The study, which polled 536 client marketers via face-to-face interviews across 12 Chinese cities, included marketing decision makers from MNCs such as adidas, Unilever, McDonald’s and Nokia. Significantly, top local companies such as Lenovo, Li Ning, Uni-President and Yili were also included in the study.
More than 200 foreign and local agencies were benchmarked according to their perceived creativity, marketing services, media planning and strategy.
In the category of ‘understanding the Chinese consumer’, 57 per cent of local agencies were perceived as understanding the target audience, whereas only 48 percent of MNC agencies could boast the same result.
While 69 per cent of MNC agencies were seen as having effective creativity, against 56 per cent of local agencies, local shops were much closer to their international counterparts when it came to the originality of their creative ideas. In the latter category, MNC agencies were only five per cent ahead, perhaps bucking some common stereotypes of local Chinese agencies. Those stereotypes were further refuted in the ‘groundbreaking and innovative agency’ category, where local agencies achieved a score of 39 per cent, nudging just ahead of MNC agencies at 38 per cent.
While MNC agencies maintained a significant edge in terms of strategic planning, they struggle to keep up with their local counterparts when it came down to sales promotion, and thinking beyond advertising.
“What is perhaps surprising is how they rate local agencies versus international agencies, said Goh Shu Fen (pictured), principal at R3. “The gap is much closer than one would anticipate so the pressure on international agencies will get a lot more intense than ever before.”
