Chinese takeaways: lessons learned from the Bite Beijing Roundtable
by David Ketchum - No comments
Bite China recently hosted a Roundtable in Beijing for senior marketers and communications executives in conjunction with Public Affairs Asia. The jumping off point for the discussion was Bite’s “Many voices: one message” global study commissioned from eConsultancy. Our report highlighted that corporate communicators must respond to this evolving media landscape by developing digital skill-sets for their companies, not to replace traditional skills but rather to complement the existing ones.
The Roundtable included senior participants from PepsiCo, internet giant Baidu, payments facilitator SWIFT, Nestlé, Mars, BASF, Double A Paper and J&J’s China joint venture Xi’an-Janssen, among other MNC and Chinese companies. Other groups represented included AmCham-China and Action Aid International. The group noted that there are unique challenges for MNC’s operating in China, but they also focused on the East/West similarities when it comes to adapting to new social media dynamics.
Traditional media is still a powerful force in China, with commercially-successful trade and business publications carving out a niche alongside the state-owned media. The range of choices makes it harder to deploy one-size-fits-all mass media campaigns, but that’s not what today’s consumer expects anyway, so the enhanced targeting and relevance of fragmented media outweighs the extra effort required to plan and deploy campaigns.
Kaiser Kuo of Baidu said: “It’s easy, in the rush to embrace digital media and social media in particular, to overlook the continuing – indeed, expanding – importance of traditional media in the China market. We focus on the fact that China has at last count some 485 million internet users, but we overlook the fact that this still only represents about 37 per cent penetration. This is not to downplay the importance of the internet and of social media; indeed, the Internet is absolutely indispensable now to a vital segment of China’s population. But it’s just important to recognise that it’s not the perfect media for marketing communications for every brand, product, or service.”
Smart companies are both creating messages that are credible and compelling that are equally appropriate for internal and external consumption, and they are empowering their employees to take responsibility for what they say both as individuals and representatives of the company they work for. In practice this approach is not at all straightforward and can create many issues, particularly in highly regulated industries and where company confidential information or IP is concerned, but ultimately defending the silos will not work.
The complete Public Affairs Asia report on the event is available here.