China’s Marketers can help themselves by helping their consumers to ‘beat the system’

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Everyone loves a bargain and none more so than the Chinese. I’ll often hear my neighbours comparing the price of their freshly bought vegetables from the nearby wet  market as they make small talk in the elevator, and at work the conversation among colleagues often turns to how to get the best price for something. This all adds up to a well ingrained ‘system beating’ mentality, with regards to getting the best price.

I read a great post about ‘System Beaters’, on Joel Rubinson’s market research blog. The post highlights how deals are increasingly guiding our path to purchase, especially in the advent of social media in its various facets, and I feel that this observation is particularly meaningful here in China. Read the rest of this entry »

Engage and Measure – Building Brands with Social Media in China

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The Rise and Rise of Social Media in China

It’s approaching my fifth anniversary of living here in China, so I thought I’d use this milestone to write about what I have seen in the development of social media marketing in my time here. It’s a unique and powerful area for all brand owners in China that has grown so fast over recent years, yet still seems to pose something of challenge in terms of the best way to 1) engage social media users with brands and; 2) measure the impact of that engagement. The timing of this post coincides with the release of the OgilvyOne ‘Connected’ report that was made available last week. It provides an excellent summary of how social media has quickly become mainstream in China and what this means for brands. Read the rest of this entry »

Lessons from KFC China Online Voucher Fiasco

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Finger lickin' good!

KFC, the usually savvy China marketers, got their fingers burnt last week due to their ’Super Value Tuesday’ online voucher promotion. The offer featured a 50% discount on their popular chicken bucket.

This is my understanding of the promo. It is run in conjunction with the popular online store Taobao, with the idea that 100 lucky respondents will be eligible for this ’instant’ offer. There are three rounds in which offers are posted; round one is at 10am, round two at 2pm and round three at 4pm, consumers respond instantly through Taobao in the hope that they will receive a voucher in their inbox, the winning recipients can then redeem their vouchers at KFC restaurants. However, it seems that last week, before round one had even finished vouchers supposedly for round two and three already begun circulating on the Internet. It would seem that they were being shared as ‘valid to all’, rather than on the original basis of being valid only to the lucky 100 winners. Read the rest of this entry »

The China Marketing Lab Manifesto

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Welcome to China Marketing Lab! In this my first post I hope to explain exactly what it is I wish to achieve with this new blog, and from which angle I will be attacking this tricky subject matter. Click on about for more info about me, but to cut a long story short, I am hoping this blog will give me an outlet to share my thoughts on some of the interesting trends I am seeing as a marketing professional working in China. I should state now that I consider myself to be a market researcher first, and therefore this blog will detail the thoughts and observations of a market research practitioner plying his trade in the Middle Kingdom. I do not consider myself to be an expert on China.   Read the rest of this entry »