CHINA: Crossing cultures

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mad.co.uk
CHINA: Crossing cultures
Source: Marketing Week | Published: 28 February 2002 00:00 In the fashion stores svelte career women browse racks of designer labels; elsewhere the sales assistants are doing a swift trade in soft furnishings, white goods and the latest styles in mobile phones. It could be Knightsbridge, or New York's Fifth Avenue. In fact this is Wangfujing, Beijing's up-market main shopping street and the well-heeled consumers are members of China's rising urban middle classes. Around the city, groups of students and office workers sit chatting with friends in Western-style bars, restaurants and the ubiquitous KFC, McDonald's and Pizza Hut outlets. Less than a mile from the smart shops and fast-food chains, the scene in Beijing's old quarter is very different. Street vendors with weathered faces sell fruit and vegetables laid out on rough wooden tables. Men in padded cotton jackets squat aimlessly by the roadside, dragging slowly on thin roll-ups. China in their hands With its accession to the World Trade Organisation, China is widely perceived as the world's greatest marketing opportunity. But while it is easy to be dazzled by a population of 1.3 billion, the reality is that less than ten per cent of Chinese citizens have incomes that can afford Western products. And for high-end goods, such as luxury cars, the market is more akin to that of a small EU state. As foreign investors scramble to take advantage of China's untapped potential, one group of Western businesses looks set to prosper: international market research agencies. Some agencies have been locally established since the Chinese government embarked on economic reform in the Eighties. But are these Western-owned agencies - armed with a battery of imported techniques - qualified to help incoming businesses acquire the deep cultural insight that they need to make their brands appealing to Chinese consumers? The issue of whether market research techniques can cross cultures extends beyond the specific case of China. With the growth in international business, research agencies favour common methodologies that can be applied globally, allowing clients to compare markets. What this has demonstrated is that Western techniques, particularly those that use projection and visual imagery, can work well in most cultures. But there must be scope for local adaptation. Research International qualitative global co-ordinator Jane Gwilliam gives an example of this, referring to the obituary technique, where respondents write an obituary for the fictitious "death" of a brand. She says: "The technique is a good way to examine brand values, but it does not work in some Far Eastern societies, because it is deemed offensive in some cultures. However, it is possible to obtain very similar results by replacing the reference to death with the question: 'What would this brand be if it were reincarnated?'." With the greater emphasis on comparing markets across national boundaries, agencies have become more inclined to treat large and culturally diverse nations, such as China, India, or indeed the US, as comprising not one but a series of markets. Gwilliam explains: "The variations between peoples within countries are often greater than those between nations. This reflects the huge differences that can exist within different regions, or between the lifestyle of an urban versus a rural community." China typifies the set of conditions that Gwilliam describes. Viewed objectively, the Chinese market is a conglomeration of regional markets, unified by a central government, but differentiated by local cultures that have their origins in the country's ancient sub-structure of provinces. In economic terms, the provinces along China's eastern coast that are home to major cities are more affluent, more open to outside influences and more developed than the provinces of the interior. There are also significant differences between the traditions, diet and even the physical appearance of people from the northern provinces and people from the rice-cultivating lands in the south. What follows from this is that in some sectors, most notably food and drink, foreign marketers may be able to improve their sales by reflecting local variations in taste in the products that they offer. Taylor Nelson Sofres Interactive Asia Pacific director Chi-wing Chan cites US sports drinks company Gatorade as an example of a company that has applied such an approach with skill. He says: "When Gatorade launched in China, it offered different flavours in different cities to appeal to local palates. It identified that in the northern city of Beijing people like sweet tastes, while the Cantonese have a preference for sour flavours, such as lemon and lime." Regional variations Even within prosperous regions, vast contrasts exist between the lifestyles and attitudes of people living in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and people inhabiting the multiplicity of small towns and rural communities that surround them. So at a sub-regional level, entrant businesses need to identify the communities they plan to target - and to develop strategies for marketing appropriately to, for instance, a management consultant at one end of the spectrum and a traditional craftsman at the other. A key issue in designing communications for developing markets is to know whether individual markets perceive advertising as entertainment, or as a source of information. Jamie Lord, business development director for market research agency Millward Brown Asia-Pacific, says: "In developed markets, such as Europe, the US, Japan and Thailand, communication has to be entertaining to grab people's attention. While this may be true for a well-developed city, such as Shanghai, many secondary and tertiary cities look to advertising to provide information to guide and reinforce purchase decisions." To illustrate the dangers of misreading the consumer's level of media literacy, Lord refers to the personal care market. "Western brands are a symbol of status to many Chinese, but they have to deliver on their promises. For instance, rural Chinese consumers consider shampoo advertisements that show girls with hair so shiny that it looks like a mirror to be misleading." Cultural blunders of this sort are more likely to be avoided by Western businesses that employ market research agencies which recruit locally, or form joint venture partnerships with indigenous agencies, instead of relying excessively on expatriate managers. The difficulty here is that while China has an abundance of young people who would make competent researchers, very few of them are in the business. In order to address this situation, multinational agencies have to invest in equipping local staff with the skills that are needed to run projects to the standards required by global clients. But while this skills base is being developed, there is the thorny issue of how to build cross-cultural teams that combine the expertise of incoming managers with the cultural insight of local employees.

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CHINA: Crossing cultures

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Tapping local knowledge Hui Tan, lecturer in international business and management at Leeds University Business School, says that to negotiate this challenge successfully, Western agencies need to exchange ideas with local researchers - not adopt the role of teacher. He says: "Incoming researchers may have great technical expertise, but to operate effectively they need to understand Chinese culture too. For instance, to get the best results from interviewees, Western researchers may find they need to adapt their way of working, or modify their view of what is, and is not, an important objective." An example of where agencies and their clients might need to sacrifice a short-term objective to preserve the quality of the research stems from the emphasis that the Chinese place on building rapport. Spokesperson for the Association for Qualitative Research, and Green Light Research managing director, Fiona Jack, says: "The whole process of building trust takes longer and respondents need more time to 'warm up'. It is important to satisfy these needs, even when the client is pressing for quick results." Research International China director Gilbert Lee adds that outside the major cities, research moderators need to work harder to win the confidence of respondents. "In the smaller towns and villages, people are less responsive to sophisticated techniques. This is tackled by visiting them at home, or conducting research among natural clusters of people who already know and trust each other. We also do more observational research." International family It is possible to exaggerate the extent to which Western agencies need to change their tactics when they engage abroad. All of the cultural traits that are said to be characteristic of the Chinese - such as an unwillingness to contradict and an eagerness to respond positively - are exhibited in varying degrees by personality types in the West. This is why Western marketers adopted projective methods in their home markets, such as mood boards or thought bubbles. To apply market research techniques effectively in markets such as China, multinational agencies need to draw upon the insights of local researchers. This does not mean recruiting from only a narrow band of major cities. While the market for luxury goods in China is concentrated in the metropolitan centres, many packaged goods brands, from soft drinks to household cleaning agents, are affordable and potentially attractive to the more affluent inhabitants of smaller towns, and even some villages. To access this wider market, agencies need to establish field offices across China's 30-plus provinces and recruit local interviewers who know the area and speak the regional dialect. The final challenge is to train these researchers in classic market research techniques - and to support them in adapting the research approaches, or the content of the stimulus material, to work sympathetically with the local culture.
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