Anthro-Marketing in Sri Lanka: Humanising Brands through Cultural Insight for a Creative Economy
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Whatever the businesses you are engaging with, you should read your customers well. As we know, customers are always changing, and on the surface level, sometimes you can only read them without understanding their inner feelings, values, and emotions. If you are capable of anthro-marketing, then you can explore more with better positioning of your brand.And also, you can think of some more tactics for customer retention. Ultimately, you can make more human-centric decisions in the long run, aligning with customer engagement. Sri Lanka is a country with many variations across different sectors. We can observe the mix between Urban & rural segments. Even you can see variation from start ups to small businesses in Galle or Kandy, and they are dealing with different customers. An anthro-marketer at one time can be an observer and sometimes a participant, and an analyst.She (he) is always looking to understand the relationship between products and the pattern of consumption.It is all about the application of methods and insights from anthropology in marketing. Even in Sri Lanka, we can have different cultural, religious, and traditional events align with Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher traditions; religious festivals; local flavour; elephant processions etc.If you want to have a branded tea for different segments, sometimes you need to conduct proper research on the rituals of elderly people.And also there is a need to understand the challenges and opportunities of Anthro-Marketing in the current dynamic business landscape as well.
To implement Anthro-Marketing, you need to have more time, resources, and expertise. Your knowledge of both subject domains of marketing and anthropology is important. Additionally, you should have experience in this area. It is not like surveys and all traditional methods. You need to be equipped with skills and patience. And also an understanding of customers’ inner emotions and needs might be challenging in the process of interpretation. Additionally, one anthropological insight in a given culture might be different from another culture, so you need to have different strategies to adapt and align with brand consistency. Anyway, if you have these competencies and capabilities, you will get many rewards. .In that context, it is important to have a real reading of customers by looking at their lived experience and with different perspectives.
We can even think of aligning Anthro-marketing with the creative economy as well. What we have to understand is the importance of moving away from traditional markets such as manufacturing and seeing the creative industries as a key strategy in a new knowledge economy(Abeysekera,2011).As an example, we can see the implications of Anthro-marketing in the area of the creative economy called “music Industry”. A few years ago, Sri Lanka witnessed a remarkable success story in viral marketing through the glocalisation of the song “Manike Mage Hithe.”. The Manike Mage Hithe cover by Yohani and Satheeshan has exceeded watched million views mainly in India and the globe by translating the same into Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. We saw Amitabh Bachchan, one of the most iconic figures in Indian cinema, express his admiration for the Sri Lankan song ‘Manike Mage Hithe’ in a post on his blog. This can be considered one of the historical events in the music industry in Sri Lanka. If you need to “go global,” we need to understand the global trends and all environmental factors. Such trendy songs like Manike Mage Hithe clearly resonate with the new generations (Y, Z, and Gen A). When viewed through the lens of Antro-Marketing and supported by smart strategies, they open pathways for the next level of promotion that can strengthen national branding.
I think the time has come for Sri Lanka to have a paradigm shift in the economy. In Sri Lanka, we continue to focus on traditional exports such as tea, rubber, coconut, and garments. However, to stay competitive in the global market, we need to think beyond the conventional and explore innovative approaches—even if it means pushing our resources to their full potential. It has been years since we discussed ‘creative economy,’ and we can see how we can incorporate Antro-marketing into this context, which can be used as a new strategy for the country in order to achieve sustainable economic development.
(The writer is a Professor in Management Studies, Open University of Sri Lanka and you can reach Professor Abeysekera at nabey@ou.ac.lk )
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