“Made-for-China” era is approaching
The posting – “Made in china vs. Made for China” – of my friend Meng caught up my attention few days ago. As she mentioned in her posting, everyone is sort of getting used to see “made in China” on the label of the stuff we purchase, but what excites me is the coming “Made for China” era.
Agreeing with Meng’s opinion, foreign companies put their efforts more on getting Chinese customers know about their products rather than tailoring their products to the Chinese culture in the past few decades, but nowadays, more and more companies are “wooing Chinese consumers by designing products for them”. As mentioned in the article “From Made in China to Made for China” on Harvard Business Review, lots of “Made for China companies” are emerging:” In September 2010, France’s Hermes opened its first Shang Xia — which translates roughly as “from top to bottom” — store in Shanghai to mark the launch of a line of ready-to-wear clothing and crafts inspired by traditional Chinese motifs. In August 2010, America’s Levi Strauss launched, with much fanfare, a global jeans brand, dENiZEN, in the same city.” Additionally, some of the foreign companies that have been operating in China for a long time has created their impression that they are Chinese and Danone is a great example. Those companies “realize that developing local products and brands lets newcomers bypass the long and cumbersome process of introducing existing products from home markets and then, incrementally tailoring them to the needs of Chinese consumers” which the foreign countries are either comfortable with or capable of.
I believe that it’s good for foreign companies to share Chinese market as it can always bring up the competition and drive up the speed of products renovation. However, what deserves more attention is that our home-made brand could also learn from them, with home advantages, we are supposed to have better performance and gain stronger brand loyalty base as we know our culture better than anyone else. Moreover, our home-made brand could also try breaking into other countries markets and tailoring our products to other countries’ culture and see what we could gain. Larger market would bring us more profits and also help firm the trust we’ve already build up within home country.