Walk around the streets of Hong Kong and you will eventually see print advertisements for Giordano, Bossini and Baleno clothing stores. Although considered local brands catering to a local market, most of the models you see on the ads appear outright Nordic Caucasian or westernized Eurasians. If you do see Asians, they will have the more aquiline and lighter skinned features of North East Asians and not the shorter, darker and more ethnic features of South East Asian people, which abound in Hong Kong. Observe some of the luxury ads for jewelry, fine spirits, and even technology products and you can spot the same trend of using models and locales quite divorced from the reality of the target consumer base.
Implicit within the images and the lifestyle that they depict involve the value system that comes packaged for consumption. Essentially these ads, as well as other luxury ads, say to consumers to purchase the item and be associated with the type of people or group depicted in the ads. The brands create a world that had been forbidden or unaffordable to local consumers ...until now. Analyze advertisements for luxury goods and you will see similar coded signals of affluence and social status. In order to reinforce the illusion of exclusivity, luxury brands exude a message denoting that elite membership and respectability can only be bought through the ownership of particular expensive status props and other vulgar displays of wealth.
To be fair to advertisers, these ads also provide consumers a fantasy around the product of quality and exotica through images of what successful people in foreign lands use and purchase. It would seem reasonable that ads for foreign wines or foreign watches should depict the main and original customer base of these products - foreigners. However, a residual effect and underlying theme that resounds through advertisement in Hong Kong reinforces both the fear of inferiority and the validation of success though material consumption. Unfortunately, products do so through the elevation of one ethnic group versus the implicit denigration of another.
Advertisers call this aspirational marketing since the group that gets targeted aspires to be like what the people depicted in the advertisement seem to be - successful and trendy. Hong Kong, more so than any other Asian city, suffers from an inferiority complex that causes it to promote and display the trappings of wealth and prosperity like a shield to justify its apparent sudden rise as a center of commerce. In a city where everyone aspires to be rich, advertisements dictate to people what to buy and feel.
The raw message states that foreign products and foreign people are better - local products and local people are worse. Throughout most of Asia, the same message gets echoed again and again: global brands vs. local brands, foreign education vs. local education, and foreign workers vs. local workers. In many cases, particularly in very poor countries, foreign products do provide better quality than local products. Local consumers can even see qualitative differences themselves and form their own opinions by testing or buying the products if they were not so blinded by the brand message that advertising reinforces. What is lacking in local consumers however versus western consumers is a healthy dose of cynical product skepticism and a critical facility to decode and deconstruct product messages derived from decades of being bombarded by modern advertising in the West. Local consumers develop brand impressions with less defenses than westerners which in itself is not bad. However, when the brand messages depict a hierarchy of self worth drawn by ethnic and socioeconomic lines, than the ads become more than product pitches but a tyrannical arbitrator of value systems
Visitors and foreign residents of Hong Kong complain that they find the city both crass and the people materialistic, which in many cases can be justified. However, given the history of the former British colony and the context of why people are here how could Hong Kong be any other way in this phase of its history? Both local and expatriates alike come to Hong Kong either as economic refugees or wealth conquistadors out to make their fortune.
Many of the Chinese residents of Hong Kong are only a few generations from the peasant fields of China so they strive to validate their success and achievement by living and purchasing the good life that they can now afford and can legally attain. It was only in the 60's or 70's that the Chinese allowed to join some of the British clubs or even live in certain neighborhoods within Hong Kong. Hong Kong society has always been stratified by the colonial structure so that even without a colonial ruler a hierarchy will still exist for decades to come.
In any hierarchy, it becomes important to display your status through outward appearances of rank and wealth. Advertising just taps into this most primal of needs to sell widgets and services. As China and most of Asia develops emerging middle classes striving to rise above their ancestor's poverty, they are easy prey to media messages of rank and validation through consumer goods. However, when these images involve the subtle messages of race and class, the filters, the critics, and the pundits that abound in the West are far and few here in Asia. It took a few decades of media bombardment for America's Generation X to develop the cynical and jaded outlook towards advertisements that led to a robust skepticism of the hype and fantasy of advertising. Here in Asia, consumers are like newborns still in awe of the technology and their new found prosperity. They place more literal emphasis on the messages that advertising conveys than those in the west. Which is why ads that depict an implicit inferiority of local culture and the superiority of global western culture becomes problematic.
When consumers from China, the Philippines, Thailand and the rest of Asia refuse to use local products and prefer only imports regardless of quality, than the power of the brand has scored a hit. When local culture looks upon the ads and sees that their skin color is not light enough, their height not tall enough, their noses not long enough, their muscle tone not bulky enough, their breast not large enough, and their eyes not large enough, than the brand know as western image has just impoverished billions of people to emotional poverty.
