| Hinde |
Hello. I’m Hinde Lamrani. I’m the International Search Strategist and SME within RWS Moravia. Let me introduce myself. My Masters’ were in E-commerce and International Online Marketing, but I did specialize in SEO and worked in both agency and in-house sides, and for the past eight years, worked within the localization industry.
Today, we have Arnold Ma, a prominent China expert with us, and he’s going to help us better understand the Chinese digital marketing landscape. I will let him actually introduce himself. |
| Arnold |
Thank you for the introduction, Hinde, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. So, I’m Arnold, and I’m the founder and CEO of a digital creative agency, Qumin, and we focus on helping Western brands to understand Chinese people and cultures, and thus create more relevant and more effective campaigns for a Chinese audience. More recently, we’ve also started to help Chinese brands, such as WeChat and Alipay, to also globalize and understand Western people and cultures, and again, thus create better and more relevant, effective campaigns.
Our mission as a business is to open the world to China. So, and I think, especially in these days more than ever, that it’s really important to understand that as different as we are, we’re all very same deep down. And I guess we’re all about bringing the world closer and connecting people and cultures together. |
| Hinde |
My first question to you is, what are the typical client challenges that you’ve seen so far? |
| Arnold |
Yeah, that’s a really good question to open up, and I could probably talk about this for, I dunno, like 24 hours. And I guess we don’t have 24 hours on this podcast. So, I think probably the biggest challenge is not so much the work, right? Because I think most people will go straight to, you know, like, how do we do Chinese SEO? How do we do Chinese creative? What do we do with Chinese social media? A lot of the challenges that we are facing initially is just around, like, whether they feel like their product or service is fit for market and whether anyone would actually buy it.
So, it’s understanding of the consumers and the audience that they’re looking to target. And for me, that connects back to understanding people, fundamentally, outside just the stuff they’re spending around products or services and their consumerism in general. So yeah, short answer is that the biggest challenge is understanding Chinese people. |
| Hinde |
So, you’re saying to brands out there who just decide, “Oh, let’s translate our website to Chinese and hope for the best.” What do you suggest to them? I mean, they definitely need to go and do some market research and find out first whether their products are in demand in China, and if so, they need a completely full-on strategy. It’s not only about translating their website, right? |
| Arnold |
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you hit the nail on the head. It’s… might be better if I tried to give you guys an example.
So, when you are creating your website copy for your English website or for your main global website, you don’t just take your product description and stick it on the webpage, right? You actually research, either call-to-action or consumer trigger points. You know, like, what are their pain points? What do they want? Why are they here? And then you try and leverage that with the message that you have on the website. And then you create some kind of a funnel, whether it’s, like, I don’t know, initially drawing their attention and then converting them via, like, different call-to-actions or buttons.
So yeah, you’re right. Rather than translating what you’ve researched and discovered and tailored for the audience in the West, you should just do the exact same process from scratch, but in China. So, starting over, rather than just translating directly. |
| Hinde |
I think this is also applicable to their digital strategy as well. Whatever worked and still works for them as a digital strategy in their home markets and other, I don’t know, European markets maybe, mightn’t exactly work in China, or, like, 90% of the time, wouldn’t work in China. They need a complete strategy, right? |
| Arnold |
Yeah. I think this is actually a quite interesting point of discussion for everyone, because there’s a couple of things, right? Like, marketing strategy, like, the fundamentals of how you approach marketing and how you build a strategy is probably the same. Are you the best practice? Are you starting with, like, audience understanding in research insights, personas, concentric circles? Moving on to the actual strategy, like, how you connect with those audience and then move on to the creative of how you create the emotional connection, the affinity, a more meaningful communication between the audience and the brand. Like, all of those things you need to do, right? These are, like, the basic fundamental of marketing 101. But it’s more how you approach all of those things and what comes out of those things that’s gonna be completely different, right?
Because Chinese culture is very different to British culture, is very different to Indian culture. So, I mean, specifically over creative, the way that you articulate your strategy will probably be completely different depending on the people you’re talking to. So, I think people need to understand the difference between marketing best practice; how you approach a strategy; creative, research insights; and the results you get out of those things. Yeah, people need to separate those two things. So rather than translate in the result into a different market, just do what you do, just take the approach and then trying to get results in various markets that way. |
| Hinde |
Yeah, yeah. This is true, but China is completely different than other markets like Western markets. If you’re thinking about the platforms you’re using, for example, for digital marketing, you might have much more similarities in the platforms you’re actually using as a digital marketer, say between France, Germany, and Spain, and China. So, you cannot just recycle whatever you’ve used, say in Europe, for China, because you’re gonna have to build up your other channels over there. You need to use other platforms in China. There’s… no Google, like we, there’s no Google over there; there’s Baidu. There’s lots of similarities, but there’s also lots of differences. And also, even like E-commerce and social E-commerce influencers, there’s so much going on in China that we don’t actually have in other parts of the world. Can you please give us more insight into that? |
| Arnold |
Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you a few examples. So, I think I’ll start with giving you an example on cultural differences, moving on to the platforms, and then maybe, like, consumer behavior in digital.
To start off with, I think I wanna give you an example of, like, the cultural differences. So, for me, like, I grew up in China. I was born in China in a town called Tianjin. Some of you might have heard it, some of your listeners might not have. And I moved over to the UK when I was around nine years old. So, I’ve been lucky enough to experience both cultures. And the biggest difference for me is probably, and a lot of people don’t realize this, the focus in the West is a lot on individuals. It’s a very independent culture, right? Whereas in China, it’s very collective. Like, the focus is on the whole. And there’s advantage and disadvantage to both of those. |
| Arnold |
I mean, I guess one advantage of an independent culture is that people are more responsible, and let’s say they grow up a lot faster in a sense that they learn to not rely on other people around them very quickly, and they mature a lot faster in general. The advantage of a collective culture is maybe like when you are thinking about something, even if it’s like a purchase, right, like of a product or a service, you normally think about the family as much as yourself and how it affects the family and again, benefit the family.
So that leads onto my next point around the cultural differences. It’s kind of, like, the order in the West, I believe, and it’s my personal opinion, is kind of, like, individual, family, and then maybe State, but in China it is very different. It’s always a family unit above everything else. So, it’s always family and then the State and then the individual. So, it’s kind of like almost reversed. And when you talk to anyone from, like, Chinese culture, whether it’s, like, a mom or dad, or a son or a daughter, they always feel like they have the obligation to put the family almost before themselves, especially, like, moms and dads. Like, if you are like the patriarch or the matriarch, that’s kind of your main thing. Whereas in this country, I think a lot of the focuses is very independent, very individualistic, which is also, yeah. I mean, it’s just different cultures.
But I wanna move a bit onto, I guess, quickly, onto platforms you mentioned earlier as well. I think everyone, most of your listeners, probably already know that platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, are all banned in China. The only thing that’s not banned in China, actually, is LinkedIn. So, if you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is your go-to for China as well as the rest of the world. So, as a result of that, a lot of Chinese platforms have evolved from scratch, and there’s a huge advantage to that actually. |
| Arnold |
So, if you think about it, a lot of our platforms like Facebook, like Amazon, they’ve always been built from scratch for the desktop environment, and also within a browser container. This is very important because when you think about it, when we moved over to, like, an iPhone, a mobile browsing capability, a mobile browsing environment, it was probably the launch of the first iPhone 3G. I think that was when browsing the internet on a mobile device became really usable and really like a natural thing. Before that, you can’t get mobile internet, it was kind of like half internet, third internet. It wasn’t like full internet, right? But when that happened, a lot of people already had legacy behaviors around how websites should behave, how social media platforms should behave, how apps should behave, applications, I mean, like desktop applications. So, it was very difficult for those companies, like Amazon, to evolve and then change into a mobile main, like, a, you know, like mobile based experience, building mobile first experiences.
So, it was always, like, adapted user experience, but in China, that didn’t happen, right? Internet penetration is still very low. When the first iPhone 3G launched, or when the first Android phones launched, that had proper mobile experience capabilities, there really weren’t any legacy behavior. Most people didn’t have internet. So, their first impression of the internet is on a mobile device, which means from scratch, people like WeChat were able to build platforms from scratch purely on a mobile device. |
| Hinde |
Same thing happens in Africa. Yeah. Where you have, like, mobile first and people started using mobiles without even having the internet before in their homes. |
| Arnold |
Yeah, exactly. So, we call it technology leapfrog. It’s…
So yeah, exactly what you said. It’s like they jumped over an evolution because they didn’t need to go through that evolution. They, almost like the technology, the hardware enabled them to skip to the next generation without experiencing the previous generation. And this happens in China so much. So, let me give you a few examples. When I was growing up in China, we only had terrestrial TV, and when I came over here, we had terrestrial TV. Then we moved to satellite and cable, right? So, stuff like Sky or, like, basically like cable and satellite. And then more recently, we’re moving to kind of video on demand, like Netflix, or Disney+, or Apple TV. But in China, we never really had satellite or cable. We went straight from terrestrial to video on demand, right? So that’s like a really big technology leapfrog.
Another really important one is mobile payments. So, China was always a cash economy when I was growing up. If you didn’t carry cash when you went out, you couldn’t get anything. Like, everyone had a China Union card or credit card or a debit card, but no one really used it, no one accepted it. There was no infrastructure to really adapt it widely with consumers. But in this country, we went from a cash economy very early on, to a card culture and card economy. So, everyone carried cards around, no one carried cash. You could pay for stuff with card everywhere, whether it’s debit or credit. So, we’re kind of now almost stuck in that legacy behavior. And I’m gonna use this word a lot, legacy behavior, in a sense that even Apple Pay is basically an extension of the card economy. It’s an extension of the card technology because you’re digitizing your card, right?
But in China, that’s not the case. With China, it is like WeChat Pay and Alipay are true mobile wallets and mobile payments, in a sense you don’t need to connect a bank card to it. You don’t need to connect the credit card to it; it just comes straight out of your account. So, it’s true mobile payments, and we still haven’t really moved to true mobile payments. So that’s, like, another technology leapfrog from a cash economy to mobile payments. I think when you move to a new infrastructure for the entire consumer audience space, the amount of time and money you invest in that infrastructure need to give you a return that’s bigger than the what you invest in.
So, moving from a card economy to mobile payments, rather card habit to mobile payments, is a very small return on convenience versus the amount you’ll have to change in the infrastructure in time and people and resources. When moving from a cash economy to mobile wallets, the retaining convenience is massive, and therefore it was worth investing in infrastructure and worth people individually investing in changing their habits. So I think it’s not because of China, I mean, well, okay… so partly because China has grown faster than any country in the history of mankind over the last 40 years, they’re used to changes and positive things that come out of changes. But I think also because they have the benefit of seeing the future or seeing what can be skipped as an evolution or technology leapfrog from looking at the West.
So, I think the next phase is potentially we might see some technology leapfrog from the West, taking learnings from China, right? So, there’s kind of like this back and forth between technology leapfrog, learning from another culture, and then that culture skipping to the next generation, learning from the other culture. And I think that’s good. It creates, like, a new technology, new evolution, and new behaviors, new habits, that benefit everyone. |
| Hinde |
So, we’ll be learning from what happens with the Chinese landscape now for what we can actually achieve in Europe? Because they’re way ahead with regards to this E-commerce on social media. Like, I mean, you can pay your taxi with WeChat. At the same time, you can also buy products and stuff. And, I mean, this bubble also of KOLs and influencers and, like, influencer marketing is booming over there. And, I mean, it started over there way before in Europe and in other markets. How do you see this going? Do you think it’s gonna last? |
| Arnold |
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think a really good transition to the next topic, which is, I guess, talking a bit more about influencer marketing and yeah, you’re right. So, the celebrity worship culture in China is more prominent than anywhere else in the world, more than America and definitely more than the UK, because I know Americans also have a very celebrity worship culture, but in China, like, the reason influencers is so popular or the influencer model is so popular is because of this thing called Guanxi. I don’t know if you guys heard of Guanxi. I call it the world’s oldest social network.
So, Facebook has, like, the social network, right? Guanxi has been around for thousands of years; it’s the foundation of all Chinese culture, between relationships from people, whether it’s business or personal. So, let me give you an example. In the Western cultures or rather independent cultures, we, when we need something, we go to the Yellow Pages or we go to Google. Sometimes you might get a recommendation if you have a friend that knows this, but most of the time, you kind of just research yourself, right? You discover things. Do you remember the days of Yellow Pages, before Google? Like, you have, like, plumbers or electricians; you would go directly and search for them. This doesn’t happen in China. Like, you never work with someone unless there’s someone in between that knows that can facilitate that relationship. So, people don’t just go on the internet and search for a plumber, or a doctor, or electrician; they always, always go to someone in the network. So, they’ll ask someone in the network… |
| Hinde |
References. |
| Arnold |
… if they don’t know someone, they’ll ask someone and then that person tend to also facilitate that relationship. So, you’re never really working or talking to a stranger, which kind of happens in the West almost. So, that’s a Guanxi network. It’s like a network, right?
So, you go to someone else to ask about something and they go to s-, kind of like a web or a star typology for those listeners who are familiar with network concepts. And I think that’s why influencers are so popular, because people have this cultural habit of only really trusting recommendations from people they know or people they know of, rather than just advertising directly and searching for things. Like, we call these hand-raisers, right? If you search on Google, you’re like a hand-raiser, saying, “Hey, I want this product. Now I’m gonna research and find it on Google.” In China, they tend to do more of their research either on their friendship networks, offline, or now, because of the internet, to the people they trust i.e. influencers, right? So, I think that’s why influencer a model is so popular in China.
But I do wanna talk about the next decade a little bit as well, because I think in 2010, between 2010 and 2020, influencer marketing was booming. It was, you know, like, it was the only thing that mattered. It was very successful, a lot of brands, because again, a lot of awareness. But I do think, and I think this is something maybe the West can learn from China or get ahead on China a bit more is that, I think the influencer marketing model is not going to be very sustainable going into 2020 and beyond. There’s a few reasons. One, I think it’s very difficult to work with an influencer who are recommending loads of different brands, loads of different products, a lot of times in the same category. You know, one day, they’re like my favorite hotel is X, the next day, their favorite hotel is Y. Same as shoes, same as clothing. Like, it’s all very, it’s very… |
| Hinde |
Commercial. |
| Arnold |
Yeah, it’s very commercial. It’s not very authentic like it used to be because I think it’s very flooded. It’s over-saturated; every own brand wants to do it now. And obviously, influencer will take the money. I think number two, this is important. Every time you pay an influencer, you’re borrowing their reach, right? You’re paying for them to talk about either your promotion, or your product launch, or your service launch just once, you know, just that one campaign. So, the next time you wanna do something, you gotta pay them that amount again, to borrow their reach. Not only is that happening, every time you pay them, every time they make a post paid by you, they’re also increasing their followers. So not only are you borrowing their reach, you’re also helping them build their followers. So, this is a very unsustainable model.
It’s kind of, like, you can compare it to leasing versus buying or investing, right? So, what we’re moving towards as an agency is what we like to call the creator model. So, rather than building official brand accounts, we’re starting to build media assets for brands. And we’re doing this in China first more than anywhere else because Chinese platforms, like Douyin, like Xiaohongshu, like Bilibili, these platforms are very organic right now. They’re not paid to play like Facebook or an Instagram. They’re relatively new platforms, so meritocracy is still very important on those platforms i.e. the best content wins, rather than the person with the most money wins. So, we’re able to work with brands to build media assets from scratch i.e. from zero followers.
So, let me give me an example, right? Rather than building an official brand account for a hotel, we build them an account about gaming because they want to target the Gen Z audience in China and there’s 500 million gamers in China, which is a lot. So, we’re essentially building a media account that is just doing gaming content where the brand is part of the conversation, rather than just a brand talking at the audience about how great this hotel is. And once we have 100,000 followers, let’s say a 100,000 random number after in there, then we have 100,000 people who all have a common interest around gaming. They’re Gen Z; they’re our target audience. And then maybe we build another media asset that’s focused around foodies that are Gen Z. And then we have 100 100,000 followers on the foodie account. Then maybe we do one around fashion, who are Gen Z who are interested in fashion. And all of a sudden, like a year later, we have three or four accounts that they’re essentially our own influencer that we own, and we can use this as many times as we want. And every penny we invest into these accounts become an investment in the future. And this model really only works in China right now because of the things I mentioned earlier of meritocracy, of the platforms being relatively new, is very difficult. And I’m sure your listeners know, and I’m sure you know as well, it’s very difficult to build accounts from scratch now on Instagram and Facebook and some of the older platforms that are already very saturated. So yeah, my thought on influencer marketing. |
| Hinde |
So, you actually mentioned Gen Z several times there. I mean, there are other generations out there. How can you market to other generations in this diaspora? |
| Arnold |
Yeah. I mean, the reason I mentioned Gen Z, just because it suited that example, but for anyone, like, it goes back to what we’re saying about marketing, right? It doesn’t matter whether you executing a creator strategy, whether you’re building media assets, or whether you’re doing like influencer marketing or paid media; it all starts with the people, right? So, I think what any brand does is just research, right? Like, if you’re looking at, I don’t know, white colors, who’re in their 40s, what platforms they’re on the most, and then what kind of stuff they’re interested in, and then trying to create. |
| Arnold |
So, for the creator model, we would try to create content. We will try to engage with creators in that category. So, for example, if they’re white colored, in their mid-40s, they might care more about, I don’t know, sustainability than gaming. Therefore, we would then create, like, a big idea around sustainability, and then create content pillars, engage creators in sustainability, and then look at the platform. So, for something like sustainability, maybe it’s less Douyin and is more like Xiaohongshu, or maybe even, I don’t know, it’s more Weibo, or more WeChat. Maybe it’s more WeChat, actually. And then we’ll just target those platforms and create on those platforms, who already create content around sustainability, and then build a media asset to that result. |
| Hinde |
It’s actually very fascinating. And there’s so many platforms out there. We know that there are some platforms out there that are similar, slightly similar to whatever there is in the West, like Google-based and stuff like that, but which ones of the platforms or the digital marketing models do you think are completely unique to China? There is nothing like that at all elsewhere. Baidu has lots of, like, products, like, you know, Dubike and, maps and, like, similar to Google. And others like Weibo, and, you know, they’re similar to other platforms out there in the West. But is there a model that is completely unique to China… |
| Arnold |
It’s a very good question. And I think that model is social commerce.
I know we kind of have social commerce in the West, you can buy stuff on Instagram, but, like, once you see Chinese social commerce, you know that it’s completely different. So… |
| Hinde |
Different breed. |
| Arnold |
It’s a different breed, it’s like a different game. They’re playing a different game out there. I’ll give you a few examples in a second, but you know, when I browse Instagram and I see a commerce link, it’s just, so it always feels like it’s an afterthought. It’s not part of the platform; it hasn’t been built for the platform at the beginning. So, it’s normally a picture of a product or a picture of a model wearing some clothing, some shoes, some bags. You click on there and you’re like, oh yeah, it takes you to the website. There’s not really much, there’s not much difference here than the browser-based ecommerce behavior/environment, right? But in China, it’s very different. Like, these platforms almost built commerce as part of the platform, as much as content or messaging or engagement, from day one.
So, the best example is I can think of is probably… So, I browse Douyin a lot. Douyin is a Chinese version of TikTok, content on there… It’s a lot more mature. It’s been around for a bit longer, so it’s less like dancing bedrooms, more like educational and interesting stuff. So, I was browsing and I’m a big fan of food. I love food. So, a lot of my content feed is about food. And I watched this old lady cooking, like, this amazing chili sauce. I’m making myself hungry now. This amazing chili sauce in the countryside where she needs to get, like, fresh chilies, fresh meat, fresh spices, like ginger, garlic, and seasoning, like star anise, like cloves and peppers and stuff. And she cooks it and I’m like, “Oh my God, I wish I could have this right now.” And what do you know? Right at the end of the video, it’s only like a one-minute video, ‘cause it’s on Douyin, you can actually, literally, you can buy that product. We have almost like two clicks of the button, in the platform on Douyin. So, this isn’t available on TikTok, by the way. |
| Hinde |
And you get it delivered, right? |
| Arnold |
Exactly. And the thing is, the crazy thing is, because the logistics system in China that supports this E-commerce system, that if you order that at lunchtime, because you’re watching it on your lunch break, you probably would have that when you get home, so you can have it for dinner. How crazy is that? |
| Hinde |
It is mad. And see, I heard of a platform that’s actually like a hybrid of Instagram, Pinterest, and Amazon all in one. |
| Arnold |
Yeah. That’s Little Red Book or Xiaohongshu. So, all of these platforms, whether it’s Xiaohongshu, Weibo, or Douyin, they have their own E-commerce shop from within the platform. So rather than, so imagine Instagram had Instagram shops, basically. So rather than linking your E-commerce link to a website like Instagram does, they have their own shop front so it’s completely integrated. You don’t have to link to a website. What it does is, like, people like Xiaohongshu, which is what you mentioned, or Little Red Book, and Weibo as well, they use the shop backend.
So, let’s say you had an Amazon store, but in China is like Tmall. Let’s say you’re an Amazon store backend. You can basically create a shop front on Xiaohongshu or Weibo, and then that would pull in the products directly from your Amazon and sync with the inventory, the order management system, so it’s just essentially creating, like, a social media shop front that’s fully seamless with content viewing, and connected also to your E-commerce backend. And that’s the beauty of it, I think, ‘cause that’s the integration, that China is completely different to the West. |
| Hinde |
So from a technical perspective, it is absolutely feasible for a small business, like say a B2C, to create an account with Little Red Book, like you mentioned, and that would be, that’s it, just, they don’t have to, like, for example, in the West, you need to have an Instagram account, a Pinterest, an Amazon, but you can only have one account with this platform and you can do all this, right? At the same time. |
| Arnold |
Yeah, kind of, yeah. I mean, you still need some kind of a backend to power your social shop front, your social media shop front, but your point still remains. Like, in China, something like Xiaohongshu could be your website, your social media profile, and your E-commerce store. WeChat, Weibo, all the same can be your website, your social media account, and also your E-commerce shop front. So, the biggest difference is that there’s loads and loads of independent ecosystems in China that you can use rather than in the West, I think is all kind of connected, right? There’s like one, big ecosystem, rather than individual pockets of different ecosystems. |
| Hinde |
Right. This is really fascinating. |
| Arnold |
Good. |
| Hinde |
Yeah. It looks like over there, they’ve jumped over, like we mentioned before, a whole kind of evolutionary step in technology and they’re there. And we are now looking at what they’re doing and learning lessons basically. |
| Arnold |
Yeah, exactly. I think the next step of evolution is going to be a completely new platform that comes out in the West. You guys had it here first. I don’t think it’s gonna be Instagram or Facebook or any of the existing status quo platforms. I think it’s gonna be a new platform that emerged out of nowhere that’s gonna change the way that we browse content, consume content, and also shop online. I think we need, we really need to evolve out of this browser behavior, browser model, like, even on the mobile, right? Like, everything we do is still so browser based. China’s moved away from that like four, five years ago. And I think that’s gonna happen in the West, but I think it’s gonna happen from a company that we haven’t heard of yet. |
| Hinde |
We’re really, really excited about all this, everything Chinese, and we wanna know more about China. Where can we find all this wealth of information? |
| Arnold |
Yeah. So, there’s a few things. On LinkedIn, there’s loads of people who talk about Chinese marketing and technology industries. You can follow myself on LinkedIn. You can just search for Arnold Ma, M-A. But we also have a website which we create a passion for opening the world to China, which is our mission, is called Dao Insights, D-A-O and then insights, one word, daoinsights.com. It’s basically a kind of like the Advertising Week or drum version of Chinese marketing. So, we publish two case studies every week, and we also have daily news and opinion pieces on Chinese culture, Chinese people, Chinese platforms and technology. All the content on the website is focused around Chinese marketing, creative and tech industries. So, check that out, subscribe to the newsletter, and find me on LinkedIn. |
| Hinde |
Fantastic. Thank you very much, Arnold. This has been a fantastic chat and very, very interesting to us. And I’m pretty sure for our listeners as well. Thank you very much for being with us today. |
| Arnold |
I really hope so. You’re very welcome, and thank you very much. |
