Weber Shandwick jumps on the globalisation bandwagon of Chinese firms

Ogilvy PR was the first to launch a China practice in April 2011, with Beijing Dentsu, Burson-Marsteller, and Fleishman-Hillard following suit.

Weber Shandwick's similar offering, called Emergent China, works with leading China-based companies to address the challenges and opportunities of engaging effectively across the world.

The WS team, led out of San Francisco by executive vice-president William Brent, who has previously spent 15 years in China as a foreign correspondent, and media and marketing entrepreneur. In Asia-Pacific, the practice is led by vice-president Natalie Lowe while EMEA is headed by senior director, Jon Phelan. Other team members are located in Shanghai, Beijing, Washington DC, London, Brussels, Johannesburg and São Paulo and New Delhi.

“Multinationals from China have a great opportunity to establish their brands and executives as global leaders and distance themselves from a common perception that they are all part of some larger ‘China, Inc’,” said Brent.

The practice's client roster includes a range of private companies and state-owned enterprises spanning a range of industries. 

The establishment of such practices help to address some of the most pressing challenges that Chinese companies face today as they try to go global, these include organisational and cultural issues, according to Darren Burns, managing director of Weber Shandwick China.

"Many simply don't have the firepower in their marketing or communications department to really build engaging brands. They tend to be internally focused on what the C-level wants versus what makes sense for consumers; they focus on selling product units rather than brands," Burns told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Being largely family-owned, the modus operandi of Chinese brands may also be different for that reason. Doreen Wang, group account director & head of branding at Millward Brown China, said  that Chinese brands are still babies when it comes to marketing their brands globally though they are ambitious.

"Chinese brands still pay too much attention on execution; they spend too much time on making their ads look good, but that’s not the key thing in marketing," Wang said in an interview for Campaign Asia-Pacific's China report due to be published in September. "They are talking to people in a sexy way and not talking about what they want to hear. The more important thing is delivering the right message that resonates with the right target consumers".

Li Ning, for example, makes marketing decisions on a trial-and-error basis without a solid consumer-based foundation to prove the validity of those decisions, Wang said. Li Ning executives have themselves admitted the brand's expansion into the US market last year has been experimental, and thus troubled.

However, certain sectors may be a bit more prepared to go global and therefore are a bit more strategic, such as the Chinese auto companies. "They are focused on markets where there are white space—the frontier markets like the Africas. Their approach is not to go into the US but look at Central Asia's emerging countries for business opportunities," said Karl Cluck, chief strategy officer at Mindshare China in a recent interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific. 

On the agency side, Johan Bjorksten, chairman of MSL China, hinted that Chinese brands may be tough nuts to crack for those that want in on the action. "Local brands tend to make hard negotiations, use strange package prices, and are often slow to pay bills. It is odd to me that local companies so often fail to understand how to work with great agencies," Bjorksten said.