Capital M Trialogues: On “brand China” and soft power

On Sunday I had the pleasure of participating in an excellent discussion at the Capital-M Trialogue alongside my good friends David Wolf, of Wolf Group Asia, and Kaiser Kuo, of Baidu but probably better known to Imagethief readers as the host of Sinica. We were the last in a series of panel discussions organized by David Moser, the multi-talented academic director of CET and another Sinica repeat offender (links to the three people above all to Twitter).

Our topic was “Brand China” in two senses of the phrase: The ability of the Chinese companies to establish their brands internationally, and Chinese soft power and international perceptions of China as a whole. Some of the key points to emerge from the discussion are below, mingling stuff from the main discussion, Q&A and some of my sidebar discussions afterward. This will be a bit of a stream-of-consciousness tour of some of the main topics and points rather than a coherent essay.

Landscape

The Chinese national brand and company brands are intertwined. There is no separating perceptions of Chinese companies from perceptions of China among western audiences at the moment. Following on the experiences of countries like Japan and Germany, David and I agree that companies have to lead the national brand rather than vice-versa, although that will come with some challenges.

David feels that Chinese brands need to be more assertive about grabbing hold of the positive things about being Chinese and not running from them. I agree with that, but only partially: I think it’s practical in certain areas where there are established, positive attributes to work with – fashion and (don’t laugh) food come to mind. But there are also areas where the perception deficit is so significant or the political aspects are so charged that it’s not yet practical to do that.

Three key things for developing brand China

I suggested that there were three key things that could improve China’s soft power and the overall “China brand”: Encouraging entrepreneurs and businessmen to take a lead role; unfettering popular culture; and reworking the government approach to messaging to external audiences.

Charging businessmen and entrepreneurs with leading relates back to need for companies to lead development of the national brand. There are smart, articulate businessmen and entrepreneurs here who have a real stake in how China as well as how their companies are perceived overseas. They could make an excellent vanguard for Chinese public communication. The problem here is that businessmen, especially in private business, must tread with supreme delicacy around issues of importance to the government. Totally understandable risk aversion acts as a large brake on their potential as communicators.

We also discussed the cultural issues that might inhibit Chinese businessmen and companies from taking lead roles in public communication, and the impact of cultural issues on Chinese acquisitions of foreign companies. We all conceded that this is a challenge. I suggested that newer companies or companies from more private-leaning (as opposed to state-linked) industries might be in a better position here, suggesting the Internet industry as a likely candidate. David hit me with the catastrophic meltdown of the Yahoo-Alibaba relationship. That’s a fair point. On the other hand, Jack Ma is a great spokesperson, Alibaba has long internationalized their communication, and they certainly know how to build a brand, so let’s see.

Popular culture is another potentially very powerful force in China’s favor. This is especially true of film, which is very accessible and for which there is a natural and existing (if a bit niche) constituency in the west. But it’s another area in which the potential is limited by the involvement of the state. My personal view of the last few years of exported Chinese cinema is pretty dim, what with the huge fixation on vast, ponderous period epics and three-hanky melodramas. It would be nice to see a broader range of Chinese film being exported. And, of course, it would be nice to see an even broader range being made and distributed here. But with the media largely steered into anodyne themes and all-audience suitability (no film ratings in China) the potential is once again limited.

One aspect of media that I think we all feel will not make a big impact is the expanded foreign news services such as Xinhua CNC. As I said in the session, anything too close to the government will trade at a discount, especially by Western audiences. I’ve written in some detail about Xinhua CNC before, so I’ll only repeat one other point I made about that yesterday: One of the real opportunities for Chinese overseas news organizations is to focus on the areas of the world that Western media chronically overlook and which, coincidentally, happen to be areas that China has an interest in, such as Africa and Southeast Asia. But they still have to come up with a good product.

The last of the three areas I mentioned was government messaging. As long as external messaging, especially on sensitive issues, sounds hostile and archaic to western ears the Chinese national brand will be penalized. The way I phrased it last night is that they need to find a more nuanced approach and give their diplomats room to tailor the substance of their messages to different national audiences. This again is an area that the government holds very close for pretty obvious reasons.

You can see a repeating theme here. All of these three areas rub up against the political philosophies that underpin the Chinese government. I am not going to get into a discussion of the rightness or wrongness of those philosophies now because that’s way too big and sensitive an issue, and also beside the point of this post. However it does point to an essential conflict between the traditions of government in China and the demands of a modern, global communication environment. This is something that will be wrestled with for a while here, but it’s also something I think that some elements of the government understand well.

A more human touch and the Led Zeppelin factor

When I think back across those three points, it’s clear to me that one of the things I seek is a sense of human engagement – less communication via institution, more communication via influential individual voices that can put a human face on China. One of the advantages of living here is that you come to see the China as a country of people, rather than either an impenetrable monolith or a collection of news story archetypes (the jailed dissident, the victim of corruption, the thuggish official, the sphinxlike modern artist…). It also reflects my personal belief that in general institutions suck at public communication, and that people can do a much better job. You can see this at work in things as basic as Wen Jiabao’s fairly well-received (though not covered in China) appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN, which we also remarked on.

On the issue of humanizing communication, the topic of the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies came up. I’m afraid I was rather harsh in my judgment, describing them as “charmless.” Don’t get me wrong: It was also stupendous, amazing and, at times, breathtaking. But it was also mostly devoid of human scale and completely devoid of humor or warmth. This isn’t an exclusively Chinese problem. Superbowl halftime shows are also pretty charmless. But American football doesn’t have a global brand problem (or maybe it does, since no one outside of North America cares about it).

My favorite moment of the Olympic ceremonies was when sportswear magnate Li Ning was hoisted into the rafters of the Bird’s Nest to light the Olympic flame, but that’s because I consider that maneuver the greatest ambush marketing stunt of all time, conducted at the expense of Olympic sponsor Adidas.

That notwithstanding, David and I both think that Li Ning is one of the Chinese brands with the best prospects internationally. In Q&A someone asked if it was possible to reconcile Li Ning’s desire to compete with Nike, Adidas, Reebok etc. with their need to build a domestic market. Our answer: Sure. Brands are global, but marketing is local. More broadly, I see fashion and Chinese streetwear as something with real international potential, niche though it might still be.

Further to the Olympic thing, I am apparently alone in the entire universe in having liked the handover to London 2012 in the Beijing closing ceremony, where Jimmy Page was hoisted out of a double-decker London bus on a hydraulic platform to the riffs of “Whole Lotta Love” while a multiculturally-correct throng punted soccer balls around the bus. Admittedly I have a big soft spot for Led Zeppelin and maybe it would have been more contemporary to hoist, oh, Lily Allen or someone like that out of the bus. (Although with Lily Allen there would have been a high risk of profanity — it’s a sign of the times that Whole Lotta Love is the safe choice.) But as goofy as it was, the London handover was a good antidote to the general stiffness of the Chinese proceedings. We’ll see how their actual opening ceremony goes. It’s -gasp- less than two years away now.

Comparisons with Japan and Korea

Comparisons with the rise of Japanese and Korean corporate and national brands came up a couple of times in the discussion, including in the Q&A. Both of those countries made the leap from being seen as producers of low-quality or anonymous products into the being the homes of extremely powerful global brands, especially in the automotive, technology and consumer electronics businesses.

We talked a bit about parallels in industrial policy between China, South Korea and Japan, but also the very different situations that each nation faced, especially with regard to economically and politically important American audiences. Japan and Korea both rose to industrial prominence as American client states. Even when American suspicion of Japan was at its height, in the late eighties, that fundamental dynamic was in place. China, on the other hand, is a large and increasingly powerful geopolitical rival to America. It’s also emerging in a very different media age than Japan and China did. On the other hand, one thing worth remembering is that the emergences of Japan of Korea both took place over generational time spans. China has been growing rapidly since reform and opening-up, thirty years ago, but it has really only been integrating globally for a decade, so let’s all see how things look ten or fifteen years hence.

We somehow managed to get through the entire discussion without touching on the product quality crises of a couple of years ago. Longtime readers will know that I devoted a lot of attention to those issues (classic posts here and here), and that was much more a product of the flow of the discussion and the Q&A than an intentional omission. Quality management will remain a bugaboo of “brand China” for a while, but, China’s enforcement issues notwithstanding, that’s something other countries have had to overcome as well. We also didn’t get into the innovation environment here, and its impact on the national brand. That will have to wait for another discussion.

The event should be podcast shortly via our friends at Popup Chinese, and I’ll throw up a link once I get one so you can get more of the actual discussion. I fear the quality won’t be great since it was recorded with little electronic dictaphones rather than from our microphone feeds, but we’ll see what we get. The audience questions were excellent, so it’s worth catching that part of the discussion if you can.

Also, we were a very Ameri-centric panel. In fairness to CET, I was the second choice after Hung Huang, so it’s not for lack of trying. The result was that we framed many of the issues in terms of western –and especially American– audiences. The world is obviously bigger than that and you could have many more discussions about brand China in other parts of the world.

And now a word from our sponsors…

Or, more correctly, for our sponsors. The event was hosted by the extremely swish Capital M restaurant, which, to my mind, is pretty much the sole redeeming feature of the “improved” Qianmen Pedestrian Street. Capital M is by the same group responsible for the well-known M on the Bund. They provided a good room for the event and an astounding dinner for the speakers who had participated in all the Trialogues.  I’m already planning a date night with Mrs. Imagethief there. Not that the company last night wasn’t superb –I’ll refrain with some effort from gratuitous name dropping, but it was a lively table– but there is good company and then there is good company, if you know what I mean.

Update:

In his blog, Atlantic Monthly journalist and former Beijing resident James Fallows notes the inclusion of a China Daily supplement in the Washington Post. An interesting addition to the soft-power arsenal, but subject to the usual state media disadvantages. Now, a Caixin supplement…