It is impossible to do good creative for local clients: This is true, to a certain degree. This may sound like a sweeping statement, but I believe that there are reasons behind it. In one of the articles published by Harvard Business Review, the institution had done a study comparing the leadership style of various office heads around the world, including in China.
The finding suggests that 72.9 per cent of the bosses in Chinese companies are those with a "controller" and "charismatic" leadership style.
Based on my personal experience, not all of them fall into this category.
In any successful relationship, building a strong foundation based on trust is the fundamental criteria, more so in a Chinese business environment.
As agency executives, we have a choice of either understanding the challenges from the client's point of view, or walking away from the business.
But before we do so, we should ask ourselves whether we have established the right authority in our role as consultant in the mindsets of these charismatic and controlling business leaders.
Chinese consumers are literal and do not appreciate creativity: The contemporary Chinese is now as worldly as he or she should be, especially those living in the first-tier cities. The issue becomes acute when the brief is to target the consumers in secondary cities. Given that Hollywood movies as pirated DVD copies sell like hotcakes all over China, this makes the notion sound quite hollow. Perhaps one has to make a clear distinction between cultural alienation and having the courage to champion daring and breakthrough creative concepts.
For example, if we were to take the famous Budweiser 'Wassup' campaign and literally do a Chinese version, it would certainly not work. But, when we show some of our work that is being produced by our other offices (such as Thailand and London) to our people here, 10 out of 10 love the creative ideas.
The sad fact is that I am equally sure that when such ideas were to be presented to local clients, 10 out of 10 will disapprove of them.
It is not easy to convince a client that if we continue to underestimate the intelligence of the consumers, we lose the chance of owning a powerful territory to sell their brands.
There are too many restrictions to do good creative work: Looking from the socio-political perspective, there are indeed many written rules that disallow creative talents from crossing the line.
However, this should not be the reason for not creating good work as the very essence of creativity is to craft something extraordinary from the ordinary.