Why Don’t We Have a Global Brand? — I

Can a global brand come out of these lands? Güven Borça asked this question years ago and found his own answers to it; I will look for answers too, from my own perspective and observations.

I have spent time in many European countries, and during that time I had the chance to observe the market, the industries and the sectors through a foreigner’s eyes. In all the time I spent there, apart from some Halk-branded biscuits I saw in a small grocery store in a small Czech town of 10,000 people, I didn’t come across a single product carrying a Turkish brand.

So why is it that we still can’t get a single brand to make its mark in the European Union, where we make the bulk of our exports (46% of our total exports)? I will answer this question in 3 parts, in which I examine the micro and macro factors in detail. If you’re ready, let’s begin:

The first, and in my view the most important: our stance as a society toward failure!

It is an undeniable fact that the way your family, the people you expect to stand behind you through every hardship and every failure, looks at failure is, as a reflection of Turkish society, built entirely on negativity and pessimism. To make this clearer, I want to go through a concrete example: imagine your family is middle-income and has spent twenty years saving money to send you to a good university. Now suppose that six months after starting university, for whatever reason, you drop out despite all that expense. As if that weren’t enough, imagine that you go against the family that has poured years of effort into you, pack up everything you own and go to India to find inner peace, and after living there for a while you come back home. How would your family react?

In business, in bringing innovative ideas to life and, most importantly, in creativity, insight undoubtedly matters a great deal, and to gain certain insights a person may need different mindsets and different ways of thinking. These insights can be hidden in someone who crosses your path at any given moment, or they can be hidden in entirely different worlds. The Turkish family structure falls more or less within certain molds. Ask anyone today and they could sketch it for you. So I ask: how many of your families would stand behind your decision to drop out of university and go to India, at the cost of losing all those years of effort? Would they accept that you are an individual and respect your decisions? The person I’m talking about is Steve Jobs.

You can also take a look at the detailed post I wrote on this topic alone: Is Your Father Proud of What You Do?

Another reason is a lack of self-confidence.

If there’s a running race at school, many Turkish mothers prepare their child for it by measuring them against the other children; they don’t know that the real rival is the child themself, and that the greatest success is achieved by competing with yourself. John Lennon, at the cinema with his mother, saw Elvis Presley on the screen, was deeply struck by him and asked: Mom, why am I not Elvis Presley? Life isn’t fair at all, I want to be Elvis Presley too. Which mother today could answer that question the way she did: maybe God is saving you to be John Lennon? Today’s winning kids are raised by mothers who send their sons back out to fight when they come home running from a fight. Generations raised with ’oh, let my son stay home so he doesn’t fall and get hurt’ turn into individuals who are afraid of losing. Everyone wants to win, but nobody knows that winning only comes through losing!

Another reason is intolerance of criticism.

Nobody wants their work criticized. Before telling you about an incident I experienced firsthand on this point, I want to share my own observations. Here is what criticism means to me: a person is naturally so much at the center of their own work that they can’t lift their head and see how that work looks from outside the shell. That is exactly where criticism comes in. Those who can look from the outside can easily see the problems you can’t see because you’re at the center. That’s why criticism is worth its weight in gold.

But it’s plain to see that Turkish brands in particular have zero tolerance for criticism. A few years ago, I criticized the woeful social media strategy of a brand that positions itself as one of Turkey’s biggest apparel brands, covering every point as it should be done. My aim was not to make the brand lose its reputation; I wanted the brand to use this platform to add value to its value, in market conditions where social media had become so important. But things took such a turn that I had to sit through a threatening phone call.

In developed countries brands bring the people who point out their gaps into their workforce; in our country they threaten them. Don’t get me wrong, I never had any such expectation from the brand when I made this criticism, but what was said after it is one of the most concrete examples of why we can’t produce a global brand.

In this first part, I focused on the micro reasons why we have no brand on the world stage. In my second post I will continue with the micro reasons, and in my third I will wrap up the series by addressing the macro reasons.

• This post was first published on Marketingholmes.com.

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