Opinion... Milk crisis can't dent the rise of brand nationalism

Yet the past 59 years have found the Chinese people grappling with the residue of a national inferiority complex, knowing that China no longer kowtowed to foreign powers, increasingly pleased with the nation’s technical and economic progress, but somehow unsure of themselves.
Whatever was left of that collective chip-on-the-shoulder began to disintegrate during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and it continued to crumble with each day and each new tally of the gold medal count.

By the time the last Paralympian had left the ‘Bird’s Nest’, something altogether new and unmistakable filled

the people and the air across China: a deep and palpable pride. But this was not the nationalist pride of anger or frustration, but a pride rooted in a new confidence.

You can see it in the faces of people in the street, you can hear it in the conversations, you can read it on blogs and online forums. You can call it an Olympic afterglow, and part of it might be that. But there is something else, something difficult to describe.

It is less about what is being said, than the confidence that lies under it. There is a growing belief that, not only can China solve its own problems, but that it can help solve the world’s problems too. Nowhere was that more evident in recent weeks than China’s discreet handling of the global financial crisis.

Ironically, it is a feeling that not even the tainted milk crisis can dent. After all, if you have just mounted a historic rescue effort to save an earthquake-stricken city, pulled off a near-flawless Olympics, delivered what had to be the most successful Paralympics in the
history of the Games, and almost overnight become the world’s banker, the milk issue seems like a straightforward matter.

Marketers, this is our wake-up call. A permanent change in the national spirit is underway, one that will subtly change the self-image of nearly every Chinese person, and - critically - change the way people see foreign brands. Simply put, we are reaching the end of the
days when there is an automatic assumption of superior quality from international brands.

Many of us have built our marketing efforts in part on the cachet brought by something foreign. That cachet has been eroding for a while. We are now reaching the point where, if being foreign is not a liability, it is certainly no longer an advantage. This is going to be an issue for every major brand, but it will be a special danger to those brands who have let the perceived quality gap between themselves and the locals erode over time.

This has implications on a range of business issues including price, distribution and product design. But as marketers, it is up to us to rouse our organisations and our clients out of this three-decade dream of presumed primacy and wake them up to a new world where the Chinese people are demanding to know why they should buy something foreign.

This means a psychic shift in the way we market. Being foreign gives us more to prove, not less. We cannot rely on occasional quality shocks to make an implicit case for foreign brands. We must recognise that, in each industry, it is only a matter of time before local competitors give the Chinese a reason to reject foreign brands. For many companies, that time is already upon them. The time to respond is now.




David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia
[email protected]