360DigitalInfluence

This article was originally posted by MEDIA

Shenan Chuang (pictured), chief executive at Ogilvy & Mather Group China, shares her insights on marketing to Chinese consumers during the rapidly approaching Chinese New Year period and gives advise on how brands can capture a bit of the holiday magic.

1. Planes, trains and automobiles. In China, each year’s ChunYun, or Spring Festival travel season, sees hundreds of millions of people crisscrossing the country to reunite with their families. During this 40-day frenzy, three distinct groups of travellers can be spotted based on their choice of transportation. Migrant workers and students flood the trains; office workers, expatriates and overseas travellers form the core of the air travel segment while short-distance travellers take to the streets in automobiles. This mass migration means most consumers deviate from their normal media consumption habits and channels for up to a month or more - not an insignificant amount of time. Buses, transit zones, and outdoor media often become the primary communication channels for a country on the move.

2. Know your (often unlikely) brand ambassadors As scores of migrant workers and students temporarily trade in the bright lights of the big cities for their hometowns in the countryside, they arrive loaded with gifts, products and information from their big city lives. Viewed as successful returnees, their attitudes and opinions on brands and products are very influential on old friends and family. For brands seeking to penetrate lower tier Chinese cities and rural markets, word-of-mouth endorsements from these (often unlikely) brand ambassadors are your best - and most effective - bet.

3. The New Year’s Eve dinner. The New Year’s Eve dinner is always a highlight of the holiday celebration and family reunions. But the format has changed over the years. First it was a must to gather at home for the annual feast. That tradition eventually gave way to eating out as many families chose restaurants for their convenience and ambiance. Nowadays staying at home for the once-a-year indulgence is back in vogue – but with a twist. Rather than slaving over a hot wok or battling for a reservation at a hotel, more families are choosing to order ready-made meals that can be enjoyed at home without the hassle of fighting for a taxi only to be stuck in holiday gridlock. This shift signals big business potential for brands that can enhance those dinners at home with tableware, gift sets of holiday spirits, sweets and snacks or even jumbo family packs for the three generations reuniting over this special event.

4. CCTV New Year’s Gala – who’s watching? The CCTV New Year’s Gala (or ChunWan) is the premier mainland Chinese television event of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl in America. As the most influential and highly rated TV show in China, the Gala attracts marketers eager to buy airtime at any cost. But be forewarned: audience ratings drop as you move from the north of the country to the south. The highest ratings can be found in Northeast China where 85 per cent of residents tune in. This percentage drops to 70 per cent for Beijing and Tianjin, 60 percent for Shandong/ Shanxi/ Henan/ Shaanxi, 20 per cent for Shanghai/ Jiangsu/ Anhui/ Hubei/ Sichuan, 10 per cent for Zhejiang/ Fujian, and below 5 per cent for Guangdong/ Guangxi/ Hainan. So before you burn through your budget, think hard about your target audience… and where they live.

5. Home (and nowhere else) for the holidays. While some sightsee during the holiday, others prefer to “ZhaiNan,” which essentially means hibernating at home doing three things: eating, sleeping and surfing the web. Surfers are primarily engaged in online shopping, SNS and gaming. In 2009, online retailer Taobao.com reported a 195 per cent increase over 2008 in the number of products exchanged by consumers during the CNY period. Bestsellers were mobile phones, digital products, household appliances and gift packs with health supplements. Another trend of recent years is the younger generation’s preference for sending New Year greetings by SMS rather than paying a visit to relatives and friends.  As the internet and mobile applications make their mark on millennia-old traditions, it’s time for marketers to make inroads into the CNY “ZhaiNan” phenomenon.

An annual survey of Chinese consumers by McKinsey took time to highlight the power of Social Media in China.

China really is a global-standard country in terms of involvement in Social Media by consumers. The landscape is, of course, radically different from other countries due to government censorship policies, but Chinese are incredibly involved in Social Media as a trusted source of information on many topics.

Samples vs Word of Mouth

The McKinsey study points to the influence of Social Media in terms beauty products in China, which is  we at Ogilvy have found to be totally true.

McKinsey found: 66 percent of Chinese consumers would be influence in the purchase of a moisturizer by recommendations of friends and family, while just 38 percent would be in the US and UK. By contrast 66 percent of UK and British consumers say that free samples could sway them, compared with 20 percent in China.

Excerpt from the McKinsey report:

The Internet is an increasingly important marketing tool. All the online media vehicles we tracked in our survey, including online advertisements, product articles, blogs, and forums, have significantly increased their impact (SEE CHART ONE). Consumers even rate the credibility of blogs and online forums higher than traditional TV ads.

This had an enormously positive impact for the company: word of mouth combined with 19,000 blogs encouraged drinkers to switch to Wang Laoji. One blogger developed the slogan: “If you’re going to donate, donate 100 million. If you’re going to drink, drink Wang Laoji.” This consumer-created ad was distributed widely online. The sales volume of Wang Laoji increased by 25 percent at one supermarket chain the month after the earthquake, and by 35 percent at one restaurant chain.

I had a wonderful conversation this afternoon with MIT Professor Jing Wang about her project “NGO 2.0 China.” We were first introduced to each other randomly through Scott Kronick, by my desk, where I kept a book Brand New China written by her. Scott asked me if I’d like to have the author’s signature – of course! During our random but pleasant encounter, Professor Jing Wang mentioned her current project -“NGO 2.0 China.” I was intrigued. Having done some research at home, I wrote to her and told her that I’d like to be a volunteer.

Professor Jing Wang launched the NGO 2.0 China project in spring 2009 in collaboration with Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing, the University of Science and Technology of China, and three other Chinese NGOs.

What exactly is NGO 2.0? Professor Jing Wang and her partners are building the first social networking platform for grassroots NGOs in

China. At the same time, they will be holding Web 2.0 training workshops for NGOs in Western and central provinces and co-developing training materials with Intel China. A ranking system will be integrated into the platform to promote the organizational transparency of NGOs.

The project was created to meet the dilemma faced by mid-sized grassroots NGOs in China: even as they each develop their own small websites, these NGOs remain as insulated from one another as before. What they actually need is a platform that allows them to share resources, build networks and recruit members at little cost. Web 2.0 would be a perfect solution to help them.

Professor Jing Wang’s design of the project, in its much simplified version, is to bridge Chinese grassroots NGOs with 1) IT infrastructure/service providers and 2) business entities like Ogilvy & Mather. The former can help build a necessary platform and participate in implementing creative ideas generated by vanguard grassroots NGOs; the latter can provide creative ideas for NGO 2.0 programs and help with content generation on the platform. In addition, (1) and (2) can both contribute to training programs for capacity-building.

The NGO 2.0 China project intrigued me because in a world where everyone is talking frantically about social media and Web 2.0, I feel this project is one of the few that has a clear purpose backed by thoughtful program design.

NGO 2.0 China is not the kind of ideal that can only end up being a good will in real life. This ideal is supported by pragmatic program design that aligns partners with different interests and drives things forward together. Imagine an IT company that has a strong interest in CSR projects. Imagine a company that is attempting to engage third-party endorsers.

Finally, NGO 2.0 China encourages me to think critically about the role that traditional and mainstream Chinese media plays in this field. Many times, published NGO stories are often dominated by sensational and distorted narrations. The effect of such reports, in addition to creating a large readership, is often the further marginalization of the victims.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, please visit the following websites: http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/people/JingWang.shtml (Professor Jing Wang’s personal webpage) and http://ngo20china.wikispaces.com/(NGO 2.0 wiki site).

Marketers of Technology Products and Services can Help Travelers Get More Out of Vacations
(A version of this editorial was first published in Ad Age China) http://adage.com/china/article?article_id=139980
China’s leisure industry is a spontaneous dance of sounds, anticipation, restlessness, sensations, human heat and intense togetherness, good and bad.

The whole country seems to feel an overwhelming desire to see, capture and carry as much as possible. They want to touch, see, touch again and see it again and most importantly, see it through the lens of a camera.

The experience is all about capturing everything in sight with as many mega pixels as possible. And sightseeing is like a race against time, and innumerable fellow travelers.

Desire to capture the evidence of being in a place can even surpass the desire to experience the place itself.
So while the Chinese travelers are busy capturing they can sometimes lose on the moments and experience part. Add to this the fact that if they are unable to organize what they capture – they can even miss on these memories.

The relative inexperience of the Chinese leisure traveler is a reflection of China’s stage of development, and it offers fertile ground for marketers.

There are various ways to helping these Chinese travelers. And marketers of technology products can especially play an important role in this.

Film and camera companies can help Chinese tourists, many of whom are first-time owners of high-end digital cameras, find better ways of organizing travel pictures. Photographs can be brought to life in more ways than just sprinkling them on a blog, e-mailing them as large files or dumping them in some obscure corner of the hard drive,
For example, PC and Television companies can inspire the users through easy to use though music-layered slide shows on that can be viewed on large flat-screen TV sets. Right now only Apple comes close to providing this kind of inspiration.

Mobile phone companies and wireless carriers could offer more ways to use location-based services by developing and marketing applications that help people learn more about the temple in front of them or the myth about a lake they are walking past.

Even non- technology brands have many opportunities. Brands related to travel, travel accessories and hospitality could play a more important role here. So could brands that help people better understand the places and artifacts that so far they have only been clicking and carrying home in the flash memory of a newly acquired digital camera.

Automakers can help those traveling by car discover unknown attractions on the way to the hotel.

For those less savvy with technology, marketers could bundle promotional materials such as city guides with tourism accessories like North Face backpacks or camera lenses.

Advertisers have experimented with these ideas in western countries but in China, most remain unknown — even though the mainland has become a massive market for domestic tourism.

A moment between shooting those shadows

It’s not easy being a foreign social media enthusiast in China. China blocks the social media sites that you take for granted. Life without Twitter I can deal with but can you imagine being denied Facebook and YouTube? They even blocked Vimeo and Last.fm. Try running a blog without being able to embed anything but videos from YouKu and Tudou (which is not necessarily a bad thing because they are less censored than YouTube - go figure).

I tried to get around with tools like Ping.fm which could simultaneously update my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Delicious in one go but bugger it is banned now too.

Of course, none of this matters to China’s 360 million Netizens who think foreign social media is inferior anyway (and in many cases they are right). However there is one benefit to living on this side of the Great Firewall of China that you folks will never know; not even my friends in Hong Kong. For while I can use a VPN server to access YouTube when I really need need it, Google’s Music channel in China is something you will only experience on the mainland.

Each morning when I log on I point my browser to http://www.google.cn/music, search for music and decide whether to add to my evolving playlist (and sing along to the scrolling lyrics) or download and send to friend or iPod.

There are prompts to purchase the music although I don’t really know why anyone would, nor for that matter what Google’s business model is, other than a sink or swim retaliation to Baidu’s equally impressive music search, listen and download system.

AdAge China features a story on the blogger campaign we did with Unilever on their front page.

Unilever Turns on Cyber Charm for Pond’s Blind Trial
Social Media Campaign in China Will Be Replicated in Southeast Asian Markets Like Vietnam and the Philippines
by Normandy Madden
Published: October 14, 2009

SHANGHAI (AdAgeChina.com) — A social media experiment to promote Pond’s Age Miracle moisturizer in China this fall is turning into a regional marketing strategy and inspiring Unilever to spend more time communicating with its customers online.

In the market for just a year, Pond’s Age Miracle wasn’t leaping off store shelves. It faces strong competition from entrenched brands like Clinique, L’Oreal, Lancome and Procter & Gamble’s SK-II and Olay brands. Like most Asian women, Chinese tend to be fastidious about their skincare regimen. Beauty care is one of the few areas where they tend to be loyal to favorite products.

Click through to read the full article (but you do need to be a subscriber)

Here’s a treat for viral video fans. YouKu Buzz (daily) posts interesting clips from leading video sharing network, YouKu. Here is Taiwanese magician Liu Qian dazzling fans in a clever viral from Nokia.