Tango has been enjoying considerable success with a series of what
are effectively business-to-business commercials speaking to a tiny part
of the population. The ads communicate with a nation of shopkeepers who,
the research shows, never miss a little mid-afternoon light
entertainment. Oh, and it does so in the language the customer base can
really understand which, in this particular instance, happens to be
Gujarati.
That commercial was developed by Tango’s ad agency, HHCL & Partners,
together with a translating company. This week, the consultancy, World
Writers, an organisation specialising in making ads intended for one
culture suitable for consumption by another, announced it was going a
stage further. It’s creating the UK’s first microculture marketing
organisation to talk to ethnic minorities in their own languages.
World Writers acknowledges the debt it owes to similar operations
elsewhere.
Australia has had agencies and in-house departments talking to its Asian
and Greek populations for years. The situation is even more developed in
the US, where the success of Bozell’s Hispanic agency is no surprise to
any non-Spanish speakers in Miami or parts of Los Angeles.
But can it really work over here? Well the numbers seem to stack up.
Around 10 per cent of the UK population is made up of communities that
do not have English as their mother tongue. And this, which includes
around 200,000 Arab and Japanese high-income individuals, is the target
market.
For Simon Anholt, the World Writers managing director, the moment of
revelation came when his Italian-born wife received a mail shot from a
supermarket chain. ’It was running an Italian promotion and, of the five
Italian brands mentioned, they had mis-spelt three of them. And I
started thinking how much more effective this communication would be if
the spelling had been correct and written in Italian, to an audience
that was already predisposed to buy these products. We are now compiling
a database of the entire nation by language spoken so we can start to do
just that.’
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