Singapore (The Star/ANN) - Culture is becoming more relevant in marketing, not less so, according to Microsoft Asia-Pacific central marketing organisation lead Frederique Covington Corbett.
"The age-old discussion about having a chief cultural officer is still very much on the table, not just from a corporate culture perspective but also having someone who could really understand the cultural clustering that's happening worldwide," she said during a panel discussion at the three-day Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity which began yesterday.
She was replying to a question from the moderator, Naked Communications founding partner Paul Woolmington, who asked whether local culture was becoming irrelevant as people globally became similar in many ways due to factors like technology.
Woolmington prefaced his question by mentioning Thomas Friedman's international best-seller "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century".
Corbett argued that the world had evolved since Friedman's 2005 book.
"The flatness that was described is no longer the one that we live in today. It's more akin to a bubble bath now; there are a lot of bubbles all over the place rather than a flat playing field," she said.
Noting that this was the biggest product launch year in Microsoft's history, Corbett said the company recognised that "one-size-fits-all" did not work, whether it meant taking a marketing campaign from the US and bringing it to Asia or building it from Asia back out to the world.
"We're looking at the fact that we may need to have different cultural clusters (Anglo cluster, Latin American cluster, etc) that will initiate work that will be very diverse and culturally relevant," she said.
"We're letting them (the clusters) come up with their own work which will be extremely varied and not necessarily have one tagline (for all) and let these pieces of work eclectically together build up to something very interesting and probably a lot more relevant and engaging at the end."
Corbett, who was Bates 141 managing partner before joining Microsoft last year, said advertising agencies and their clients should treat cultural knowledge as a professional competency.
"It's not just about translation and transcreation but really about understanding what's going on in the different markets where we want to change behaviours in," she said.
Another panellist, Dell Asia-Pacific general manager of strategic alliances and mobility/tablets Ian Chapman-Banks, questioned the notion of lumping Asian countries together by having a homogenous marketing campaign.
"China is shipping more PCs than North America, and Japan is selling more smartphones over US$500 than possibly the whole of Europe put together.
"So why are we lumping them together through homogenous marketing campaigns run by Westerners?" he asked.
"Really, we should create it (the campaign) here in Asia and transport it back to the US and the UK because we are so far ahead in terms of trends and business models. Countries like the US have more to learn from Asian countries now than the other way around."
On the need for the post of chief social officer, Chapman-Banks said social networking should be owned at a very senior level of corporations rather than being left in the hands of the agency or the marketing department.
The Star is the official and exclusive Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity representative for Malaysia.