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But it wasn’t. The attributes of the Carioca lifestyle are, in fact, characteristic of any number of “water-facing” cultures around the world. The coast of Sydney, Australia, has its own version of Cariocas, and so does Southern California, the North Shore of Hawaii and Miami’s South Beach. Taking shape around a beach, or shoreline, each one of these regions is nearly indistinguishable from its overseas counterparts. Each places a strong emphasis on physical attributes, and the natives’ popularity is connected to their social ranking. Cariocas across the globe are influential in introducing fashions and brands to the rest of the world. My mission was to try and understand the psychology of the Carioca—the mind-set, that is, of anyone who lives on a fashionable coast—and bottle and sell it.
The Carioca sensibility, then, was simply a local Brazilian version of a suite of emotions and desires that exists all over the world, one that originates in, of all places, the Mediterranean. This was something I’d learned a few years earlier while working for one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious clubs in Hong Kong.
As one of Hong Kong’s largest community benefactors, the Hong Kong Jockey Club has long been perceived as the aspirational essence of Hong Kong: a gilded, privileged circle that everyone wanted to join but few people could. Yet despite its historical legacy, one issue loomed in the club’s future, namely, the brand of the “horse.”
Since 1884, the year of the club’s founding, the horse had been the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s most recognizable icon, and a key asset in distinguishing the club from competing gaming providers. The problem was that worldwide, from 2005 to 2013, Google searches for horse had dropped 28 percent. In Hong Kong, horse searches were down by as much as 42 percent. Even more significantly, since 2005, Google searches for horse racing in Hong Kong had declined 61 percent, and there was also a dramatic decline in sales of local children’s toys centered around horses, whether it was toy stables, toy farms, or miniature horses.
These statistics were later confirmed in what I saw, or rather didn’t see, in children’s bedrooms across Hong Kong. There were no horses. The few times I caught sight of one, it seemed merely decorative. Primed by their own childhood memories of Black Beauty, The Black Stallion and Hollywood Westerns, Hong Kong parents had grown up revering the concept of the horse—from the 1930s to the 1960s, the film industry’s most popular genre was the Western—but they hadn’t passed that interest along to their children. Horses no longer played a starring, or heroic, role in the books parents read to children, or in children’s books in general. With some exceptions, Hollywood no longer even made Westerns. Was there any hope for the future of the horse?
Around the world, whether they’re engaged in jumping, riding, fox hunting, rodeos or ranch work, the horse symbolizes freedom, beauty, grandeur and power. In order to reestablish the horse “brand,” I spent the next few weeks reaching out to local toy companies, and also to Hollywood. Unfortunately, the “rebranding” of the horse never resulted in a full-blown campaign, but along the way it dovetailed with another observation that linked to freedom, aspiration and power.
As I spent day after day observing the races at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, I noticed how the members of the crowd paid greater attention to the men and women they aspired to than they did to the people they didn’t. Aspiration is difficult to pick up when you’re in an audience setting, easier to observe from a height. Looking down from a balcony, for example, you can see that humans tend to form a circle around the people we admire, or wish to emulate, in the same way we do when in the presence of a politician or celebrity.
People with money in Hong Kong like to show it off. Over a period of several weeks, it became apparent to me that people were ordering foods and drinks based on what a wealthier demographic was ordering. Their own friends, in turn, ordered these same goods and drinks, creating, in the end, an unbroken chain of aspiration. As I mingled with the crowds, I couldn’t help but notice a second dimension linked to aspiration: superstition. Over the course of an average day, I saw any number of Hong Kong residents knocking on wood, spitting three times or placing their chopsticks beside their teacups for good luck. Superstition, I knew, had already trickled over into local design schemes. In 2005, while constructing the entrance to Hong Kong Disneyland, executives had decided to adjust the angle of the front gate by 12 degrees, and also placed a subtle bend in the walkway from the train station to the gate to ensure the flow of positive energy, or chi.7
To whom did Hong Kong’s ultrarich aspire—and what was the connection, if any, between aspiration and superstition? If you glanced at the lapels of the coats of nearly every Hong Kong businessman, or strolled through Hong Kong’s malls, you came face-to-face with the same three words: Made in Italy. Hong Kong’s most popular and renowned restaurants had one theme in common: Italy and Italian food. Hong Kong’s highest quality cafés were Italian, and the highest-level deals and meetings all took place in Italian restaurants. Not for the first time, I was reminded how the Mediterranean lifestyle influences humans on a subconscious level. In China, according to the New York Times, you can find an Italian-themed retailer called Christdien Deny, whose font is eerily similar to that of Christian Dior, as well as a clothing brand known as Frognie Zila, whose website features photos of Venetian canals and other well-known Italian landmarks.8 Relatedly, the most aspirational cafés in Japan all have French names (some of which don’t make sense in any language, including the “Monna Lisa,” “Pierre Herme Paris” and “Quand L’Appetit Va Tout Va”), and roughly 80 percent of all Japanese girls fantasize about marrying in Paris—which no doubt contributes to the record-breaking sales of Louis Vuitton across Japan, as well as to a contemporary psychiatric condition informally known as “Paris Syndrome.”9 According to the BBC, “Paris Syndrome” affects roughly a dozen Japanese tourists every year, who arrive in Paris bearing romantic expectations of the French capital, but end up hospitalized “when they discover that Parisians can be rude, or the city does not meet their expectations,” adding, “The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.”10
These parallels—between a country and a foreign culture whose values compensate for elements or emotions missing in that culture—are common across the world. The Brazilian flag may feature a blue globe against a yellow rhombus, yet just as visible across Brazil is the Swiss flag, whose white cross on a red field shows up on any number of health-related organizations, pharmacies and physicians’ offices in an attempt to communicate trustworthiness and orderliness in a mostly chaotic country.
More even than France, why is Italy the repository of so much global aspiration? One short answer is the car industry, whose brands include Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti and Maserati, but the Italian fashion industry provides another answer. What aspirational clues do Italian brands convey so powerfully that even Hong Kong businessmen line up to emulate them—and could it possibly provide me with a clue that could help me turn around Devassa?
Years before I worked for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, I found the epicenter of aspiration in Tiene, Italy, a small city outside Venice, while helping a company, Cristiano di Thiene—which owns the licensing rights to a brand called Aeronautica Militare—figure out who made up its core audience.
With lines for men, women and children, Aeronautica Militare’s clothing is characterized by patches, symbols and “good luck” icons borrowed from the military and connected to real-life stories. In conversation with the brand’s design team, I found that more than any other fashion demographic, and like Trollbeads fans and Jenny Craig customers, Aeronautica’s core audience was both intensely loyal and more superstitious than average.
The fashion industry is akin to a highway with three different lanes and speeds. Colors, cuts and fashions vary from season to season, but larger trends, like patches, graphics and logos, endure for decades. In the wake of the 2008 global recession, many consumers were reluctant to wear
high-end logos in public, but recession or no recession, Aeronautica fans continued to wear their clothing proudly and boldly. Ignoring changes and variations in cut and color, Aeronautica fans seemed determined to travel in the fashion world’s slowest lane.
As I interviewed Aeronautica fans across both northern and southern Italy, in many residences I stumbled across a symbol or a memento of dreams—a plastic fighter jet, a pilot’s uniform, a piece of military insignia hidden in a closet or packed away in a box stuffed underneath a bed. When I asked them about it, many told me about a childhood dream they’d had once that never came to pass. They wanted to be a pilot. They wanted to be powerful, or in charge. They wanted things to run on schedule. With its patches and military iconography, Aeronautica Militare, it seemed, had become a compensation for childhood dreams of freedom. (Many of the brand’s fans told me that their fantasies growing up centered around flying.)
Fashion, I was reminded again, gives consumers a shortcut to becoming a perceived member of an aspirational tribe. I’ve also noticed a direct and unsurprising correlation between people’s levels of self-esteem and their display of patches, brand names and logos. Like Ralph Lauren, Aeronautica has two variations of its logo. One is overt, the other subtle. The more discreet logo was favored by Aeronautica fans whose childhood fantasies hadn’t come true, whereas fans who were still pursuing their dreams tended to wear the more conspicuous logos.
One Aeronautica fan was a student pilot who’d been in a plane crash at age 24 and lapsed into a coma for nearly three months, never realizing his fantasies of turning professional. When he saw his first Aeronautica shirt, he told me, he fell in love. Another 25-year-old male Aeronautica fan I met favored multiple patches and the brand logo embossed across his coats and shirts. Among his proudest moments, he told me, were when army forces entered the café where he went most mornings and asked if he’d served in the military.
Aeronautica Militare, it seemed, had more in common with an addiction than it did a fashion label. It seemed like its fans could never buy enough of the brand. They also considered it their duty to recruit other fans to Aeronautica—and did so by seeking out individuals who matched the values that the brand represented, visible on both its text-based and non-text-based shirts. To explain, among Aeronautica’s several lines is one where the shirt collars lift to reveal authentic Air Force–related codes, jargon and terminology that only military insiders might understand, and another that is missing these details. This distinction, as I later found out, was more important than it might first appear.
The critical clue I gathered about the brand came about by accident as I watched consumers through one of the store’s CCTV systems. Nothing unusual stood out until I noticed that a small group of customers engaged in a bizarre reflex: when they picked up an Aeronautica shirt, they flipped the collar up and down. It took one or two seconds at most, and was easy to miss. Were they trying to determine where the shirts were manufactured? If not, what were they looking for?
That night, I found myself in the empty store, doing what I’d seen consumers doing: flipping Aeronautica shirt collars up and down. For the first time, I observed the letters and text-based symbols embroidered on the underside of the collars of certain Aeronautica shirts. Returning upstairs, I reviewed the CCTV tape and sure enough, the shirt collars with the text hidden underneath the flaps were the store’s top sellers. I noticed another thing, too. Many of the customers wore their new shirts out the door—an unusual behavior that I couldn’t help flagging. As I replayed the CCTV recordings, it became clear that in contrast to the other customers, this same distinct group—15 percent of all the shoppers perhaps—flipped their collars up when exiting the store, displaying the symbols underneath for all the world to see.
A week later, I’d arranged to meet a group of Aeronautica fans at a Milanese nightclub. As we stood around chatting, I began noticing the differences between the Aeronautica fans who wore their collars up and the fans who wore their collars down. It was exclusivity. The ones with the raised collars clustered together in small, tight groups. Those with their collars down were scattered all across the room. While talking to members of the collars-up group, it soon became clear they were from the south of Italy, while the collars-down group was from northern Italy.
We all send out clues that convey our membership in a tribe. It could be the brand of watch we wear, or a pair of shoes. It could be layered clothing, or an absence of socks, or the presence or absence of a logo. If you find a bar of soap in your shower, it’s doubtful you are in northern Europe, or, for that matter, New Zealand, whose residents seldom use bar soaps either, and whose culture is oddly similar to Scandinavia. Beyond how we adorn ourselves physically, the clue could reside on the rear end of a car. In Zurich, Switzerland, for example, residents with four-digit license plates are perceived to be wealthier and better connected than those with a six-number plate, a subtle distinction among the residents of one of the world’s richest cities. In honor of my experience working with Aeronautica, I call this phenomenon “The Flipping Theory.” In the case of Aeronautica shirts and collars, I could only guess that among southern Italians, a raised collar made it easier to pick up women.
Still, a crucial ingredient of Italian behavior, one I would later bring into my work for Devassa in Brazil, didn’t take place until the following day.
Sitting down for lunch in a café outside Bologna, I noticed that my waiter and, for that matter, every Italian waiter, had a habit of pouring soda, water or beer into my glass from a high vertical angle. In almost every other country, waiters pour liquids while keeping the bottle at a subtle horizontal tilt. But in Italy, waiters raised the bottle high, as if wanting to drain it more quickly and accurately. Following their scene-setting, attention-getting leads, Italian customers topped off their own drinks in the same way.
Where had I seen this behavior before? The answer: Brazil. Whether in Rio, Salvador or São Paulo, Brazilian waiters and consumers pouring drinks turned the bottle over until it was nearly upside down, allowing the liquid to drain as quickly as possible. This small habit, shared by Italians and Brazilians, gave me a link that would help me connect the dots between two different, but similar, cultures.
The two countries also shared a love of football, or what Americans call “soccer.” I knew that in their work on behalf of Chevrolet, the US automaker, the marketing group Jack Morton Worldwide found a way to turn football into a unique platform. Knowing that football provides a strong, emotional connection with fans of all ages, company executives immersed themselves in the sport and its singular relationship with fans across the globe. The agency ultimately created a partnership with the One World Play Project, a start-up organization whose mission is to bring virtually indestructible balls to children in war zones, refugee camps, disaster areas and other disadvantaged communities around the world.
Which made me wonder: Could a similar alliance take place between Brasil Kirin—which manufactures soft drinks as well as beer—and Brazilian soccer? When I began interviewing soccer coaches in Salvador and São Paulo, it soon became clear there was a dramatic need for mentoring and sponsorship programs in Brazil, but that the expense and the country’s infrastructure would make them too difficult to implement. That’s when I turned my attention elsewhere.
For years, I’ve been intrigued by the similarities between the world’s most influential brands and the world’s best-known religions. I once went so far as to interview 14 leaders from religions including Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism and Islam in an attempt to figure out the ten characteristics their faiths had in common. In order of importance, I found that they were: A sense of belonging; storytelling; rituals; symbols; a clear vision; sensory appeal; power from enemies; evangelism; mystery; and grandeur. When you think about the world’s most powerful brands—among them Apple, Nike, Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola, LEGO—you realize they all make use of some if not all of these pillars. Apple,
for example, shrouds its product releases in mystery. Apple fans are among the most ardent brand evangelists in the world, and Apple also offers its users a strong sense of “belonging.” Not least, is it any coincidence that the Apple logo hangs from an unseen thread in many Apple Stores like a Bethlehem star?
Among the most elusive of these ten precepts is the sense of community and belonging. In an information age, most of us feel unanchored. The mobile economy has allowed many people to live anywhere they want, and the more “community”—that feeling of localness and belonging—makes its way online, the more it has dropped away in real life.
No less essential to a religion—or a brand—are rituals. Whether you drink a Corona beer alongside a lime, or order a Caffè Misto at Starbucks, the rituals of a shared language, and a shared way of doing things, bond consumers together. Rituals serve as an entry ticket to an exclusive universe consumers want to join, and the more often they repeat a ritual, the more of a hardcore fan they become. This subject seemed worth exploring, especially since religion was declining across Brazil.
Brazil is the world’s largest Catholic country, with 60 percent of Brazilians identifying themselves as Catholics, a decline from a Catholic majority of 92 percent in 1970. Studies estimate that the decline in practicing Catholics in Brazil will continue and that “by 2030 Catholics will represent less than 50 percent of Brazilian churchgoers.”11 Expecting high levels of religious enthusiasm across the country, I was surprised to hear from Brazilians how little a role religion played in their lives. Even if they hadn’t said anything, the trend was visible in many residences. Fasting and abstinence are common to the Catholic Church’s Advent, Ember Days and Rogation Days, but most Brazilians told me they paid them no attention. Two decades earlier, when I first visited Brazil, every room would have had at least one of its corners devoted to the Virgin Mary, or at the very least a religious urn holding a spray of flowers, but in contemporary Brazil, most people’s “collections” consisted of branded beer cans or bottles holding flowers or pens. Most Brazilians told me that if they were remotely attracted to religion, it wasn’t to traditional Catholicism, but to newer evangelist and spiritualist teachings.