01.28
This is the fourth in a series of posts about 2010’s top five brand stories in China. All five are listed in the December issue of Labbrand’s LABReport.
Hermès Launches Shang Xia (上下)
What Happened
French luxury giant Hermès helped fund the creation and launch of Shang Xia, a new luxury brand designed and manufactured in China. Aside from owning over 75% of the company, Hermès’ specific involvement is not yet clear. The first Shang Xia boutique is in Hong Kong Plaza, a luxury shopping mall in Shanghai.
The brand’s products are slightly more affordable than those of Hermès, which has 20 stores in China already. Also, Shang Xia is positioned as a Chinese brand, led by a designer from Shanghai (although trained in France), with products—such as tea sets, apparel, and jewelry—made from local materials and designed based on traditional Chinese craftsmanship.
Why It Matters
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01.20
This is the third in a series of posts about 2010’s top five brand stories in China. All five are listed in the December issue of Labbrand’s LABReport.
Levi’s Launches dENiZEN in Shanghai
What Happened
137-year old American apparel company Levi Strauss & Co. launched its first brand to debut outside the US in August of 2010. Dubbed dENiZEN, the lower-priced sub-brand is targeted at 18 to 28 year-old men and women in Asia, and specifically China, where Levi’s has been operating for 10 years. Levi’s hopes dENiZEN will present a more affordable entry point for Chinese consumers, and has emphasized the brand’s accessibility by using amateur models—“everyday people”—in runway shows and advertisements. dENiZEN first launched in Shanghai, with plans to expand to Beijing and other cities.
Why It Matters
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12.23
The end of 2010 marks about a year in Shanghai for me, and over 100 posts on this blog. As I did at the end of 2009, here’s a list of some of the top posts of the year, according to PostRank and Google Analytics (I’m not sure why they’re so different). As for other people’s “best of” lists, the only one I’ve seen this year is Time’s, and I was especially interested in their Top 10 Buzzwords of 2010 (is it because I live in China, or just because I’m getting older that I recognize so few of them?).
Top six Semantic Argument posts of 2010, in descending order, according to PostRank:
And according to Google Analytics:
Happy holidays (and happy birthday, Adam)! Talk to you in 2011!
10.27
Last week I was honored to be asked to present to a group of French business students called Le Club des étudiants français de Shanghai. I was asked to discuss “branding,” but keep it high-level and light rather than getting too didactic or detailed. When one of the club’s founders invited me to speak, he thought it would be fun if I introduced myself in French, which I can’t even pronounce correctly much less speak. At first I declined, citing the stereotype that Americans are monolingual. And then I realized that would be an interesting way to kick off a conversation about brands. Here’s basically what the presentation (above) covers:
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09.27
About eight months ago I moved to Shanghai. It’s my first time living outside the United States as an adult, and as a consumer it sometimes feels like being reborn. Don’t get me wrong—Shanghai is a modern, diverse city, so it’s not so hard to find familiar Western brands here. But because of the ubiquity and lower cost of local brands (or at least less familiar ones), I’m constantly in the position of making decisions about brands with which I have no history—not the brands I grew up with and saw my parents using as a child—not the ones for which I remember a famous ad campaign from the 80s or can hum a jingle on cue.
(And as a side note, sometimes even the most familiar brands are somehow unfamiliar here.)
Of course it’s impossible to remove all the preconceived notions that influence a purchase decision, but in some ways I feel like a subject in an experiment: How do we form opinions and develop biases about things that are new to us? And it’s not just that they’re unfamiliar…the written language barrier also blocks access to otherwise simply communicated messages. Since moving here I’ve twice bought yogurt thinking it was milk. (Hey, show an American a white-and-blue, one-quart cardboard carton at the supermarket, and it’s milk. Talk about a strong semiotic code. Now I do a shake-test just to be sure.) Sometimes I can’t even read the name of the salty packaged snack I’m buying, much less the ingredients list, nutritional information, or where it’s manufactured, not to mention any romance copy about how crunchy or flavorful it is.
If this was an experiment, what could we learn from it? It’s hard to say how applicable the results would be to any other situation. Most adult consumers are literate. They watch local TV and read local periodicals. The fact is, I’m not even in the target market for the majority of the products I’m buying. Regardless, I do feel I’m learning about my own consumption habits from a new perspective and therefore gaining some insights that could be generalized to other consumers. For example:
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02.02
It’s been awhile since my last post. In the interim, I’ve moved to Shanghai where I’ll take a position as Senior Consultant with a Shanghai-based strategy firm. More on that later.
Today’s post is about naming—specifically naming in English, or at least for primarily English-speaking audiences (suppose I have to make that distinction now). Upon seeing Pollywog’s list of what they consider the best and worst names of 2009, I realized that most of the “best” names are
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