The Creator of French Loft Story Vamps Sephora in China

Who?
Alexis de Gemini , ex- French ChannelM6 (Big Brother, Popstars, Bachelor and Pekin Express), founded his production company A2G creation in 2009. Laetitia Rambaud, Director, Media and Advertising EMEA at Sephora. Rémi Guigou, Director of the Image of Sephora.Project Managers: Anne Véronique Bruel, President Greater China Sephora, Laurene Dutartre, Marketing Image Manager at Sephora China

What?
The case study “Sephora Beauty Academy”, broadcasted summer 2011 on Dragon TV and the Web, presented at the first evening event China ConnectInTheCity event organized by Laure de Carayon.

How?
30 days of shooting with a team of five French and Chinese 90
10 episodes of 45 minutes broadcasted on primetime, with over 30% audience market share on the Shanghai region
15 million views of episodes on the net
25 million votes combined on the web
51 080 posts around the program on Weibo, one of the Chinese twitters
40,458 blog posts
A production cost equivalent to a programme on TNT in France, or, one third of a prime time on M6.

How?
Alexis de Gemini discovered China with Pekin(Beijing) Express. He moved in shortly after with his family and develops over ten concepts he pitches to brands and channels. “To go to China, it’s better to be small, agile, which many large audiovisual structures can not,” he says. Sephora was seduced by “Beauty Academy”, a format that allows to educate a population consuming more care products than makeup. “In Communist China, there was a total lack of makeup culture. The mother-daughter transmission does not exist. “Beauty Academy is a major competition in 10 episodes, looking for the country best “make up artist”. At stake: a two-year contract with the brand.  

Chinese E-commerce, Mobile, SNS and Marketing, China Connect will be Back in Paris in 2012, March 22 and 23

In Paris, it is rare to find serious events on Chinese marketing, calling on real players such as brands and media, as opposed to consultants.  China Connect is one of those events.

What is China Connect ? A sort of open forum, where any marketing specialist interested in China may listen to presentations by the major players in marketing, and meet them in the networking areas. The event is rich, intense, lively and completely worth the cost. It is all the more important since the major players of emarketing – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Youtube – are not present in China for political or economic reasons, and since China has developped its own players for the  several hundred millions of Chinese connected through their PCs or mobile phones. These players have often grown autonomously from the western world, due to the specifics of Chinese ideograms, or for cultural reasons such as the predominance of mobile phones over PCs.

Have you heard of the war machines that are the weibos from Sina or Tencent ? The world’s largest B2C ecommerce site TaoBao ? The Baidu search engine ? The local equivalents of youtube : Youku and Tudou ? If not, run to China Connect, because China is preparing to invade the West, and what is happening in China today will happen tomorrow in Europe. To prepare for this, you can come and meet the head managers of these players and build your network.

In parrallel, numerous brands from the fields of luxury, design and consumer goods will be presenting Chinese business cases, offering lessons that are often valid across industries. Finally, a few experts in Chinese marketing will focus on the reality of numbers, on the on-going battles between the various Chinese players, on the successes and failures …

Among participants this year (available on the following site http://www.chinaconnect.fr):

-Youku, the Chinese Youtube, represented by its General Manager for East China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzen and the whole east coast) Lee Li.

-Elleshop.com.cn, the e-commerce arm of Elle magazine, leader in Chinese women’s fashion for the past 25 years.

- case studies with the Adidas brand, presented by  Hélène Saurais, in charge of the brand’s ecommerce activity

-Fei Wang Eyewear, profiled glasses for the specific Chinese physionomy, represented by its founder Fei Wang

-Philips’ Chinese design center, represented by its star designer Tammo de Ligny

-the famous Shanghai blogger Sam Fleming, who will analyse the key trends in the Chinese internet.

Many others are expected to join the list as they confirm their participation.  

Weibo – Opium of the Masses

Weibo – the only talk in town, whether in China or elsewhere

What is a Weibo ? As its name indicates, it is a microblog on which you can write 140 chinese characters (equivalent to 1,400 of our letters), and which allows you to attach a picture which can be changed at will from your mobile phone, and sent with a new text to all your followers. In short, a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, all of which (picture, text and blog access) is managed in three seconds through a mobile phone.

A formidably effective communication tool, whose versatility comes from the fact that 140 chinese characters offer a lot of room for expression, available at any time

While Twitter is forbidden in China, Weibos are proliferating. The one from sina.com, the first to appear two years ago, will end up eating up the giant internet portal which generated it. On par with Sina and counting more than 200 million users, Tencent Weibo is the child of Tencent instant messaging (among other things), a local social network. Then there are others, smaller, less advertised.

As Chinese political experts point out, Weibos were not shut down last summer, when popular discontent (also spread by these same weibos) was very high due to the high speed rail crash. Could Weibo be the Facebook of Chinese “Jasmin Revolution” ?  

Meet Henri Liu, A Swiss Watch Guru Made in China.

Many of my clients decry the lack of horology knowledge affecting most Chinese editors and bloggers. Granted, the watch industry is fairly technical, and many editors are content to simply rehash a few public facts about the brands. They listen to several industry interviews, and parrot those and other articles they read in the press. One exception is a Chinese journalist who has gone out of his way to truly understand what makes a watch “tick”.

Henri Liu was the first journalist to focus on watches at a time when lifestyle press was barely emerging. Having worked many years for the Chinese State, Henri was recruited in 2001 by the Trends press group, the organisation who slowly introduced all of the Hearst media in China. Henri Liu is then assigned to the new Chinese version of Esquire Magazine as an editor for the Men section. With luxury watches suddenly appearing in China, Henri takes a particular interest in horology.

He starts attending major watch trade shows like BaselWorld and SIHH in Geneva. At the time, he is the only known Chinese journalist specializing in horology. This gets him invitations to all the great Swiss manufactures. And he scores interviews with all the greats from Swatch’s Nicolas Hayek to Philippe Stern at Patek, and Jean-Claude Biver at Blancpain at the time.

He spends countless hours trekking throughout Switzerland and former East Germany in the manufactures learning how watches are designed and built

Then in 2004 Trends CEO Wu Hong, a brilliant man, decides to create a dedicated watch magazine from scratch. He calls it Trends Time and asks Henri to run it as its editor in chief. At that time, the male luxury watch is a growing phenomenon. Collectors start appearing left and right. Wu Wong senses this trend and capitalizes on it with a dedicated watch magazine. A first in China at the time.

P1.cn : a Chinese Social Media for Luxury Brands

Owing to its great potential of billionaires, millionaires etc…(see Bain 2010), China has developed some huge communities and clubs for wealthy digital members who want to improve their brand culture. Copycats of Facebook, Twitter, You Tube or Flickr are also available of course, but luxury brands do use some far more competitive tools to catch the Chinese wealthy people’s attention, the young ones in particular who have been pointed out as those who today are buying luxury goods instead of putting their money aside.

P1.cn is quite typical of these digital networks which seem mostly creative concerning the recruiting of their members (let us specify that, as they do not save any money, when these young people have 1,500 Euros, they spend each month 500 Euros to make a living in any chinese big city and have 1,000 Euros left for extra money).
In March 2010, after a year and a half lifetime, this social network for Chinese yuppies counted already 633,000 members. Though the admission to this club is more selective than any other occidental membership. To become a member you must have had your picture taken in some big city of the chinese west coast (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangshou or Shenzen) and this by one of the platform photographers who reign in the fashionable streets surrounding the shopping malls as well as in the high society’s parties. Their target: the twenty-two to fourty years old young people dressed in top designers clothes or the most typical trendsetters; a community that can be recognized at a glance.

P1.cn, exactly as “asmallworld”, is a true social network with its profiles, its connected members, its blogs, its privileged loyalty cards, its groups, its events and its weekly newsletter about luxury… Pleasures which are overused by the P1.cn “beautiful members”. It does look as if this audience thinks of nothing else than letting off steam, celebrating, shopping and showing their fashionable look. Here there is no business networking but exclusively fun and fun again. A visit on the site will tell you more about this gilded youth’s hobbies and the emptiness of their motivations.