How Horses, Shirt Collars and Religious Belief Helped Recarbonate a Struggling Brazilian Beer
Once, while working for a local telecommunications company in Medellín, Colombia, I learned that one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Comuna Trece, was home to the largest escalator in the world, one as tall as a twelve-story building. The escalator was opened to the public in 2011 as part of an initiative to connect neighborhoods on Medellín’s outskirts to the downtown. Despite the amount of traveling I do, I almost never have time to visit tourist attractions—I collect insights from people, not monuments—but the Medellín escalator sounded too good to pass up, and the telecommunications executive agreed to come with me.
Twenty minutes later, we were in the backseat of a cab, heading to Comuna Trece when, without warning, the driver pulled over. Afraid for his own safety—Comuna Trece had a reputation for petty crime and gang violence—he had changed his mind. The executive and I hailed another cab. This driver, too, had no interest in taking us to Comuna Trece. We must have gotten in and out of half-a-dozen taxis before we finally reached our destination.
Bisecting a sprawling shantytown, Medellín’s escalator was modern, stylish and immaculate, with a serpentine red roof covering its 357 stairs, stories and landings. A team of red-shirted neighborhood residents milled around the bottom, answering questions and making sure no one stole the “magical” stairs that seemed to vanish into the earth, as escalator stairs can appear to do. The executive and I were there for a half hour before catching a cab back to downtown Medellín. Later, she told me, that to her colleagues’ surprise, she was considering buying a home in the area.
People have asked me over the years if I ever feel unsafe visiting unfamiliar countries. My response is always the same: the day I let myself feel fear is the day I stop working. When you surrender to apprehension, or worry, or nerves, you effectively place a filter over your senses and are no longer able to see what’s right in front of you. Yet why wouldn’t I follow the lead of nearly half-a-dozen experienced taxi drivers who, it’s safe to assume, know their city neighborhoods better than I do? My response is that very often, a “fear halo” surrounds a city or country, the result of events that took place years earlier—in this case, the 1980s, when Medellín was synonymous with drug cartels and violence—and this fear halo affects residents, too. I had a very similar experience years earlier when I was preparing to visit Nigeria. People warned me about random terrorism threats, power outages, widespread corruption and more. I encountered none of these things, and, in fact, Nigeria is still one of my favorite places to visit.
Which isn’t to say that over the years I haven’t had one or two close calls. Once I was nearly kidnapped in Venezuela. I’d just finished giving a keynote address in Caracas, and my taxi had just pulled up in front of the airport when two men greeted me by name. They were there, one told me, to make sure I reached my gate in a timely manner. Not for a second did I believe them, and I also had a nagging feeling something wasn’t right. Thinking quickly, I told them that I had changed flights, and obviously no one had alerted them to the last-minute switch. Would they mind watching over my suitcase while I paid a quick visit to the bathroom?
Who leaves his bag behind with strangers if he doesn’t plan on coming back for it? Gripping my smaller computer bag—it had my toothbrush in it, I told the two men—I made my way toward the men’s bathroom and, once inside, looked behind me. The men looked fretful and anxious. By now convinced something was wrong, I left the bathroom a few seconds later via a back door. Having lost sight of me, the men were now craning their necks. They looked panicked. For the next fifteen minutes I did whatever I could to avoid being seen. I ducked through a series of waiting areas. I crouched down behind kiosks. At one point I caught a glimpse of a black car driving away. I never saw either of the men, or for that matter, my suitcase, ever again.
Fear often shadows tourists paying their first visit to Brazil. Most websites and guidebooks issue the same warnings: Don’t bring anything to the beach. Avoid wearing jewelry or expensive watches. Make sure you leave your cell phone and wallet in your hotel room, preferably in a locked safe. A friend told me that when he told friends he was planning his first trip to Brazil, two of them told him—jokingly, or maybe not—that Brazil is famous for its organ trafficking industry, and he could find countless stories online about tourists blacking out and awakening to find a kidney missing. Like many stories about Brazil, this one is an urban legend.
Still, I found that Brazil’s fear halo had affected some of my Brazilian colleagues. During a visit to Salvador, in northern Brazil, where I was doing interviews on behalf of Brasil Kirin, my host not only provided a translator but a local driver. And, in some areas of Salvador, even the driver was reluctant to go inside the favelas. Another day, when we pulled up in front of a crowded Brazilian elementary school during a soaking rain, I saw that my assistant was literally shaking. I suggested that the two of us take a short walk, and he could show me what “fear symbols” he was picking up on in the neighborhood. We did just that. No bars covered any of the windows; there were no padlocks on any of the doors. Residents sat outside, smiling and talking and fanning themselves. My assistant finally admitted he could find nothing obviously, overtly fear-inducing about the neighborhood, and from that point on he came with me everywhere.
Kirin is a Japanese-owned beverage conglomerate, known for its beers and soft drinks. Brasil Kirin, the national affiliate, has a wide portfolio of local brands, including Devassa, which means “libertine,” or “naughty,” a tropical lager founded by locals in 2001 in Leblon, the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan and desirable neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Then and now, Devassa’s logo is a kneeling, scantily clad, alabaster-white female posed with both arms behind her neck.
The problem? Somewhere along the line, Devassa had lost its identity. At one time a premium ale, the beer was now just another supermarket brand, indistinguishable from the others. My mission: to restore Devassa to its upmarket status by creating an “aspirational” brand, meaning a higher-priced beer that consumers associate with a desirable, even elusive lifestyle. In a country like Brazil, with its rigid class divisions and strong commitment to façade, this was a complex problem that would require, in the end, a complex solution.
Of all the countries I’ve visited, Brazil is the one whose image and veneer are most radically at odds with its everyday life. Brazil, it is said, is home to the world’s most beautiful women, the best-looking men, the most seductive music, the most sinuous dancers and the most libidinous nightlife. But with the exception of parts of Rio de Janeiro, during the next two months in Brazil I found few glimpses of ease, or glamour. Brazil is a soulful, warmhearted, hospitable nation unlucky enough to be saddled with high levels of government corruption, an overburdened infrastructure, a poorly funded education system and stark discrepancies between rich and poor. At the same time, compared to the efficient, highly developed countries of northern Europe, Brazil is also raw, emotional and direct. A well-known musician who grew up in Rio before moving to Los Angeles summed up to me his experience living in both America and Brazil. “The US is a great place to live,” he said, “but I feel terrible whenever I’m there.” He paused. “Brazil is a terrible place to live, but I feel great whenever I’m there.”
Brazil boasts a population of around 200 million people—a sprawl of races, cultures and ethnicities spread across 5 regions and 26 states. In some parts of Brazil, residents are digesting print media for the first time; in others, residents have just bought their first television sets; in cities like Rio and São Paulo, younger generations are as sophisticated and plugged-in as their contemporaries anywhere else in the world. More relevant to the job I was carrying out for Brasil Kirin, the country is divided into five government-issued class segments, each one based exclusively on a household’s gross monthly income. These are class A (Wealthy), B (Fairly Wealthy), C (Average), D (Lower Middle Class) and E, which is synonymous with poverty and illiteracy.
Brazilian natives are born into a class and, barring any surprises, the governmental machinery ensures they will stay in that class for the foreseeable future. Once Brazilians are tagged with a C or a D, it is almost impossible for them to improve their economic future or social standing. A stamp of C or D also signifies the degree of education a person has attained. Members of classes A and B, for example, have usually completed some form of higher education, whereas members of class D haven’t finished high school and class E is essentially unschooled. A Brazilian’s economic class also determines where a person’s children will go to school, and the kind of work he will end up doing. Class A is generally made up of business owners, bankers and highly skilled workers, whereas class C, which includes teachers, nurses and mechanics, generally comprises those who provide services to classes A and B. Less formally, a Brazilian’s class designation also dictates the sorts of food and beverages he eats and drinks, where he shops and the kinds of bars and restaurants he frequents. In short, each Brazilian social class brings with it an unspoken suite of “allowable” tastes and desires, from clothing to music to food.
“Being told that there are no social classes in the place where the interviewee lives is an old experience for sociologists,” the author Leonard Reissman wrote in his 1965 book Class in American Society. “‘We don’t have classes in our town’ almost invariably is the first remark recorded by the investigator . . . Once that has been uttered and is out of the way, the class divisions in the town can be recorded with what seems to be an amazing degree of agreement among the good citizens of the community.”1 Brazil is no exception to this ethnographic truth. Most Brazilians will deny they notice any class distinctions, but after a few beers, most will tell you they can assess the social class of other Brazilians on the basis of teeth, clothing, shoes and—not least, especially for woman—their hair and facial features.
The average Brazilian woman is short and slightly heavy, with a dark complexion and curly or frizzy hair, not at all helped by the country’s high levels of humidity. She may or may not have African ancestry, considering that outside Nigeria, Brazil today is home to the largest percentage of people of African descent (during the slave trade era, Brazil was the destination for nearly 5 million enslaved Africans).2 The straighter a Brazilian woman’s hair, the higher her perceived social class, which explains the immense popularity of hair straighteners in Brazil. (An executive at Procter & Gamble told me once that throughout South America, girls and young women spend up to 15 minutes de-tangling their hair.) It may also explain why, alongside Colombia and Venezuela, Brazil has overtaken the United States as the plastic surgery capital of the world. As the Guardian reported in 2014, “With less than 3 percent of the world’s population, Brazil accounted for 12.9 percent of the cosmetic operations performed [in 2013]. This included 515,776 breasts reshaped, 380,155 faces tweaked, 129,601 tummies tucked, 13,683 vaginas reconstructed, 219 penises enlarged and 63,925 buttocks augmented.”3 As a rule, Brazilians have no qualms about undergoing plastic surgery; plastic surgery signals to the world that they care about their appearance.
I soon grew to understand the intricacies of the national social hierarchy. Brazil’s national identity revolves around three things: football (i.e., soccer), beer and the beach. Football is a passion in many countries, especially England, but at some point most English boys give up their childhood dream of becoming world-class athletes. When I asked teenage Brazilian boys about their dreams about the future, nine times out of ten they told me that their fantasy was to become a football player. For them, the images of the country’s greatest stars—Pelé, Garrincha, Ronaldhino, Kaká, Zico, Socrates and others—were vivid and enduring. Yet in a country the size of Brazil, the chances of succeeding in sports are small, which is why, at some point, reality is replaced with the harshness and hardship of everyday life.
One contributing factor is Brazil’s exhausted educational system. There are so many children to educate that in lower and elementary schools, one-half of the school-age population attends school in the mornings, and the other half shows up for classes in the afternoon. For anyone other than the top economic classes, there is no organized way to get ahead in Brazil—no after-school or mentorship programs or clubs. Compare this to the United States, for example, where many parents are so afraid their children won’t get into the right college that they schedule lessons, hire SAT tutors and set up music, karate, dance and language lessons. Few hours in the day of a middle-class American child are unscheduled, whereas for many Brazilian children, life itself is an ongoing improvisation.
Also in contrast to the United States or England, few Brazilians would consider “jumping class” by returning to school, studying for an advanced degree or applying for a better job. In Brazil, class migration is based exclusively on consumption, appearance and brands, which has the unfortunate effect of exhausting people’s bank accounts without a plan to replenish them. Even indigent Brazilians spend their money on status symbols. As a 2015 New York Times op-ed noted about Brazil, “Many homes have flat-screen TVs, but are not hooked up to public sewers. Many say these 40 million whose living standards have been raised are not a new middle class but are just ‘poor people with money.’”4 Brazil is the only country on earth where entire product ranges exist to help consumers blend into the class just above them.
While Devassa wanted to target all classes, the B class was clearly the brand’s favored demographic. To celebrate the brand’s origins, I also wanted to relaunch Devassa in Rio de Janeiro, the coastal city where trends and fashions generally take root across Brazil. But to what should Brazilians aspire? The question was familiar, and one that over the years had taken me from Hong Kong to Italy . . . and back to Brazil.
Before exploring aspiration, let’s ask ourselves whether it’s possible to determine the taste differences among half-a-dozen beers or, for that matter, water. Globally, there are thousands of bottled water brands—one Los Angeles restaurant even has a water sommelier on staff5—but if I blindfolded you, could you really describe the taste of one bottled water over another, and mean it? An equivalent number of beer brands swells the shelves of most supermarkets and liquor stores. Whenever I’ve done blind taste tests with consumers, most say they can detect subtle taste differences among beer brands. But the fact of the matter is that 99 percent of the time, what they claim is the taste of Heineken, or Molson, or Corona is, in fact, another brand entirely. So what lies behind our preference for one beer over another?
More than most beverages, beer and emotion cannot be teased apart in Brazil. Almost every time Brazilians interact with friends or family, beer serves as the centerpiece of the gathering. Ironically, all across the world—including Brazil—a large majority of consumers dislikes the taste of beer. Many have told me that when they had their first taste of the stuff, usually when they were young, their distaste was outweighed by the symbolic meaning of beer as an emblem of adulthood. In this way, beer is like coffee. Most of us like the smell of coffee beans and freshly brewed coffee—but do any of us enjoy the actual taste of coffee? With both beverages, it seems, we embed in our memories the moment when we first tasted them, as well as the symbolic transformation we experienced as we made the internal shift from child to adult. The memory of this moment lasts throughout our lives, overriding the taste of both beer and coffee and tricking us into believing that what we’re drinking tastes good even when it doesn’t.
Considering that I was in Brazil to help transform Devassa, I started to spend my evenings in bars, observing the various local rituals around beer drinking. After a few days, it became clear how Brazilian beer drinkers conveyed discreet class signals based on how they positioned their bottles on the table. If they were drinking a premium beer, drinkers set them down with the label visible to the rest of the room. If the beer was less expensive, the label faced inward. I knew that for many Brazilians, one core aspiration around beer drinking was to order enough of the “right” beer—for example, Heineken. A 22-year-old Brazilian man even told me, “Me and my friends would save money to buy a Heineken bucket at the bar. It makes us feel like kings—until we catch the bus home.”
Another phenomenon I noticed was the Brazilian preoccupation with temperature. Inside bars or corner stores, each fridge featured a display showing the current temperature inside the unit. Most were extremely low—24 degrees Fahrenheit was common—meaning that the beers inside the fridge were practically frozen. As is true in many parts of the world, including America, Brazilians prefer their beer impossibly cold. Ice-cold temperatures typically kill whatever minimal flavor beer has to begin with, which in the case of both Brazil and the United States, indicates that residents in both countries are averse to strong bitter flavors.
Beer, of course, was also an incomparable bonding tool. People drank it almost exclusively in social settings, surrounded by large groups of friends. Like any alcohol, beer served as a device of transformation, dissolving emotional boundaries. But what about class boundaries?
On the basis of my Subtexting, I knew that if a Brazilian woman wanted to “jump class,” almost always the first thing she did was to go online to study and research her chosen class on both an emotional and materialistic level. On the basis of her research, she might begin to talk differently. She might make plans to straighten her hair, or listen to new music, and in some cases persuade herself to embrace a new style, or fashion, that she knows the upper classes favor. I’d caught any number of Brazilian women flicking through websites, as if through a museum of dreams, fantasizing about the lifestyles, and the brands, of A or B class people. These brands, in turn, become tickets, membership passes almost, to the next social rung.
Earlier I wrote that our perception of the world is almost always local, focusing almost exclusively around ourselves and our neighborhoods and our traditions and our beliefs. But who influences us to buy a certain product, helps us form an opinion or exposes us to a brand we later use ourselves—a wristwatch, a musical genre, a facial moisturizer, a wine label? It’s not something we often think about, but when I ask this question to people online and offline, the answer is invariably celebrities.
It’s fascinating to trace how the concept of celebrity has evolved since the 1960s, when Giorgio Armani first had the idea of giving away free clothing to celebrities, thereby linking clothing with aspiration and glamour. A decade earlier, in the 1950s, there were maybe a dozen or more “real” celebrities, but by the 1990s this list had grown to hundreds of people, including celebrity CEOs, chefs, hairdressers, party planners and interviewers. Today the list includes “subcelebrity” categories, including reality show stars and YouTube personalities. In a 2015 survey of 1,500 respondents ages 13 to 18 conducted for Variety by celebrity brand strategist Jeetendr Sehdev found that YouTube stars “scored significantly higher than traditional celebrities across a range of characteristics considered to have the highest correlation to influencing purchases among teens . . . YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars.”6
Notwithstanding celebrities, who influences us within the context of our own lives? Every culture, it should be remembered, has its own default topics of conversation, a default script of subjects, ranging from the weather to sports to food. When two people meet for the first time, generally speaking, what do they talk about? What is the first thing out of a waiter’s mouth in Russia, in England, in America, in France, in Montenegro? How do taxi drivers greet passengers across the world, and what do they discuss during the ride? What do neighbors say when they meet in the lobby or the sidewalk, or mothers when they meet other mothers in the park?
As I’ve sat in homes across the world, I’ve noticed we tend to “read from” a conversational script that seldom varies week after week. Depending on the country I’m in, this script has its local nuances, but it generally goes like this: Two people greet each other. They say something about the weather. They offer each other something to drink or eat. They exchange compliments about each other’s clothing. But when we deviate from this script, what causes us to stray? The answer, I found out while conducting an informal, monthlong experiment, is the objects surrounding us.
Once, when I was consulting for Nescafé’s instant coffee division, the executive team and I realized that many contemporary kitchens had become so sleek and minimalist there was no longer any physical space for Nescafé’s signature glass coffee jars. This meant that Nescafé as a topic of conversation was also gone—which in turn had led to declining revenues at the company. My mission was to bring Nescafé coffee jars back inside the kitchen, and back into the conversation. I tried this same strategy out in Brazil. To see whether I could influence people’s conversations, I brought along small decorative objects, which I placed in people’s kitchens or living rooms. A coffee mug. A glass jar. A yellow teapot. In more than three-quarters of the cases, the object, or the brand, dominated the conversation for an average of seven minutes. It seemed that by introducing an object into the room, I could alter the direction of a conversation and “change the script.”
This insight had strong ramifications for the rebranding of Devassa. What consumers say about a brand can be controlled and in some cases reduced to a preprepared sales pitch. For a brand, this is critical. Imagine: ten words that represent the heart, soul and essence of a brand, no longer controlled by print ads or television commercials, but by consumers themselves. As the popularity of hair straighteners and plastic surgery across Brazil attested, more than most countries Brazil was strongly affected by “influencers” and by “aspiration.” I tucked this observation away for later.
Doesn’t the desire to “change the conversation” explain why some of us wear glasses with colorful frames, or boldly colored necklaces and earrings, or wildly decorated handbags, or even rubber bracelets? These small touches and additions serve as both calls for attention as well as talking points. Generally speaking, there is a story attached to the lizard pin we wear, or the black rubber strap we wear around our wrist. They position us in the center of the story. When we become the star, the focal point, the narrator or the subject of attention, our brains release dopamine. Any celebrity will tell you that fame and attention are addictive, which may partly explain why most social media users stream a steady barrage of news, food photos and landscapes and receive in return a cannonade of compliments (“Wow,” “Amazing,” “Love it”). Via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we have all become celebrities in our own lives.
Up until a few years ago, whenever I gave speeches I asked audience members if anyone was wearing a yellow LiveStrong bracelet. (Over the years I’ve seen businessmen in Armani suits and expensive Swiss watches wearing the LiveStrong band which, I might add, is manufactured in China.) Invariably two dozen or so audience members would raise their hands. Why do you wear it, I asked? Most told me they wore the LiveStrong bracelet to show their support for the fight against cancer. Today, in the wake of Lance Armstrong’s doping controversy, almost no one would want to be seen wearing a LiveStrong bracelet. Still, when I asked audience members why they stopped wearing the bracelet—did this mean they no longer believed in fighting cancer?—most admitted they began wearing the bracelet to stand out, to inspire a conversation and even to show their superior moral status.
Across the globe, aspiration exists at every level of society, from the lowest to the highest. But how does aspiration begin? How old are we when we first become aware of desiring what we don’t have? More to the point, to what, or to whom, did most Brazilians aspire?
As I traveled across the country, one word kept popping up: Cariocas.
Carioca is a demonym used to refer to the residents of Rio de Janeiro. The term originated as a mild insult to refer to the descendants of immigrants, but has evolved today to refer to any Rio native, and to membership in a distinct, coveted, moneyed lifestyle. “To be Carioca, you have to enjoy the beach and be casual in life,” one Brazilian told me. Another Rio resident defined Carioca this way: “You are social and friendly with everybody you meet.” Among the other definitions of a Carioca: Free-spirited. Not worrying too much about life. Letting things happen. Every Brazilian I interviewed was convinced that the Carioca way of life was exclusive to Rio, and also exclusive to Brazil.
But it wasn’t. The attributes of the Carioca lifestyle are, in fact, characteristic of any number of “water-facing” cultures around the world. The coast of Sydney, Australia, has its own version of Cariocas, and so does Southern California, the North Shore of Hawaii and Miami’s South Beach. Taking shape around a beach, or shoreline, each one of these regions is nearly indistinguishable from its overseas counterparts. Each places a strong emphasis on physical attributes, and the natives’ popularity is connected to their social ranking. Cariocas across the globe are influential in introducing fashions and brands to the rest of the world. My mission was to try and understand the psychology of the Carioca—the mind-set, that is, of anyone who lives on a fashionable coast—and bottle and sell it.
The Carioca sensibility, then, was simply a local Brazilian version of a suite of emotions and desires that exists all over the world, one that originates in, of all places, the Mediterranean. This was something I’d learned a few years earlier while working for one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious clubs in Hong Kong.
As one of Hong Kong’s largest community benefactors, the Hong Kong Jockey Club has long been perceived as the aspirational essence of Hong Kong: a gilded, privileged circle that everyone wanted to join but few people could. Yet despite its historical legacy, one issue loomed in the club’s future, namely, the brand of the “horse.”
Since 1884, the year of the club’s founding, the horse had been the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s most recognizable icon, and a key asset in distinguishing the club from competing gaming providers. The problem was that worldwide, from 2005 to 2013, Google searches for horse had dropped 28 percent. In Hong Kong, horse searches were down by as much as 42 percent. Even more significantly, since 2005, Google searches for horse racing in Hong Kong had declined 61 percent, and there was also a dramatic decline in sales of local children’s toys centered around horses, whether it was toy stables, toy farms, or miniature horses.
These statistics were later confirmed in what I saw, or rather didn’t see, in children’s bedrooms across Hong Kong. There were no horses. The few times I caught sight of one, it seemed merely decorative. Primed by their own childhood memories of Black Beauty, The Black Stallion and Hollywood Westerns, Hong Kong parents had grown up revering the concept of the horse—from the 1930s to the 1960s, the film industry’s most popular genre was the Western—but they hadn’t passed that interest along to their children. Horses no longer played a starring, or heroic, role in the books parents read to children, or in children’s books in general. With some exceptions, Hollywood no longer even made Westerns. Was there any hope for the future of the horse?
Around the world, whether they’re engaged in jumping, riding, fox hunting, rodeos or ranch work, the horse symbolizes freedom, beauty, grandeur and power. In order to reestablish the horse “brand,” I spent the next few weeks reaching out to local toy companies, and also to Hollywood. Unfortunately, the “rebranding” of the horse never resulted in a full-blown campaign, but along the way it dovetailed with another observation that linked to freedom, aspiration and power.
As I spent day after day observing the races at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, I noticed how the members of the crowd paid greater attention to the men and women they aspired to than they did to the people they didn’t. Aspiration is difficult to pick up when you’re in an audience setting, easier to observe from a height. Looking down from a balcony, for example, you can see that humans tend to form a circle around the people we admire, or wish to emulate, in the same way we do when in the presence of a politician or celebrity.
People with money in Hong Kong like to show it off. Over a period of several weeks, it became apparent to me that people were ordering foods and drinks based on what a wealthier demographic was ordering. Their own friends, in turn, ordered these same goods and drinks, creating, in the end, an unbroken chain of aspiration. As I mingled with the crowds, I couldn’t help but notice a second dimension linked to aspiration: superstition. Over the course of an average day, I saw any number of Hong Kong residents knocking on wood, spitting three times or placing their chopsticks beside their teacups for good luck. Superstition, I knew, had already trickled over into local design schemes. In 2005, while constructing the entrance to Hong Kong Disneyland, executives had decided to adjust the angle of the front gate by 12 degrees, and also placed a subtle bend in the walkway from the train station to the gate to ensure the flow of positive energy, or chi.7
To whom did Hong Kong’s ultrarich aspire—and what was the connection, if any, between aspiration and superstition? If you glanced at the lapels of the coats of nearly every Hong Kong businessman, or strolled through Hong Kong’s malls, you came face-to-face with the same three words: Made in Italy. Hong Kong’s most popular and renowned restaurants had one theme in common: Italy and Italian food. Hong Kong’s highest quality cafés were Italian, and the highest-level deals and meetings all took place in Italian restaurants. Not for the first time, I was reminded how the Mediterranean lifestyle influences humans on a subconscious level. In China, according to the New York Times, you can find an Italian-themed retailer called Christdien Deny, whose font is eerily similar to that of Christian Dior, as well as a clothing brand known as Frognie Zila, whose website features photos of Venetian canals and other well-known Italian landmarks.8 Relatedly, the most aspirational cafés in Japan all have French names (some of which don’t make sense in any language, including the “Monna Lisa,” “Pierre Herme Paris” and “Quand L’Appetit Va Tout Va”), and roughly 80 percent of all Japanese girls fantasize about marrying in Paris—which no doubt contributes to the record-breaking sales of Louis Vuitton across Japan, as well as to a contemporary psychiatric condition informally known as “Paris Syndrome.”9 According to the BBC, “Paris Syndrome” affects roughly a dozen Japanese tourists every year, who arrive in Paris bearing romantic expectations of the French capital, but end up hospitalized “when they discover that Parisians can be rude, or the city does not meet their expectations,” adding, “The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.”10
These parallels—between a country and a foreign culture whose values compensate for elements or emotions missing in that culture—are common across the world. The Brazilian flag may feature a blue globe against a yellow rhombus, yet just as visible across Brazil is the Swiss flag, whose white cross on a red field shows up on any number of health-related organizations, pharmacies and physicians’ offices in an attempt to communicate trustworthiness and orderliness in a mostly chaotic country.
More even than France, why is Italy the repository of so much global aspiration? One short answer is the car industry, whose brands include Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti and Maserati, but the Italian fashion industry provides another answer. What aspirational clues do Italian brands convey so powerfully that even Hong Kong businessmen line up to emulate them—and could it possibly provide me with a clue that could help me turn around Devassa?
Years before I worked for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, I found the epicenter of aspiration in Tiene, Italy, a small city outside Venice, while helping a company, Cristiano di Thiene—which owns the licensing rights to a brand called Aeronautica Militare—figure out who made up its core audience.
With lines for men, women and children, Aeronautica Militare’s clothing is characterized by patches, symbols and “good luck” icons borrowed from the military and connected to real-life stories. In conversation with the brand’s design team, I found that more than any other fashion demographic, and like Trollbeads fans and Jenny Craig customers, Aeronautica’s core audience was both intensely loyal and more superstitious than average.
The fashion industry is akin to a highway with three different lanes and speeds. Colors, cuts and fashions vary from season to season, but larger trends, like patches, graphics and logos, endure for decades. In the wake of the 2008 global recession, many consumers were reluctant to wear high-end logos in public, but recession or no recession, Aeronautica fans continued to wear their clothing proudly and boldly. Ignoring changes and variations in cut and color, Aeronautica fans seemed determined to travel in the fashion world’s slowest lane.
As I interviewed Aeronautica fans across both northern and southern Italy, in many residences I stumbled across a symbol or a memento of dreams—a plastic fighter jet, a pilot’s uniform, a piece of military insignia hidden in a closet or packed away in a box stuffed underneath a bed. When I asked them about it, many told me about a childhood dream they’d had once that never came to pass. They wanted to be a pilot. They wanted to be powerful, or in charge. They wanted things to run on schedule. With its patches and military iconography, Aeronautica Militare, it seemed, had become a compensation for childhood dreams of freedom. (Many of the brand’s fans told me that their fantasies growing up centered around flying.)
Fashion, I was reminded again, gives consumers a shortcut to becoming a perceived member of an aspirational tribe. I’ve also noticed a direct and unsurprising correlation between people’s levels of self-esteem and their display of patches, brand names and logos. Like Ralph Lauren, Aeronautica has two variations of its logo. One is overt, the other subtle. The more discreet logo was favored by Aeronautica fans whose childhood fantasies hadn’t come true, whereas fans who were still pursuing their dreams tended to wear the more conspicuous logos.
One Aeronautica fan was a student pilot who’d been in a plane crash at age 24 and lapsed into a coma for nearly three months, never realizing his fantasies of turning professional. When he saw his first Aeronautica shirt, he told me, he fell in love. Another 25-year-old male Aeronautica fan I met favored multiple patches and the brand logo embossed across his coats and shirts. Among his proudest moments, he told me, were when army forces entered the café where he went most mornings and asked if he’d served in the military.
Aeronautica Militare, it seemed, had more in common with an addiction than it did a fashion label. It seemed like its fans could never buy enough of the brand. They also considered it their duty to recruit other fans to Aeronautica—and did so by seeking out individuals who matched the values that the brand represented, visible on both its text-based and non-text-based shirts. To explain, among Aeronautica’s several lines is one where the shirt collars lift to reveal authentic Air Force–related codes, jargon and terminology that only military insiders might understand, and another that is missing these details. This distinction, as I later found out, was more important than it might first appear.
The critical clue I gathered about the brand came about by accident as I watched consumers through one of the store’s CCTV systems. Nothing unusual stood out until I noticed that a small group of customers engaged in a bizarre reflex: when they picked up an Aeronautica shirt, they flipped the collar up and down. It took one or two seconds at most, and was easy to miss. Were they trying to determine where the shirts were manufactured? If not, what were they looking for?
That night, I found myself in the empty store, doing what I’d seen consumers doing: flipping Aeronautica shirt collars up and down. For the first time, I observed the letters and text-based symbols embroidered on the underside of the collars of certain Aeronautica shirts. Returning upstairs, I reviewed the CCTV tape and sure enough, the shirt collars with the text hidden underneath the flaps were the store’s top sellers. I noticed another thing, too. Many of the customers wore their new shirts out the door—an unusual behavior that I couldn’t help flagging. As I replayed the CCTV recordings, it became clear that in contrast to the other customers, this same distinct group—15 percent of all the shoppers perhaps—flipped their collars up when exiting the store, displaying the symbols underneath for all the world to see.
A week later, I’d arranged to meet a group of Aeronautica fans at a Milanese nightclub. As we stood around chatting, I began noticing the differences between the Aeronautica fans who wore their collars up and the fans who wore their collars down. It was exclusivity. The ones with the raised collars clustered together in small, tight groups. Those with their collars down were scattered all across the room. While talking to members of the collars-up group, it soon became clear they were from the south of Italy, while the collars-down group was from northern Italy.
We all send out clues that convey our membership in a tribe. It could be the brand of watch we wear, or a pair of shoes. It could be layered clothing, or an absence of socks, or the presence or absence of a logo. If you find a bar of soap in your shower, it’s doubtful you are in northern Europe, or, for that matter, New Zealand, whose residents seldom use bar soaps either, and whose culture is oddly similar to Scandinavia. Beyond how we adorn ourselves physically, the clue could reside on the rear end of a car. In Zurich, Switzerland, for example, residents with four-digit license plates are perceived to be wealthier and better connected than those with a six-number plate, a subtle distinction among the residents of one of the world’s richest cities. In honor of my experience working with Aeronautica, I call this phenomenon “The Flipping Theory.” In the case of Aeronautica shirts and collars, I could only guess that among southern Italians, a raised collar made it easier to pick up women.
Still, a crucial ingredient of Italian behavior, one I would later bring into my work for Devassa in Brazil, didn’t take place until the following day.
Sitting down for lunch in a café outside Bologna, I noticed that my waiter and, for that matter, every Italian waiter, had a habit of pouring soda, water or beer into my glass from a high vertical angle. In almost every other country, waiters pour liquids while keeping the bottle at a subtle horizontal tilt. But in Italy, waiters raised the bottle high, as if wanting to drain it more quickly and accurately. Following their scene-setting, attention-getting leads, Italian customers topped off their own drinks in the same way.
Where had I seen this behavior before? The answer: Brazil. Whether in Rio, Salvador or São Paulo, Brazilian waiters and consumers pouring drinks turned the bottle over until it was nearly upside down, allowing the liquid to drain as quickly as possible. This small habit, shared by Italians and Brazilians, gave me a link that would help me connect the dots between two different, but similar, cultures.
The two countries also shared a love of football, or what Americans call “soccer.” I knew that in their work on behalf of Chevrolet, the US automaker, the marketing group Jack Morton Worldwide found a way to turn football into a unique platform. Knowing that football provides a strong, emotional connection with fans of all ages, company executives immersed themselves in the sport and its singular relationship with fans across the globe. The agency ultimately created a partnership with the One World Play Project, a start-up organization whose mission is to bring virtually indestructible balls to children in war zones, refugee camps, disaster areas and other disadvantaged communities around the world.
Which made me wonder: Could a similar alliance take place between Brasil Kirin—which manufactures soft drinks as well as beer—and Brazilian soccer? When I began interviewing soccer coaches in Salvador and São Paulo, it soon became clear there was a dramatic need for mentoring and sponsorship programs in Brazil, but that the expense and the country’s infrastructure would make them too difficult to implement. That’s when I turned my attention elsewhere.
For years, I’ve been intrigued by the similarities between the world’s most influential brands and the world’s best-known religions. I once went so far as to interview 14 leaders from religions including Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism and Islam in an attempt to figure out the ten characteristics their faiths had in common. In order of importance, I found that they were: A sense of belonging; storytelling; rituals; symbols; a clear vision; sensory appeal; power from enemies; evangelism; mystery; and grandeur. When you think about the world’s most powerful brands—among them Apple, Nike, Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola, LEGO—you realize they all make use of some if not all of these pillars. Apple, for example, shrouds its product releases in mystery. Apple fans are among the most ardent brand evangelists in the world, and Apple also offers its users a strong sense of “belonging.” Not least, is it any coincidence that the Apple logo hangs from an unseen thread in many Apple Stores like a Bethlehem star?
Among the most elusive of these ten precepts is the sense of community and belonging. In an information age, most of us feel unanchored. The mobile economy has allowed many people to live anywhere they want, and the more “community”—that feeling of localness and belonging—makes its way online, the more it has dropped away in real life.
No less essential to a religion—or a brand—are rituals. Whether you drink a Corona beer alongside a lime, or order a Caffè Misto at Starbucks, the rituals of a shared language, and a shared way of doing things, bond consumers together. Rituals serve as an entry ticket to an exclusive universe consumers want to join, and the more often they repeat a ritual, the more of a hardcore fan they become. This subject seemed worth exploring, especially since religion was declining across Brazil.
Brazil is the world’s largest Catholic country, with 60 percent of Brazilians identifying themselves as Catholics, a decline from a Catholic majority of 92 percent in 1970. Studies estimate that the decline in practicing Catholics in Brazil will continue and that “by 2030 Catholics will represent less than 50 percent of Brazilian churchgoers.”11 Expecting high levels of religious enthusiasm across the country, I was surprised to hear from Brazilians how little a role religion played in their lives. Even if they hadn’t said anything, the trend was visible in many residences. Fasting and abstinence are common to the Catholic Church’s Advent, Ember Days and Rogation Days, but most Brazilians told me they paid them no attention. Two decades earlier, when I first visited Brazil, every room would have had at least one of its corners devoted to the Virgin Mary, or at the very least a religious urn holding a spray of flowers, but in contemporary Brazil, most people’s “collections” consisted of branded beer cans or bottles holding flowers or pens. Most Brazilians told me that if they were remotely attracted to religion, it wasn’t to traditional Catholicism, but to newer evangelist and spiritualist teachings.
I knew, too, from my own studies that there was a direct correlation between commercial characters from movies, television shows and games in homes (including Homer Simpson, Snoopy and Hello Kitty) and lower rates of churchgoing. In one Salvador favela, I remembered a teenaged boy showing me a figurine common across Brazil: a small white glass horse and a rider. It was St. George, a Roman soldier and Christian martyr famous for battling a dragon with a sword. St. George was a symbol for victory, but not, it seemed, religious victory. Every week, the boy told me, he and his friends would ritualistically fill a small glass with beer and set it in front of St. George and his horse, ensuring that their favorite local football team, Todo Poderoso Timao, won that week’s game. More than religion, it seemed, a local Brazilian football team was fulfilling the desire for belonging, and a beer brand was now connected with good luck, belonging and camaraderie.
In the northern city of Salvador, I also couldn’t help but notice the colorful local bracelets for sale. These were known as Bahia bands, or wish bracelets, whose origins are said to correspond and intertwine both with African gods and Catholic credo. In Brazil, wearing one or another color is said to bring out the color’s innate characteristics. Orange signifies joy and enthusiasm; green is said to impart money and growth; and hot pink represents friendship. Equally as important as what color you wear is how you tie a Bahia band, making a wish on each of the three knots you tie—no more, no less—and keeping the Bahia band on your wrist until it falls off naturally.
If religion was declining in Brazil, what was taking the place of the human desire for belonging, and unity, and mystery, and ritual? What made Brazilians feel like they belonged to something greater than themselves?
The answer, as prevalent in Hong Kong as it was in Italy and Brazil, was superstition and ritual. Keeping in mind the north-versus-south cultural divisions in Italy, and the west-versus-east rivalry in Brazil, I knew I’d found the start of a solution to reinventing Devassa for the twenty-first century. What stood out most about Brazil? Aspiration. The need to show off, to assert membership in a tribe. A countrywide decline in religion and churchgoing. Taking inspiration from the world’s religions, I would give Devassa three attributes borrowed from the world’s best-known religions: evangelism, sensory appeal and rituals.
Once I’ve developed the beginnings of a hypothesis—in this case, that Brazil and Italy were, at core, similar cultures—I generally begin searching for additional small data that can either support or overturn my premise. For example, how do women wear their hair, and if they color their hair, what is the most popular shade? In Italy, women favor blond hair dye. (Flip through the stations on Italian television, and it sometimes seems that every second woman has hair so blond it’s almost white. In addition to getting rid of curls, blond hair dye is equally popular across Brazil, as blond hair is synonymous with wealth and popularity.)
If Brazil had more aspirational consumers than almost any other country in the world, then quite possibly Italy, and Italian culture, could help me decode what Brazilians really wanted. In addition to how waiters and consumers held their bottles, and women colored their hair, there were other parallels between Italy and Brazil, including climate, high levels of governmental corruption and the influence of the Catholic Church. Italy and Brazil were even geographically divided in a similar fashion, with the south symbolizing “pleasure” and “easy living” and the north representing business, and efficiency, and order.
To create a sense of belonging, the first thing I needed to do was link Devassa to the Carioca sensibility. I knew that the authenticity, casualness and freedom of the Cariocas was seductive to Brazilians living outside Rio. Along with its beers, Devassa also owns and operates stand-alone bar-restaurants in choice locations along the coast that offer Brazilian cuisine, free Wi-Fi and, of course, Devassa beer. Devassa’s bars were, in fact, my secret weapon. I would use them as “temples,” or places of worship, where members of the Devassa “brand congregation” could congregate.
South America is known as a “high contact” culture, meaning that residents stand closer to one another, touch one another more and are accustomed to more sensory stimulation than residents in, say, northern Europe, with Australians and North Americans believed to be more moderate in their cultural contact level. In Brazil and elsewhere across Latin America, music matters, which is why it was important to create a tactile, sensory impression with the Devassa beer glass. My own research shows that if we “record” an experience using multiple senses, we remember it 200 percent more than we would if only a single track were involved. Add a social element, or a sense of belonging, and our memories engage even more powerfully with the experience.
Just as French and Austrian glass makers have evolved the production of glass to a fine art by matching a specific wine to a specific glass—resulting in literally thousands of different wineglasses on the market—the new Devassa-branded beer bottle would enhance and soften Devassa’s taste. By emphasizing Devassa’s fragrance (60 percent of the taste of any beverage derives from its fragrance), the Devassa-branded bottle would become the new, exclusive way to drink Devassa beer.
As a group, wine drinkers indirectly signal how much they know about the wine in front of them. They swirl the wine around in the glass. They air the wine out. They take a sip, and hold the liquid in one cheek. They talk about the aroma, the astringency, the body and the taste left on the palate, or the “finish.” It is almost as though they are persuading themselves that the more they know about the wine they are drinking, the more money they’re willing to spend. The rituals of airing wine, and swirling it in the wineglass, had become so synonymous with expertise that over the years I’ve caught people unconsciously swirling water and ginger ale in cafés and restaurants.
The next step was to create a signature Devassa ritual.
Broadly speaking, a ritual can be defined as a fixed sequence of behaviors or words that transport us from one emotional, social or physical state to another. Most rituals operate on two levels. The first is tangible, and sensory, while the second is symbolic and emotional. Ideally, like the lime in a Corona beer or Amazon’s one-click “Add to Cart” button, the ritual should be simple, memorable, easy to execute and anchored in reality.
At heart, our new Devassa ritual—which will soon be rolled out across Devassa bars nationwide—is all about experimentation and “finding your own flavor.” Here’s how it works: Entering one of Devassa’s branded seaside bars, a customer orders a draft. The waiter or bartender is instructed to ask, “Would you like an extra flavor with that?” The staffer then produces a tasting tray on which rest four shot glasses whose rims are dusted with differently flavored powders, from salty to lemony to chocolate-infused, giving the glasses a frosted edge similar to the salt that hugs margarita glasses. (Our waiters are also expert at placing the exact amount of powder on the rims.) Customers test out the flavors, eventually ordering a pint of beer alongside their flavor of choice. So far, the new Devassa ritual has been performing very well, and I’m optimistic about how it will continue to do in the future. Most impressive is how much the new ritual stands out, and attracts attention, creating the best possible synergy with the beer itself, engaging consumers while also bringing in nonbeer drinkers, too.
There was a second important dimension I also wanted to instill: transformation. Across the world, almost everyone fantasizes about sitting by the ocean, especially on hot summer days. Locally, though, access to Rio’s most popular beaches is reserved mostly for tourists or members of the upper classes, in the same way the skyboxes at the Hong Kong Jockey Club are for those who can afford them. Yet Jockey Club customers at every price level can catch a glimpse of what it’s like to perceive a horse race, and the world, through a skybox. To this end, we redesigned our Devassa bars to ensure the possibility of transformation. My goal was to whisk customers away from their everyday problems and complaints and into a parallel world where “life is but a dream.” I might add that Devassa bars have their own set of rules. In each is a pen, a notebook and a black box. Customers memorialize and deposit all their work problems into the box before abandoning themselves to beer drinking and camaraderie.
Transformation. Consumers wanted to escape the crowds, dirt, dust, poverty and relentless church of Rio. How could we help transform them into becoming freer, happier, sexier fantasies of themselves? To this end, we created a gigantic floating island—in effect, a Devassa-branded bar floating 200 feet off the shore of Copacabana, complete with deejays, surfboard-shaped tables and cameras live-streaming all the festivities to the mainland. The mission? To make the dream of lounging ocean-side “almost real”—but also tantalizingly out-of-reach. In the future, our Devassa island float will make appearances at the Rio Carnival, where Devassa will sell beer not available anywhere else, and at various street parties from Rio to São Paulo.
Having addressed the national need for superstition and ritual, I was left with the topic of aspiration. Here, I couldn’t help but think back to what a marketing colleague told me once about working for Sabra, the hummus manufacturers. The hardest part of working at Sabra, she told me, was creating a transformation in the American diet from processed, unhealthy snacks to more wholesome, vegetable-based fresh foods. Her mission, as she saw it, was literally to alter consumer behavior. The fantasy she had of every American man, woman and child snacking on chickpea-based hummus seemed possible, exciting and even heroic—that is, until she began interviewing people one-on-one in cities and towns across the American Midwest. Sitting in homes, attempting to interest consumers in their first (free) taste of hummus proved to be surprisingly difficult.
Among the first things my colleague found out was that for the uninitiated, the most common perception of hummus was a brown, boring, vegan, “hipster” food, one associated with aging hippies, acid trips and tie-dyed T-shirts. Most interview subjects told her they seldom if ever touched the stuff. The team then interviewed experienced hummus-lovers who ate hummus passionately and regularly. In common, most if not all of these people revealed that they had a memorable “first time.” Each had a very close friend—a person they knew well, and trusted—“concierge” them into trying out the dip amid a small gathering of close friends. In most cases, this trusted friend had given them hummus to sample along with a familiar snack they loved, whether it was baby carrots or potato chips, while also emphasizing that hummus was both wholesome and healthy.
This “concierge” insight inspired Sabra to rethink their marketing campaign, and made them prioritize “experiential sampling” in ways they hadn’t before. Sabra began to understand the value of its most loyal consumers as future “concierges.” This insight, needless to say, would never have come about from survey data, but only as the result of ethnographic research and the search for smaller data.
The Cariocas, I knew from experience, were less a specific demographic than a universal ideal. In common with beachside communities across the world, from Hawaii’s North Beach to the surfing communities of Malibu and Seal Beach, California, the Carioca symbolized informal living, physical beauty, wealth, freedom and lack of responsibility—in short, those characteristics we believe that southern Italy embodies.
Two weeks later, my team and I had selected four visible, innovative, well-connected Cariocas whom we appointed as seeders and ambassadors for Devassa 2.0. Our Carioca ambassadors would use their distinct networks to present monthly cultural events—parties, sports activities, fashion shows, music concerts, art openings and charity events—that incorporated the Devassa brand, and gave our newly revitalized beer the opportunity to connect authentically with consumers. Our four Cariocas would have an enormous influence on the public perception of Devassa, their responsibility being to seed, or thread, the brand back inside Rio society at an aspirational level, and from Rio to the rest of Brazil. They were tasked not only to generate interaction through social media, but also to recruit ten additional “amplifiers” who could spread the word about Devassa online and off.
More than a drink or its taste, we tend to remember the stories that surround our drinking. The better a beverage is at inspiring conversation, the more we feel that we, and the drink in question, are integral parts of the same tribe. It is still too early to assess how Devassa 2.0 will fare, but the executive team and I fully expect consumers to congregate around the beer’s new narrative—one that combines transformation, desire, sensory appeal and ritual to create an experience honed in Hong Kong, developed in Italy . . . and common to anyone who has ever craved transcendence—that is to say, all of us.