Yesterday I was watching a re-run of Jay Leno’s Late Night Show and it happened to have as a guest, Bruce Parry, an expeditioner who has a show on Discovery Channel called “Going Tribal“. Bruce’s gigs for the past few months have been his crash course into tribal integration in tribes across the world — Here’s a video podcast. He gets to become a tribesman for a month or two and live the life they lead, the food the eat, the places they live in — you get the picture.

What drew my attention was the fact that Bruce objected when Leno called the tribesman “primitive”. Also clips from the show showed some tribesman laugh uproariously at the stuff this “single white male” goes through such as during the “right of passage” ritual. It’s all a matter of perspective. Even within the USA marketers are challenged by the diaspora of cultures and need to fine-tune their marketing strategy.

For those of you, marketers, working specifically on multi-cultural marketing — here is a book that provides insight into this branch of marketing: 7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multi-cultural world by G. Clotaire Rapaille,

Rapaille’s theory asserts that:

one’s decisions as to product purchases, political candidate preferences and the like are influenced by sub-conscious “imprints.” These imprints, he says, are located within the reptillian brain.

Whoa! If you want to go psycho on your marketing, here is a rough print of the 7 Secrets:

1. People buy relationships; they don’t buy products
2. Beware of the Cultural Archetype
3. Decode the cultural DNA
4. Now, Encode the CNA (Core Code) into your marketing plan
5. Back to basics – It’s all in the problem you are solving
All marketing is about solving a particular problem, certain problems are universal (such as food/clothing/shelter), other problems local.

6. The more global, the more local
Check out MTV India (Huge success and for obvious reason)

7. III World War is cultural and it’s here and happening

Check out Rapaille’s blog, which is less marketing and more political. If you want more on multi-cultural branding, here’s Mike Bawden’s blog (PR agency) with some cool inputs.