Does every Australian audience want to be spoken to in the same way?
When previous cyclones blew through the Top End, some brands turned up for the clean-up. Others posted about it.
Up here in the NT, everybody knew which was which.
That kind of thing is both common and easy to spot in a place this small. But it’s not just a Territory thing, it happens everywhere and raises a question – in a country bolted together as a federation of states, with remote regions and vastly different tribes of people and perspectives, how should brands talk to avoid the tyranny of distance, or at least the perceptions thereof?
Why is this important… because the one thing I know about Australians wherever they are is that they don’t like to be put into a bucket.
While this may sometimes be difficult to see from the manicured windows of Surry Hills or St.Kilda Road, most brands understand this. It’s just common sense in a country our size. Yet some, obsessed with ‘efficiency’, choose to ignore this Australian condition. Believe me when I say it is noticed.
‘Consistency’ isn’t the debate – a brand needs one voice, one promise, one reason to exist. But nuance matters. McDonald’s a prime example: same brand, same promise, same golden arches everywhere, but in Australia it answers to ‘Maccas’ and builds campaigns around the Maccas run. Coke did the same thing: ‘Share Happiness’ was the brand platform, and here it became Share a Coke. The idea didn’t change but the way it communicated did.
Maybe the origins of this issue lie in the absorption of regional data into national numbers. Averages tell you what most people do, most of the time. But “most people” isn’t a real audience. It’s a blend. Drop that blend into a place like the Northern Territory, and parts of it stop working. Not because the broad data was wrong but because it lacked the insights necessary to leverage nuance.
The point is that that looking through the lens of a local adds something that broad numbers can’t. Data tells you what might happen. A local tells you why it will happen, and whether the same thing will happen three thousand k’s up the road.
Some of the best insights I’ve had never came from a dashboard. They came from having a yarn with some grey nomads at a roadhouse down the track, and from mates telling me why shoulder season is their favourite time of year. Same as the Cyclone clean-up. None of it replaces the data, it just adds another level of new data that might just be irreplaceable.
Brands that go to this effort up here are appreciated and loved. And again, people can tell. One strong idea told like you know the place, that doesn’t feel posted in from head office – that’s harder than running a template. But people up here remember which brands bothered.
