How to Sell to The Poor and Functionally Illiterate

The kerfuffle over adverts for Horlicks and Maggi Noodles that were inadvertently broadcast in the UK has been illuminating for more reasons that any one article can describe: Row over ad for Horlicks ‘that makes children tall’.

Adverts for GlaxoSmithKline, producers of Horlicks, and Nestle, the makers of Maggi Noodles, included suggestions they could make children grow taller, do better at schoolwork, become faster at sports and stronger…

The advert concluded: ‘Children have become taller, stronger and sharper. The Horlicks challenge – now proven!’…

Neither advert would have passed regulations in the EU, where it is illegal to make unsubstantiated associations between foods and health claims…

They said they had passed the legal requirements for broadcast in Bangladesh, where they were aimed.

Advertisers can’t make unsubstantiated claims like that in the UK where there is generally easy access to sufficient food to ensure that children aren’t growth-restricted through lack of calories or macro-nutrients. However, it is legal to make those claims in countries where you might have substantial numbers of people who might have food-insecurity and may be under-nourished.

Recently Wall Street Journal argued that the “sheer force of numbers” and the impetus of globalization mean that more businesses will need to understand how to advertise themselves and their products to “subsistence consumers” with marginal access to education, healthcare and sanitation: Emerging Lessons.

As these consumers gain access to income and information over the next decade, their combined purchasing power, already in the trillions of dollars, likely will grow at higher rates than that of consumers in industrialized nations. The lesson for multinational companies: Understanding and addressing the needs of the world’s poorest consumers is likely to become a profitable, as well as a socially responsible, strategy.

A characteristic associated with low-income consumers, and one that has major implications for doing business with them, is that many struggle with reading and math. Like the 14% of Americans estimated to be functionally illiterate in a U.S. government survey, subsistence consumers have difficulty reading package labels, store signs or product-use instructions, or subtracting the purchase price of an item from cash on hand — all of which hampers their ability to put their limited incomes to best use.

This has some resonance with George Orwell’s self-consciously cynical depiction of the contrived frivolity of advertising and PR campaigns.

Gordon had a big job on hand at the moment. The Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. were sweeping the country with a monster campaign for their deodorant, April Dew. They had decided that B.O. and halitosis were worked out, or nearly, and had been racking their brains for a long time past to think of some new way of scaring the public. Then some bright spark suggested, What about smelling feet? That field had never been exploited and had immense possibilities. The Queen of Sheba [asked for] a really telling slogan; something in the class of ‘Night-starvation’–something that would rankle in the public consciousness like a poisoned arrow. Mr Warner had thought it over for three days and then emerged with the unforgettable phrase ‘P.P.’ ‘P.P.’ stood for Pedic Perspiration…It was so simple and so arresting. Once you knew what they stood for, you couldn’t possibly see those letters ‘P.P.’ without a guilty tremor. Gordon had searched for the word ‘pedic’ in the Oxford Dictionary and found that it did not exist. But Mr Warner has said, Hell! what did it matter, anyway? It would put the wind up them just the same. The Queen of Sheba had jumped at the idea, of course.
[George Orwell: Chapter 12, Keep the Aspidistra Flying]

However, the writers’ digression into the significance of concrete thinking for low literacy populations was disconcerting.

One of the key observations we made is that low-literacy consumers have difficulty with abstract thinking. These individuals tend to group objects by visualizing concrete and practical situations they have experienced…

Being anchored in the perceptual “here and now” also interferes with the ability of low-literacy consumers to perform mathematical computations, especially those framed in abstract terms…

We found that low-literacy consumers spend so much time and mental energy on what many of us can do quickly and with little thought that they have little time to base purchase decisions on anything other than surface attributes such as size, color or weight.

They tend to think in pictures…

Disconcerting, because it seems like an awkward re-hash of some of the misinterpretations surrounding Basil Bernstein’s work on concrete, abstract, restricted and elaborate linguistic codes.

Crudely, thinking is characterised as concrete or abstract. Concrete thinking can be caricatured as over-literal, lacking in metaphor and grounded in the personal and particular situations. The usual example is that when asked to discuss the intention behind the phrase “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” one response might be, “You might break the glass” rather than a caution against judging other people. The assumption was that concrete thinking places boundaries on reality and an individual’s ability to cope with it.

However, the advertising in question is expressed in statements of superiority for branded foodstuffs: ‘Drinking Horlicks makes children taller, higher-achieving and stronger’. This looks like two companies are advertising to “subsistence consumers” by expertly addressing their fears; this is possibly not a novel strategy for either of them. Deficiencies in macro-nutrients may well be widespread in these targeted communities.

Attributing the particular vulnerability of “subsistence consumers” to functional illiteracy seems to be under-selling some remarkable skill-sets: it fails to acknowledge the tremendous amount of work that goes into writing legally-watertight small print, and creating alluring and purposefully-elusive-to-the-point-of-being-deceptive advertising copy. Beyond that, people and industries have made fortunes based on the emotional intelligence of knowing how to sell products by trading on relationships, trust and borrowing authority from others.

Industry specialists have worked very hard to make sure that such practices conform to relevant laws and guidelines in various countries and they deserve their full measure of dubious credit for that. It’s not just “subsistence consumers” or people who are functionally illiterate that are susceptible to direct or indirect advertising or the manipulation of information sources: providers of news stories and advertisers are creating a softer version of gaslighting.

Tags: Advertising Standards Association, ASA, functional illiteracy, GSK, Horlicks, Maggi Noodles, Nestle