NU 12#1 - New Product/Service Beer "Pong" by A de la Cruz

Anna Mae Dela Cruz  4

S10

I was playing beer pong the other night when a friend made a comment that got wheels turning in my head.  He said that the beer pong must be great for the beer business.  We consume at least four bottles in every round, play a good ten rounds per night, and are surrounded by a crowd of people who likewise grab beers from the cooler.  A sensible conclusion, but one which I felt rested on some critical assumptions.  For instance, the game isn't very well-known within local circles, even among the bar-going twenty-somethings.  Patrons are mostly students or alumni from international schools, who even hold competitions on it.  That night we were also joined by a couple of Korean tourists who made us realize that our local beer culture isn't very well-developed either.  There are countless beer games in Korea, they said, and they shared common game mechanics that proved their games are certainly more structured than ours usually are.

What I'm trying to put forward is not a new product or service—beer pong—or even ways to promote beer sales through beer pong.  What the experience made me realize is that we need to look into the process of marketing new ideas.  Beer pong will only be great for the beer business if the local beer culture supports it.  We could have commercials showing people having a grand time playing the game, and thus indirectly drive beer sales up by promoting beer-consuming activities.  However that will not work if people cannot relate—if beer pong is perceived to be new and alienating rather than fun and familiar.  Therefore if marketing executives decide to use beer games to drive beer sales, they must begin by modifying the existing beer culture to make beer games more popular—say, by sponsoring beer pong tournaments, designing commercials in ways that introduce these games, or subtly putting photos and posts on beer games in social media.  A new product must fit the culture it's in.  If it doesn't, change the culture, or change the product.  One way or another, these two must fit.

Considering the local culture is second-nature to professional marketers, hence there is nothing new about this process in the corporate world (though some still mess it up).  However it's an idea that could sure use greater use in other industries—the development industry, for example, where business and management competencies are in short supply and where they must be applied to more complex situations.  Social health insurance, for example, only fits into a certain sociocultural environment—one where the sense of social solidarity is strong.  In fact a health systems forecast conducted by the World Economic Forum in partnership with McKinsey reveals that one of the "critical uncertainties" that will shape health systems in the future is attitudes on solidarity, precisely because it is a key factor in determining the selection and design of social health insurance mechanisms.  The choice of health financing mechanisms (of which social health insurance is only one) must consider the culture, lest we end up trying to fit square pegs into round holes.  That is exactly what we are doing here—trying to push for social health insurance in a culture where social solidarity is weak to non-existent.  Traditional means for promoting things like PhilHealth must change to either build a culture that supports social health insurance, or to bypass the problem.  The same goes for the internal problems faced by such government agencies:  Back then it was my task build a balanced scorecard for the corporation.  Another square peg in a round hole.  Such a scorecard cannot thrive in a culture and structure that is not conducive to performance, hence I designed the initiative to implicitly and explicitly transform attitudes and practices on performance—an approach that was lost when I left the company, and which I perhaps should have communicated better to the team that inherited my tasks.  Depending on the context, creating a product-culture fit can be as easy as putting together a few creative marketing tactics, or as hard as transforming entrenched cultures, fighting political battles, and modifying laws and institutions.  But the point is, that fit must either exist in the first place or first be created.  Otherwise, that we encounter resistance to good ideas should not surprise us.

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