Luxury brands’ mistakes in China

Despite its status as one of the world’s great epicentres of growth in the luxury sector, brands are making critical mistakes about Chinese customers that encourages a fickle relationship in a hyper competitive market.

Why it matters

As Jing Daily points out in a recent piece, the same marketing techniques that have built loyalty in other markets cannot simply be grafted onto China’s retail landscape. But by a similar token, mistaking the country’s ultra-high mobile penetration for a replacement of marketing fundamentals can be similarly costly.

Details

• Many brands, drawn in by the potency of shopping festivals or of super-app promotions, have prioritised short term tactics over the long term storytelling that builds brands.
• Beware the influencer with many brand relationships: they may be extremely famous, but it’s not going to help you stand out (differentiate) if you are just one of many brands signed to a KOL.
• Terms like millennial and Gen-Z aren’t particularly useful in the West, but are beyond useless in China where a far more nuanced understanding of five-year cohorts or less and, better still, identities is far more fruitful.

Sourced from Jing Daily