Marketing and culture: Cultural fit vital for China campaigns

WARC, 6 March 2014

BEIJING: Marketing campaigns that fit culturally have a greater chance of succeeding in China but they will also have to work on mobile according to a leading figure.

SY Lau, president of Tencent's online media group, told Mobile Marketing that the mobile internet in China was far ahead of developed countries thanks to major investment in 4G networks and the low cost of smartphones.

"China used to follow the US in terms of internet innovation in the PC era, but this has changed now," he said. "China is blazing its own trail in the mobile era."

He noted that mobile was now becoming a lead element in marketing campaigns with ever more people going online using mobile devices. "As the mobile internet becomes more strategic to delivering brand messages, creativity will become even more important to helping campaigns cut through", he added.

Lau also saw an increasing use of online video which he expected would not only affect how people wanted to consume content but also how brands and social companies engaged them.

He advised that social context was critical for success, and cited the example of Tencent's WeChat messaging app, which developed a gifting feature for Chinese New Year in a social media equivalent of the traditional red envelopes containing money that are given at this time. This had helped Tencent "significantly" increase its presence in the internet and mobile banking sector.

And he highlighted Weishi, a new Vine-like app for sharing short videos, which he said had hit 160m views on Valentine's Day and which he expected to grow rapidly in terms of both user adoption and brands looking to build it into their campaigns.

Data sourced from Mobile Marketing; additional content by Warc staff

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