Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 24 February 2014 issue)

Dear Kam,
I’ve got this really old advertising jingle playing in my head. It’s been there for days and it won’t go away. The product doesn’t even exist anymore. What do I do?
The Piano Man

My old car died a slow and painful death. I couldn’t open the electric windows, the air con stopped working, it overheated if I stopped moving, and perhaps worst of all, the stereo died. I should have sold it but I loved my car. It was my first car and it had been the hippest thing around when I bought it. It got so hot in my car that I could only drive at night but I did work out routes that offered shade from trees and overhead highways just in case I needed to drive in the day. And I had to absolutely avoid getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. Many times, I arrived to meetings completely drenched in sweat and people would ask me if it was raining outside.

But the car had to go when the stereo died because now I didn’t have any entertainment. Without the stereo, I couldn’t listen to my favourite songs or discover new music and instead, I had to rely on the music in my head. I thought I could sing The Beatles because surely I knew those songs inside and out but I found I just couldn’t remember the lyrics. Instead, to my surprise, I found that the only songs I knew completely were old advertising jingles. I discovered that my brain is filled with nothing but advertising jingles stretching all the way back to the 1970s. Somehow, only advertising jingles had wormed their way into my brain’s hard drive and made me want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Clearly, advertising is a powerful thing. Or rather, it was a powerful thing.

I was watching an interesting documentary about how brands are coping with the death of advertising. Maybe that’s a bit extreme but advertising as it once was is basically as relevant as the steam engine. A steam engine might still work, but do we use it? There was a time when everybody watched the same TV shows and, therefore, the same adverts, but that’s all gone now. The old-fashioned TV commercial desperately clings on for life as ads on YouTube, but who watches more than the required five seconds? A friend of mine runs a market research and media strategy company in London and his feeling is that brands and advertising agencies are colluding in what he calls a “dirty secret”. He believes that advertising doesn’t work anymore — we’re bombarded with advertising but very little of it gets through because now we can and do choose to ignore it. My friend thinks that the brands and agencies are continuing with old-fashioned campaigns because they don’t know what else to do. The agencies offer “proof” of “eyeballs” and the brands choose to believe that those numbers mean anything. But my friend would say that because he is in the business of trying to sell an alternative.

The documentary I watched suggested that there are new ways to sell a product. Obviously, cost is essential, and it must be reasonable and competitive. The product itself is its own advertising — is it any good and does it help answer other questions that the consumer finds important, like sustainability? What is the brand experience? The customer must be treated with respect and be offered an enjoyable even exciting experience before, during and after purchase (somebody in the documentary called this “moments between moments”, those moments when usually we are just left waiting for the actual moment). Costumer service is extremely important and is its own advertising. It’s good to have a 24-hour call line, but we want to be able to talk to a genuine human being and not just somebody who is reading from a script. I’ve been surprised to find myself having several discussions with friends where we’ve been comparing various call centre experiences and each time, we try to work out which company has finally woken up to the fact that we are grown-ups. For this to happen, the staff must also be treated with respect.

Obviously, the documentary cherry-picked the best of the best as examples (Virgin Airlines and Apple were mentioned a lot) but while watching it, I was thinking about Malaysian brands. How do they compare? At the risk of making an unfair sweeping statement, I think our major brands are mainly really old-fashioned. They’re good at operating in a market that favours a monopolistic, autocratic even feudal outlook where a customer can be dictated to — take this product and be grateful. Even self-professed
mavericks have proven that they are happy to play the monopoly game. All too often, I get the impression that the subservience of the staff and customer is more important to management than any care for the company’s long-term future.

Small companies are different because they haven’t been drowned in money and given the best seats in the game. Small companies have to think differently and they will get their reward because the time will definitely come when our market will open up completely, when we have a real choice. When that happens, we might look around and discover that we’ve been sitting in a broken-down old car where the windows, air con and stereo don’t work. We might be singing jingles from the golden age of advertising, but ultimately, we don’t care and we will happily move on.

Dear Kam,
My parents are always going on about how the air used to be clear. I say, “You did it. You clean it up.” I thought that up myself.
Smoky Eyes

Somebody from my father’s generation once told me how his family tried to escape from the Japanese army back in 1942. They took a boat upriver to hide. The thing that struck him was that when he looked down from the boat, the water of the big and wide river was crystal clear. I simply can’t imagine that. I didn’t even know that our rivers could be crystal clear and just assumed that they are naturally muddy. Now I’m becoming an old-timer myself and I would have trouble trying to explain the delights of stopping at a rest house to a young person. Each generation has seen something that has gone and we just get used to it and settle into the new normal. I wonder if young people growing up today even realise that the air over KL used to be clear. You know, a bit like during Chinese New Year but more so.

Perhaps we’ve become so used to living in a system that just makes it up as it goes along and we now lack the ability for actions of long-term boldness, but our rivers and air must be made clear again. It’s just not right for each generation of Malaysians to be handing over to the next an increasingly degraded environment — “Congratulations, you’ve just inherited Malaysia. I broke it. Whatever.” Sounds like an opportunity for a “study tour” in, I don’t know, London sounds nice. I hear you can still pick up a property bargain if you pay with cash.

Reprinted with the kind permission of