Spotlight BRIC, Part 4: The Russia House

In this series of articles, we will look at the group of countries known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which have been on the global radar as some of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets, focusing on particular social and cultural trends in each of these countries.

Today, we will look at trends in social media use in Russia and differences between the country’s two most popular social networking platforms, Facebook and Vkontakte.

As with the other BRIC countries, social media usage in Russia has experienced significant growth. For example, in the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%. By 2011, it had more than 4.5 million regular users. Moreover, in June that year, Russians spent on average nearly 10.2 hours per month on social networks, nearly twice the US average and more than twice the amount of time spent by their global counterparts.

Within this upward trend, however, there are other interesting online trends and customs that can tell us something about Russian social media users. While Facebook, like in many other parts of the world, is popular in Russia, many Russian users log on to an alternative home-grown social network called Vkontakte. And although significant overlap between their respective user bases can be expected, the two sites do not have the same kind of appeal.

With its global reach, Facebook tends to attract early adopters who are English-speaking or at least eager to engage in global communities and are more savvy about global tech and social media trends. Vkontakte, on the other hand, is a space for Russian speakers and younger users with low purchasing power. This means the approach needed to tap into the user base of each is different. For Vkontakte, in particular, being able to speak Russian is necessary, and the younger profile of its user base makes it unsuitable as a medium for advertising expensive goods and services.

However, this does not mean that Vkontakte is lacking in marketing potential—with tens of millions of members, its user base is still larger than Facebook’s. It just means that it is important to plan the right kind of campaigns that would match the site’s user demographic and online culture.

In this regard, Clearasil has enjoyed remarkable success with its campaign, boosting sales by as much as 30% between 2009 and 2011. It took advantage of the Vkontakte’s user demographic of young people, their core target audience, by creating a campaign based on a Vkontakte app called Clearbooth, which allowed users to create videos about the product’s benefits, thereby engaging their customers and taking their opinion into consideration to improve their positioning and product offer locally. In tandem with this, Clearasil made use of the online culture of a social networking platform frequented by young people by designing the app so that the user-generated content could go viral within the platform through a competition. The results were impressive, with more than 13,000 pieces of content created and a total reach of half a million people.

Clearasil’s success with Vkontakte demonstrates the latter’s viability as a marketing platform. It also indicates that adequate research and a tailor-made strategy are necessary to tap into the potential of Vkontakte as a means of reaching millions of Russian-speaking users.

By Moses Lemuel

Spotlight BRIC, Part 3: The battle for Brazil

In this series of articles, we will look at the group of countries known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which have been on the global radar as some of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets, focusing on particular social and cultural trends in each of these countries.

Today, we will look at trends in social media use in Brazil.

So far, our survey of the BRIC countries tells of an upward trend in social media usage. Statistics show that 88% of internet users in China and 51% in Brazil have written their own forum or blog posts compared to only 32% in the US, indicating that rates of participation in social media are higher in the former two countries. Moreover, Brazilians are among the most active in social networks, with a reported 18.9% of Internet users visiting social networks over a period of a month, perhaps as an online testament to their reputation as warm and sociable people.

Until recently, Orkut has enjoyed greater popularity amongst Brazilian users compared to Facebook. And while the number of users on Facebook has been growing rapidly, the most dramatic growth is in the number of users on Twitter, whose market share almost doubled from 17% in April 2011 to 31.3% in August 2011, according to data from F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi and IBOPE Nielsen Online. This makes Brazil’s rate of participation on Twitter the highest in the world.

Twitter’s success in Brazil has been attributed to the ease with which Brazilians can use it to connect with their idols and to browse topics of interest, which has interesting implications for brands wishing to build a loyal following in the local market. However, the most fascinating story in the country’s social media scene is Orkut’s rise and its eventual defeat by Facebook.

When Brazilians began joining Orkut en masse in 2004, partly in an effort to outcompete other countries in terms of numbers, English-speaking users reacted to the proliferation of Portuguese content on the site by forming communities such as “Too Many Brazilians on Orkut”. Thus, according to social media researcher Raquel Recuero, Orkut’s popularity in Brazil also became its limiting factor, as the aggressive push to expand the Brazilian user base and the linguistic exclusivity of Portuguese content eventually drove off other users. By the time Orkut moved to divide its network into regions, it was too late. The site had begun losing its global edge to other social networking sites including Facebook. From there, it was simply a matter of time before Facebook became so much larger globally that Brazilians are induced to jump on the Facebook bandwagon as well.

Orkut’s dethroning by Facebook may be a sign that Brazil’s heretofore self-sufficient social media scene is becoming increasingly globally connected. The plurality of Facebook’s user base offers greater prospects for content diffusion across cultural and linguistic groups. This means more sharing of content between Portuguese-speaking Brazilian users and English-speaking users, which may in turn make it easier for foreign brands to reach Brazilians through social media.

By Moses Lemuel

Spotlight BRIC, Part 2: India of the social media age

In this series of articles, we will look at the group of countries known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which have been on the global radar as some of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets, focusing on particular social and cultural trends in each of these countries.

Today, we will look at the widespread use of local English dialects as well as social media in India and what this means for the future of the country’s social media landscape.

The English language is much more deeply-rooted and has a much longer history in India than in China. It is part of the legacy of the colonial period, when India was under British administration. However, Indians have made the language their own through the use of local dialects.

Unlike in China, where English is regarded as a foreign language and the amalgamation of Chinese and English known as ‘Chinglish’ is looked down on and even banned from use in the media, Indians feel a sense of ownership and even pride towards localised versions of the language, which feature idiosyncratic phrases such as “I’ll come today itself” and “I go there thrice a week” as well as combinations of local and English words. Moreover, English has enjoyed rising popularity in India due to the economic opportunities it opens up and the social status it confers to those who are able to speak it.

Meanwhile, social media use is also on the rise. There is an estimated 35 million Facebook users in India, and the country is ranked 4^th in Asia for the number of users on Twitter. Although the numbers pale in comparison to those in China, there is good potential for growth in India’s social media landscape as the country has an estimated 121 million internet users. And as mobile phones are the primary driver of Internet usage in India, this number will continue to increase with the widespread adoption of smartphones.

Both the potential reach of social media and the popularity of ‘Indlish’ in India are demonstrated by the popular reception of hit song “Why This Kolaveri Di”, which went viral on YouTube at the end of 2011. The song, sung in a combination of the Tamil language and English, has racked up nearly 40 million views on YouTube by the end of January 2012, becoming a top trend on Twitter in India as well. The song is peppered with ‘Tamglish’ catchphrases including its distinctive title (meaning “why this murderous rage” in Standard English), which has been incorporated into local slang as a phrase used to poke fun at another person’s irritation in the manner of to the English catchphrase “You mad?”

For those keen to take advantage of social media as a marketing tool in India, “Why This Kolaveri Di” also tells a forward-looking tale of the country’s nascent social media landscape. The advantages of social media marketing in India may not be as clear as in China, and the variety of languages spoken in the country, with more than 20 languages with over a million speakers, adds a layer of complexity to the matter. However, as the literacy rate climbs and as more Indians jump on the social media bandwagon, we can expect to see more and more web content in ‘Indlish’, which offers a convenient means for Indians throughout the subcontinent to communicate with each other as they interact online.

By Moses Lemuel

Spotlight BRIC, Part 1: China and the global connection

In this series of articles, we will look at the group of countries known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which have been on the global radar as some of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets, focusing on particular social and cultural trends in each of these countries.

Today, we will look at China and its increasingly globally-connected population, particularly in light of the rising popularity of the English language and the rapid growth of social media usage.

It is estimated that the number of English learners in China is at least over 300 million and constantly growing (Lidi, 2008), which potentially means that the number of English speakers in China will at some point exceed the population of the United States. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese social media users currently exceeds 250 million.

So what does this mean for brands looking to expand their reach in China? While it is tempting to conclude that the growing numbers of English speakers and social media users imply that it will automatically be easier to reach more people in China, this is an opportunity that should not be taken for granted; rather, it needs to be cleverly exploited. Although the Chinese have a preference for learning Standard English rather than a localised version or ‘Chinglish’, China is still a primarily Chinese-speaking society and will remain one for the foreseeable future. This means the Chinese will continue to use the Chinese language, what is locally known as Putonghua (Standard Chinese), among themselves, indicating that Putonghua will remain the primary language of local media.

However, rising interest amongst the Chinese population in learning the English language and in Western culture does have great potential for facilitating cross-cultural communication and marketing. Initiatives such as popular online video series “OMG! 美语” (OMG! American Language), shown here featuring American pop culture icon will.i.am, demonstrate that it is possible to promote American culture while being fully in touch with local linguistic and cultural sensibilities, especially through Chinese social media such as popular microblogging site Weibo. Moreover, according to the Gerson Lehrman Group, 95% of surveyed Chinese citizens are more trusting of brands that advertise through microblogs, while 61% of Chinese social media users decide to make a purchase because of a digital marketing campaign.

These trends present international brands with an effective way to reach their target audience in China, especially the younger generations who are increasingly web savvy and eager to learn more about other cultures.  Through a judicious combination of English and Putonghua in ad campaigns with a more extensive use of social media, where regulations on language are also less stringent, it may be possible to maintain a crucial linguistic connection with the target audience while capitalising on the popularity of English language and social media use in China in order to get local people talking about a brand’s products.

By Moses Lemuel

Reference: Lidi, Wang. (2008). The Spread of English in China and its Implications. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics: 31(3), p. 32.1-32.4

Adnormal: advertising, local laws and taboos

Typically, advertising must conform to laws and cultural norms. Most advertisements from the 1950’s – 1970’s, like this particular selection for example, wouldn’t be acceptable today due to changing perceptions about various issues such as gender, racial discrimination and public health. The effect of the cultural shift is such that some of these advertisements might even be illegal today.

Nowadays, advertisements regularly do not pass muster and are banned. This can be due to reasons that have to do with nudity, depiction of drug use or likelihood to “cause excessive fear and distress”, amongst others. Even when local laws are clear, bans can often be dependent on context and the interpretation of the offending advertisements. Thus, besides abiding with local regulations, advertisers need to be sensitive to ever-shifting cultural sensibilities.

To make matters more complex, cultural norms and sensibilities don’t just vary across time. They vary across different societies as well. This might seem obvious when we think about it, but it is easy to forget that what is acceptable in one society may not be in another. A good example is that of deodorant brands that launched a set of advertisements based on flirting  in India last year, which were considered “indecent, vulgar and suggestive” by the local authorities.  Even without the use of official bans, content may be regulated through self-censorship by broadcasters, which is the case in the United States, where many condom ads cannot be shown despite containing no nudity due to the fear of backlash.

There are some well-known facts about restrictions on advertising globally. Alcohol and tobacco advertisements, for example, are banned or restricted in many countries. There are also some prominent hot button issues that advertisements would do well to avoid being associated with, such sexism and racism.

However, cultural norms and local laws can be fairly obscure and apply to things you might not expect. In Lithuania, language is a potential problem as linguists are employed by the Lithuanian Language Committee to perform random checks on aired content to look for linguistic errors.  Broadcasters must remove any offending content found or face fines, making it necessary to ensure that voice-overs have proper accentuation. Language is also an issue in France, where it is required by law that everything on an advertisement must be translated into French, so even a tagline such as Nike’s “Just Do It” must appear with a French ‘subtitle’. This is due to a law that was passed at the end of the 1990′s by then Culture Minister Jacques Toubon, who wanted to promote and preserve the use of the French language.

Incidentally, a Nike advertisement was banned in China in 2004 for completely different reasons. The ad, which featured US basketball star LeBron James in battle with a cartoon kung fu master, was banned for misusing Chinese “cultural symbols” and for failing to “uphold national dignity” and respect Chinese culture.

So perhaps a good set of advice would be: don’t just do it; research local laws and sensibilities before proceeding with an ad campaign, just in case it ends up pushing the wrong buttons.

By Moses Lemuel