A Softer Sell Fits Chinese Market

An NBA basketball star dukes it out with a Chinese kung fu master and wins. American audiences probably would enjoy the flashy fight sequence in the ad and leave it at that. Not in China. Viewers offended by the Chinese defeat expressed their outrage online. Authorities yanked the Nike ad in December, saying it violated the country’s dignity.

Ditto for Japanese carmaker Toyota, which aired a commercial last year showing one of its sport utility vehicles cruising past kowtowing Chinese stone lions.

Such are the pitfalls of doing business in the world’s fastest-growing advertising market, in which sensitivity about cultural icons and Western dominance is acute.

Yet multinational companies eager to sell their products to more than 1 billion Chinese say that in some ways consumers here are very easy to please, as long as you know what makes them tick.

Topping the don’t-go-there list is anything that resembles rebellious or anti-establishment behavior, said Tom Doctoroff, the regional director of advertising giant J. Walter Thompson in Shanghai.

That means scenes popular in the West, such as soccer players causing traffic jams by kicking a ball around in the middle of the street, would be out of the question here.

What about that Pepsi commercial in which Michael J. Fox climbs out his window and dodges traffic in the rain to get an attractive neighbor a can of soda? No. In a Chinese version of the ad, the local pop star stops at the traffic light.

Determining what is proper behavior, however, is not always easy. Pizza Hut didn’t see a problem with showing a boy standing on a desk to tell his friends how good his pizza tastes. Censors killed the ad because standing on a table with a crowd watching was considered rebellious.

Advertisers also can forget about showing tattoos, pierced ears or women kicking and punching the air in an aerobics class.

Individualism is frowned upon. Even sheer indulgence takes a back seat to practical benefits.

“If a woman takes a bath in a beautiful, comfortable tub, that is not going to sell here,” Doctoroff said. “Nothing is just about feeling good or tasting good. Everything has to have a payoff.”

So it wouldn’t work to show a woman enjoying a cookie in the comfort of her home. But if a commercial showed a group of people eating cookies in public, it would create the feeling that they were members of the upwardly mobile middle class and the ad would be a success.

That is why Pizza Hut is popular here and frozen pizza is not, Doctoroff said. Dining out has a showoff value that eating in does not, he said.

The same rule applies even when selling toilets. Instead of presenting a person alone in a bathroom, a Chinese ad has a woman showing a friend how nice her toilet bowl is.

Most commercials project a happy, bright and clean picture. “It’s the 1950s, but in color,” Doctoroff said.

That approach may bore a Western audience exposed to decades of changing advertising, but in China, it is still new and exciting. The simpler the message, the easier it is to digest.

Many marketers see this moment as China’s golden age of advertising, as the 1930s and 1940s were for the United States.

The numbers alone tell the story. According to ACNielsen, the annual growth rate of the Chinese advertising market is close to 40%, compared with 3% to 4% in the United States, said Quinn Taw, managing director at Mindshare in Beijing. Taw said that the real growth rate might be closer to 20%, still a phenomenal figure.

“The growth is historical,” he said. “Over the next few years, it will overtake Germany and Britain to become No. 3.” And then it’s only a matter of time, he said, until China’s advertising market overtakes Japan’s to rank second to the U.S.

The growth is partly driven by young Chinese businesses that are big spenders but tend to pay little attention to creativity. One health tonic company made its name by buying the most expensive slot on prime-time television and repeating the same slogan.

“In the U.S., an ad may take 24 months to go from storyboard to when it gets on the air. In China, this would happen in three or four weeks,” Taw said. “You’re looking at pinpoint communication. They are looking at big sledgehammer communication.”

Observers say that’s because most Chinese, who are neophytes in the world of marketing, are not yet experienced in creative advertising. That leaves plenty of room for practiced foreign advertising firms to take the lead in wooing Chinese consumers.

“This is the last great virgin brand-building market,” Doctoroff said. “We can be successful just by doing the ABCs.”