Great front page article in today’s Wall Street Jorunal, “Pigs Get the Ax in China TV Ads, in Nod to Muslims“, showing how Beijing has made the call to pull ads with pigs in them, even though this year is the Chinese ”Year of the Pig“, so as to not offend China’s 20 million Muslims, who consider pigs unclean. 

As I read this article, I could not help but think back to the recent PBS series, “China From The Inside” which I did a post on.  That show did a nice job touching on Xinjianghina, the Northwest province of China which purportedly wants independence but Beijing disagress under the subterfuge of “only the terrorists there want independence”, and they proceed to crack down on folks in this province in a way that teaches the USA what ”shock and awe” really means.   The article suggests that pulling this advertising is a ploy by Beijing to buy political capital with these folks and not inflame them even more.  I agree.   If so, a pretty savvy politcal move.  Hey, the folks in Beijing aren’t dumb.  Great article. 

On the business side, I also wonder whose head rolled in Nestle’s marketing department who made the call to spend millions on an ad campaign centered on a cute pig, without giving thought to how Beijing might pull such advertising so as to not offend a small segment of its 1.3 billion population.  This is the type of foresight and intuition that no business school class can teach you.  You either have such a skill to think ahead like this and have a Plan B in place when things go wrong, or, you don’t.