Better management through anthropology

strategy+business, December 13, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Kilito Chan

The next time you hear someone arguing that a liberal arts education is wasted on businesspeople, direct them to Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision. In this new book, the award-winning journalist, chair of the Financial Times’s US editorial board, and Cambridge Ph.D. in social anthropology makes a compelling, readable argument for the business value of her academic discipline. Tett finds that this value is delivered in three ways: anthropology makes the strange familiar, it makes the familiar strange, and it attunes awareness when listening for social silence.

“Making the strange familiar”—the quest to understand other people and cultures—goes back to the origins of the science of anthropology in the 19th century (although its main purpose in the early days was to justify “civilized” Western colonialists who were stealing the labor and resources of “primitive” peoples). In 1990, this quest—understanding, not plunder—led Tett to a remote village in Soviet Tajikistan, where she studied marriage rites for her Ph.D.

Making the strange familiar has also led marketers in a global economy to embrace anthropology in their quest to figure out how to sell their products to customers in far-flung markets. The resulting insights can be valuable indeed. Switzerland-based Nestlé’s sales of Kit Kat bars were lukewarm in Japan, until 2001, when marketing executives noticed that sales of the confection surged in December, January, and February on the island of Kyushu. Curious, they discovered that students associated the name Kit Kat with kitto katsu, which means “you must overcome” in the local dialect. The students were buying the bars for luck when they took their exams for high school and university. Nestlé built its Japanese marketing strategy around this insight, and by 2014, Kit Kat was the country’s best-selling confection. Read the rest here.