Marketing, Storytelling and Connecting with Diverse Perspectives with Tony Lee

Brian: Today we are talking with Tony Lee, Head of Strategy at LEXIGO. Tony started his marketing career in the mid-nineties when Yahoo was the number one search engine and Beanie Babies were all the rage. With decades of experience helping brands launch, communicate, and grow, he has worked across commercial, not-for-profit, and government sectors developing marketing communication for everything from baby products to burial plots. Tony has also dedicated the last few years championing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, especially within the LGBTIQ+ community with leadership and board positions at Minus18, Switchboard Victoria, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and the Victorian Pride Centre. He also lectures in marketing, brand management, and digital marketing strategy at RMIT University. Tony, welcome back to The Native Experience.

Tony: Great to be here.

Brian: Tell us about yourself and what you are nerding out on right now.

Tony: I am Tony Lee, Head of Strategy at LEXIGO. I have been in this position for about two years. I help with intercultural communication campaigns, taking campaigns and looking at efficacy in communicating with multicultural audiences and working out ways to improve communication to reach the intended audiences. I have been in the industry for over 25 years.

Tony: When I first came to Australia as a little kid, I was one of very few Asian people in the school. I had a great fascination with culture and was very curious about other people's cultures. I grew a fascination with advertising. I saw advertising as a little window into the zeitgeist of society, what people were talking about and interested in. I found it fascinating to see representations of lifestyles and ideas I would not have been exposed to. I built a career out of that fascination.

Tony: I have seen the communications industry morph from media and marketing having control over the message, through social media adoption, to what we have today with streaming and individuals having greater access to channels and the ability to create and co-create messages. What I find interesting is how multicultural marketing communications seems to be behind in meeting this pace. I am fascinated to see how AI and emerging technology will enhance the way we communicate in intercultural ways.

Brian: I have come to the conclusion that marketing is a strong level of influencing someone on how to think and act. Sometimes it is done negatively, sometimes beautifully. It is a way of communicating where people make a choice. Am I making sense?

Tony: Absolutely. Communication involves a sender and a receiver. In marketing, the sender is paying to create communication to reflect a behaviour, attitude, or action they want the receiver to take. Marketing communication represents part of culture. Communication is culture and culture is communication. Rather than just being a mirror of society, marketing has a powerful role to shape the way we see culture and see ourselves reflected in that culture.

Brian: Let us use the Barbie movie as an example. Have you seen it?

Tony: Yeah, it is a great movie.

Brian: I have noticed that a lot of TV shows started integrating real-life issues into fictional universes. That began the agendas. Marketing, on the other hand, is more subtle in influencing someone. Is marketing more effective than some of the messages TV shows are trying to achieve?

Tony: Marketing is essentially delivering a message from sender to receiver. That message is engineered and orchestrated based on who we are talking to. A good marketer will always know who they are talking to, their motivations, goals, and pain points. They present a solution to a problem that the consumer may not even know they had. There is consumer psychology and research behind it, but there is also an agenda that a marketer seeks to enforce.

Tony: I think the multiverse is a huge device used by storytellers to reimagine or retcon problematic aspects of history. This is bleeding into communication. There is this idea that you cannot necessarily trust the information you are seeing. A lot of communication now focuses on establishing trust. When you are a storyteller, you are creating a universe. Marketers are storytellers too. They create the rules of that universe, the codes people pick up from language and imagery, and invite audiences in to spend time there.

Brian: I have never heard a marketer explain it like that. All of a sudden I realised, I already do that. I am a storyteller trying to communicate solutions. You said marketers are trying to provide a solution. That is one of the biggest things that sets marketing apart.

Tony: Marketing often provides the solution. Usually the marketer is the hero of the plot. But increasingly, marketing needs to make the customer the hero. They are the ones telling their story. Your product is a plot device that has to be relevant for that hero's story.

Tony: I think about brand as being the story. I always say to my students at RMIT, a brand is a story that has always been told. A brand is a promise you keep with every touchpoint. When the story changes, your relationship with it changes too. If it does not fit, you might find it jarring. The careful tension for storytellers and marketers is how to change the story in a way that brings the audience along without alienating them. This is becoming more difficult as our attitudes and ethos change.

Brian: History is history. The danger of rewriting it is that the lessons learned disappear. Learning from history but not repeating the same mistakes and changing the narrative is what is important.

Tony: We have to acknowledge that the mistake existed. A lot of brands get this wrong. They do not acknowledge, they just move on and hope people forget. But we have the internet now, which has a very long memory. This comes back to authenticity and trust. Only the people who trust us and have been loyal can forgive us. There is such an emphasis on building community and trust around brands.

Brian: Mistakes will happen. Own up to them, move forward, learn from them, make it better. If I saw companies doing that more, I would trust them more.

Tony: That is certainly true of the younger generation who have grown up globally with access to all these cultures from international access points on their devices. They have a broader worldview and are demanding more in terms of holding brands to account. They want transparency and authenticity. They want brands to operate as good citizens.

Brian: Let us discuss localisation in marketing. Monocultural versus multicultural versus cross-cultural approaches.

Tony: All communication is about senders and receivers. Multicultural marketing introduces an intermediary to act as interpreter or translator. In monocultural communication, there is a dominant language and a presumption that anyone who wants to interact has to learn that language. Most communication in Australia is done in English with an expectation that those who want to engage should learn English.

Tony: Multicultural communication acknowledges that other people from different language groups exist side by side with the dominant group. But the cultures sit parallel and do not really intersect. The communication is translated and placed into an environment where another culture can pick it up.

Tony: Cross-cultural communication makes an attempt to make communication more portable into another language. It prioritises similarities between cultural nuances and makes small tweaks. The idea is one form of communication that taps into lots of different cultures. Most of the time you end up with innocuous, watered-down communication. Sometimes it reinforces stereotypes. Sometimes you see tokenism.

Tony: The way we look at communication is intercultural. It is often cited as the most effective form. It centres on active participation and co-creation between two or more cultures. Instead of a sender sending to an intermediary to interpret, the intermediary and sender work together to create the message so it goes straight to the receiver. That is the approach we take at LEXIGO. If a community or language group is a participant in creating the message, they are more likely to be receptive when it is delivered.

Tony: You would be surprised how few people think about this as a primary consideration. There is always a conversation around price versus quality versus speed. Translation often comes at the end when it should be at the beginning. Create a better message from the start rather than hoping the English version translates well enough.

Brian: Is it a lack of awareness or resistance to implementing an intercultural approach?

Tony: Most people in the marketing industry live in a monocultural context. A survey suggested that 85% of people in marketing, communications, and media are Caucasian from Anglo-European cultures. Only 15% come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Almost 50% of Australia's population was either born overseas or has a parent born overseas. That has not been reflected in who we recruit to the communications industry. There is also a massive lack of representation in senior leadership, not just in Australia but in America and the UK as well.

Tony: There is a bit of fear, a lack of know-how, and it comes down to time and budget allocation. Multicultural components are usually seen as an afterthought. I wish people would prioritise it because I think it is important for the health of society. If we are going to support multiculturalism, it needs to be represented in the stories we tell through media.

Brian: What steps and tips do you recommend?

Tony: Fundamentally, this is about establishing partnerships and working with people with culturally and linguistically diverse lived experience. Having more diverse voices creates more interesting stories. You see things from different perspectives and educate people in ways they may not have seen before.

Tony: There is a greater emphasis on prioritising observation. Whenever I start a project, I immerse myself in understanding the product and the audience. If you want to adopt a more intercultural approach, have dialogue, immerse yourself in that culture, find people to partner with, talk about the intentions of what you are trying to communicate, get feedback. Dialogue requires two people.

Tony: The best businesses communicate with an empathy lens. They think about what the audience is expecting, their needs, fears, and desires. Take it a step further and think with an intercultural lens. Invite partners, share experiences. We can do that through partnerships, recruiting, or a general awareness of what is going on outside the monoculture.

Brian: Is there a danger of getting too broad? You want to represent everybody, but is there a point where you lose the identity of who you are trying to reach?

Tony: 100 percent. Modern marketing technology gives you so many tools for personal dialogue with your intended audience. This idea of mass communication needs to change. Find where people are engaging and meet them there. You can still apply a goal of reaching many people, but meet them with communication that resonates with that person. Why create watered-down communication when you can be specific and targeted? Modern marketing technology lends itself very well to multicultural marketing, but we have not harnessed it well enough.

Tony: Communication is culture and culture is communication. The media we consume has a profound influence on how we see, understand, and treat people. Growing up, I saw very few portrayals of Asian people in communications and always felt like I did not belong. Imagine how powerful it would be if people started to see themselves reflected in the stories. It affects how they see themselves and resonates in a way that changes behaviours and encourages action.

Brian: Surround yourself with people who can help, who live that life or have that experience.

Tony: A common thing I hear from marketers is that they do not want to engage because they might say something wrong. That leads to avoidance behaviour and fear. But when you go to a different country as a tourist, you bring a tour guide to help you navigate. There are multicultural agency specialists who can act as that tour guide. It is healthier to embrace a growth mindset and lean into understanding these cultures rather than avoiding them.

Tony: People from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have to code switch all the time to make it more comfortable for others. Meet them halfway. It is not a challenging thing once you get the hang of it.

Brian: Any last piece of encouragement or advice?

Tony: The very best creative and communication does not just sell products and build brands. It can also change behaviours and shape society. As an industry, the marketing industry has an important role to lead that change. And that is the change I want to see.

Brian: Tony, thank you. This has been fun and educational. Do see Barbie.

Tony: I think it is an amazing example of how brand legacies can change and help shape conversations that lead to a more positive future.

Brian: Tony Lee, Head of Strategy at LEXIGO. Thank you for joining us. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.