Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.

It is likely the post will also in other categories too.  For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.

Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.

I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own  minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.

The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.

I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.

  • Chinese brands opportunity

    Chinese brands opportunityl – a sister company of my agency has launched a report on the top 50 Chinese brands. The report is exhaustive and has lots of smart stuff in it that will undoubtedly make it into the PowerPoint presentations I have to churn out over the next year. Leafing through it though I was immediately struck by one aspect of the data in particular.  Four of the top ten brands derived less than 20 per cent of their turnover from outside China. And nine of the top ten brands derived more more than a third of their revenues from outside the country.

    In fact, it was only Lenovo that made over half its money outside China. This immediately struck me: abroad was Chinese brands opportunity. As the bulk of these brands have services that would certainly work internationally and there is an unreleased potential to create the next Shell, Citibank, British Airways or Whirlpool. Given that China is looking to move up the food chain as countries like Vietnam and the Philippines have lower cost workforces than areas like Shenzhen, international brand growth by these Chinese companies or their peers is only a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’.

    The biggest barrier for fulfilling Chinese brands opportunity is the ability of the management team to move past hubris and a China-first focus. This is something that ‘struggle’ or wolf culture organisations like Huawei fail to do that well.

    More information
    BrandZ – Top 50 most valuable Chinese brands 2013

    Archived from blog posts I wrote for PR Week. More business related posts here.

  • Multi language content

    We were having a discussion in the team about the various different approaches to multi language content campaigns. Should we have different accounts for each language? Should we put multi-language content in the one post?

    It really depends on your brand what you’re trying to do. For Hong Kong (the market my team cared about); one account makes the most sense.

    But one approach we ruled out after looking around at a selection of different retail brands was using a machine translation service in-lieu of English editorial for multi-language content.
    Hallowe'en

    This example came from the Facebook page of Circle K Hong Kong. Circle K is a convenience store chain that is almost ubiquitous in Hong Kong. It is a subsidiary of the Fung Group.

    Despite all the discussions about deep learning there is still a way to go for mainstream multi-language content solutions. Hong Kong Cantonese is particularly hard for a few reasons:

    • The language is immensely symbolic
    • Cantonese uses a lot of idioms
    • It has evolved very fast compared to the mainland version of Cantonese. Popular media, the internet and international culture evolved the language out of all recognition. A language expert friend listened to Cantonese language courses issued to US government personnel in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, commented how similar it was to the mainland.

    Whilst Cantonese is a tough language for machine learning, it is good at seeing machine learning’s limits. English language in popular parlance has changed a lot. The use of bae, basic, finsta or lit are classic examples of uses that wouldn’t have occurred ten years ago. Google Translation got its corpus of information from looking at organisations that publish multi-language content like UN organisations. But this officialise doesn’t provide much guidance for how a language is used outside of official policy documents.

  • Jamie Hewlett + more news

    Jamie Hewlett

    Jamie Hewlett was not someone that I would have associated with luxury menswear brand Dunhill. Dunhill have been creating interesting content for a number of years, that used to be accessed through an iPad application and their own site. This interview with Jamie Hewlett is brilliant. Hewlett’s talent as a comic creator developed early with him working in the studios of Bob Godfrey. Godfrey is famous to UK TV watchers for the cartoon series Rhubarb & Custard. After college Jamie Hewlett was recruited for Deadline magazine, which is where his iconic Tank Girl creation was formed and his relationship with Damon Albarn of Gorillaz.

    Jamie Hewlett submarined during the 1990s when the underground became mainstream drawing Get The Freebies. Eventually Jamie Hewlett teamed up with Albarn to provide the visual look of The Gorillaz.