The Negotiation

2022 is finally over, and we’re so excited to share the first episode of 2023 with you! This episode of The Negotiation is part 1 of our conversation with Dave McCaughan. Dave McCaughan is a Marketing Thought Leader and Storyteller. He has spent the last three decades in Asia Pacific leading strategy planning and in senior management roles with McCann, one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies. He joined McCann in 1986 in his native Sydney, where he built the Strategic Planning function, and since 1995 has been based in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo leading regional strategy and communications campaign development for clients like Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nestle, Cathay Pacific, Sunstar, Hitachi, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. In 2015 Dave launched BIBLIOSEXUAL, which works with brands to bring together his long-term passion for understanding the relationship between form and content.

In today's episode, we discuss Dave’s extensive work in marketing brands in Asia. He explains why he chose the name BIBLIOSEXUAL for his company. We then dive into a discussion of Japanese culture and consumer habits, and how international brands need to think about the market when advertising. Enjoy!

Show Notes

Topics Discussed and Key Points:

●      The Coke vs. Pepsi challenge 
●      How great brands figure out what matters to people and play to that
●      Why storytelling is fundamental when you are in business
●      The reason Dave chose the name BIBLIOSEXUAL for his company
●      Why it is important for a marketer to understand the mediums that matter to consumers 
●      The potential future homogenization of the Asia Pacific region
●      Japanese advertising and what flawed perceptions exist among international companies 
●      Why cultural context is so important for Japanese consumers
●      Cultural stereotyping and country stereotyping

Timestamps 
[03:09] Introduction to  Dave and what he does, as well as where he is located
[04:43] Dave’s background
[13:59] Why “BIBLIOSEXUAL”
[22:52] Dave's description of the Japanese consumer
[24:48] The reason behind Japan's usage of celebrities in advertising
[25:53] The misconception behind Japanese consumers' transference of identity
[29:32] Do we have to present a brand as technologically advanced when we go to Japan? 
 
Notable Quotes
“My one belief is that a marketer's main role is to understand what matters to people. It's not about understanding how they use your product. It's what matters to those people.”

“The term BIBLIOSEXUAL is something I've been playing around with for 20 years using in different presentations.”

“When you're in business in general, when you're in the marketing business, you know, storytelling is fundamental. And so, you want to have a chance to tell a story.”

“There are different mediums. Everybody has particular mediums that - for reasons we just can't figure out -  we are totally biased towards, we fall in love with, or we think ‘that's much, much better’. Right? And if you're a marketer, it's really important to understand which mediums really matter irrationally in many ways to people.”

“When I lived in Japan, we did projects where we did very successful campaigns and the only thing we changed was a single line on the back of the pack.”

“Japanese ads are more likely to use celebrities in ads than anywhere else in the world. It's the number one [celebrity] market in the world. And so, typically, you're twice as likely to use a celebrity ad in Japan as you are in the United States.”

“[Visual] context in Japanese culture is most important. So, if you can't see the background, you can't understand the person, you can't understand why they're saying it or how they're saying something.”

What is The Negotiation?

Despite being the world’s most potent economic area, Asia can be one of the most challenging regions to navigate and manage well for foreign brands. However, plenty of positive stories exist and more are emerging every day as brands start to see success in engaging and deploying appropriate market growth strategies – with the help of specialists.

The Negotiation is an interview show that showcases those hard-to-find success stories and chats with the incredible leaders behind them, teasing out the nuances and digging into the details that can make market growth in APAC a winning proposition.