I was recently fortunate enough to be invited to attend market research with consumers in Indonesia and Vietnam. These are representative of each side of a well-known divide in attitudes between Far East societies, known as ‘Chopstick’ and ‘non-Chopstick’ cultures. I’ll let you work out the differences, but the starting point for this journey was Singapore, a melting pot of many cultures and the place where most multinationals and their agencies have settled. That makes it definitely chopstick.
In between the creation of ideas and their testing, I was able to investigate one of the most interesting aspects of these cultures from my perspective – their supermarkets. Here’s what I saw…