It was 20th May, of this year, and I found myself sitting across from the president of Club Med; the venerable holiday-resort brand beloved of Europeans. His name is Henri Giscard d'Estaing and we were present for the official opening of the Club Med Joy View Golden Coast, a resort four hours from Beijing, on the coast of Qinhuangdao.
“ In your view, is there any way for a small western brand without Chinese speaking staff to get into the Chinese e-commerce world? I mean, even a small foothold?...
What are the e-commerce marketing tools that are doable for a non-Chinese staff that can't constantly keep up with every trend?
My assumption is that none of this can run very well with all those limitations. But is it possible to run "reasonably" well enough to at least get a foothold? And if so, how? Thanks for any insights.
In the August 7th, 1982 edition of the New York Times, there was printed a flashy headline: CULTURE OF JAPAN BLOSSOMING IN AMERICA.
The article quoted a Richard Lanier, director of the Asian Cultural Council, who said: "American awareness of and appreciation for Japanese culture is greater than it ever has been."
“Here is something I'd love to hear your thoughts about: Our company offers car rental services and a good chunk of our customers are Chinese. That's great, we even have a Chinese language version of the website, we accept Alipay and Tenpay and so on.
In the first part of this series, we learned that western brands have intrinsic advantages in China, such as being associated with creative, original, and high-quality products. While this still holds true, we must also appreciate how quickly the China marketplace moves, and the pace of its development. Chinese consumers don't stand still and this is clearly evident in how brands are perceived.
Bullet Messenger (or Zidan Duanxin), a new Chinese messaging app, has hit the headlines in the past few weeks with hyped-up discussions over the possibilities of this new app challenging the dominant position of WeChat, a ubiquitous everyday messaging app in China.
A unicorn is defined as a startup company that is valued at more than a billion dollars. China now has around 164 unicorns, according to a joint study, but this number has increased. China's number of unicorns overtook the US', which has around 132, as of the end of 2017.
In short, manually translate all key pages into Mandarin Chinese written in Simplified Chinese script, the universal language used across the mainland. Make sure your language is concise and persuasive – good copy matters just as much in China as it does in the West!
Besides just translating, make sure to adjust the content of your website for Chinese users. Learn what they want, then add or edit content that addresses their concerns.
Nearly 20 years ago in January 1999, Starbucks opened their first store in Beijing basically introducing coffee culture to China. However, twenty years later China and its consumers have changed and competition has blossomed – so, where does Starbucks now stand on the Chinese market?
Google is reportedly in the process of re-entering the Chinese market. The American tech giant has been developing a search engine for China and it has led to speculation over how a Google re-entry, and its fight with local rivals, might play out.
