David McCaughan describes the first ten years of his working life as a children’s librarian in Australia as “sitting on the floor, telling stories to children.” Now, as Director of Strategy and Content at McCann Worldgroup here in Japan, he says, “I spend my day with a bunch of (big) kids, making up stories for other people.” He moved around the world for a few years, including a year spent working as a butler for a “mad Italian duke,” before moving into the McCann group as an advisor on Australian cultural norms. The appointment came about largely as the result of a thesis he had written on a political campaign masterminded by McCann (he laughingly describes this as “mainly helping them to understand the accent”), a function now described as “strategy planning.”
Photography by Hiromi Iguchi
Journal: What does the job of Strategic Planning involve?
David McCaughan: You need to be able to understand local culture: What people are about, what drives and motivates them, what people really want, what our clients have to offer, and how to bring these together.
We have many people studying cultural factors—what people are learning from drama shows, from pop music, the effect that Korean drama shows have had on Japanese housewives, that sort of thing. Then we can look at how these influence people’s views of the world and their potential buying habits. Sometimes it’s simple things, reminding us of the basics.
Journal: Can you give examples?
McCaughan: There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about aging society, and the over-60s. Many people think of these retired guys as tired old salarymen in a dark suit at the end of their working life. What we see is the original rock ‘n’ roll fan. In 2007, when this generation started to retire, one of the biggest growth industries in the country was electric guitars as these guys put together the bands they’d played in 35 or 40 years previously. But talking to marketers, they’re written off as old and dying.
There’s this disconnect between having the longest-lived population in the world, and writing them off at 60. An average 60-year-old woman in Tokyo today will live to be 93—she’s got a third of her life to go. It’s ridiculous to suggest that this is the end of her life.
Another example: 35-year-old women married for three or four years with 3-year-old kids. One thing we forget is that they were OLs for most of their life, members of one of the biggest spending groups in the world. Why is this pattern going to change when they’re married? Of course it doesn’t, which is why we see a range of fashion and products reaching married mothers which would have been unimaginable some 20 years ago. Women are playing more roles, and more fluid roles.
So we put this kind of thing together, and figure out new products and new ideas. A lot of this is done in-house. We publish reports, get out and conduct workshops and so on for our clients, explaining what’s going on.
Some of this is built into contracts, some of it is one-off commissioned work, and some of it is done to attract and grow business. This business has always been about bringing news to clients, you have to tell them about new ideas. If you just wait for people to walk in with a brief, you’d be out of business very quickly.
Journal: This is much more than being an advertising agency—more like being a marketing consultancy?
McCaughan: We try not to call ourselves an advertising agency, because we don’t believe we’re in the “ad agency” business. We like to define ourselves as being in the “demand creation” business. It’s our job to help create demand for our clients’ brands. It’s our job to go and find out what people are interested in, what they want, what they’re afraid of, and find out how the client’s brand is going to help answer those needs, and thereby create demand for the brand.
As an example, a few years back we went to the Acuvue contact lens company and said there was a demand here for a contact lens with a black ring embedded. “Why?” they asked. Because of the Japanese and Korean ideals of beauty related to larger eyes—gibberish if you live outside these societies, but producing this lens created a demand where people who wouldn’t normally buy contact lenses could enhance their looks without resorting to surgery.
