Which tools can you use to reach Chinese as they vengeance shop post COVID?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and I am pretty excited today because this is my silver jubilee. The 19th of June 1995, I opened the offices for EastWest Public Relations. I'd arrived in Singapore on the 14th of June 1995, having sold my house and quit my job and moved to Asia to start the agency. So here I am now, 25 years later, having opened the office in Singapore, spent 12 years there, and then opened an office in, in China, Beijing, 2006, and then an office in Bangalore in about 2009. And then now I have moved back to England in 2019. So it's been an amazing journey over 25 years. And so I've opened 4 offices And what I wanted to reflect on today in PR terms was what I've learned from managing my own public relations and starting my own companies in those different countries, but also of course managing the PR for over 500 clients. Now, one of the recurring themes I think about international public relations, which I think is valuable because it's not just about the international nature, it's also about Just communicating to different audience types. So when I've been living in Asia, I've lived in countries that are sort of religious and non-secular. And the first point that comes to mind is the importance of cultural sensitivities. Living in Southeast Asia, we are surrounded in Singapore by Muslim countries, for example, of Indonesia. So, and the Philippines has a Catholic population, Malaysia also Muslim. So the cultural sensitivities around, for example, shaking hands, we didn't shake hands, we would touch our heart when we met people. The relationship between men and women was very different between foreigners, farang as we were called, and the locals was also different. Now things have changed significantly since 1995, but the, the need to respect the local cultures and the local dialect and the local religious mores is still very much in play. This is also true when I've done work in the Middle East. It meant that, for example, when I was working on a product in Indonesia, it was the halal products. And the halal meant that they were able to be consumed by Muslim faith followers. And this was a key point of difference because, in fact, this cosmetic product was developed specifically for Indonesian and Malaysian women because of the ingredient mix. A second element, of course, are the languages and the variations between languages. Now, I mentioned Singapore. That country had decided after the race riots of the 1960s to make English as a national language under Lee Kuan Yew. Now, I mentioned setting up an office in Bangalore, and that was a very interesting case because actually in the Indian market, when it comes to things like banking, adopts English. But when it comes to public relations and other activities, there are 121 recognized languages, but some 1,500 different dialects. So Hindi is the sort of main language with over 500 million speakers, but if one is working in southern India, you may need a different language set to if you're working up in the north or to the west of India. So what we would find when we're doing press relations, you would need very much to have regional and local teams, not just for the practicalities, but actually for the translation into the different dialects. One of the nicest ways perhaps of looking at the difference in international variations is on Mother's Day and holidays. Now often companies will use holidays as platforms for activities. Mother's Day actually doesn't happen on the same day around the world at all. Mother's Day in Norway is the 2nd Sunday of February. Libya, it's March the 21st. In the UK, it's the 4th Sunday in Lent, which means that it's changes every year, which is a great excuse for getting it wrong. Sunday was the 2nd day in May, so fully a month after the UK. Indonesia is the 22nd of December, and each country has got its own Mother's Day. Whilst we think about our own countries and our own cultures, when we're launching campaigns, public relations campaigns, even across our own markets. If you think about the UK and the number of dialects that we've got, and even the languages like Welsh, for example, one language does not necessarily fit all. Certainly that applies to humour, but also possibly to anything with a religious implication or bent. So what I have been thinking about now is how we have got opportunities as companies to market ourselves internationally, because technology is meaning that we can market to overseas clients, but also logistics has become global, and now we can buy things on Amazon, or we can have things shipped in China, for example, in through Taobao, that come from over the world. So we've got global sourcing, and that means that there's an opportunity but also a challenge as business owners to be both consistent globally or nationally, but also to respect local variations, varieties. Finally, I'd like to just highlight one that I like, which is that in the West we have politicians who have gray hair and we think that that means wisdom, but in China we have politicians who dye their hair so that they look young. So here's a classic example of how 2 different cultures approach the same class of people but with different values. I thought that it might be an interesting opportunity To just share with you some insights about the China market, and to do that, I've asked a very special young man called Charles Yang in our Beijing office to share his insights on the Chinese media.

Welcome to my channel. This is Charles from East West PR Agency, and today I'm going to talk about the media scene in China. PR or in a marketing field. Media has always been a very important part. In China, we basically have 2 types of medias. The first one is traditional media, and the other one is social media. When we talk about traditional media, someone might say that they are somehow like out of fashion, But I want to say traditional media is a very important news resource. We have TV, we have broadcast, we have newspapers and magazines for traditional media. So basically they are like TV-based or paper-based media with about 8 to 10 years of development, social media has been more and more popular in China. According to the 45th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China released by China Internet Network Information Center, short for CNNIC, by March 2020, the number of Chinese internet users has reached 950 million. With an internet penetration rate of 64.5%, and the number of mobile internet users has reached almost 900 million, with the proportion of mobile internet users reaching 99.3%. All the companies in China are using social media ways to get noticed in China. For social media in China, basically we have 5 categories. WeChat is the most important part. On WeChat, there are multiple functions we could use for social media. We have a subscription account, service account, enterprise account, And mini program. Also we have moments, we have advertisement on WeChat. Almost all the companies in China and companies want to enter China market has an official account with verification, probably, I think. And WeChat is the first step in social media and it is a very important one. Next, we may get the microblog platform. It's from sina.com. It's somehow like the Twitter in the world, and we have microblog in China. Nowadays, we use microblog more like a window of a company. And the next, searching engine. In China, there's no Google here, so we have Baidu, we have 360, we have Sogo searching engine. These are the biggest 3 searching engines in China. With searching engine, we could do advertisement on it, we could do a searching engine management like keyword bidding, and we have a searching engine optimization, the SEO in short. Well, the last 2 categories have reached the fastest speed of growing in social media. They are short videos and live streaming. For short videos, we have TikTok and Kuaishou. For live stream, they always come with e-business like online shopping, for example, JD, Taobao, and Pinduoduo. Under this special situation, I mean the coronavirus, many enterprises have found a new way of selling products by live streaming. They don't need to pay the rental fee, they don't need to do the decoration. What they need is only the presenter and the product. Many celebrities such as movie stars, singers, actors have been doing livestream to help to promote products for enterprises. So that's the overall knowledge of media scene in China. Hope you can get something learned.

So thank you, Charles. Yes, we absolutely did learn a great deal from you there. Now, it's not only going into China that is the opportunity for companies around the world. It's also the Chinese coming out of China. There are a growing number of Chinese companies that are looking for direct investment overseas, but obviously are partnering with companies at all stages of the, of the supply chain. And it's also the tens of millions of Chinese that are going overseas now. Well, not just now because of COVID-19, but the growing trend, especially in ASEAN, But increasingly into Europe has been the the growth of the middle-class Chinese tourists, and the application that they are looking at is the Dajong Dianping. And Dajong Dianping means basically public comments, and it's a bit like a TripAdvisor for the Chinese. So that has some four and a half million merchants and three hundred and ten million. monthly active users. Now, as Charles is saying, the number of people on the internet in, in China is phenomenal. Remember, there are 1.4 billion people. But the other key statistic about China, as Charles mentioned, is the use of mobile phones. So with over 900 million mobile phone devices out there, it means that mobile apps and geography location-specific apps, as I mentioned just on yesterday's podcast about Google My Business, means that being sensitive to the opportunity arising from the mobile traveler is now more and more important. So the Dianping enables you to basically publish everything about your company in Chinese, and this can be especially for things like restaurant reviews, hotels, sports and activities, leisure centers, obviously shopping, for tourism, and so on. Now, what's interesting about Dianping is that you can start an account from overseas, or companies like ours, EastWest, can help a client to set up an account and to populate it with, with video and all the things that one would expect to have for a consumer review site. Now, it was purchased in 2014 by Tencent, and in China, the 3 big companies are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They call them the BAT. And Tencent bought this Dianping because what they've enabled you to do is to post reviews on your WeChat and on your Dianping and have them go back and forth. So many companies are using WeChat for commerce because it is an integrated communication platform where people are sharing videos, photographs, either one-to-one or one-to-many in groups. But also they have mini programs, and the mini programs are being used for shopping and for applications like delivery of food and for ordering your courier. So the final part with the Tencent WeChat is that it has payments as well. So from a PR point of view, what's amazing about this Dianping, uh, integrated with WeChat is that really you're getting your consumer, if it's an outbound traveler, all the way from their messaging and their sharing and their purchasing, and then also placing their reviews and sharing those reviews in real time. This is a platform being used very heavily by the Middle East by the tourism board of Dubai. So they're getting Chinese tourists to post pictures of themselves and to share those back home so that it would encourage other tourists to come to the Middle East. So if you have a business that is going to be attracting people from overseas, or companies from overseas, it's important then to think about The cultural sensitivities, the language sensitivities, just the holiday sensitivities, the timing if you like there. And of course there are issues like currency. But it's also then important to consider the platform. The holy trinity here of Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter don't translate in many markets of the world. So we have to also look at adopting different platforms, and those platforms are not only essential for going outbound but also for attracting the inbound audience. So how do we address this complexity as entrepreneurs and business owners? I think that the answer lies in simplicity. I talk in our Speak PR program about the need to storify, to personalize, to engage, to amplify, and to know. Companies like Apple and Nike do, in my view, some of the best work here. They keep the brand essence simple, but then they allow the marketing to take place in-country. So what you'll see is the, the brand essence is the same, but it'll be Chinese, for example, consumers, Chinese messaging, Chinese holidays that are all the key parts of the message. It's not localization of a Western message into an Asian market. I think the other thing that one has to do is to ensure that the message is simple too. In our press release recently, I wrote that we are everywhere virtually, which in English seemed to make sense and be nice, but for the team in China translating that, there are a number of different options that they could take So as we build complexity into our message, the opportunity for miscommunication is magnified. So we're all the way back to Weyl's Law, which I've been talking about in earlier versions of the podcast. So simplicity really is the key. So I'd like to just leave you with a thought, which is when we come into our public relations, a man once said that if you talk to a man in language he understands, that goes to his head. But if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. Of course, true words spoken by Nelson Mandela. And as we take his words and we think about public relations, the messaging that we have for our clients, for our staff, and for our partners, we must communicate in a language that they understand But also in a language that goes straight to their heart. So that wraps up this episode of Speak PR. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please leave a rating or subscribe to our newsletter at eastwestpr.com. In the meantime, I wish you fantastic health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating.