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Studying thousands of selfies reminded me that today’s teenaged girls have a strong need to be the stars of their own lives. Which explained the cameras angled from the ceiling in every room in every store, creating the illusion that each and every Tally shopper was the leading lady of her own life. Everywhere on the store’s walls were framed representations of Tally Weijl’s bunny logo. There were polka-dotted bunnies, bunnies in cameo lockets, Victorian-era bunnies and bunnies that looked as though Andy Warhol had painted them.
I’d also made it a point to introduce storytelling inside the store. A pair of brightly colored shoes was positioned alongside a small bookcase, dominated by a large hardcover book entitled Safari. Why? In some core way, Tally Weijl consumers were on their own private safaris, searching for an ideal pair of shoes. The concept of a safari validated their mission, while giving them implicit permission to explore every last square inch of the store.
But I’m saving the best for last.
Over the years I’ve spent hours observing dressing rooms, noticing how girls in pairs squeezed themselves into tiny cubicles only to leave empty-handed; noticing how their boyfriends would stand outside, waiting, clearly irritated about the unending Try-On-Take-Off, “What do you think?” sessions. Tally Weijl’s new dressing room area was itself a candyland, with each dressing room painted a different shade of red, green, orange, yellow and blue. Outside, I created a “parking lot” area, where boyfriends could keep an eye on their girlfriends without coming across as impatient or intimidating. But inside was where the magic—and convergence—happened. With the support of the Tally Weijl board, I’d engineered what I called a “Clicks and Mortar” dressing room. To explain: In every dressing room, I’d positioned a large, Internet-equipped, floor-to-ceiling mirror that, at the tap of a finger, transformed itself into a giant, live computer screen. A girl who had gone inside a dressing room, alone or with a friend, to try things on could now type in her Facebook name and password, go onto Facebook, connect with her closest friends in real time, model shirts, pants and shoes before a live camera, initiate a “voting session” and—item by item—request and receive instantaneous feedback about what looked good on her and what was a near miss. In short, the new Tally dressing room was an online and offline version of the secret morning rituals I’d learned about just two months before.
In Tally, we had succeeded in creating a fashion temple—a lounge area and destination equipped not only with phone rechargers but also with the fastest Internet connection in Vienna. Since the launch of Tally Weijl 2.0, the brand has mostly overcome its fashion crises, revenue is up dramatically and the number of Tally Weijl Facebook fans has quadrupled; but more important, the role of one bricks-and-mortar store has been redefined and reinvented. Today, adolescent Austrian girls line up to enter Tally’s dressing rooms, extending a private at-home 6:19 a.m. experience among friends into the rest of the day, building the Tally brand, as well as their own starring brand, by texting selfies to Facebook friends. One girl I spoke with called the new Tally “breathtaking,” while another who earlier had given the store a “3” now awarded it a “9,” adding, “It’s now so over the top that you have to see it.” The store, in short, deserved a big hand (with or without cream).
Chapter 7
Sleeping without a Bedspread
Charred Paper, Toy Cars and Pixie Dust Help Decipher the Meaning of “Quality” in China
Almost without exception, Westerners who travel to third world countries return home with the same impression. They report that in spite of having fewer resources and material possessions, residents of places like Guatemala or Peru or the Philippines seem to be dramatically “happier”—kinder, friendlier, more giving and hospitable—than people who live in the West. To me, this reveals just how irrelevant the Western concept of “happiness” is to anyone living outside the first world. If you ask people who are born with very little whether or not they are happy, most will reply they are neither “happy” nor “sad.” They are simply living their lives. Their priorities are, in no particular order, working, putting food on the table and taking care of their families.
Writers and philosophers from Buddha to Herodotus to Aristotle have been writing and thinking about happiness for centuries. Yet it’s worth remembering that, rather than an inherent characteristic or aspiration of being alive, the Western happiness industry is, according to the Harvard Business Review, “an artifact of modern history.”1 The idea of happiness as an expectation didn’t begin to flower until 250 years ago, in the years following the Enlightenment. Before that, even in the West, life generally verged on the austere. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that the pursuit of happiness gradually evolved into a legitimate goal, and unhappiness became a blight to be avoided.
The happiness movement gained strength throughout the nineteenth century, as jobs moved outside of the home and, according to Harvard Business Review, “Wives and mothers were urged to maintain a cheerful atmosphere in order to reward their hardworking husbands and produce successful children.”2 Happiness has evolved today into a singularly Western, and especially American, phenomenon—even a mandate. After all, it was an American sound engineer who created the television laugh track and an American company, McDonald’s, that came out with the Happy Meal.
Ironically, our insistence on being happy all the time almost guarantees unhappiness, if only by creating the fear that you’re not measuring up to other people’s levels of contentment, wealth or well-being. The Internet, of course, hasn’t helped. Earlier I wrote that the level of transparency in a country has a direct and negative correlation to a nation’s level of happiness. Nor can a country’s wealth or stability be said to contribute to its overall contentment. The World Happiness Report, an annual study published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, measures a nation’s overall earnings, living standards, employment, physical and mental health and cultural stability. In 2014, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway were the top-three “happiest countries.”3 This same year, a Gallup Poll came at the subject from another angle, by asking adults in 143 countries if they’d had “positive experiences on the day before the survey.” These ranged from laughing, smiling, feeling well rested, being treated with respect and even doing something interesting. No Scandinavian countries made the top 20, and nor did America. Instead, the poll was dominated by Latin and Central American countries including Paraguay, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador and Guatemala.4 At the bottom of the list, reporting the lowest “positive experiences,” were Middle Easterners and Africans. The Gallup pollsters made it a point to say that “low positive emotions” didn’t necessarily correlate with “high negative emotions.” Russians, for example, report some of the lowest positive emotions in the world, as well as some of the lowest negative emotions. Why? According to one source, “Gallup has previously reported that people in this region simply don’t report many emotions at all—positive or negative.”5
My definition of happiness? The number of specific days a person remembers over the last year, which often coincides with the number of times he or she passed through a Transition Zone—went on vacation, had a baby, took a child to college for the first time, rode a bicycle, went hang-gliding for the first time. Rather than being measured linearly, happiness should be perceived as a congeries of “moments.”
What about other Western concepts like “freedom,” or living an environmentally “green” lifestyle? Let’s take China as an example. Most Chinese people are aware they live under the grip of a state-controlled media. According to NPR, government restrictions are sometimes invisible, with websites often failing to load or “technical error” messages appearing on the screen; thus, many Chinese don’t even realize the Internet is being censored.6 As for those who do, an almost ten-year-old poll conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project and a group of Chinese academics revealed that “almost 85 percent of those su
rveyed say they think the government should be responsible for controlling the Internet.”7 A majority of Chinese citizens subscribe to the Confucian belief that a government is mandated to exert its authority by showing parental care for its citizens. Citizens, in turn, owe it to their government to respect and obey rules and mores. Yes, in a perfect universe, everyone would have a microphone, an opinion and an audience, but is it worth it if their actions or behavior damage social norms or stability for the whole collective?
As challenging (and rewarding) as it sometimes is to travel the world uncovering desires and coming up with a new brand or product solutions, it is harder still asking people if they are happy, especially in a nation like China that is gradually adapting Western values and definitions in much the same way I found that “green” and “organic” had made their way into India. Until the late 1990s, China teemed with bicycles and bike riders. Bikes weren’t a “green” response to China’s pollution levels—which were already troublesome back then, though not nearly as bad as they are today—nor was bike riding linked to virtue or to “competitive altruism,” the term used to describe the status humans glean from their superior social consciousness. Circa 1995, most Chinese simply couldn’t afford a car. Bikes were the only way to get around, and the car was a status symbol linked to a distant Western definition of happiness. Today, you see many fewer bikes in China, and the Chinese automobile industry is the biggest in the world. I am merely speculating, but I would argue that once the Chinese were able to access the same films, music and television series the rest of the world watched—albeit 24 to 48 hours later, and on pirated websites—and once they saw what they were “missing,” they became less “happy.”
That’s why it was both a test and an opportunity when a major Chinese automobile manufacturer asked if I could help them “brand” the concept of a Chinese automobile, both locally and internationally. What was the ingredient that European car brands had that “Made in China” cars lacked? If Chinese cars shared almost exactly the same features and options as European-branded cars, why did Western cars outsell them, even in China, by a three-to-one ratio?
Embedded in this question was a problem I’d come up against before when working in China: an overemphasis on rational thinking and a disregard for the emotional ingredients that go into brand building. The reasoning among Chinese companies goes something like this: a product is a brand. A brand is a logo. If a logo is prominent, then consumers, sales and profits will follow. An almost comical illustration of this logic took place in 2001, when 72 hours after the first Apple Store opened its doors in the United States, the first-ever “Apple Stores” made their appearance in China. Chinese Apple store employees wore robin’s-egg-blue, logo-embossed T-shirts that precisely mimicked the ones worn by Apple’s American employees. There was only one problem: Chinese Apple Stores had no affiliation with Apple and sold dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other household appliances rather than computers. Again, this is a core problem I come up against whenever I work in China, where the functional, or Blue Script, matters far more than the emotional, or Green Script, and companies and products pay the price.
Every successful brand stands for something more than itself, and that thing is emotional. A great brand promises hope, the contagion of coolness, or desirability, or love, or romance, or acceptance, or luxury, or youth, or sophistication, or high-quality technology. By way of illustration, imagine if you could choose between two cars that are precisely the same in all ways—the same color, the same engine, the same design, the same quality—except for one minor detail: the first was made in Denmark and the second was manufactured in Greece. Which one would you pick? I’m guessing most people would select the Danish model, associating it with Danish values like craftsmanship and close attention to detail. Next, imagine that you were asked to choose between two bottles of the same expensive perfume. The label of the first read Paris, Rome and Beverly Hills. The label of the second read Albany, New York, Manchester, England, and Bong Bong, Australia. Which bottle would best encapsulate the emotional values you hoped the fragrance might convey?
Cities and countries are no different from any other brand, and before I took on the automotive project I had to face the fact that China had a serious national branding problem, even among its own natives.
As an illustration of two successfully branded destinations, let’s look at London and Paris. To non-natives, London evokes various words and feelings, among them Big Ben. Rain. Winston Churchill. The Beatles. Buckingham Palace. Twiggy. Tea and Scones. The Clash. Prince William and Kate Middleton. The Rolling Stones. Harry Potter. Cricket. Similarly, Paris evokes Romance. Love. Wine. Cheese. Baguettes. The Eiffel Tower. The Louvre. The Seine. Edith Piaf. Jean-Paul Sartre. Regardless of what everyday life is actually like there, from a branding perspective, both London and Paris are Too Big to Fail.
This is seldom the case when I’m called in to brand a country or city—otherwise, why would you even need a marketing consultant? A country’s “brand” is an aggregate of its wars, music, sports, climate, leadership, location, tacit traditions and national character—its entire social, political and cultural history—which blur and intersect over time. In the case of London, Big Ben and rain cannot be teased apart any more than love and food can be separated in Paris. Reputationally speaking, if there is anything to learn from a country that is Too Big to Fail, it’s what I call the Power of Less—which, in today’s overcrowded Information Age, matters more than ever.
Like any other powerful brand, the best-branded countries and cities of the world can be distilled into one or two words. When we think of Richard Branson, we think rebellious; Oprah Winfrey, compassion; and Apple evokes Innovation. Countries are no different. Those that lack a one- or two-word association, or that are young, or in flux, or at war, or in social or economic crisis, or whose reputations were never clear to begin with, face a big challenge: How do they begin to establish a brand? The question was one I confronted almost twenty years ago, when I first visited Dubai.
Though it had been growing slowly since oil was discovered there in the 1960s, Dubai in 1997 more closely resembled a dream, or concept, of a city, than it did an actual city. There were maybe three or four tall buildings, no shops, no highways, no beaches, no skyscrapers. Arguably, Dubai as people know it today began with a concept dreamed up by Majid Al Futtaim, who, inspired by a ski resort he’d seen in Japan in the mid-1990s, decided to construct his own indoor ski slope, Ski Dubai, in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Featuring an indoor mountain with five slopes and a quarter-mile-long run, Ski Dubai was an immediate success and taught Mr. Majid and other local developers that a bold, innovative approach can transform—or in this case, create out of thin air—a country’s reputation. Ski Dubai set off an unspoken competition among Dubai’s builders and entrepreneurs: Who could break the most rules the fastest?
Today, Dubai is a global business hub and a wildly popular tourist attraction. The city has around 600 buildings, skyscrapers, malls and hotels, with a population of around 2 million. Ninety-six percent of Dubai residents are foreign-born, and Dubai kharfours, or supermarkets, feature foods and beverages customized for 16 or so different nationalities (there are over 100 different varieties of rice alone). Most of Dubai’s foreign-born residents work in the city’s financial and construction industries, attracted by the absence of corporate income taxes and a 2002 land reform law that allows foreigners to buy local real estate.
Like Las Vegas, Dubai is the twenty-first-century version of a Pop-Up City, a city renowned for its seeming mission to be the first, the tallest, the fastest, the biggest, the most ornate and outrageous city in the world. Dubai has the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa, and “the world’s most luxurious hotel” in the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, a seven-star hotel that sits on its own man-made island overlooking the Arabian Gulf (seven stars, maybe needless to say, is a rating, and a star system, that exists nowhere el
se in the world). Dubai has the world’s largest mall, flower garden and Formula One stadium. Dubai’s Emirates airline is the first airline to offer on-board suites, showers and minibars, and its Business and First Class lounges connect directly to waiting airplanes. To combat the desert climate, Dubai was the first country to install cooling systems on its beaches and inside its swimming pools. Here and there across Dubai are vending machines that deliver bars made out of solid gold. Does anyone actually buy a gold bar from a vending machine? It’s unlikely, but it’s the thought, and the brand, that counts.
A few years ago, I was in Dubai giving a speech about “country branding” to a big group of tourism and marketing officials. At one point, I pointed out that the world’s most powerful country brands could be broken down to one or two words. Afterward, over dinner, one of the female guests asked me what Dubai’s “one word” brand was. The question flustered me. Country branding takes years, decades, sometimes even a century, to establish, I told her, and despite its accelerated growth, Dubai was still very young. When she persisted, I finally gave in. The word I came up with was the result of visiting and working in a city that in 17 or so years had evolved from a sandy oasis to Oz. The word, for better or for worse, was plastic.
Recall that our brains form a somatic marker when two things that have nothing in common come together, positively or negatively. If it takes a country years to establish a brand, Dubai shows that with the strategic use of somatic markers—a ski resort in the desert, a seven-star hotel, vending machines that spit out gold bars—successful country branding can be done in a much shorter period of time.