Everything on ‘Other’

This article has previously been published in the magazine of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, issue 177 and has been modified slightly for the digital channel.

It’s a recurring question: how can we optimize our marketing communication for different geographical locations and target groups. We’ve already finished it for the western market, but how do we approach the East Asian market? For example, can we just translate our English website to Chinese? Well, No. » More: How to design your content strategy for the Chinese market

Have you ever installed an App on your mobile that didn’t provide you the experience you had hoped for? Of course you have. Not all Apps are as good. (Actually the more Apps a store has the lower the average quality). Why was the experience not good? Was the App hard to use, did it look ugly, or did it have annoying advertisements that popped up at undesired moments (as if they could ever popup at desired moments), etc?

All these User Experience aspects are part of the User Interface (UI). In the last couple of years there has been a trend to describe these aspects, and the activities involved in improving them, with the term User Experience Design or just UX. Unfortunately, this attention to UX has diluted the name of this interesting field of work.

Proctor & Gamble rarely mess it up, when it comes down to marketing campaigns. But now they do seem to have. In their “Proud sponsors of Moms” campaign they have lowered themselves to one of the lower of the lowest, if it comes to parenthood. In the ad below they glorify the disgustingly pushy behavior of moms accepting nothing but the best from their children’s performance in sports. Those moms will stop at nothing: dragging their children out of bed to training in the early morning when the kinds clearly need their rest, showing only disappointment and no support when their son or daughter fails and only showing happiness when they (the parents) reach their goal: they have made their child win Gold in the Olympics.

Let’s think about it a bit further: Wouldn’t it be great if your child becomes an Olympic champion? Yes, of course. It would make me proud, as well. But while I’m proud of my son every day, the chances that he will become a Olympic champion, especially when I push him very hard, are exceptionally small. Is a ruined youth worth the effort? Is it my right to ruin my son’s youth? Is it the right thing to do towards a happy (adult) life for my son? There are enough specialists pointing out why we should be aware of pushing our children too hard, before it is too late » More: Moms doing the worst job in the world, with P&G