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.

With the Help of Zhenji, Target, the Chinese Luxury Magazine, Innovates in a New Field: Pairing up Chinese food and Bordeaux Growths

In China, 80 % of the wines and spirits will be drunk during a meal, a chinese meal of course for Chinese people do mostly eat their own cooking which has been given to them by the Gods.  This is the reason why it is so important, concerning the wines that would like to be referenced in this country also, to work on the wines/chinese dishes pairing in terms of marketing. Here is the complex challenge in which the great wines of Bordeaux, the marketing agency Zhenji and the luxury magazine Target set off.

For Zhenji, the first thing to do was to contact the Shan brothers from the “Bonheur du Palais” in Bordeaux which is today one of the top chinese restaurants in the world not counting China. Then different classics from the best chinese cooking were selected. The ultimate purpose being that, when a client orders the well-known “Three-ducks-stuffed Duck”, a classsic of the Suzhou’s cooking, he immediately thinks of the great wine of Bordeaux to match: a Chateau Cheval Blanc.  Helene Yuan, the restaurant’s  wine waitress, tasted the wines and the dishes to combine them. Sent by Target, Sam Wong, a star of culinary design in Shanghai and gastronomic consultant for every restaurant in the real-estate complex of Xintiandi, put the finishing touches to the food presentation while Yoshi Omori, the photographer, was artistically matching damask tablecloths with luxury tableware and glasses to enhance food and wines… The editor Lin Tian for his part, interviewed the chefs about their recipes or the precise vocabulary to be used in this dishes/wines pairing. For Tommy Shan, the restaurant owner, did actually create some special words to define these new pairings, words that will have to feature in the text facing each picture.

Today, Target is working on this special issue which will come out on January 5th 2011, the chinese New Year Day traditionally celebrated by many families or friends feasts where great wines of Bordeaux could be offered or drunk. But this Target special issue would also be very useful because, today, chinese restaurants have no sommelier, no-one to be consulted about wich wine could taste best with the chosen menu; a lot of personal Chinese gourmets would probably appreciate this kind of information too.

Those who listen to malicious gossips like that, in China, ginger has been added to the great Chateau Petrus or that some Chateau Lafite has been drunk down in one will surely laugh, thinking we are casting pearls before swine… Whatever happens, wine marketing in China will have to take the time-honoured chinese cooking rites into account.

Tatler innovates with the launching of “China City Tatler”

In China today, as the mainland country becomes more and more developed, the challenge for luxury brands is to find some new resources in the so called “second tier cities” or “third tier cities”  (there are five classes of chinese cities according to their economical develoment and the number of their inhabitants). Any brand product can already be bought in Chengdu, Dalian, Shenyang or Chongqing for, in these big country cities, the most attractive customers are to be found: the ones who, less informed and new to the HNWI’s world, really do appreciate luxury brands (a kind of “nouveaux riches” to use a coarse expression).

Shanghai Tatler and later Beijing Tatler, each of them in due time, had already given to the wealthiest classes some kind of “media mirror”, allowing their values to circulate and be transmitted. In this way, Tatler did help creating these fashionable gatherings where the first Chinese HNWI celebs had been brought to light so that, today, every member of the Chinese elites pounces monthly on its great news magazines to see if he has been well placed.

In September 2010 and right in the middle of a media landscape exclusively occupied by television and daily press (or by the internet), Tatler did launch its “China City Tatler”, that is to say 5 magazines for several second tier cities and their surroundings: Sichuan Tatler for the city of Chengdu, Jiangsu Tatler for Nanjing, Zhejiang Tatler for Hangzhou, Chongqing Tatler for Chongqing, Liaoning Tatler for Shenyang and Dalian (and it is a well-known fact that the consumption of luxury goods by the wealthy HNWI elites is really significant in these sevral chinese country cities). So that their social microcosms will at last have a chance to take shape through their own magazines and also to find the information they need concerning their favourite product, the one every member of this society circle is talking about.