THE SAMSUNG GOAT™

I thought it was a joke at first, but then I remembered where I was... and it still didn’t make sense.

The rice harvest is celebrated in small villages all across the State of Sabah throughout the month of May, with the last two days marked as a public holiday called Kaamatan, or the Harvest Festival. In Kota Kinabalu they hold a two day event at the fairgrounds on the outskirts of town, with singing, dancing, eating, drinking, and cultural festivities aplenty, and with over thirty different ethnic groups in the region, the festival is full of unique cultural traditions. The fair was an ethnographic delight, but surprisingly, one of the more enlightening moments occurred when I noticed a series of banners hanging up around the beer tents. Carlsberg was sponsoring a raffle - buy three beers and you could enter to win some prizes. And while Samsung was supplying the loot for the runners-up, the grand prize winner was to receive... a live goat!

I don’t know why, but this totally blew me away. I’ve always enjoyed checking out advertising when I travel as a way of gaining geographical insight, but this little piece of marketing had me asking all sorts of questions about where I was in the world. I think mostly because (except for the fact that I’m not from Borneo) I’m probably a pretty good fit for the target demographic. It’s interesting to think about the market research that must have gone into this contest. New technology seems to have a universal appeal these days, but how did winning a live goat reveal itself as the ultimate draw? And I wonder what the people at Samsung thought about their latest and greatest smartphone coming in second behind some time-honored livestock? I can just imagine how the conversation went...

Carl: “Thanks for partnering with us on this give-away, but do you think you could also throw in a live goat? The grand prize really needs to hit home with these guys and your smartphones just aren’t cutting it.”

Sam: “Uh, wow. Don’t you think we should stick to one category for the prizes?

Carl: “Yeah, well it’s either that, or the runner-up gets a brood of chickens.”

Sam: “Ok, fine. We’ll throw in a live goat, but do you think it would be possible to brand it with a Samsung logo? And we’ll really need to push the fact that it can double as a garbage disposal...”

Who knows if this contest appealed to its target demographic, or if it was a botched marketing ploy, but either way it was a perfect example of why I love to travel - it’s the littlest things sometimes that put my experiences into perspective, and make me realize that I’m not in Kansas anymore...