If companies like this (with all of their resources) could make such a dumb mistake, I wonder just how many Western analysts, pundits, and fund managers are making similar mistakes with regard to China?
Non-Westerners I talk to here in Singapore all say the same thing: China is the real thing.
It may look different and not behave how we (Westerners) would expect it to, but that doesn't mean 'their' system is not effective.
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It's a sign of how foreign "do-it-yourself" big-box chains have struggled to attract customers in China, where homeowners have little experience in renovating apartments and prefer to pay low-wage decorators to do it for them.
"Do-it-yourself is not popular in China," Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group, told AFP.
"The feeling in China is that if you do it yourself that means you are a peasant -- not the sturdy, manly image DIY chains have crafted in the US."
Despite China's booming property sales and a home-improvement market growing 15 percent a year and worth $100 billion in 2009, such chains have been forced to pare back operations in China -- or leave the country altogether.
Reading through all this ... I can see where their underlying marketing is already wrong.
Trying to read the Chinese mind or different pockets of people in general with a Western perspective and expectations .... that's already off-base marketing research.
There's NO attempt atpeople study, observation or any understanding of their social make up at all and where they're coming from at all.
The 'peasant thing' is very true. Back in the olden days in China, there was a clear divide between the peasant working farmers and hard labourers vs the educated and those who owned land. Yup the lords, scholars and the peasants.
Doing hard labour or any labour just meant generally you were 'low class'. Same reason the Chinese culture in general equates being fair and alabaster-white = the non-labour, non blue-collar class. The peasants are darker skinned from working all day in the fields supposedly.
Way different from the Western ideal of tanne = the leisurely rich who can sail off to Greece and the Carribbean on their luxury yachts.
They could have taken a look at how the newly coined rich China immigrants (those with farming roots) these days pamper their children. They wait on them so much, you wonder how those kids will turn out 50 years from now. At 7, it's not uncommon to see mothers or nannies running after the children with spoonfuls of food (or 16 yr old high-schoolers driving themselves to schools in their BMW X6s, in Canada).
Even early generations of rich Singaporeans would never lift their finger to do anything 'the servants' could do. I know, because my great-grandparents and to a lesser extent my grandparents were like that. It's only with Western education and upbringing that you eventually evolve and make educated self-reliant choices for yourself..
(Having been raised in this background .... I would hate for my children to grow up as human- amoebas unable to be self-reliantly resourceful. Or to turn their noses up at washing a cup they used or cannot help the paid movers in lift that couch.
Because, as we have seen recently ... 'rich' is really in the hands of fate. The rich one day, can be paupers if destiny (and a God, if you believe in one) so decides).Many Chinese are very pragmatic to begin with. Frills and packaging and 'Western-culture goods' might work with the newest rich (current) out to prove a point to their neighbours that they are 'westernised'.
But otherwise, show a labourer or peasant made recently-rich something he could prboably make himself. And why would he pay Ikea $200 for 6 pieces of planks ---- that heavens, he has to put together himself?
And to him, the end result doesn't even look 'plush' - their PRC idea of grand anyway. The Baroque-ish or Italian-Renaissance type decor stores might have caught on better. Think grandoise-opulence with a lot of the newly-loaded cash-easy crowd, or at least the high-end zen-contemporary look.
NOT Home Depot or Ikea. Bohemian? Eclectic? Those are for the beggars.
Whimsical rich does not catch on with most of the Chinese-mentality crowd. You have to flaunt it, to show you have it ... this means designer labels that look designer, luxury cars and opulent ostentaious decor.
Same thing with Mr A and some of his comments and observations.
IF marketing researchers march into unknown territory with their (sometimes arrogant) Western mindsets, it's a doomed failure waiting to happen. The cultures are wayy too different, and trying to see things
without really understanding social patterns is short-sightedly silly.
If the marketing teams had spent time just observing and analysing people in general, getting below their skins .... and perhaps picking up some Chinese history or patterns of social behaviour and why people act as they do ... perhaps they wouldn't have tanked quite so badly.
BBQs would never work. Worse, a DIY BBQ - one you'd have to assemble yourself from Home Depot. Many PRCs I know consider BBQ unhealthy, some associate the carcinogenic charred meat with cancer. The Cantonese like their own from of BBQed meat ... not the Western version.
Many new Asian immigrants who live in Western countries have that Weber BBQ for show (to show they're 'white-cultured' enough), not for real usage.
Some of the Taiwanese entrepreneurs who march into China are making real good. Why? They have way better understanding of the entire culture and the specific market niches.
for eg, Taiwan's showbiz darling Barbie Hsu (Big S) just married into one of the top Forbes-listed Chinese families, after a mere 20 day romance.
Interesting to note: the food founder is a
Canadian-educated Taiwanese lady Zhang Lan (Barbie Hsu's mother in law) - one of the top entrepreneurs in China. I think they branched into fusion fare.
