B2B International is pleased to announce the dates of its upcoming training courses in Shanghai: On Thursday, 22 September 2011, we will be running a Market With Intelligence course, and on Friday, 23 September 2011, we will host a course on Value-Based Marketing.

As with all our courses, these full-day, hands-on training workshops will enable attendees to not only learn the theory of marketing, but – crucially – to apply the learnings to their own businesses. A brief summary of the course schedules is shown below, but more information can be found here “Shanghai Marketing Training Courses”.

To book your place online, please click here.. If you have any questions, please call your nearest B2B International office or email shanghai@b2binternational.com

Market with Intelligence – Thursday, September 22, 2011

This course introduces you to the key principles of market research and how research tools can be used to grow your business. Topics covered include:

• Introduction to market research
• Obtaining qualitative insights for business decision-making
• Obtaining quantitative insights
• Turning the results of research into action

Value-Based Marketing – Friday, September 23, 2011

Our value-based marketing workshop explores the key marketing principles and how you can make them work for you, including:

• Market intelligence and value-based marketing
• Market analysis, mapping and segmentation
• Competitive intelligence
• Creating customer value
• Pricing for value capture and profit

With so many people interested in the state of the economy, Alaric Fairbanks this week takes a look at some of the more unusual indicators which may tell us whether prospects are looking up.

Even – perhaps especially – here in Beijing, as elsewhere, not a day goes by without mention of the economy and how quickly it will recover or not. Supplementary to this are the business confidence or climate surveys and their subsequent reports of optimism and pessimism.

These are all very well, and may be a good source of column inches or publicity for a research company. This is all OK with me but, even if reflective of whatever business community or industry sector’s level of confidence, it is perhaps worth thinking about which sources of information are behind, say, agreement with a statement expecting an increase in profit, revenue, headcount, etc.

From examples I have seen, including, I confess, a climate survey we conducted, there is little attention paid to the sources of information upon which these feelings are based. When it does appear, it is usually a choice of ‘respectable’ sources, such as newspapers, journals, or official statistics. Less expected or rational influences are often overlooked and, even if included in the question set, a respondent may not admit to having been influenced by an alternative or informal source.

Of course, it would be great for our business if businesspeople took tailored market research as their main source of guidance for decisions and even opinions, but as this is not always the case, I was curious as to what observations people were making to inform their levels of confidence.

To this end we spoke informally to contacts in the Western business community about any indicators used to reflect on their business prospects. A common theme emerged around indicators being derived from the physical environment, especially through observation. A simple example of an informal indicator was counting or estimating the number of new building sites passed on the way to work – the more new sites, the stronger the economic prospects.

These conversations suggested that observations were aimed at levels of activity. They tended be a mixture of fairly Beijing-specific and the more general. Observed indicators from work and life in Beijing with a perceived positive correlation included:

• The number of properties marked with the character “chai”, indicating ready for demolition.
• Visibility of yellow construction helmets seen at lunchtime
• Levels of air pollution, sometimes with reference to the official air pollution index
• Time taken to get to work

And with a perceived negative correlation:

• Number of unsolicited job applications
• Number of cold visits by salespeople
• Ease of purchasing train tickets.

Interestingly, although not all of these are anecdotally based, they all appear to have some underlying rationale. It would be interesting, at least to me, to look into how effective these indicators really are… but things are fairly hectic here at the moment, what with projects, proposals, etc – another way of showing how things are going right now!

In his latest Thursday Night Insight post, Matt Powell reflects on his experiences working in our China office and the difficulties inherent in conducting business across cultural boundaries.

I recently saw a TV advert from one of the world’s major banks that professes to its excellent local knowledge in every single country.  Of course, this campaign has been going for quite some time now as the bank positions itself not as a sprawling, faceless mega-corporation, but indeed as a very localised and personal bank.  Whether or not the bank does in fact deliver upon its promise remains to be seen, but the importance of local knowledge cannot be underestimated.

There are many horror stories about corporations naively taking one product or brand that is successful in one country and launching it into a foreign market without first adapting the product or its branding to meet the local culture.  Pepsi and Coca-Cola give two sterling examples of ‘how not to do it’.

When Pepsi launched their cola in China, the company thought it would be sufficient to translate their slogan "Pepsi Brings You Back to Life" into Chinese and simply launch the product.  Unfortunately, the slogan was translated a tad too literally and instead proclaimed that "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave."  Of course, the problem was rectified, but damage had already been done. 

Coca-Cola did something fairly similar when launching their product in China; they chose to launch their brand using Chinese characters that read phonetically as “Kekoukela”.  Of course, the phonetic spelling sounded similar ‘Coca-Cola’ to a westerner, but I imagine there weren’t many Chinese consumers looking to purchase a refreshing can of “female horse stuffed with wax”.  Surely, even just the smallest foray into market research would have highlighted these significant blunders, and saved the companies millions of dollars – let alone the damage done to the brands.  

Indeed, in many cases, the same message or piece of information can still cross hazy lingual and cultural boundaries.  I myself had an experience when on secondment in our Beijing office, where lingual barriers became slightly hazy to say the least.  Each day when finishing work I would order a taxi to where I lived, pronounced ‘Hua Mao’.  Every time I asked, the taxi driver would either laugh, shake his head, ask to see a map, or (in one extreme case) make a loud cat-like ‘miaow’-ing noise at me.  I knew I was saying the name of the location correctly, so although slightly perplexed at the behavior of the Beijing taxi drivers, I thought nothing of it… until, that is, one day towards the end of my stay when I took a taxi with some of my Chinese colleagues.  When I asked the taxi driver to me to my destination my colleagues burst into uproarious laughter – it turned out that for two months I had been saying the words correctly, but pronouncing them with the wrong tonal inflection – and, of course, was asking the taxi driver to take me to ‘cat with flowers’.  At least the miaow-ing taxi driver seemed slightly less disturbing after that.

Although it is an amusing story, it does indeed highlight the importance of local knowledge and just how critical the nuances of any language and culture really are.  To most westerners, what I was saying and what I should have been saying sounded fairly similar indeed, but (despite me always managing to get to my destination) the difference it made to the local person – the person who mattered – was huge.   

At B2B International we, like the large bank, recognise just how important local knowledge is.  Every country is different and brings with it a whole set of language issues and cultural traits.  We use ‘mother-tongue’ interviewers when conducting international interviews for this very reason; the cultural nuances are critically important in understanding information and indeed any subtle inferences that may be missed by someone who is not completely immersed in that particular culture or language.  Indeed, across our three offices we can span the globe from Asia, to Europe, to the Americas.

Our expertise can help our clients in many ways – from conducting multi-country studies in various languages, to conducting in-depth research and analysis in specific countries, to researching new markets to enter.  For more information about how we could help your Company, contact a member of research team at our European headquarters in Manchester, our Asian headquarters in Beijing, or our American head office in New York.

AdAgeChina is adamant that China remains one of the few bright spots for multinational marketers at the present time.  After all, with some 300 million urban and upwardly mobile consumers, China can boast the world’s largest numbers of internet and mobile-phone users, as well as the biggest global market for cars, beer and cigarettes.

But it can still be a tough market to crack, and a new white paper from Ad Age – Winning Consumers in China – can help those, particularly in consumer markets, looking to grow their brands in China.
Some top tips from the paper, many of which also apply to b-to-b markets, include:

• Don’t think of China as a single country.  According to AdAgeChina, an unbelievable 273 of its cities are each home to more than one million inhabitants, giving you some idea of the tremendous scale of this country.
• Don’t misinterpret the popularity of some Western brands as a desire among Chinese to become Westernized. China is advancing apace and is embracing many Western products and ideas, but it also has a strong identity, a proud history and many unique traditions of its own, all of which must be acknowledged and respected.
• Underestimate local brands at your peril.
• Beware mass media in China. One of the most effective ways to reach consumers in the world’s most populous country can actually be through one-to-one marketing.

The full white paper can be purchased from adagechina.com.

B2B International, with research experts on the ground in its Beijing office, offers some similar tips to business-to-business marketers interested in the potential of this huge country.  Our white paper, Marketing and Selling to Chinese Businesses, explores the reasons behind both successful and unsuccessful marketing and sales approaches in China, and can be downloaded here for free. Alternatively, email beijing@b2binternational.com if you would like to find out more from our team in China.