Hidden Connections That Transcend Borders and Defy Stereotypes | Aparna Bharadwaj | TED

I've lived and worked in some very diverse countries around the world.

I was born in India, but I grew up in Iran.

I remember I was about eight years old, as a child in Iran,

with my family watching the beautiful festival of Nowruz.

Nowruz is celebrated usually at night with families gathered around a bonfire.

They share food. They sing songs.

Sometimes they even jump over the fire for good luck.

And I remember how deeply that reminded me of another festival called Lohri,

celebrated all the way over in India,

also with families gathered around a bonfire, sharing food,

singing songs together.

Even an eight-year-old child can tell

how profoundly similar those two events look

in two sets of countries that are culturally so different.

Like a kind of hidden connection.

As an adult, I’ve spent 20 years of my life

studying consumers all over the world.

What they feel, what they believe in

and how they act upon those beliefs when they buy things.

And of course, a big part of my job is to truly understand

the diversity that exists in the world.

But maybe because of my upbringing,

what truly fascinates me is when we find these hidden connections,

these secret similarities between people where you least expect them.

Today I want to share some of that magic with you,

bring you into my world.

And we are going to go do some detective work

on the world's consumers together.

Stay with me, because I think

there's a message of hope in here for all of us.

Before we start, let's have a think

about how companies, businesses are organized today,

how they operate today.

Most commonly, companies are organized by regions, subregions.

That's how supply chains, organizations are set up.

And if it's not geographies, then it's some other thumb rule.

It could be linked to some common historic period.

So, for example, the Commonwealth countries.

It could be linked to common religious roots.

For example, I've been a part of a lot of discussions

on the halal economy.

It could be something, anything

that allows us to put the world into neat little boxes,

neat little clusters, that explain why people are similar or different.

But I realized that when you study the consumers

and when you go deep,

it's interesting how none of that applies.

How wrong some of that thinking can be.

Let me show you.

About a year ago, a team of us set out to understand

how consumers exercise choice around the world.

In this process, we interacted with over 40,000 consumers

in 18 countries around the world.

We asked them many, many questions about their mindsets to start with.

So, for example, your worldview, your personal philosophy.

Do you feel optimistic? Do you have a love for technology?

Do you care about peer approval? Things like that.

But we also tried to study some very specific consumer behavior.

So, for example, what do you look for when you buy a snack

or you buy a beverage or luxury products?

What needs are you trying to fulfill?

As you can imagine, there was a ton of data

for the geek insiders to go crazy with, right?

I love that type of data.

So anyway, we take all that data, and we start to draw correlations.

We start running all these analyses.

And we come up with this kind of a proximity analysis.

Quite simply, every green dot represents people of a particular country.

The closer the green dot is to the map in the middle,

the more similar the mindsets are for those two sets of countries.

And the further the dot from the map,

the more diverse the mindsets for those countries.

It's as simple as that.

So of course, when you do this for the US,

you can see that the Canadians, the people of the UK and the Australians

are very similar in mindsets to the Americans.

Now we had been studying consumers for a long time

and the whole team fully expected

that we were going to see a lot of clusters come through,

based on some of those thumb rules that I talked about earlier.

So imagine our surprise.

We run this data and we find very little clustering

based on any of those thumb rules.

We didn't, for example, find an Asian culture cluster.

We didn't find a European cluster.

Nothing like it.

In fact, we found 90-percent correlation between the Americans and the Australians.

Two sets of people on the literal opposite ends of the world.

Can you imagine that? How amazing is that?

And this is a big deal, by the way,

because businesses, companies operate, govern themselves,

entirely on the basis of these clusters that we found didn't even exist.

And believe me, we tested a bunch of thumb rules.

And the interesting part was

that it was not as if you can find new thumb rules

to replace the old ones that don't work.

The answer was kind of technical, actually.

It was: just don't do it.

Resist the urge to find any kind of thumb rules to explain the world.

These are only propagating stereotypes.

So then we said, OK, if all these thumb rules don't work,

how do you make sense of all the diversity that we see around us?

How do we put some patterns? How do we understand it?

So then we started to study the specific consumer behavior I talked about.

What do you look for when you buy insurance?

What do you need when you buy beverages?

When you buy apparel, cars, things like that?

And here we found something that was even more profound, I think.

Let me show you.

So this time I'm using China as the base market.

Again, as before, green dots, overall mindsets.

Now you can see immediately when you see this chart

that the Chinese are such a unique group of consumers.

The inner circle is empty.

The second circle is also empty.

Then you start to see India, Mexico, a couple of other markets.

But the correlation shows not a lot of similarity

between the Chinese and those group of customers.

So clearly, China stands apart.

Very unique group of consumers.

But we notice Japan on the top left here.

The Japanese are so diverse from the Chinese.

And yet I know so many businesses that put Japan and China

as neighboring countries in the North Asia cluster.

That's so common.

It's so wrong.

Anyway, I digress. I get very excited with this stuff.

(Laughter)

So then, coming back to the point,

on top of it, we overlaid these black dots.

The black dots are now the needs when you snack.

So what motivates you when you reach out for a snack?

That's the black dots.

And when we did that and we studied it, we found a hidden connection.

I don't know if you can already see it, but I'm going to circle it for you.

We found that the Indonesians,

the Saudi Arabians and consumers of the UAE

snack in very similar ways to the Chinese.

Let's think about it for a second.

These are Muslim countries.

Very different culture, very different background to the Chinese.

And yet they snack is similar ways.

How cool is that? Right?

And similar how?

Well, for first, in all of these countries,

snacking is a moment of social indulgence.

It's something you do as a group.

So people snack in groups, they share the snacks.

They often buy a hot snack that they purchase from a hawker or a food court.

Somebody prepares it fresh for them.

The quality is not guaranteed. It's very important.

They snack in similar ways.

In contrast, the Americans, over on the top left,

snack very differently.

Americans snack alone.

(Laughter)

They don't share their snacks.

It's often at their desk in a package,

very different from the rest of the countries.

Now I wonder, do the Chinese and the Indonesians know

that they snack similarly?

I seriously doubt that.

But what a beautifully human thing to know, right?

And valuable, too.

Imagine what a Chinese snacking company can do with this insight.

A lot, right?

Let's take you to another one.

I'll show you another one.

Still staying with China.

The green dots are still the mindsets,

but this time the black dots are how you buy cars,

what you look for when you buy an automotive product.

Now again, I guess you guys are getting better with this now.

But here's the hidden connections.

We found -- and I'll name a few countries,

there's quite a few similar to China, but two that I'll call out.

South Africans and Nigerians buy cars with similar motivations as the Chinese.

In all these countries, your car, your ride, is a status symbol.

It tells your peer group who you are.

So your car needs to show you’ve arrived in life,

and it's a very external point of influence.

What will others think if I drive this particular vehicle?

In contrast, look at the Germans at the bottom.

Very different, very internal, very personal.

Your car has to be fun to drive.

That's very, very important.

And who blames them, right? With those beautiful autobahns.

Lovely roads, no speed limits.

Of course you want your car to be a fun ride, right?

But wait, look at the French now.

The French are very different from the Germans.

They want their cars to be reliable to navigate narrow roads.

So there you have it.

Two countries, France and Germany, neighboring countries, European countries,

very different motivations.

And then a couple of African countries

similar to the Chinese in the way they buy cars.

No clustering, no business group will ever put these countries together.

But maybe a road trip from Beijing to Lagos is just going to do the trick.

Who knows?

Anyway, one more, last one.

Indulge me, just to rub it in.

So here's another one. We're coming back to the US this time.

Again, green is the mindset,

but the black this time is how you buy clothing, apparel.

Now remember we talked about how the Americans and the Canadians

are very similar in mindsets earlier?

And we also talked about, you know -- of course,

they are closely connected neighbors as well.

Now, however, they don’t buy apparel the same way.

The Americans buy things that are on-trend.

They're looking to indulge.

The Canadians look for utility.

They are looking for apparel that can be good for adventure,

and a love of outdoor sports is critical here.

But controversially, the Russians buy apparel

in very similar way to the Americans,

also looking for something that’s on-trend,

also looking to indulge.

Now to say that there've been tensions between these two countries

is a serious understatement, right?

And yet they have this one beautiful connection.

They have one thing in common.

What a lovely idea. Right?

Now I could go on and on.

I showed you just a few examples today.

But we found this over and over again.

Category by category.

Country pair by country pair.

We saw this in all kinds of things,

like luxury, beverages, insurance, you name it.

We found these connections everywhere.

And I don't mean any of this to belittle the massive, beautiful diversity

that we see in consumers around us.

That's exactly why consumers are such an important study

for people like me.

But I think this work shows that mankind is connected

in a profound way that we never imagined.

It also shows that these connections defy any stereotypes

that you and I or businesses can come up with.

These are patterns where you least expect them.

And in these connections, of course, there are commercial opportunities

for marketeers who can embrace this insight.

Of course, it's commercially valuable.

But today, I want to go a step further, if you permit me.

I think in these connections,

there's also a message of hope for the world.

We live in a world that has globalized for more than four decades,

and yet we're getting torn apart, shaped by the geopolitics of our time.

Countries are falling into blocs.

Fault lines are appearing everywhere.

I'm not a specialist in geopolitics.

I'm just a student of the consumer.

But when I look at this data and I think about it,

if only people knew that we are similar in the most profound ways

in some of our most everyday activities,

in the way we sip a cup of coffee,

taste a snack, try on a new outfit or test drive a car,

how beautiful would that be?

Maybe if we knew that,

we would also learn to understand and empathize with each other.

It's a lovely thought to reflect on maybe with your next cup of coffee.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)