Avoiding the glib and the ethnic

By Jack Pearce

Tuesday 1st October 2002

If a Spaniard is Spanish and an Aussie an Australian, you'd expect the Britons to be British, right? Wrong, according to a survey of 1000 young Britons reported in UK newspaper Marketing Week. Just 35% of these twentysomething UK residents described themselves as British. When probed further, only 53% said they felt a strong sense of British identity. Asked for icons, the pundits gave the thumbs down to such staples as the Union Jack, Marks & Spencer and British Airways and plumped for curry, Buckingham Palace and the BMW-owned Mini. So much for Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia", a national branding experiment now widely regarded as a flop.

What's going on?

Well, it's a global marketplace, with national identity blending into one global system. Globalisation, goes the argument, is an inevitable and overwhelming consequence of capitalism - economics is driving centralisation, consolidation and global branding. In this view of the future, New Zealand becomes an outpost of the northern hemisphere's (read Anglo-American) economic engine. Companies like Baycorp or Lion Nathan will of course be situated offshore, closer to their customers and capital markets. Local chains like Whitcoulls will be bought and changed to the brands of their northern hemisphere owners, such as WH Smith. As free trade spreads, even our laws begin to harmonise with those of our northern hemisphere partners. Like a law of physics, the economics of globalisation tends toward a simple truth: think global, act global.

That's one view of the future. But it's a glib one. For one thing, the benefits of consolidation seem to be rarely realised - as the failure of companies like French media firm Vivendi and the AOL-Time Warner merger is now showing. For another, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Martin Sorrel, boss of one of the world's largest advertising and marketing groups, WPP, says consumers are "actively seeking out brands with a genuine history and authenticity" in response to the blandness of McDonald's et al.

A second view of the future sees people searching for this authenticity in their ethnic roots. At its worst, it's called nationalism. The reason for the Union Jack's unpopularity among mainstream young Britons is its adoption by the reactionary British Nationalist Party, a racist and neo-fascist political movement. Ugly as it is, the BNP is a search for authentic Britishness in the face of global glibness. In a positive form, ethnic authenticity is behind the success of the $US5.1 billion African-American hair products market. Black Americans spend more on health and beauty products than any other US consumers, and brands such as Dark & Lovely, Frizz Free and African Pride are now being taken over by big players Revlon and L'Oréal. Another US ethnic success is Goya, a Hispanic-owned grocery brand targeting Hispanics with traditional drinks. Sales, now at $US770 million, have been growing in double digits for the past five years. In New Zealand, the rise of ethnic marketing is evident in the Asianisation of Auckland's retail scene. Expect to see more Polynesian products enter the mainstream, too.

I suspect ethnic marketing won't be big in New Zealand, because there just ain't many of us, ethnic or not. A third, and more interesting, future for New Zealand is in the fusion of styles and cultures occurring in music, cuisine and the arts. It gives us an edge in the global marketplace. How so? Take the fusion cooking style of Penny Oliver or highly successful London-based Kiwi chef Peter Gordon, who's at the forefront of Pacific-rim cuisine. These new styles bring a freshness that isn't a slave to their roots. Nor is it monocultural, or a franchise like Starbucks. Similar fusion is happening in fashion and art, and in the south Auckland music scene where artists such as electronica group Pitch Black blend traditional Polynesian music with rap and pop.

Globalisation need not result in a monolithic franchised economy headquartered in Houston or Singapore. Nor does a response to globalisation need to retreat to religious or ethnic roots. A more creative riposte is to forge new ideas by fusing the old and the new, one culture with another.

Fusion can be New Zealand's thing.

Jake Pearce runs marketing consultancy Chisel

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