Motive: Feed a Child and the cost of getting cultural language wrong

by DK Badenhorst. There is no way to tell the story of starving children in a lovely way. There is just no nice way of saying ‘millions of children eat less than a domestic dog’. But a cultural understanding of your market will make you aware of any minefield you’re heading into. And don’t assume that, because you are from the place, you’ll know.

Sparked outrage

A recent ad from Feed a Child has sparked outrage amongst South Africans. The one-minute commercial depicts a black child living as a domestic animal in the home of a clearly upmarket residence. The storyline is simple: the average domestic dog eats better than millions of children.

Somehow, this ad has pushed a button for South Africans, who claim that it’s comparing black people to dogs, opening up the slow-healing wounds inflicted between 1948 and 1994. The anger and shock have not been focused on the disturbing fact about child nutrition; instead, they’ve been about the child being black.

Not that this is the first ad that has had white or black people in it. Countless fashion and fragrance ads depict white people as wealthy and an equal amount often show black people as labourers, lower-income earners and even homeless.

The outrage feels a bit like a mother being concerned about her new carpet when her child has a gaping wound from a gunshot inside the home. Yes, the carpet is new, but you might want to secure your child’s survival first.

Open up some elbow room

To elbow open some space for my point of view, I’d like to take a look at this Levi’s ad that ran in that dreadful period when we all started getting to terms with what Ninja Loans meant.

The ad reads: “This country was not built by men in suits.” A brilliant line that resonates with the past and the present.

People harbored a resentment towards men in suits – they were, after all, the people who, with a sleight of hand, managed to steer the global economy into a recession.

But then there is also the cowboy. And few things are more American than cowboys.

The Levi’s ad manages to capture the entire story of the cowboy in one image: the bachelor on a mission. At home in the wild, working hard to ensure that good prevails and that a future gets built.

The power of cultural narrative

This strong sense of personal freedom and adherence to reputation still drives the American red states and Steven Pinker writes some fascinating insights about it in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. It’s easy to spot this in the Levi’s ad and you’d be excused for staring at communication for a little while longer than you should. It’s tempting to let your mind drift over the next hill to see what awaits our hero.

This is the power of a cultural narrative.

But what narrative did the Feed a Child ad tap into? Unfortunately, not the pet one.

The first problem is that, as a species, until quite recently, we’ve been treating each other like animals. The result? There are too many real narratives to remember and they completely overshadow the hypothetical narrative that argues that ‘if millions of kids were treated like this, they’d still be better off’.

So what do we see?

Not the same visual language

A lot of it probably lies in the performance of the child: there is a subservience that makes you think of a home-slave bringing his owner a newspaper, rather than a joyful dog executing his morning chore.

Core to the dog bringing a paper is happiness and reckless joy; core to the narrative of a slave is hopelessness and a complete absence of free will. The analogy simply does not carry the same visual language.

One does not have to dig too far to find the visual language of this commercial, not in pet ownership or starvation, but in slavery and oppression. The lacklustre glare, the sitting at the mistress’s feet, the eating out of her hands, the fearful and anxious glance from behind a chair all speak of that most dreadful instinct that our ancestors had to oppress and to make others conform.

Whether the modern day language is accurate or not is not the point. In our visual language, these images will carry the meaning of oppression and race discrimination, regardless of what else you want it to say. You simply cannot wring a different meaning out of a sign.

So how can this story be told?

Example one: The Boxer

I’ve written on political narratives in advertising before, using the example of Amstel’s The Boxer.

The narrative of ‘I have to fight hard to make it in life’ is a minefield of suffering, racism and apartheid stories. But Amstel did a brilliant job by borrowing from language that was forged by hard-working, failure-denying, stair-running Rocky Balboa.

It’s a strong narrative that can get you away from ‘the struggling black man’ to ‘an honest man on a mission’.

Example two: The Reader

Bell’s recently did a brilliant piece of work called The Reader. If you do not struggle to hold a tear back in this commercial, you either don’t understand the concept of having a father or you have no real emotion to speak of.

Here, too, you can see the potential for a narrative around the illiteracy of the apartheid generation. Instead, the commercial manages to thread its story around the pride and love of a father and a son’s appreciation of his father boldly stepping into his world. It’s no longer about the disempowerment of old people; it’s about the boldness of a father who cannot be deterred from wanting to understand his son’s world.

How to understand culture

We take culture for granted and, in order to understand it, first you should step out of it, disconnect and step back in with an objective mind.

Secondly, a semiotic analysis often yields some interesting pitfalls or inefficiencies. You want to say ‘power’, but you’re simply saying ‘reckless’. Or, in this case, you’d like to communicate ‘hungry child’, but you ended up communicating ‘oppression’.

This is a message worth sharing. South Africa needs to know that so many children are living in such conditions. The message is also not just an empty appeal to emotion; it’s a genuine effort from an NGO to increase donations in order to feed more children.

Decoding culture allows you to make sure that both the sender and the receiver of your message has the correct software needed to ensure that the message received contains the same information as the message sent.

Brands should aim to mirror language. Brand messages should carry clear, reliable and relevant meaning that help people make the statements they feel they should, but sometimes struggle to articulate.

DK Badenhorst is a cultural insight and semiotics consultant who brings cultural context and long-term trend insights to brand communication.

“Motive” is the new by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup.

 

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