Trying too hard to impress the kids.

When walking back home today, I passed by one of those many milk tea shops that are popping up these days. Hell, there’s even foreign idiots here that now believe that milk tea is a completely Vietnamese thing because if you step into the wrong part of town, they may even outnumber places that sell the traditionally preferred coffee. Young local girls do seem to be really into it though and therefore, the next logical step is to target that lucrative foreign audience.

What is representative of the foreign audience these days? How can we connect with our target consumer and let them feel that they can belong to us? If you ask these people, it would be silly soy-boy, pubic facial hair and Ethiopian/Rasta flags. Bars have long employed the use of such imagery, but now milk tea shops do too? It was bad enough that they were all playing the same crappy pop music.

Yeah, I can totally imagine dreadlocked rastas smoking fat joints while sipping on a 珍珠奶茶. Nothing says ‘Caribbean’ like minute amounts of tea, excessive use of sugar syrup, tapioca pearls and what might not actually be real milk. Apparently none of these places sell weed either. How hypocritical.

Every second bar has some sort of stupid imagery linked to the funny act that they are trying to put on to sell you their products or services. It can be sexual innuendo in a place that’s subtly to hint that the bar staff will fuck you if you tip them well enough, it could be a string of mini foreign flags to show foreign guests that you are so ‘international,’ or just that commonly misused red, yellow and green flag to look cool and rebellious in front of the young ‘uns.

Rasta flags are of course, something that is easy to copy. However, you can guarantee that with most young white people that want to act rebellious, there’s only one reggae artist that they’ve ever heard of: ‘Bob Fucking Marley.’ Despite the fact that reggae is a genre of music with a long and glorious history, with many other artists, sound-system crews and DJ/selectors that went onto have influence elsewhere across the world, they only know of that one single guy that happened to break into the Western charts a few times. Maybe they also know about Shaggy (at a push). There’s already an English teacher by day promoting a party far out of Da Nang town with that iconic Marley face on.

What’s even more amusing? You might even see imagery of Che Guevara in such a place, dead bang next to Bob. While once can be certain that they are targeting a millennial audience that do consider themselves to at least be socialists; how would their overly-liberal selves feel if they knew about Che’s attitude towards black people? Not to mention how he handled that thorny issue of gay rights. The fact that murals of his face seem to regularly pop up in rasta themed bars is bloody hilarious.

There’s also one place in town called ‘Burger Republic’ that also seems to go for the use of deceased commie hero imagery. It seems quite ironic that the staff tend to be well trained, polite and attentive, it has often got a few customers in and I’d hazard a guess that it is a profitable, well run business. How very capitalist of them.

In addition, there’s ‘Cộng Caphe,’ that nationwide chain that take communism and goes cosplay about it, something seems to magnetically attract Korean tourists. Vietnam is still a socialist country, yet even that in itself can be turned into an opportunity to get rich as an individual private shareholder.

Maybe those two places successfully pull it off. Others definitely don’t. They might put inspirational quotes on the wall, a load of shit about ‘positive vibes’ or whatever else out there, yet it will always seem fake and totally lacking in authenticity.

You wanna see a really cool mural? Go to ‘King Coffee’ on Hồ Xuân Hương and you’ll find one of Eric the King, Roy Keane and David Beckham that’s probably been there for years. Or check out that Fresco village off the side of Nguyễn Văn Linh. They’re a hell of a lot more interesting to look at than any of that fake rasta shit.