From digitalization to cultural tribes

By 1979, Sony had proven itself as a master of complex technology. But it was about to launch one of the simplest products it would ever make. 

A tape recorder which couldn’t record. A stereo with no speakers, but rather a small 3.5mm jack into which you could plug a basic set of headphones. It was, of course, the Walkman.

The very simplicity of the Walkman should have made it a textbook case for global standardisation. Across the world, a unisex demographic of adolescents and young adults drove music consumption. Behaviourally, they shared the same habit: they were on the go. 

The product and function were globally uniform. 

But the marketing and usage wasn’t.

In the US, an early Walkman commercial shows a group of young people dancing on the streets, expressing themselves openly. They drag a bystander into the dance by putting a set of Walkman headphones over their ears. The Walkman lets Americans take music outside while being mobile. They can enjoy and express their feelings anywhere they want to.

Japanese ads from the time could scarcely be more different. One of the most famous shows a Japanese snow monkey with a Walkman, standing still by itself. As the camera pulls back, it reveals a shocking fact; the ape stands upright, like a human. An announcer asks, philosophically, the progress in sound continues, but what about the progress of mankind? The Japanese enjoy technological progress in itself – something to be enjoyed alone, giving your full attention to the sound.

This example illustrates cultural differences in product usage and the need for marketing to adjust.  And the need for this has grown.

The diversity of preferences has increased over the past decades through digitalization. The online world allows us to pick and choose our tribes. Does the PlayStation Generation of different countries value the same things as the Walkman Generation? Will the Millennials who grew up in the shadow of 9/11 hold the same values, beliefs and motivations as Generation Z, profoundly affected by the crash of 2008? What creates your values—your nationality, your generation, or your ethnicity?

In upcoming articles, myself, Group CEO at Hofstede Insights, Michael Schachner, Research Director at Hofstede Insights, Pinaki Dutt, Global Head of Connected Intelligence at Mediacom, and Hofstede Insights Associate Partner Martin Karaffa will leverage data from a ground-breaking piece of research on culture and marketing, which we call Consumer Culture Intelligence. The study covers over 61,000 consumers in 60 countries, and scores of subcultures. It will enable marketers to dissect a world of culturally diverse consumers, and do so with precision. Rather than clustering markets in a crude, arbitrary way, we’ll introduce a new technique that maximises economies of scale and synergies of excellence, while avoiding the opportunity costs of unexploited local market gaps.