You wouldn't think of China, the world's largest producer of and market for counterfeit goods, as an ideal habitat for brand building.
And if I have one gripe with Brand Warriors China - whose authors are accomplished branding and strategy consultants in Asia - it's that it rather glosses over this issue. After all, despite China's WTO accession and Beijing's vehement protestations that it's cracking down on intellectual property abuses, video retailer Blockbuster announced in January that due to rampant piracy, it was closing its 29 Hong Kong stores and scrapping its mainland expansion plans.
Threateningly, too, as co-author Gilmore observed, "Many fake goods are being sold at virtually the same price as the genuine article, and - horror of horrors - some cheeky counterfeiters have chosen to trade at a premium to the original." Yet she concludes brightly: "Brand builders are going to have to work harder than ever to justify their price." Fine, but if I'm a brand manager at Burberry, whose lookalike wares are ubiquitous in China, I'm not much consoled.
That said, branding pertains to more than just easily knocked-off consumer durables, and actually it is successful home-grown Chinese brands - not just in manufacturing, but also in services, the web, medicine, electronics, broadcasting and investments - to which this book is primarily devoted.
Rightly, the authors emphasise the facility with which Chinese brands are able to incorporate spirituality and social ideology, and marvel at the capacity of the Chinese language to hold and convey brand values.
"Single characters very often have two or three layers of meaning. The language itself feels like a treasure trove of codes and symbols."
Nowadays, many Chinese businesses make deliberate use of metaphors in their brand names and logos, and their engagement with the discipline of branding continues to mount. But China brands have not always been big winners.
In one of the book's 15 case studies, the deputy general manager of China Mobile, Lu Xiang Dong, explains that 10 years ago, there was no need for a corporate brand; the ministry that provided the service was the "brand".
The company's first mobile offering wasn't even labelled. "It was our customers who came up with the first product name for the mobile phone - Da Ge Da, meaning literally 'big brother big'."
Refreshingly, where many discussions of Asian branding focus on the plight of foreign companies doing business in a land of mystery, this book includes only one such tale. It is the insightful (if cliched) story of Unilever's discovery that the globe's fourth most sprawling nation is - surprise! - more heterogeneous than initially thought. "There is not 'one China'," explains Peter Ter-Kulve, CEO of the China operation of Unilever's Wall's ice cream line. "When people say they have a China strategy, they mostly don't know what they're talking about."
This book is fundamentally Chinese in perspective. Brand Warriors China gives a grand induction to the secrets of the pagoda.
- Jeremy Hildreth is an associate with The Writer in London. This book review was first published on Brand Republic's website at brandrepublic.com.