grab key insights from their local consumers.

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How Color Works for A Brand?

Colors are very important for a brand in order to be recognized in the market. A good brand campaign should be based on several components. Constructing a good color and a suitable color branding means to create a successful and focused use of colors in order to describe the product not only for its beauty but also for its specific features.

Human brain is very sensitive to colors, so once they reach the cerebral cortex modes of perceptions can become active. Color is about conveying crucial information to your consumers. The effect of colors arises both from acculturation and physiology, and these influences are enforced by one another. Color often sets the mood of a brand through logos and packaging. The role color choice can play in brand identity should not be underestimated.

Select A Right Color

Selecting colors is complex, and choosing colors without the consultation of professional designer is like hiking the Andes without a guide. Selecting the right color is about the audience. Therefore, you have to consider: Who is your audience? And what is the message you are trying to convey to that audience?

Coca-Cola with  RED

From Gobe, who is the author of Emotional Branding, Red means power, activity, energy, and rescue. Red is long wavelength and it's arousing. Red is a stimulant. Studies show that red can have a physical effect, increasing the rate of respiration and raising blood pressure.

Why Coca-Cola Chose Red?

As Coca-Cola product is unique in its genre, so, for its originality, customers should recognize it and love it more than other drinks in the market. In this sense, red is the perfect color for this kind of product. It is a product who is able to meet a huge part of the target audience playing on two winning factors: individuality and customization as the second.

Red is a very energizing and makes you feel brighter, energetic, and full of life. Coca-Cola matches perfectly with red because it is a bubbling product, made by a secret recipe with full enthusiasm. 

Choosing red as a brand color for Coca-Cola indicates that they have a passionate and motivated personality. That is what Coca-Cola always shows. They are determined and fully motivated. In this way, the target of its audience are characterized by proactive and dynamic people, who like to enjoy themselves and their life.

Coca-Cola Brand

The name of the brand is written with simple white font in order to highlight the red color behind it. It is a perfect match with simplicity and color branding option. About Coca-Cola brand, there is no need to have a more elaborated logo because the red background is seductive enough to take a look at and stay focused on it at first look. 

As soon as the brand appears, the desire to grab one drink it is almost automatic: in daily life, for example, among other drinks in shelf, the first bottle picked up would be Coca-Cola. It is red, and cheap and, above all, seductive and catchy like only RED can be. 

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We are Entering into the Mobile World

Harvard Business School--held its 18th annual Cyberposium conference on Nov 2, drawing over 700 attendees to a panel of  co-founders of various technology companies. Mobile is the major issue for the panelist to talk about, especially the mobile advertising and the evolution of payment due to the mobile world. While technology drives the evolution of mobile, it changes the business model as well. 

What "Mobile" Means?

"Mobile" is the word to describe various platforms out there in the marketplace other than your desktops. More people are adopting smartphones and tablets and they are getting comfortable using them to surf on the Internet and chat with their friends. In fact, mobile is 2-6X faster than PC and online equivalents. In this way, people share, comment, chat and make purchases anytime and anywhere.

Mobile Advertising

Marketers are finding new opportunities in mobile advertising. The panelists mentioned that 60% mobile advertising is from search, others are from direct messages, websites banners, intervals between online streams and etc. Mobile advertising could be more attractive than PC's or online's because of the reason that once you click on an ad on your mobile platform, your focus is the ad that permeates the entire screen. Say, when you are playing an iPhone app game, advertisers like to insert ads before you start the game or before you are about to enter into the next level. When those ads appear, they stretch into the full screen so that you have to either click "skip" to skip them or wait for them to pass. In this way, effectiveness for mobile advertising is maximized. 

Real Time Engagement

Positive sentiments about particular brand take action immediately but negative sentiments as well. In the mobile world, people tend not to hesitate to post their true feelings about brands on social medial such as Instagram or Twitter. Targeting for particular brands is improved for marketers thanks to the increasing use of social networks. People are generating information about themselves, making it easier for marketers to target them. However, this makes harder for markets to create a clear brand message without people's disruptive inputs, so there is a growing challenge for marketer to pick a unique position for their brand to stand out in the marketplace. Also, due to people's higher expressive capabilities, it makes harder for managers to measure the advertising effectiveness as well.

Geolocation Provides Relevance 

Geolocation might be the most important aspect for mobile business. Most smartphones have the capability of providing geolocation data, providing more relevant data for marketers. For example, people use Foursquare to check in to find ads and coupons nearby their physical locations. Sharing locations on Foursquare is a great start to find ads that are relevant to you. Foursquare takes a more personal approach to their consumers. Consumers might miss some data relevant to them, but geolocation data can compensate for that. Geolocation data on Foursquare also provides recommendations from your close friends. However, challenges are still great for marketers because they have to figure out how to offer special coupons or ads for people with geolocation devices instead of just telling basic information as well as how to measure contributions from mobile.

Mobile is the Wallet

Mobile brings about the revolution of new transactions, and it changes the way marketers approach to people. Seeing PayPal and Google Wallet as examples, which connect mobile advertising to the global world. In order to work as a wallet, consumers have pay to get in, so it is not popular to make transactions on mobile wallets. How the mobile wallet is utilized is through ACH, which requires a banking account on all the links the bank build on the retailing network. Even though it seems exciting for marketers to do new business on mobile, regulations are many, and incumbence makes it difficult to innovate. Intermediary connection such as Google wallet or direct connection such as companies' websites is a choice for new business model in the mobile world.

Therefore, the development of both digital technology and social media is challenging the traditional business model. Mobile becomes a great part of the challenge to traditional business models. It is still a great challenge to make all mobile platforms compatible and to let banks and retailer agree on a selling model. But I think the new challenges end up pouring more energy and opportunities into the market.



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2012 Top 10 Market Trends from JWT Intelligence

JWT Intelligence is a center for provocative thinking that is a part of JWT, the world's best-known marketing communications brand. In this video clip, it provides us the top 10 trends in the market for 2012. I found that they are important for marketers to know consumers' shift in lifestyle in order to better get insights from them.



1. Navigating the New Normal
Accessibility is the key for products in any categories. Since there are more products and services out there in the marketplace, people have more chances to substitute your products with others. In this way, the more accessible your products are to your consumers, the more sales you can get.


2. Live a Little 
People tend to sacrifice less to enjoy their leisure. There are already pressure for them cumulated from the daily work, so they don't want to make efforts to release the pressure. The easier your products can offer the need for consumers, the better for your brand. In addition, purchase tends to be more emotion-driven, so good interactivity should be built between brands and consumers in order to gain success.


3. Generation Go
There is a unique resourceful environment created for different generations even including the Lost Generations. With different medium platforms available for marketers to choose for their target audience, different people in different generations are able to all able to engage more with their brands.


4. The Rise of Shared Values
Thanks to the driving technology, it pushes people towards more "We" other than "Me." People tend to be more involved into groups than any time before. If brands are able to create synergistic values rather than mutually exclusive values, they can benefit more for their corporate interests.


5. Food as the New Eco-Issue
Food companies tend to focus more on their food qualities than any time before due to the green movements nowadays. This awareness of food quality is not only for food companies but also for consumers as well. In this way, awareness for good food qualities is extremely high now.


6. Marriage Optional
Women gain more power in defining their own marriage. For women from east to west, they start to realize that marriage is a life choice rather than an offer any more. Women become more active on their marriage. The implication from the increasing power towards marriage could also be seen as women's higher purchasing power in the marketplace and higher status in the society.


7. Reengineering Randomness
Digital sphere enables people to have much more personalized space. Randomness is key for marketers to realize. Randomness could be more opportunities to do business, but it could also be intrusiveness to consumers. Security and trust factors play in the role. In this way, marketers should be able to find the most appropriate way to target their audience.


8. Screened Interactions
Technology pushes forward people to actually touch and feel services themselves. People are more interactive with their brands because they are entertained when relying on those touch screens. In this way, how to manage your screens of any kinds of your media platforms including laptop, tablet and smart phones becomes increasingly important.


9. Celebrating Aging
Countries including both eastern and western are transforming into aging societies as there are more people live longer. Thus, companies should build up their awareness towards the aging.


10. Objectifying Objects
However, a more digital world doesn't mean consumers don't prefer real objects any more. In fact, since more and more things are digitalized, people tend to cherish those things that they can hold in hand and can last for a long period of time. The key is still connection. Unlike connection with people in the digital world, the connection here is shared objects with people to build relationships.

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Have you ever faced a bug in social media?

Have you ever faced a bug in social media? If you have never had those experiences or didn't even know what I mean by bug, then you are a lucky person. Even though we can think about it as a temporary technical problem whether temporarily or not, there are bigger problems that arise as well.

Last night Sept 24, after I liked one of my friends' profile picture on Facebook, I refreshed the news feed page. What happened after that was that there only showed public figures on that page. I didn't realize some problems at that moment. Then I went to the search engine like normal, to search for some close friends, but no friends showed up. I started to get confused, so I went to my friends list to try to find them. Things happened with the opening page showing "No Friends Yet." After checking some of my friends' homepages and trying to add them back as friends, I was told that "you are already connected," which started to make me upset. Thus, that night ended up with me being unable to see friends on my news feed, to add them back or to see photos of me in my friends' albums.

When I searched for the solutions this morning, I suddenly found that I was not the only personal made miserable by bugs in social media. Actually, there were more than 100 people around today experiencing the same Facebook friend bug as I did, and Facebook was not back to normal until 8 pm.

In fact, social media bugs are quite common. Another Facebook bug happened today when Huffington Post published that private messages had been posted on people's Facebook timeline. People got frustrated and embarrassed by those posted messages, which are supposed to be private. When things come to an ex or a complicated relationship, the issue of privacy much more severe.

When you face a bug on social media sites, 

You should:

First, KEEP CALM
You have to believe that you are not the only person suffering the problem. If there are other people experiencing the same problem,  you yourself can do nothing about it, and the web itself will find a way out.

Second, Let Others Know
Communication is always a key to success. Talk about your situations with your friends or tech pro who might understand your problems. If it is setting problem arise by yourself, then you can fix it immediately.

Third, Report the Problem
Even though big social media companies like Facebook may receive thousand of emails from their users, trying to report should always be a solution. Also, try to report your problem through other social media such as Twitter and Tumblr because people are connected under the flat world.

Fourth, Wait and See
Wait for applicable solutions. Or, it might just work again for no reason.


When social media bug happens especially regarding privacy issues, business firms should still behave ethically. This is because firms rely more on social media strategies to reach their target audience nowadays.

We, as interactive social media users, should actively react to these kinds of problems because we hold power and business companies rely upon our responses and reports.




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Apple pushes the Integration of Web Radio

Rumor to gain attention 

As iPhone 5 finally showed up in the market this Friday Sept 14, Apple has kept its glowing power in the communication business. Prior to that, on September 7,  The Wall Street Journal  posted an article called “Apple Seeks to create Pandora Rival.” What Apple Inc. intended to do was to take on Pandora’s music streaming service and create its own music service station. With this announcement, Apple Inc. is taking advantage of its existing iTunes customers while hurting businesses such as Pandora and Spotify, changing the marketing sales model as well as the communication model.

Is Apple going to monopolize online music?

We will see a monopoly of online music radio service, or in other words, an integration of custom music radio stations. According to Youtube video by Ethan Smith, a Wall Street Journal news editor, there are 400M iTunes customers, 50M Pandora customers and 16M active users on Spotify, so Apple could just pull their existing iTunes users into the new custom-radio station without losing users. Instead of incorporating advertisements into different music services, now marketers would focus primarily on the coming music service, decreasing the total cost of advertising. 

When the announcement of Apple’s seeking Pandora rival came out, it hurt the business of other web radio companies especially Pandora, seen by Pandora’s decreased stock price since Sept 7. As Pandora mostly relies on revenues from smartphone advertisements, says Qineqt, it becomes deeply vulnerable when rivals like Apple comes into the stage to try to get those advertisers. 

Different Sales Model, Different Marketing Communication Model

The sales model in this market is changing from buying (iTunes) to renting (Pandora), according to editor Smith. Under this circumstance, the communication model is changing as well since customers are able to choose their preferences of taste given a particular period of time. In this way, Apple is trying to disrupt the digital ecosystem, by adding its version of online music radio , which is far away from its traditional role, according to CNBC’s Jon Fortt published on The Time Business.

Therefore, we are seeing a merging of web radio services in the coming future with Apple’s entry. Since once Apple offers streamed music service to individual users, its competition with Pandora will be absolute. However, what remains uncertain is whether Apple is going to have a free version with ads like Pandora does.

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