Dave McCaughan Part 2 | Responding To Shifting Consumer Demographics In Asia

The Negotiation

This episode of The Negotiation features part 2 of our conversation with Dave McCaughan. Dave McCaughan is a Marketing Thought Leader and Storyteller. He has spent the last three decades in Asia Pacific leading strategy planning and in senior management roles with McCann, one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies. He joined McCann in 1986 in his native Sydney, where he built the Strategic Planning function, and since 1995 has been based in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo leading regional strategy and communications campaign development for clients like Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nestle, Cathay Pacific, Sunstar, Hitachi, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. In 2015 Dave launched BIBLIOSEXUAL, which works with brands to bring together his long-term passion for understanding the relationship between form and content.

In this episode, we continue the discussion by talking about Japanese consumer trends, youth marketing, and how it has changed over the years, product placement and decision fatigue. Dave then shares his thoughts on how brands should pay attention to older consumers in Japan (a category with growing influence and purchasing power). Finally, we do a deep-dive into the topic of toilets, and how Dave got involved with them. Enjoy!

Topics Discussed and Key Points:

● Japan’s changing population demographics

● Manga mongers

● Youth Marketing

● Mobile gaming as an impactful medium

● The K-Pop revolution in Asia

● The attention economy

● The silver population and how consumer brands need to engage them

● Cost of customer acquisition versus the lifetime value

● Why the future globally is all about aging populations

Notable Quotes

“If you watched Western movies made in the eighties, American Hollywood movies, there was a big thing that Japan was about to overtake the world. Right? It was going to buy out everything.”

"The more people got used to Korea as a cool place, the more they're going to feel good about buying Korean brands.”

“Statistics say that for people under 30, the number one medium that they engage in every day is mobile games - as in the amount of time they put into it. And it's usually somewhere between 3 to 4 hours a day.”

“Sometimes we think of gaming as entertainment. We don't think of it as media. In the same way that we might think of television as media, right? But mobile gaming is a medium.”

“The truth is that if you want to get people's attention, young, young people, particularly in Asia, the thing they're paying attention to is this the screen on their mobile phone.”

“When you look at the numbers and you find out in nearly every category - yes, it might be an advantage to have a repertoire of, you know, five or six flavors. But the truth is that two flavors will always sell 80, 85, 90% of all your product.”

“We're finding out that people seem to be fatigued because they're bored. Right? It's not necessarily that they are really fed up with something or that they don't like [it] - they want something else.”

“The single most powerful medium in the world to get your brand success is word of mouth. It is people who like your product or your service, talking to other people about why they like it and getting them to try it.”

“Very soon we're going to get to the point where 25% of the world's population is over 60.”

“Other institutions have sort of shown that people in their sixties are as adaptable and probably have adapted to more new technologies [over their lives] than people under 30. Because for people under 30, there has been no major new technology for 25 years.”