The good and the bad of China brands

In a new video for Campaign Asia-Pacific, marketing industry heavyweight Tom Doctoroff lays down some home truths about what Chinese brands currently get fantastically right and what they're getting horribly wrong.

Specifically, Doctoroff draws attention to the possibility that the country's cultural mindset is having a knock-on effect on structures. "When you have overall a relatively protective culture, where people revere the concrete and they tend to think that the abstract is not bankable, the conceptual is not bankable, then that tends to translate into fairly rigid corporate hierarchies," he says.

This video kicks off Campaign's new short-video series, Marketing Masters, in which respected industry minds will share their expert wisdom on specialist subjects. We will have more episodes featuring Doctoroff's insights, and considering the imminent release of Campaign's highly anticipated Asia's Top 1000 Brands, we've made sure that our questions have a particular focus on brand development.

Doctoroff, APAC CEO of J. Walter Thompson until June last year, recently joined Prophet as senior partner. He has more than 20 years experience working in China and has authored two books on the subject; Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer and What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and the Modern Chinese Consumer.