Martin Karaffa is a brand strategist based in Munich. He works with The Culture Factor Group since 2018. Before that, he was a Global Planning Director at BBDO and JWT where he worked on Mercedes-Benz, Unilever, and BMW. Martin helps big companies understand how cultural differences affect their brands around the world. He also worked as an Intercultural Communications Training Consultant for the United Nations Office of the Ombudsman.
As you may or may not know, I start all these conversations with the same question. I borrow it from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I haven’t found a better way to start, which is why I keep using it. But because it’s such a big question, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in complete control—you can answer however you want, or not at all. There’s no way to get it wrong. The question is: Where do you come from?
I come from a history of tragedy, farce, desperation, and lust.
Shall we take those in order?
They all sort of mix together. “Where do you come from?”—I could take you on the geographical tour, which is interesting in itself. But if you want to understand where my soul is centered and the journey it’s taken, I think some generational history is important.
Three of my four grandparents were immigrants to the United States. The fourth was a Mennonite—Pennsylvania Dutch. The rest came from abroad and endured incredibly difficult experiences. There were many secrets, so much to hide or manage. I imagine there was a lot of heartache.
My maternal grandmother, the Mennonite, ran off at fourteen with a dashing Italian stonemason ten years her senior. They crossed the border from Pittsburgh into West Virginia to get married underage—where no one would check too carefully. A few months later, they married again under assumed names. Then, I believe after her fifteenth birthday, they had to return and do it all over again under their real names. I’m still not sure they were completely truthful about the dates.
On my father’s side, it’s hard to say exactly where my grandparents were born or who their parents were. We've done all the DNA work, and it’s complicated. There was dysfunction on both sides of the family. I won’t dishonor their memory by going into detail, but the result was that my parents married very late in life.
So I’m a boomer—a late boomer. A yuppie boomer, not a hippie boomer. A grid-and-good boomer, not a free-love boomer. And getting married over forty, as they did in the 1950s, was quite unusual at the time. So that means in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh—a real Monongahela Valley mill town, very much Deer Hunter territory. That’s where I was born. And it wasn’t pretty, but, you know, maybe I didn’t know that at the time.
What was it like? What was the name of the town?
McKeesport. McKeesport. What do I remember about being young in McKeesport? Well, I do remember it. Let’s go back to The Deer Hunter, which took place in Clareton, Pennsylvania. In the Monongahela Valley, there was always a river, a town on the river. On the river was the steel mill, where they could barge in the coal and iron ore and barge out the completed steel. Immediately up from there was the business district. And on the hill—that’s where people lived.
The Deer Hunter was set in Clareton, which was two towns down from me. Between Clareton and McKeesport was Duquesne, which was Hungarian. And Glassport—which I’m not totally sure about, but I think it was Ukrainian. And we were Slovak. Far eastern part of Slovakia. Very, very, very tough culture. Absolutely no tolerance of ego. Very much: don’t get too comfortable, don’t rest on your laurels.
So growing up there, little did I know what was in store for me in life. But it was a very, very grim place. On the plus side: great education. Strict three R’s, right?
I went to a school where the teachers had been there for so long, they’d say to some of my classmates, “Oh yes, I remember your father—he had trouble with his cursive W’s as well.” So it was strict. But in and around Pittsburgh, the industrial wealth created an incredible amount of benevolent money, which fed cultural institutions.
When I was a kid, every Saturday I went to an art class called the Tam O’Shanters, which is quite famous now, I’m told. I was never really the same age as the others, but it was filled with all kinds of artists—Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, and just huge numbers of them. Writers like Annie Dillard. And of course, Jeff Goldblum—a famous Pittsburgher—went to this art class. It was run by a very, very gay American sculptor named Joseph Fitzpatrick.
And, of course, the two kids chosen from my neighborhood—we were both gay. I mean, God, maybe that’s why we got the incredible privilege to go to that art class. You know, “send the gay ones off,” right?
But overall, it wasn’t pleasant. Just a pretty miserable, fairly dirty place. Yeah. And now, you know, it’s heartbreaking in many ways, because if there’s a place where the Rust Belt is crumbling the most, it’s there.
Yeah.
McKeesport, I think, has the fourth-highest crime rate in the country.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah. And it’s entirely, 100%, poverty that’s driving it. So that’s kind of heartbreaking. But when I was an early teenager—this is where the story picks up, Peter, you’ll love this.
I’m here for the whole story, Martin. I’m curious, though—I’m feeling for young Martin. What did young Martin want to be when he grew up? Do you have a recollection?
Oh yeah, yeah. Very solid recollection. Young Marty wanted to be an architect. And part of that came from drawing. One of the things I know now—from, you know, the finest psychological care in my late fifties—is that young Marty was hyperlexical, autistic, on the spectrum. Hyperlexical Asperger’s. One of those kids who swallowed dictionaries. But that Asperger’s side of things was pretty cool. For me, it was pattern recognition. I could do perspective drawing.
Wow.
Right? And I thought, that’s great. I could draw buildings, draw houses—like the ones my father dreamed of building. If I were a kid now, it would be very obvious. Did you play with Matchbox cars, Peter?
I did, yeah. Of course.
Did you go zoom, zoom, zoom—they go fast? Or did you line everything up neatly, cars parking, and take a great deal of pleasure in organizing them? Like, “These kinds of cars go over here, and those go there.”
If one must make a choice… I’m identifying with B.
Yeah. That was totally me. That’s one of the things they use now to help diagnose kids on the spectrum. That was me 100%.
What’s the hyperlexical part? I mean, your use of the phrase—one of those people who, what did you say? Swallows dictionaries? Yeah. I identify with that massively. Tell me more—what kind of person is that?
Well, I remember I caught shit in class because I used the word apt. We had this spelling thing, and the theme was space.
Of course, I didn’t ingratiate myself with the fifth-grade classmates. The teacher asked, “What kinds of words do you want to spell?” All the kids said rocket and space and things like that. And I said, “Oh, I just read this thing—vertical assembly.”
You do know about that, don’t you, Peter? Yeah—that there’s a building called the Vertical Assembly Building, right? What is now Cape—again, Cape Canaveral—where they put the rockets together going up. Right? I thought that would be a fun word. Not too challenging. And boy, did I catch it for that.
But it was totally aligned with everybody’s interests! You were connecting to the rocket thing.
Yeah! I didn’t know what was wrong with them. Yeah. But that’s the thing. Some of us—and this is something that ended up helping me in my professional life later on, which I’m sure we’ll get to after the interesting bits—it’s all about pattern recognition.
As a strategist, or when you're trying to understand how people behave, what you're doing is piecing together patterns. That’s what people like you and me—though I won’t make any assumptions about you—that’s what our particular condition makes us good at. We notice patterns. We can’t help it. So that was kind of what it was like when I was a kid. A bit grim, yeah, to be that way. But there were a lot of things to read. A lot of adult conversations around. A lot of quietness.
Except at school—then it was loud. And of course, there was the usual kind of bullying when you’re a gay kid. But I made my peace with that. And then, when I was around thirteen, the family moved to Australia—to the southern suburbs of Adelaide—because my father had a midlife crisis and took early retirement from United States Steel. I can’t tell you how different it was. The light. The sun. The “Yeah, I don’t care if you’re a bit weird—everyone’s a bit weird” kind of vibe.
That was the environment I grew up in. And at the time, the southern part of South Australia was actually a pretty good place. They called it the Dunstan era, after a governor who was in office for a long time and was very committed to public education—again, a lot of investment in cultural initiatives, in making the place extraordinary in terms of cultural and educational opportunities. So I had a cool time growing up in South Australia. It was much better than McKeesport.
So catch us up—where are you now? And what do you do? How do you spend your days?
Well, right now I’m in Munich, where I’ve lived since 2007. There’s a long story behind that, but I’ll go back a bit to my early professional life. I went to university and studied linguistics—remember, I swallowed a dictionary. And because my mother was a lawyer, albeit not a very successful one, I thought, All right, I’ll go to law school. That was disastrous. There was a reason she was a failed lawyer, and whatever that was, I inherited it.
So I had to look for a job. I ended up getting one at an ad agency. And that’s where the “word” led me to where I am now. There was a trainee program in Melbourne called the Advertising Federation Trainee. Ten agencies each had one cadet, and we all went through the same program. I did that in 1982. It was called the AFA Traineeship.
In 1992, at the same agency—DDB Needham, as it was called then—a certain young woman named Mary did the same trainee program. She’s now the Queen of Denmark. That’s my brush with notoriety.
Advertising can equip you for all kinds of careers. But after rotating through different departments, I landed in the creative department—and I stayed. I was pretty good. Managed to win a few awards, did a decent job.
But at one stage, I was at JWT. And I kept rejecting briefs. So the managing director came into my office and said, “Well, the planning director has quit.” I was working on the Ford account for Australia and New Zealand. And I said, “Well, yeah, it wasn’t all that good.” And he said, “Well, I suppose you could do better.”
I said, “Well, maybe I could.” And that was how I became a planner. An account planner, a strategy planner. And I have to say—it was humbling. I thought, yeah, I can write briefs, right? But no, it’s a different skill. And I had to put in the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says you need to gain mastery.
I put in the hours to do that. And I only started to gain mastery when they said, “Would you like to be posted to Tokyo?”—where I was deputy head of planning for JWT Tokyo, or co-deputy head. It was a fantastic thing. Always an international person partnered with a Japanese professional. And Usami-san—or Sammy, as we called him—splendid guy. Just amazing. Changed my life.
Your time in Japan.
Yeah. Changed my life. And started to tell me—to give me the hint—that maybe culture is an important part of what we do in strategy, marketing, communications, and things like that. And cultural differences are so frequently underestimated.
So after that—five years there—I met my now husband, who is Japanese. And they posted me to New York to be the first of two global planning director positions. A rare bird, that is. And this was in the time of DOMA. So Masa couldn’t follow me on the strength of our relationship.
After about three years of doing it long distance—about the longest distance you can make on the planet, I think—we said, this sucks. And started looking for jobs around the world.
I was the first one to find a job, here in Munich, working for BBDO as the director of international planning. Effectively global planning director on the Daimler businesses—Mercedes-Benz—which I did for about 12 years. And when that ended—quite naturally, corporate gig ended—I hung up my shingle as an intercultural marketing consultant.
How long ago is that?
That was 2019.
Oh, wow. That's amazing. That’s right around the time we met.
Yes, yes. And we could, in the course of our discussion, heap praise and love on the person who introduced us. Which I’m only too happy to do.
It’s true. Eliza Yvette Esquivel.
But it was interesting, because that was kind of a good time to start a global business that you conducted mainly on Zoom.
I want to—for a moment—I want to return to that moment in Japan, when you said you had an awakening, maybe, about the role of culture. And I just wanted to—maybe—is there a story you can tell about that? About what you learned, or how you learned it, or the impact it had on you and your work? Because it’s a through line for everything you do. Would you agree?
Oh yes, yes, yes. It certainly is. And it was inspiring. There are so many of those. But the one everyone enjoys hearing is KitKat. See? You’re laughing already. You’re laughing already because everybody knows there’s this big, weird thing going on about KitKat in Japan. And it wasn’t big, and it wasn’t weird, around the turn of the 21st century when JWT won the account.
JWT had had KitKat—or did at the time have KitKat—since dinosaurs wandered the Earth. And so the whole business of Have a break, have a KitKat—incredibly powerful branding idea. Award-winning ads. Incredibly successful.
In Japan, the large Japanese agencies—JWT was one of the largest foreign agencies, but nothing compared to Dentsu or Hakuhodo. Hakuhodo had the account. And they were saying, “Well, you have to position it because it’s an English chocolate, and you should position it on that. Get the right attractive young woman in a tartan skirt to do a little dance about having a break.”
And JWT obtained the account because we were going to have a break—to Japan. So we did some research: what does having a break really mean to Japanese people? Because KitKat—it’s a kind of cookie coated in chocolate—is a perfect thing to have with a coffee break. Japanese workers drink tons of coffee. And it’s all, why couldn’t we do it?
So we did some. And it was a very, very interesting thing, because it was my colleagues kind of nudging me in a direction. And they said, “We should do some qualitative research. Give people disposable cameras.”
Which—you know, we were foreigners. Phones in Japan had cameras at the turn of the 21st century. We were too stupid to know that. Idiot foreigners. But we gave them disposable cameras, and we said, “Take it for a week. Every time you take a break, take a picture of the break. And note: is it a good break, is it a bad break, is it a kind of so-so break?”
So we got them to bring the photos back in. And one of the things we discovered was that culturally, Japanese people hate KitKat breaks. You know, you're working, you have this little break, and something whimsical happens, and then you go back to it, right? That’s the way—the original British branding idea.
But Japanese people stay tense in those short breaks. You know, you go and have a cigarette and feed your caffeine addiction and you come back, because, you know, everybody is looking—how are we working together, what are we going to do? So taking a break is kind of like letting the team down.
And we got lots and lots of those kinds of bad breaks. A good break—which, you know, we actually had trouble translating it into Japanese—the word was yasumijikan, which means a little vacation, little holiday. And that always happened at the end of the day. So when you kind of got home and you sat down and you said, “Oh, now I can relax at least.” And that was it. That was a break.
And, you know, again, go back to the usage and attitude statistics. That’s when most people consumed chocolate in Japan at the time. You know, it wasn’t a little bit of energy, like you’d have your Cocoa Pops at breakfast and it gives you energy to work throughout the day.
No, you replenish your energy after the end of the day. And that was also something that—believe it or not—was a key insight in how to market Smirnoff in Japan. Because, you know, do you rest at the end of the day, or do you drink alcohol to rev yourself up to party? That kind of thing.
And so that management of energy was very important. So sure enough, what the creative team did—and they were kind of pushing me very hard, and I thought, good, fair, right—was to show lots of times when tension is relieved.
And it was often romantic tension, because young women were the chocolate eaters, and boys were their sources of tension. But it really came alive when we noted that young women—particularly teenage girls—one of the things that stressed them out was, of course, the university entrance exams. Because it's kind of brutal.
You have to go to cram school—or juku, as they call it. And the jukensei are the young people who study late into the night so they can pass these university entrance exams, which actual school doesn’t prepare you for. Incredibly stressful.
And the sales force for Nestlé in Kyushu recognized—well, they lit on the fact that kitto katso kind of sounds in Japanese like “you must win.” Katsu is luck, or fortune, or victory, or whatever. And so they said, you know, have this for your juku study—because you're studying late into the night, right?
And that was so successful, we said, could we blow it out? And we did. There was a website called goo.jp—g-o-o.jp—which is where the students went to do their practice exams. And so we did what Australians would call push polling. “Here’s an amusing little survey you can take at the front: What is your favorite good luck charm for your university entrance exams?”
And they gave five choices, one of which was Kit Kat. And of course, at the top was an omamori, which are the little good luck or good fortune charms you buy at the shrine or temple.
Yeah.
And number three was what they called katsudon, which—katsu is also the word for cutlet, borrowed from the French. And katsudon is cutlet on top of rice bowl. And that's supposed to be good luck. But Kit Kat came in second. And that—oh, PR, off to the races after that.
Yeah.
Right. And particularly our client in Japan—just a human dynamo, who was on every chat show you could imagine. And it just took off from there.
Amazing.
And that was it. And boy, even though I had to be guided there by my colleagues, boy, did I bask in the glory of that, I have to tell you—professionally. But it is such a dramatic thing.
Such a dramatic thing. And, you know, everyone knows about the so-called “crazy flavors” of Kit Kat. And one of the first things that happened after we got the business—there was a change of management at Nestlé—they went to Australia to buy white chocolate technology. Because white chocolate is easier to put all the flavors in than dark chocolate.
And so that’s also part of what I do now. There’s a particular aspect of some cultures called long-term orientation—or sometimes we call it optimization—where you’re always wanting to improve and change. It’s not like, “I’ll give you the same chocolate I always have.” And so being able to do that—all the different flavors—Japan scores very highly on that. That particular dimension of cultural difference. Very important that you’re constantly seen to be changing.
Yeah. This is where I want to—because your work has been with the Hofstede Insights on cultural difference. My experience is just in the States, and sort of spending time around the country and understanding how Americans experience things. So I’ve never really been in a position of, sort of, a global—looking at things from a global perspective. So just starting at the base level: how do you define culture? And then what’s the framework or the tools that you use to map cultural difference? You were sort of hinting at it just then, because this is the stuff I think is just so fascinating.
Well, for one thing, I’ll just start by saying—the definition of the word “culture”—very, very huge variety. My good friend and former colleague, Steve Walls, whom you should interview, by the way—
Oh, that’s right.
Yeah. Yeah. But Steve says, the way we use the word culture is, “A culture expert is anybody with a cooler Instagram feed than you.”
Right.
But that’s not the way I see it. Professor Geert Hofstede—the late Professor Geert Hofstede—was an engineer. He worked for Shell, and I think he had something to do with IBM too. But he was posted to Japan, and he looked around. I mean, like—you look around, clearly there’s different stuff going on. And because he was an engineer, he said, “I should measure this.”
And the definition of culture that gels with what Professor Hofstede observed is this: any place where people share an arbitrary emotional preference—when enough of them share the same emotional preference—that’s a culture.
So for example, I have an emotional preference for quality of life, as opposed to achievement. Neither one is better than the other, right? And most people around the world would say, “Yeah, you can have a bit of both.” But that’s what makes it such a good cultural dimension—because generally, some of us are going to lean to one side, and some of us to the other.
Now, Professor Hofstede called that—in a most outdated and politically incorrect way, and I will say that—he called it masculinity and femininity. Because it was the only one of the differences he isolated—this preference for achievement, where you sacrifice quality of life—it’s the only one where, at the top end, where everybody's achievement-focused, you see any difference between the genders.
So Japan, for example, is very much what he would’ve called “masculine,” but which we at the Culture Factor—which is the firm I work with—call motivation for achievement and success, right? Japan’s one of the top ones in the world. Everybody drives themselves.
You know, Japan is the first place in the world to—well, I mean, there’s the Japanese word karoshi, you might know, which is death by overwork.
Oh wow.
And by the way, the first legal case for karoshi, brought by survivors against an employer—I believe, or at least rumor has it—happened at Dentsu. So there we go.
Oh wow.
But don’t quote me on that. Or broadcast it or anything like that. But you know—and that’s the point—men and women are differently predisposed to sacrificing quality of life. Sweden, at the other end of the spectrum—you can do this on a scale of one to 100—Sweden scores five. So it’s a very quality-of-life place. And there’s no difference in that attitude between men and women.
Wow. And what—just for comparison’s purpose—what would the U.S. score on that? If Sweden’s a five, what’s the U.S.?
Well, this is what I love to say. Because—which Americans are you talking about? This is an interesting one, because people talk about American culture. But I often say, you know, America’s not really a culture—America is a constellation of subcultures.
So you would be surprised. America’s supposed to be competitive. But it is surprisingly less so than places like, you know, Germany, for example, which scores higher. There are—because America is on the top end of all of this—it’s not as high as Japan. But you’ll find American men are a bit more competitive.
So you take millennials and Generation X men, for example—they're the ones who say, you know, and certainly the “greed is good” boomers, of whom I am an uncomfortable member of that cohort, are the ones who said, yes, you’ve got to give 110% all the time. And, you know, coming second is the first loser. Right? That’s this motivation for achievement and success. Well, haven’t you ever heard that?
No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t heard that one.
You young fellow, you. But that was a particular cultural bubble. And the emphasis, say, for example, on wellness, mental health, anxiety—among Generation Z—very, very big contrast. Now, that shows up in that work-life balance. People have observed it, and you can see it in the figures.
Interestingly, young women are the ones who are keeping the flame of ambition alive, if you want to call it that—particularly millennial. So they’re the ones who do that. And that also means, along with this competitiveness, goes all kinds of other cultural artifacts, like interest in hard luxury.
Hard luxury—you know, watches, for example. Watches, couture, right? Not soft luxury, like food, or soft luxury like hospitality, for example—treats, right? But those things—status symbols. And there are money status symbols. And there are what we’ll call—what I call, for want of a better word—status status symbols.
What’s a status status symbol?
Well, here’s a second dimension of cultural difference, and it’s called power distance. Are you hierarchical or egalitarian? Now, officially, the United States is supposed to be egalitarian. And historically, it always has been. So there's a natural tendency for people to want to display status and power distance in hierarchical cultures.
So for example—Russia, China—they're both hierarchical cultures. If you're at the top of the tree, you get certain privileges. And that’s just the way it is. Whereas in the United States—low power distance. Or Australia—very low power distance. If you're at the top of the tree and you take some privileges, you're going to earn that one. Or, more to the point, you're going to pay for it.
So, status symbols in the United States are how rich you are. Status symbols in Russia are how important you are. You know, you buy an SUV to drive in the USA. You get driven in one in Russia. Or India, or wherever. So those kinds of things—which are all data-driven—you can measure it. You know, when you ask people a whole lot of odd questions that seem to have nothing to do with whether or not you're likely to buy a watch, for example, it's just incredible to see that.
Like, for example, if you sacrifice quality of life for achievement, you want to have something—you know, you can’t show off by going on a holiday and posting your hike on Instagram. You have to show it off with a watch. You have to show it off with an expensive car.
What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in this for you?
Well, the joy in this is—I’ll go back to pattern recognition, right? I look around the world, and I’m kind of like, where’s the sense? What’s the sense of the world? You know, I kind of have to figure it out. That’s just me. It’s the way I’m wired. I discovered that late in life.
And just the sheer ability—when you get this kind of unlocked thing that you can share with everybody, you know, in these things called people that can be so mysterious, and difficult, and frustrating—when you kind of say, yeah, I figured that out, that’s what... that’s why... that is where I get my professional—my professional, you know, pleasure from. That. Now, I get very enthusiastic about that.
Yeah.
And, you know, for example, part of my work now is looking at assets—film, often. And there are pre-test results. And clients come to me and say, “Look, we don't know why this ad works in this culture, and this ad doesn’t work in another culture. What’s the big thing?”
And using these numbers, you can kind of go, Oh, what's going on here? And that's what I love about it. You know, it took me a long, long time to work out that I actually enjoyed math.
Because, you know, when you're at school, and you're a bit of a weird kid whose attention is distracted, and you take an hour to do the 10 math problems the teacher has set for 30 minutes, and things—well, I got the impression I was bad at math. But you know, I actually kind of like it. Numbers—you see a spreadsheet of numbers—there's a pattern in it. Like, numbers tell stories. Incredibly rich.
And you can do that. You can see that in the patterns of: Why do some consumers respond to this, and other consumers in other cultures or generations or cohorts or whatever—why do they respond? What's their—what’s the emotional thing, the emotional preference they have in common?
How have things changed over the years, in terms of—you know, we talk all the time about culture, subculture, as a way of talking about things now. That wasn’t the case when I started out. How would you describe the way the marketing world gets culture now, versus maybe how they did when you started out? What’s the state, maybe, of cultural understanding these days, from where you sit? Do you feel like we’ve gotten better at it? Do you feel like we know what we’re talking about? I mean, of course, I’m asking you to make broad generalizations. Forgive me.
Oh no—broad generalizations, yes. Let me take a little detour into broad generalizations, right?
One of the things in the last decade of the 20th century, first decade of the 21st, and thereabouts, was this belief that—you know, you can’t stereotype. That everybody is entitled to be communicated with in the manner that they absolutely choose, and that’s perfect for them. And guess how we're going to figure this out? Not by asking them—but by using an algorithm that observes the behavior, right?
And that was kind of... you know, in the name of not stereotyping, it led us down a path that denied our common humanity. There is now a great deal of reaction against that, because the more you personalize a message to its intended recipient, the less effective you become. I mean, this personalization—it really has a... the law of diminishing returns sets in fairly quickly, in all of that.
Yes, if you're going to sell a minivan, you're probably not going to talk to people without kids. In spite of the fact there might be some single person who has a surfboard—or several surfboards—and he wants a minivan to sleep in, or whatever. Yeah, that’s great. We should accommodate him, says the politically correct marketing world. But really, marketing is about playing the odds. So you're going to talk to parents.
But if you say, okay, for our particular kind of minivan, we want to talk to people who have, you know, between two and four children. And we believe they're going to be more progressive and well-educated. And they're going to prefer loud colors, because they want to make a statement and express themselves. Because just because they have kids doesn't mean they want to show themselves as conservative. And you do all of that, and you say, Are you talking to an audience of three people? Or whatever?
No—we have things in common. Because of the generation we’re in, the cohort, the economic circumstances—all that kind of stuff. Or, which is what Professor Hofstede originally said, because of the way we went through our formative experiences.
I am, for example, pretty much on the kind of low power distance side of things. Because that was the formative experience. In late 20th century America, when I came of age—yes, you can climb the social ladder if you study hard enough, work hard enough, and things like that.
Other people, going through other generations, going through other formative experiences—where it doesn’t look possible that you’re going to have that opportunity for social mobility.
Right? So they’re going to carry those values with them—not necessarily for the rest of their lives, because you do change your values as time goes on—but they’re very, very sticky. And the formative experiences are extraordinarily profound for you. And I still have trouble, you know, being guarded around people from a higher status. I’m either afraid of them, or I just say, I’m not going to pay attention to their status.
Yeah.
Right. I mean, I’m sensing that very, very strong nod from you, Peter—that you’ve kind of painted yourself into the same corner, right?
Yep. Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah.
But what people understand as culture in marketing nowadays is very difficult, because we tend to be transfixed by the changes in culture, as opposed to what’s profound and deep and important in culture. In culture, you don’t have a culture of one—no such thing. What do we share? Does that make us into a stereotype? Well, it makes us into a type.
Yeah.
Right? And I’m a type, you’re a type.
Yeah.
If I’m not a type, then what do I share with other human beings?
Yes. I loved your earlier phrase about America. You know, I asked a question about a singular America, and you pushed back with the phrase, a constellation of subcultures. I’d just love to hear you talk more about that, if at all—for that same reason, too. And what you’re just saying reminded me of, I mean, it’s a cliché for anybody in the advertising world, but the idea of fame, which I think is something I learned late—that we benefit... you know what I mean? The value is in the fact that I know that you know, and that everybody else knows the thing, right? That there’s shared value in that—right? That things are famous. That’s culture. What’s that relationship I’m talking about now, would you say?
Well, I’m reluctant to venture into the constellation of subcultures, because unless I have three hours to explain it—which I’m happy to devote—but I think that—
I know that you are.
We’ve already got a tenuous hold on the listeners right now. I’m not sure that we can do that. But thinking about something like criticism: in the United States, there are cultures whose formative experiences have been subjected to more criticism than, say, other Americans. So it might be somebody constantly saying, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough. Yeah, you’ve achieved this, but... you’re still too lazy. There are a number of different groups in the U.S. that are like that.
And this dimension of cultural difference that I’ve called long-term optimizers, where you’re constantly told that you have to improve. And if you reach something that’s satisfactory, incrementally, little bit by little bit by little bit, you have to add to it. You can always be better. And you can’t be lazy and rest on your laurels. As opposed to those who say, Yeah, you’re great. You don’t have to change. You’re golden. Love yourself.
That’s the two things. Now, I’m not going to go into all of these, but you do get—if you are subject to that kind of criticism in your formative years—then you’re going to be one of these people who says, I always have to improve.
And there are two groups I’m going to nominate as that. I’m not going to go into it, but: Asian-Americans and African-Americans. Both, in their very, very different ways, have—on the whole—been told, Yeah, you can never rest. You don’t want people to think, you know, you’re lazy, or you’re not good enough, or something. So you always have to constantly push yourself. And that has so much—you know, again—it has a lot to do with expenditure patterns, for example.
Do I say, well, there are some things I’m going to—and this is, you know, it’s crazy that it should be different—there are some things I’m going to invest in, like the watch or the car, whatever it is. But some things? Yeah, they’re not important. I’m just going to let it go. Like—and this is the classic thing—paper towels.
Wait, tell me the paper towel story.
Well, you know, have you ever heard of a luxury paper towel?
No. Have I?
There you go. Generic. It'll do. It doesn’t matter if you’re incredibly wealthy. You know, if you’re one of these people who says, I have to be constantly better, you’re not going to be constantly better in everything. You’re going to, you know, buy the cheapo paper towels.
Like, Costco is one of the great—what we call—optimizer brands, where, you know, yeah, we’ll scrimp on the necessities, splurge on the luxuries. Buy in bulk versus buy the Rolex. And Costco made a lot of headlines when they started selling Rolexes, right?
Yeah.
So—quality basics versus those things where the brand really matters. You know, premium spirits, for example. Fashion. Couture. Accessories, right? I'm not going to make generalizations that could be misinterpreted, but there’s a great deal of investment—you know, you're not going to waste your money on unimportant things—but in both African American and Asian American communities, there’s investment in the things that matter. The material goods that matter, that are kind of worth it.
As opposed to people who grew up like me—and I’ll talk about myself—who just said, Oh yeah, yeah, Timex watch, that’s better than a gas station digital watch, isn’t it? Which you used to buy for $3.99. But, you know, Rolex? Really? Am I going to spend the money on that? Now I’ll be the one to get the Cadbury chocolate as opposed to the generic house-brand chocolate, for example.
I’m always curious to hear people talk about this, but—what’s the role of qualitative? Like, how do you learn? Do you have a point of view on research? And what’s the proper role of different forms of research to sort of understand the role of culture—for a brand, or for a client?
Well, Peter, you and I have actually discussed this, I seem to recall, at some length. I sense a leading question. But there are a number of things I think we can observe about qualitative as we move into the second quarter of the 21st century. First of all—qualitative doesn’t get you information. I see you nodding in agreement on that.
And it used to be—like when I first started in the industry, you know, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth—clients would come in and say, Oh, let’s do a few quick groups just to get a lay of the land. Just to do a quick thing. And, you know, they would do that. And all of a sudden, it would be... You’d get all kinds of unfortunate things. Because it was done in haste. And it was done superficially.
Yes.
Now, qualitative, I feel, is on the verge of a rebirth. Because there are some things you can only do with qualitative that you cannot do any other way—that no digital means is going to be able to substitute for. And part of that, even though you might use digital means to gather the input, to conduct it, is that things that ask a human being to use imagination—you can’t do that any other way.
And, you know, AI will get very good at that—at creating things—but not imagining things, perhaps. Again, could surprise us. Never say never. So that’s important.So all of those techniques that I know we’ve discussed—like, for example, world-building. Like, for example, imagine you are here... imagine a person who would do X, or consume this brand, or use a library, or whatever. Imagine them.
You know, when you have something that says imagine that, or imagine the person who...—anything where you start with the word imagine—that’s, to me, already on the right track for qualitative research.
Yes. Can you be—I mean, this is the stuff that we've definitely talked about before, because it's so thrilling—but we share that clarity about that idea: the imagination. Can you say more? What are you thinking about when you think about imagination, or what are you pointing at when you call out the imagination as being within what qualitative does, and what other things don’t do?
Well, let me answer that question in a very perverse way. I’ll talk about what it’s not. It’s not words, right? It’s stories. It’s not words. Use three words to describe so-and-so—yeah, I still use that technique on those rare occasions when I do qualitative. But one of the things I think—it’s not just stories—it’s pictures.
If qualitative doesn’t involve some kind of visual stimulus and response, I’m kind of suspect of it, in some ways. And it might be where—that’s a challenge, because when you collect data by (and I’ll call it data) insights by digital means, it’s very easy to do it in words. And AI works much, much better with words than with pictures.
True.
And that’s the thing. And just as a complement to actual qualitative—one of the things I do is, oftentimes clients will have a concept or a word or something like that. And again, I don’t want to talk about any current projects, but if we use a word like, you know, a phrase like gaining recognition, that’s a concept. And you’ve expressed it in words.
Translate that phrase into every cultural language you want to explore. Now—and do an image search on it. And, you know, it’s almost so crude that it’s laughable to do that. Because you’re—
What’s your favorite research tool?
Oh, I don’t know. Google Images? But it works. Absolutely works. Difficult when you get to subcultures, because you can’t necessarily look at lexical proximity—which is the fancy word I use to say what words seem to go along with these pictures, so we can reverse interpret them. It’s so simple, but it’s so powerful to see.
When you do that thing called recognition—and I had to do this recently for a client—you see that recognition means thumbs up, if you’re in the United States. Thumbs up, you’re golden, employee of the month, you know—whatever.
If you do that in, say, some Asian languages, recognition means—yeah, you pay respect to somebody who’s higher status than you. So it’s not everybody who can be so-called “recognized,” right?
You look at recognition in various different languages, and it’s always the king or queen—or the, you know, or the authoritarian, by the way. Whereas in the U.S., recognition is about—yeah, it’s what we give to each other. Now, that’s a cultural difference that follows that power distance.
Yeah, that’s amazing.
And whenever, you know, a marketer comes to me and says, “We want—this is all about people feeling good about themselves, and this product makes you feel special, that you're being recognized for,” you’ve got to say, Well, hang on—that’s not going to fly in 60% of the world. So that’s a roundabout way of answering the question about qualitative.
Yeah. Why so vital now? I mean, I love the idea that we’re maybe approaching a rebirth—I think rebirth is your line, is what you said. Lay that out for me—what’s the argument for the rebirth of Qual in the second quarter of the 21st century?
The reason is that it’s the only way to get to emotions. Right?
Yes.
The imagination is the way to get to emotions. Because what you want to do—and I feel sure you agree with this—is that when we ask people direct answers to direct questions, there are two results.
If you do it in our kind of—I’m saying “our,” meaning American, Western European kind of cultures—the only thing you’ll do is engage the frontal lobes of the brain. We’ll be dancing around up in the front, and people will over-rationalize and be logical and things like that.
If we do it in what Hofstede called collective cultures, and what American anthropologist Edward T. Hall called high social context cultures—where people are woven into the social fabric—and you ask them a direct question, they’re going to consider, Why are you asking that question? And why are you asking it of me?
So, that relationship is going to drive the answer. And what we, in our Western European, North American, first- and second-world cultures, would think of as the truth—it’s a very different thing. Because the truth is—well, Americans often use the phrase read the room. But in collective cultures—you know, the ones where people look first at who’s asking the question—they talk about reading the air.
Really?
And, you know, having lived in Japan and having a Japanese spouse, you’ll understand how this particular point is of vital importance to those of us with international marriages. In Japan—which is not a particularly collectivist country, particularly nowadays—but there’s a bit of that kind of natural Asian disposition toward it, there is a way to say no.
Right.
A high-context way of saying no. May I give you a Japanese no? A Japanese no is: “Why, what an excellent proposal you have for supplying our 10,000 widgets. That’s such high-quality merchandise, and such thoughtful execution. But if you think we’re going to pay that, you’re crazy. So, if we can come to an agreement on price, I feel sure we can do business together.” That’s a Japanese way of saying, Get lost. It’s called yes, but if.
Oh really?
Yeah. Yes, we love that. But are you kidding? If we can do this, then we’re fine.
Yeah.
But that’s a very high social context. And everyone in Japan knows when you’re being told no. But for many years, overseas businesspeople would go to Japan and say, Yeah, I think we got this deal! And... it’s not the case.
So, when you’re using only words—particularly in these collective cultures—what you’re doing is you’re getting a diagnosis of the relationship between the questioner and the respondent.
And that was one of the reasons why, of course, going back to the beginning of our chat, why we said, You’ve got to have pictures to show what a break means to Japanese people. Because they didn’t officially say, I expend my energy during the day and then replenish it at night, as opposed to Westerners who say, I get my energy at the beginning of the day, and then I go down at night.
And—nobody would actually say that. That’s people like you—and from time to time, me—who are going to have to look at it and say, What are people saying about this? And just, What’s the story?
Beautiful. Martin, I want to thank you so much. We could talk for hours. I love listening to you and learning about culture from you. So, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom with us.
Oh, Peter—you know, it is such a pleasure to speak with you, at any time, in any capacity. I really enjoyed your questions. And you didn’t even cut me off, like, you know, like some loquacious people get cut off from time to time.
So I think, you know, I’m ahead in this deal, I think.
Beautiful. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Peter.
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