These days, China is gearing up to become one of a few truly mobile-first economies in the world. While the West has been transiting relatively slowly, China proves to be rather “efficient” – considering how Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, or the BAT trio, have made it to the list of the global top 10 tech-giant in less than a decade. On the other front, being part of the mobile-first culture, Chinese consumers embrace the ubiquity of mobile devices and become accustomed to interacting with brands and purchasing a wide array of products via these new digital gadgets. The opportunity is certainly there and equally exhilarating: in 2020, China’s digital economy made up nearly 40 percent of its GDP – a collective contribution by 853 million daily users of mobile media.
How do these facts translate into the context of cross-cultural communications in China, now increasingly captured by digital media? To facilitate effective marketing practices, the key lies in the fundamental differences in the way brand content is accessed and engaged with, which pivots around a strong focus on unique brand content as well as technology-enabled consumer experiences.
- Content, not promotion
For decades now, Western marketers of global-expanding multinational brands have relied on one simple premise: while content and channel selections need to be localised, the Western marketing paradigm is perceived to be universal where price-based promotions are prioritised (even more so in developing economies), rather than consumer experiences of brand values. A promotion mindset might mean easier to quantify ad impressions and evaluate ROI, but it equally deprives of the chance to utilise mobile media’s affordances in creating a continuous and meaningful cultural experience of brands.
As digital media permeates into the everyday of Chinese consumers, focusing on interactive brand content rather than promotion would yield better results. This is because when marketing communications becomes part of the mobile-first Internet culture in China, consumers inevitably expect to participate in the creation of meanings afforded by digital media’s two-way communication mechanism.
However, some brands with a rich heritage in the West, despite years of presence in China, remain too reluctant to embrace the opportunity. For instance, Tod’s, an Italian luxury leather brand, is still overtly oriented towards a one-way communication strategy: in the Ciao by Tod’s campaign, the ad features its high-quality leather clothes and accessories and use the Italian word “Ciao” to represent its cultural heritage. While there’s no dispute that the brand symbolises craftsmanship and refinement, the Chinese consumers are simply not ‘buying’ the message because the brand doesn’t offer flexible marketing strategies to enhance two-way conversation and rich engagement. From an audience’s perspective, the campaign might even be translated, in the worst case, as ‘not making enough efforts to understand where the heart lies’.
Of course, some other luxury brands have seized the tide in China’s mobile-first culture. A typical example is their use of KOLs (key opinion leaders, or influencer in a western perspective) in creating branded content (often veiled as organic content to the best extent possible). These KOLs are often present on multiple digital platforms, such as Weibo, a broad-based SNS similar to Twitter, or RED, xiaohongshu, a UGC e-commerce-oriented platform similar to Instagram. KOL (influencer) marketing is particularly rewarding in China’s context because it is content-based, cross-platform, interactive and facilitative in cultivating community of awareness, loyalty and meanings.
Recommended: Digitally China Podcast: The Ups and Downs of Social Commerce
This podcast episode offers a comprehensive overview of RED’s critical role in China’s digital ecology nowadays. It is a fast-growing, e-commerce-oriented SNS popular among young, female urbanites.
- Enhancing consumer experiences
The second facet of China’s mobile-first culture is people’s reliance on digital technologies for everyday communicative practices. The reliance is so fundamental that an interesting phenomenon, ditouzu, has emerged out of it. Literally translated as head bowing clan (people who are absorbed into using mobile devices), it indicates how everyday experience in China is organised around digital media; this is problematic in many senses, but the phenomenon equally suggests how marketing strategies in China shall seek to put mobile at the centre of campaign planning.
On the other hand, as I have mentioned earlier, the fast transition into a digital economy not only leaves Western marketers uncertain when entering the Chinese market, but also domestic marketers who have yet had a well-established playbook to follow. One thing for sure though, is that Chinese marketers are more willing to embrace state-of-the-art technologies, and many cases have actually showcased the success and efficiency in combining brand communications with mobile-enabled methods.
Such a technology-friendly approach is best exemplified by Tencent’s 2019 campaign that features a mixed-reality experience called “Moonment” to document the lunar transition during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Integrated into the WeChat system, Moonment allowed users to take pictures for instant sharing, which was further supported by location tracking, AR and camera filtering functions. Coca Cola China, in a similar vein, created an AR experience that took user to virtually travel through 23 cities across the country.
Mobile technologies, used in a good way, can be powerful tools to enhance consumer experiences as the cases show. Nonetheless, one may argue that mobile-enabled methods come with higher risk, as compared to a promotional type of marketing strategies. Yet, while the Western playbook is safe and reliable, it isn’t as future-proof or sustainable in the context of the fast-changing digital ecology in China, and in many other countries in the future to come. So, cross-cultural marketers shall ask:
“As people worldwide are becoming digital natives, are we still going to target them via the same well-established channels?”
- Final thoughts
The strategic focus on unique brand content and technology-enabled consumer experiences is a lesson to contemplate upon for cross-cultural marketers. China’s case might be a future blueprint for digital marketing, or an unfinalised paradigmatic framework to consolidate. But for now, if you are trying to untap the Chinese market, think about what Danielle Jin, Visa’s Head of Marketing in the Greater China Region once said: “The Chinese approach starts with thinking about content, information, and knowledge that could be engaging and shared; it isn’t about advertising and price promotions.”
Think again.
Mark Chen 
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