FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

I thought for a moment. ‘Mate, it’s just the kind of thing Sidney Wing would like to tuck up his sleeve for possible future use against us.’

  Dansford Drocker grinned. ‘That son of a bitch will do anything for money. Let me see, printing the questionnaires, the salaries for a couple of dozen fictitious field-research personnel, travel, crunching the numbers, writing a recommendation – that ain’t chicken feed. We’ll have to bill the client, and all but an itty-bitty printing job goes into the agency’s pocket.’ He laughed uproariously. ‘Sidney Wing is going to love it, son!’

  It was the first time I’d heard him say anything derogatory about his Chinese partners. Dansford was right, Sidney knew nothing about market research, but loved the prospect of making money with virtually no outlay.

  ‘There’s only one problem,’ Dansford said as he explained the idea to Sidney. ‘We need an independent organisation, something with a letterhead.’

  ‘No problem – Beatrice Fong Market Research Company,’ Sidney volunteered.

  ‘They have one?’ I asked. It was curious that Mercy B. Lord hadn’t mentioned it to me.

  Sidney picked up the telephone. ‘They have now. Tomorrow we will have stationery.’ He turned to me. ‘Just let me have the details and one of your fancy layouts and slogans, Simon. Ronnie will organise the rest through production.’

  Dansford cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps something more anonymous? New York knows about Beatrice Fong.’ He looked directly at Sidney. ‘If they were ever to find out, it could be awkward.’

  ‘Yes, her name is not necessary,’ Sidney replied, then looked directly at me. ‘You’re the creative one, Simon. Any ideas?’

  I searched my mind for an acronym. ‘South-East Asian Research Agency, SEARA?’

  ‘Splendid,’ Sidney said. ‘What about a slogan?’

  ‘I don’t think research companies have slogans. Maybe a line under the company name, you know, Researching the needs of the Asian market, something dull like that?’

  ‘Excellent!’

  It wasn’t particularly good, but what the hell – a research company that didn’t do any research didn’t need any research into the copy that went under the stationery masthead. ‘What about registering the company?’ I asked. ‘It could take months. I mean, I can’t put “Pty Ltd” on the masthead when the company doesn’t officially exist. Wouldn’t that be fraud?’ I was trying to recall my long-forgotten economics studies.

  Sidney gave me a look that could only be described as pitying. ‘It will be done before the end of the week,’ was all he said. Of course it would – his guanxi connections would see to it. There was a Chinese way of getting things done and there was a Western way. In matters such as this, the Chinese way was undoubtedly the better one.

  Sidney had obviously seen the advantages of a merger with an American ad agency and, moreover, must have weighed up the consequences and decided there was more going for it than against it. But, as a general rule, inviting foreigners into the boardroom was not only dangerous, it went against every Chinese instinct. With Westerners came transparency, no more smoke and mirrors. No longer could a tokay, that is, the proprietor, keep two sets of books, one for the tax man and one for himself. The phoney research company would have given him renewed faith in the power of duplicity and was tailor-made to his Chinese way of thinking.

  Like all Chinese businessmen, Sidney was a trader. Buy today, sell tomorrow and repeat the process ad infinitum. He patently didn’t believe in building the integrity and personality of a brand in a market – what we call brand equity – so he would regard the Colgate research initiative as utter foolishness, which in fact it was, but for the reason I mentioned earlier, the almost pathological reluctance of the Chinese to give a straight answer that would truly reflect how they felt.

  ‘We’ll have to find someone to front our “independent” research company,’ Dansford declared. ‘Someone plausible, articulate and presentable, who can be trusted not to spill the beans, someone who can also be trained to do a token field survey.’

  ‘That’s going to involve some training. Is it really necessary?’

  ‘We have to base our questions and the results on some local information – a small field project to determine how a local washerwoman thinks.’

  ‘I will find someone,’ Sidney said.

  ‘Absolutely trustworthy, I suggest; someone we can quickly train in the language and procedure of market research, preferably female. She won’t need to run the company, since there’s nothing to run, but she will need to do the token survey. We’ll take care of whatever number-crunching and office work there is here in the agency.’ He turned to me. ‘You’ve seen a fair bit of field research, Simon. What do you suggest?’

  ‘Well, it was mostly in tobacco – cigarette advertising in Australia – but I expect the techniques don’t change much. To make this look authentic a token field study should involve close to 200 legitimate interviews. In Australia that’s a sample and allows you to “taste” the market before you go full steam ahead. We need someone who can go out into the kampongs and interview the Chinese amahs, the washerwomen, using the questionnaire we design, so we can then extrapolate the answers for the overall findings. This is not paperwork we can invent without having that first “taste” on which to base the final recommendations. Otherwise, any experienced market researcher in New York will pick the fraud.’

  ‘How long will that take?’ Sidney asked me.

  ‘Three weeks would be my guess. We’d have to work with her to devise the questions she asks. That’s why it’s important to get someone who is not only intelligent and intuitive but who can also relate to the needs of potential customers – Singapore’s washerwomen.’

  Sidney looked doubtful. ‘It would be unusual to have a woman do this interview work.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s essential,’ Dansford shot back. ‘We’re talking about a laundry product, Sidney. Who the fuck uses the product? Women, right? They are the ones who will buy it, use it and decide whether they like it. A woman coordinating this research makes perfect sense. There has to be a bright young woman we can trust. New York and Milwaukee will buy that.’

  Sidney nodded. ‘We will find one. How old?’

  I hardly dared think it, but Mercy B. Lord would be perfect. She was twenty, almost old enough to have taken a degree, personable, accustomed to dealing with foreigners, beautiful and intelligent and could be said to know the locals from the washboard up. She would be ideal to work with us on designing a questionnaire. Briefing her on how to front a research meeting, if that became essential, wouldn’t be too hard. I thought of the countless research meetings with Wills where just such a young woman was involved. But if I suggested it, Sidney would be onto me in a flash. He was nobody’s fool.

  Then I heard Dansford say, ‘Oh, not too old. Advertising market research is a young profession even in the States, and here it’s nonexistent. Let me see, someone in her early twenties, bright, can handle the client …’ He smiled and looked at Sidney. ‘It would help if she was sexy.’

  I quickly did a layout for SEARA Pty Ltd, together with the slogan Ronnie assured me translated well into Chinese. I went along with it, even though it met with Ronnie’s approval.

  The slogan I’d created for the soap – Easy on your hands, easy on the price – was as close as I could get to the Chinese words in English. This time Ronnie was adamant it wouldn’t work. Which was why I persisted with it.

  When New York came back and asked why we hadn’t emphasised the claim – ‘More whiteness and brightness, the result: personal pride and reward’ – I explained that to credit the detergent with the result, not the person doing the washing, would be considered a major loss of face for the Chinese user. It was a guess, but a fairly educated one. I had explained the concept to Mercy B. Lord and worked through it with her. This may not have been strictly kosher but she knew the market and the people from the street level up and spoke the various languages and the patois known as Singlish. Mos
t importantly, she understood the Chinese taboos. But she had one other advantage: as a Catholic she wasn’t locked in to the local superstitions – or, if you like, religious beliefs – and so could be more or less dispassionate. She also did the various translations from my English ‘purchase proposition’, that is, the information about the product you want the customer to retain – Big Lather looks after your hands, helps you get great results, and because you use less and get more lather it costs less than soap.

  Advertising agencies very seldom invent the concept for a new product, and in Asia it had never been done before. If Big Lather proved to be successful, after the enormous success of Texas Tiger, I was well on my way to being a big wheel in Asian advertising, and in terms of Samuel Oswald Wing, untouchable. If Big Lather worked in the rest of Asia, it would eventually be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Colgate-Palmolive. I would have not just a feather in my cap, but a floor-length Maori-style cloak made entirely of feathers. If it failed, I would be, as we rather crudely say in Australia, dead meat.

  So there you go. I was doing something unethical, which, if it were discovered, would result in my instant dismissal. The concept of the laundry detergent was my idea; my judgment was on the line. If the product failed and it ever got out that we’d fudged the research, as always happens after a disaster, then I would be entirely to blame. I knew that under no circumstances whatsoever would I implicate Dansford, who had stuck his neck out to help me. You could bet London to a brick Sidney had his butt well and truly covered. I could hear him in my mind: he had, at my request as a director, located the Beatrice Fong Market Research Company and then taken no further interest, blah blah blah.

  Looking back I can only think that when you’re young you regard yourself as bullet-proof and disregard the consequences of failure. The Big Lather concept was radical. Instead of coming in a box, it came in a large tube, like toothpaste. You squeezed out about half an inch that would dissolve in cold water to produce enough liquid to wash a big garment. For instance, two squeezes would clean a double-bed sheet. Furthermore, a tube lasted as long as two bars of blue lye soap and was cheaper and easier on the hands. It was a big ask, and I learned later that the boffins in the lab in Milwaukee initially pronounced it impossible. But New York had the final say and the product-development marketing team liked it. Naturally, they weren’t prepared to go ahead with the lab R&D without covering their arses with good market research.

  However, as some sort of defence, excuse or justification, I reasoned that if the Western research model didn’t suit the Asian mindset, it must be possible to develop one that did. This request from Colgate-Palmolive was the first from our international clients, but it wouldn’t be the last. Whether or not I believed in market research wasn’t the point.

  Even before we’d completed the phoney research project, I had formulated a plan that I hadn’t yet discussed with anyone. Over the last months I’d seen a fair bit of my mother’s family and grown quite close to two of my second cousins, Peter and Henry Kwan, henceforth referred to simply as cousins for convenience. Peter, the elder, ran a very exclusive Chinese antique shop in Orchard Road that had been started by his grandfather on his mother’s side in 1918, and Henry was associate professor of sociology at the Singapore Institute of Technology, neither of them electing to go into the family palm-oil business.

  If we got away with the phoney or, if you like, unacceptably small research sample we planned, using a questionnaire that was mostly guesswork, my plan was to consult the family academic and see if it wasn’t possible to build a research model to take to the population, ‘in the field’, so to speak, that was psychologically correct for Asian conditions and mindset.

  However, this all depended on our pulling off the phoney research project and me keeping my job. If we got away with it, I would have the time to work on the real McCoy. In the meantime there was no point in thinking about it.

  Of course, I could always have pulled out of the ersatz Colgate-Palmolive research. That was morally and ethically the correct thing to do, but all I can say is I didn’t. I was convinced the Big Lather concept would work in a test market and I guess I allowed my personal vanity and need to succeed to overrule my conscience.

  There was one further factor. Ronnie Wing hated the Big Lather concept. ‘It’s ridiculous, Simon, the Chinese won’t buy it.’

  ‘So, tell me, Ronnie, how many times have you done the family wash by hand?’ I replied.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? I’m Chinese, I know.’

  ‘Okay, but we’re going with Big Lather regardless.’

  ‘Remember who told you it was shit, Simon.’

  ‘Yeah, mate. As I recall, you said that about the Tiger.’

  ‘That was different,’ he mumbled. ‘It was the girls on the cars in the parade down Orchard Road that made that work for Texas Oil.’

  It was pointless arguing. I had to believe that if Ronnie hated the idea of Big Lather, then it was spot-on.

  I more or less salved my conscience by convincing myself that we’d do the ‘taste’ first; futile as it might be, it was better than nothing. If Big Lather went into limited production and failed in the test market, Colgate-Palmolive would be unlikely to smell a rat. After all, wasn’t that the point of market research? To find out what works and what doesn’t? Some seemingly great concepts had been known to fail in test markets in the West, even after the initial market research into the concepts had supported them. People, much as we’d like to think the opposite, are simply not predictable or, as I’d often suspected with the W.D. & H.O. Wills research back home, research simply asked the wrong questions. If Big Lather failed, then the client would be likely to put it down to market experience and with Lady Luck on my side no one would be any the wiser. I told myself this happened every day and that Big Lather might just prove to be another one of those products over which you fold your tent and move on.

  You may imagine my surprise and delight when Mercy B. Lord called me at the agency three days after we’d talked to Sidney to announce that Beatrice Fong had decided to open a market-research company called SEARA. ‘Oh, Simon, I’m terribly nervous. I know nothing about market research,’ she cried. ‘Beatrice says Sidney Wing has agreed I’ll be trained by you and Mr Drocker. Is that true?’

  ‘Congratulations! We didn’t know it was going to be you, but of course I’m delighted.’

  ‘Yes, but will I be able to understand you?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed you having a great deal of trouble understanding me before now.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Simon – the technical language, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You’ll learn that soon enough. In truth we need you rather more than you need us. You see we have to devise a questionnaire for washerwomen, and really we don’t have a clue, but you do. You’re in touch with the respondents.’

  ‘See, “respondents”, is that a technical term?’

  I laughed. ‘No, I should have said the common people, ordinary people,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, you go out into the field, the kampongs, and ask washerwomen the questions we’ve devised between us, we crunch the numbers and we use them in our report to Colgate-Palmolive.’

  ‘Honestly, do you think I can do it?’

  ‘On your ear – I mean, easily. When can you come in?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ve been given three weeks off from my meet and greet.’

  ‘That’s not a lot. The first week will be spent devising, designing and printing the questionnaire; the rest of the time you’ll be out in the field.’

  I made up my mind that Mercy B. Lord would never know the dodgy nature of our research, that she’d only be exposed to correct methodology, or as correct as Dansford and I could make it while never having had any hands-on experience ourselves.

  Working on Mercy B. Lord’s training for the initial Colgate-Palmolive research for Big Lather was highly enjoyable. After we’d reviewed what ne
eded to be done, we decided we would need closer to six weeks if we were going to cover our arses. But Beatrice insisted that she could only spare her protégé for three weeks, which was the time we needed for Mercy B. Lord to go out into the marketplace and ask questions. The old bitch wouldn’t budge, or that’s what Sidney told us, so Mercy B. Lord volunteered to come to my flat at night to be trained. It was a rewarding but difficult time. I loved having her to myself but was falling more deeply in love with her, especially in the hours when I could gaze at her openly as she sat for the portrait I was painting of her.

  After the wonderful night of the black cheongsam at Raffles, we’d been out to dinner perhaps once a fortnight, but there was no promise of a relationship and she kept me at arm’s length – a chaste kiss at the end of the evening and that was it. The six weeks of training her in research techniques and language proved to be no different. I grew accustomed to watching the brake lights of a late-night taxi as it turned the corner to disappear finally into the darkness, her departing peck on the cheek exaggerated in my mind into a lingering lover’s farewell.

  To cut a long story short, Mercy B. Lord spent her first week helping us devise the questionnaire and the next two using it to do field research. She brought back eighty-two interviews that we used as the template for answering, in dozens of variations and combinations, the 2000 fake questionnaires. Once we’d crunched the numbers, surprise, surprise, they came out in favour of the name and product promise of Big Lather, clearly indicating it was worth doing the R&D then going to test market.

  Our luck held. New York was delighted with the research and approved the R&D. We were going to go to test market with Big Lather. I’m ashamed to say that Jonas Bold called to tell me that the head of research in our New York office, who had personally done the presentation to Colgate-Palmolive, thought I ought to be congratulated for what was a beautifully designed piece of research, since my name was so clearly associated with organising and working with the independent research company. Jonas added that he (the research director) wanted me to know that the task of presenting so well-crafted a piece of work had been a pleasure, and that he looked forward to future projects.