How technology did not beat totalitarianism- Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China watcher Kaiser Kuo discusses Western narratives on China’s rise. Technology did not beat authoritarian regimes, he explains, just as other Western views on China were profoundly wrong. The Arab Spring uprising was the first sign technology did not bring repression down, but not the last one, he argues.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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How Twitter, Facebook removed China's fake accounts - Victor Shih

Victor Shih

In a remarkable move Twitter and Facebook removed this week China-based accounts spreading fake news on Hong Kong. Political analyst Victor Shih looks in Politico at the effect of this new policy against Russian-style fake news.

Politico:

The accounts suspended by Twitter and Facebook on Monday were not linked to China’s state-run media organisations. 

Rather they were part of a network of fake accounts whose described tactics appear akin to the Russian misinformation campaigns coordinated to sway American public opinion in the lead-up the 2016 U.S. election. 

“China is copying Russia and has set up a large number of accounts on Facebook and Twitter to pump out anti-protester propaganda filled with factually untrue statements and pictures. [Such accounts are] an attempt to polarise opinion, which Twitter and Facebook have publicly stated they don’t want to do, so they are acting on their new policies,” said Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. 

He noted that the platforms had tightened regulations following “blowback” after the 2016 poll. 

“They increased the level and awareness and [changed] the algorithm that they are using to catch manufactured campaigns for a political end, especially a violent political end,” Shih added. 

Facebook on Monday removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts involved in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong”.

More at Politico. Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Amazon failed in China because of business issues, not the government - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein

Amazon was the latest online Western casualty in China. The US company has been clueless in organizing its business in China, and it was not the government who killed Amazon, says business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order in the Voice of America.

The Voice of America:

China is considered by many as a difficult market for foreign players even without taking into account hindrances caused by government policy. In the case of Amazon, however, analysts said the reasons for its poor performance lie in its not being able to localize to meet the requirements of the market. 

Shaun Rein, managing director of Shanghai-based China Market Research Group (CMR), said Amazon's Chinese platform could not survive because it did not have a strong and stable management team. He does not think Amazon was hampered by government policy. 

"I don't think it is a problem of government protectionism," he said, adding, "They (Amazon executives) didn't have the necessary relationship in China and were unable to build the right ecosystem for people to sell on Amazon." 

Getting a large number of local sellers is crucial for an e-commerce platform to provide goods at competitive prices and in sufficient variety to customers... 

Foreign internet-based businesses have very little presence in China, which has the biggest number of web users in the world. This is partly because a large number of U.S.-based sites including Google, YouTube and Twitter are banned, while e-commerce companies have walked away. Amazon's departure will likely only make it harder for other foreign retail companies to succeed there. 

"I think it would be very hard for large e-commerce players from foreign countries to build in China. It is still possible for niche players like there are opportunities in luxury space and cross-border trade," Rein said. 

American and European brands will have to depend heavily on local e-commerce companies like Alibaba and jd.com to see their products, analysts said. Although Amazon will continue to sell foreign-made goods, its reach is limited in China because local companies dominate the cross-border trade as well. 

"Unfortunately, Alibaba is almost a monopoly in some ways and they have way too much power because they control the eyeballs," said Rein, adding, "They (Alibaba executives) control traffic so they are able to force Western brands to discount even if Western brands do not want to,"Rein said. "Alibaba controls the relationship with the customer rather than the brand controlling the relationship with the customer."

More in the Voice of America.

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Censorship will prevail, even when Facebook enters China - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Mark Zuckerberg caused quite some controversy when plans emerged to censor Facebook to facilitate a possible return for the company to China again. Whether you agree or disagree, the way China censors the internet is more than just blocking a few Western sites, and will not go away says internet expert Kaiser Kuo in ChinaFile.

Kaiser Kuo:

Given China’s increasingly strict Internet censorship, it should surprise no one that any re-entry by Facebook would be conditional not only on the company’s acquiescing to censorship, but on its demonstrating the ability to carry it out to Beijing’s satisfaction. Equally if not even more troubling would be the requirement, all but inevitable, that Facebook store Chinese user data on servers in China, making that data accessible to Chinese courts and law enforcement. Even if Beijing deigns to allow Facebook a presence in China, Facebook will face a firestorm of criticism from human rights and data privacy activists. 

It will defend its decision by invoking the same logic that American proponents of engagement have always deployed. Some connectivity is surely better than none, which is essentially what Facebook has today: a tiny, inconsequential handful of China’s over 700 million Internet users are regular users of platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Facebook probably won’t make its case by suggesting that connecting China will bring about political change; it was, after all, suspicion of that sort of thing that got them blocked in the first place. They may instead point to the inherent good in connectedness, and note the evil—mistrust and misunderstanding—that arises in its absence. All this justifies compromise. 

Google faced a similar dilemma when it decided to enter China in early 2006. But the moral calculus has shifted in the intervening 11 years. Google may have been viewed with suspicion even then, but now—after various Color Revolutions and Arab Spring uprisings with the names of American Internet properties conveniently appended to them by the American media—Beijing will exact far greater compromise. China blocks far more foreign websites, and blocks them more aggressively, than it did then. Chinese users have excellent alternatives: social media platforms where their friends already are. They aren’t clamoring for Facebook, and those who want it have little trouble hopping the Great Firewall to get to it: nationalists bent on trolling pro-independence Taiwanese celebs hopped the wall in droves this past summer, after all. So Facebook has little leverage to speak of; it will play by Beijing’s rules or not at all. 

Indeed, Facebook’s only real card is the public relations value to Beijing of letting the company in: “See? All that nonsense about censorship was clearly overblown.” But it’s not. One of the regrettable effects of our use of the “Great Firewall” as a metonym for Chinese Internet censorship is that too many people equate censorship with the blocking of sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In fact, the censorship of domestic Chinese sites is far more onerous, and impacts a far greater number of users. That won’t change with a Facebook entry. 

Whatever your posture toward Facebook for its willingness to compromise on freedom of expression in the name of engagement and greater global connectivity, the unblocking of Facebook to users in the People’s Republic of China, should it come to pass, must not be construed in any way as a loosening of censorship.

More viewpoints in ChinaFile.

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New US internet companies succeed by complying with the government - Ben Cavender

Ben Cavender

China has seen a wave of new internet companies, actually succeeding. A surprise after Google, Facebook, Twitter saw them locked out. Business analyst Ben Cavender tells in Quartz what the trick is: complying with the Chinese government. Names? Evernote. LinkedIn. Uber.

Quartz:

After Google’s exit, those three firms have yet to come back. But in recent years, other American internet companies have found a degree of success in China—or at least a bit more stability than their predecessors. 

The solution involves sacrifice—hand over data and control, and the Chinese government will hand you the keys to the market. 

“If you want to develop an internet business in Chinese now, you have to be willing to work with the Chinese government, even if that means censoring content or sharing access to your data,” Ben Cavender, principal at the China Market Research Group, told Quartz... 

By now, some may say that question sounds downright passé. Google and Facebook, the posterboys for internet companies shut out of China, are now knocking on its door. 

Facebook has reportedly opened an office in Beijingand aspires to develop a consumer-facing product. Mark Zuckerberg’s China infatuation seems carefully staged. Google, meanwhile, is rumored to be working on an app store for China, as a way to reach consumers without relying on its search engine. 

“Google decided to take a stand, and they effectively locked themselves out of the market,” Cavender said. Businesses must ask, “How important is China to our growth and what is our long-term perspective on what to do there?” he adds.

More in Quartz.

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Consumers still pay a premium for brands - Tom Doctoroff

+Tom Doctoroff 

Some branding experts have been suggesting brand loyalty among consumers is on the decline, as they get access to more information. Shanghai-based branding expert Tom Doctoroff disagrees with the interviewer of Knowledge CKGSB. "People are still willing to pay a premium for brands."

Knowledge CKGSB:

 Q. We sometimes find that consumers are less loyal to brands. Where do you think this will leave the idea of branding? 

A. That is the $64,000 question and I wholeheartedly reject it. All you have to ask yourself is: are there still products that people are willing to pay a premium for? That premium ipso facto is loyalty. When you think about brand loyalty, and declining brand loyalty, what you’re talking about on the flip side is increased price sensitivity. So perhaps it’s true, that as consumers evolve they become less brand loyal in some sectors, but more brand loyal in other sectors, as you scale the Maslowian hierarchy of needs, a cleaning detergent could be high involvement for you when you’re relatively poor and you need clothes to shine. [But] as you move up, what you wear in terms of a brand, your car or your mobile phone becomes more high-involvement for you and more relevant to your life and you’re willing to pay a higher price premium for that. In emerging markets, you have waves of consumers entering different phases of economic development, so there will always be new consumers. With urbanization in China people are owning homes or moving to cities for the first time. So their brand choices are high involvement and then there’s loyalty. Societies are always evolving. Different segments of societies’ engagement with different types of categories is always shifting as well. Even in the US—in the recession of 1989 everybody thought that generics would take over the store. They haven’t because of the relationship that people have with categories and brands. So I don’t quite buy it, but I will say certain pockets of commoditization do occur. 

Q. Some experts are saying that people are often ‘product loyal’ rather than ‘brand loyal’ and it’s easy to confuse the two. Is that a differentiation that we need to be paying attention to? 

A. I disagree. I’m not saying that product attributes aren’t critically important. We have to define our terms: what is a brand? A brand is the role of a product in life and it is the relationship that a person has with a product. That relationship is forged through both product engagement, but also from a clear proposition that is in many cases passively received and actively defined by the manufacturer. When you are engaging with Apple, you are engaging with the Apple experience. Ultimately a brand is an experience. So if that experience is not only multidimensional, but also consistent, that experience becomes a holistic brand. Take Lego. It’s not just the fact that you have blocks that makes Lego a strong brand. It’s that you have a clearly defined brand idea, a relationship between the brand and consumer of inspiring builders of tomorrow. So every time you come into contact with that brand—whether it’s Lego Land, the Lego movie, the Lego retail experience, or the Lego toy itself—then you are reinforcing a predefined relationship. Once you start defining a brand as a relationship, you stop talking as if the product and brand can be separated. They can’t. The brand is a relationship that is an alignment of function, emotion and role in life, so that it’s all consistent. Of course if you don’t have a strong and cohesive brand, then the product becomes very important. But that [would be] a very vulnerable product because people can simply out-innovate you very quickly.

More questions in Knowledge CKGSB.

Tom Doctoroff is the author of Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing and a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. 

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Brand building: consistency in a social media age - Tom Doctoroff

+Tom Doctoroff 

Building brands needs more than tools, argues Shanghai-based author Tom Doctoroff of Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing at Bloomberg Surveillance. "Brands have to make clear where they stand." Uber is an example of a company who seems pretty clueless.

Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

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Twitter is a tool, not a strategy - Tom Doctoroff

Tom Doctoroff

Branding needs more than social media tools like Twitter or Wechat, says Shanghai-based author Tom Doctoroff of Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing on his book tour. Virals on social media do not build a brand, nor sell burgers, he says.

Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

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Building brands with social media - Tom Doctoroff

+Tom Doctoroff 

Author Tom Doctoroff, Asia Pacific CEO of JWT, tries to close the abyss between social media and traditional branding in his latest book Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing. In Thoughtful China he explains why branding on social media need the more traditional insights.

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How protectionism helped China´s internet players - Shaun Rein

+Shaun Rein 

Author Shaun Rein has to defend his book The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation, and Individualism in Asia, against the blockade of internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter in an interview with Richard Heffner. This is how China´s protectionism has helped domestic firms.

Richard Heffner´s Open Mind:

HEFFNER: But, but they’re closing off their innovation in the sense that it can’t be an international experience yet and, and Twittter can’t be born out of China because … 

REIN: Well, that’s where I disagree with you. Okay? And, and here’s why … the actual protectionism actually has helped proliferate innovation in China. So, in, in the Internet mobile space … especially mobile space, which is sort of the theme of my new book … The End of Copycat China … because the Chinese players didn’t have to compete against well-funded Twitter/Facebook, they were able to make mistakes. 

Initially they had inferior products, so you had companies like, you know, Sina, like Ren-Ren come up with virtual clones. Because they were protected, Chinese consumers had no choice, they had to use them. 

But over the last five years some of these firms have gotten really great at research and development and they’re actually more powerful than when you … then, then the American companies right now. 

Because they’ve been, you know, competing in a non-competitive environment. And they’ve now started to go abroad. So “WeChat” which is ten cents company, actually has replaced Facebook as the biggest social media population in Indonesia in less than ten months. 

I was in Indonesia in Q1 of 2013 … and Facebook was all the rage. Indonesians had never hear of “WeChat”. By the end of the year when I went back, everybody was using “WeChat”. 

I was in South Africa earlier this year, people everywhere in South Africa were using “WeChat”. So what we’re now …

Much more in Richard Heffner´s Open Mind.

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Why Twitter - or WeChat - is not a strategy - Tom Doctoroff

Branding guru Tom Doctoroff takes on the social media hype in his latest book Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing. Digital tools and big data have taken over old-style marketing, and Tom Doctoroff pleads for a end to the schism.

From the press release of publisher Palgrave:

In a cultural climate saturated by technology, marketing professionals have focused their energies on creating newer and more digital methods of advertising their brands, with the fear that if they don’t embrace "Big Data," they will fade into obscurity. But Tom Doctoroff, Asia CEO for J. Walter Thompson, argues that this frenzy over digital media has created a schism in the marketing world that is hindering brands from attaining their true business potential. The tension between traditional branding and the seemingly unlimited possibilities presented by the advent of "digital" branding leads companies to abandon the tried and true aspects of marketing for the flash of the new. In this informative new book, Doctoroff explains why a strategy that truly integrates the two ideas is the best way for a brand to move into the future. Using some of the biggest brand names in the world as examples, such as Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple, he breaks down the framework of marketing to explain how digital marketing can’t stand without the traditional foundation.

And at Forbes David Slocum recommends his book:

Tom Doctoroff, Twitter Is Not a Strategy: Remastering the Art of Brand Marketing (Palgrave MacMillan, November 11) The Asia CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Doctoroff uses characteristic wit and decades of experience to take on the twin hypes of digital media and the China market and to offer insightful principles for successful customer engagement and integrated brand marketing.

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What Western e-commerce can learn from Taobao - Benjamin Joffe

+Benjamin Joffe 

Alibaba´s e-commerce platform Taobao excels in integrating social functions, says internet expert Benjamin Joffe in CIO. Although it specifically focuses on Chinese buyers, not those in the west.

CIO:

Alibaba is crafting social-networking platforms specifically to complement two of its core operations. The beta version of a Web site with Facebook-style applications and a Twitter-style feed is being grafted onto Taobao.com, Alibaba's auction and retail Web site, a spokeswoman said. A more professional platform that the spokeswoman likened to LinkedIn is being added to Alibaba.com, the group's business-to-business e-commerce operation.

The entertainment-based platform for Taobao in particular combines standard social-networking functions with original features that promote online purchases. It goes a step beyond efforts to mix e-commerce and social networking by Western companies like Amazon.com and Facebook, said Benjamin Joffe, CEO of digital strategy and research company +8* (Plus Eight Star).

Western companies could potentially benefit by adding social functions like those on the Taobao platform, but the site is also uniquely suited for China's young Internet user base, he said...

Taobao's efforts may have more success (than Amazon or Facebook), partly because users will enter its social-networking platform knowing that it is based on an e-commerce site, said Joffe, the analyst. "They don't need to explain too much to their users," said Joffe. "It will feel very natural because commerce is what Taobao is all about in the first place. They are just adding social features to do it better." The young majority in China's base of Internet users has caused online games, entertainment and instant-messaging applications to grow faster then e-commerce in the country, Joffe said. Taobao is now drawing on those proven products to drive its own expansion. It was the first large e-commerce site to offer instant messaging, and social networking is a natural next step for its expansion, said Joffe.

More in CIO. Benjamin Joffe is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form. Are you looking for more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check our recent list. 

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Why Facebook opens a sales office in China - Shaun Rein

+Shaun Rein 

Facebook is blocked in China, just like Twitter and Google, but is opening a sales office in China. Chinese companies have to tap into the sales power of Facebook as they go abroad, as their global ambitions grow, explains business analyst Shaun Rein on Bloomberg TV. How do you want to sell in Indonesia or the US if you are not on Facebook?

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