I’ve been in Shanghai for a little while, and I’m always fascinated by seeing which foreign brands have successfully integrated into China. Last year, I took note of the brands I saw over the course of a day. I wanted to recreate a Chinese version of that, so I asked some of my native Chinese Gen Y friends about their own “brand timelines”.

Gathering recognizable brands turned out to be a little more difficult than I thought. The Chinese Generation Y-ers I talked to interact with brands in a different way than North Americans. For example, clothing is usually brandless (or effectively no-name) and you go shopping at markets. For food, you usually eat at your schools’ canteen, a local noodle shop, or cook something for yourself. A big part of their day is interacting with items that can be considered brandless.

With that in mind, what follows is a composite of the different aspects of a Gen Y’s life in China, gathered from a handful of people aged 19-25.

Personal Healthcare

Personal healthcare is dominated by foreign brands.

Clothes*

The reality is that most people get their clothes at no-name shops. If you’ve got foreign-branded stuff, you’ve either got a little bit of cash or it’s a fake.

Breakfast

Usually, people make their own breakfast.

Commuting

Metro is really the only way to go. No one’s got a car unless you’re really rich. Besides, license plates are only available through auction.

Hanging out

KFC, Pizza Hut and Mcdonald’s are very popular in Shanghai. In contrast to North America, Pizza Hut successfully sells itself as an upscale, classy venue and people go to Mcdonald’s to hang out, study and chat.

Going online

Sony Vaios have roughly the same “prestige” that Macs have in the West. Apple is starting to make headway, but Shanghai is very much a Microsoft Windows stronghold (thanks to massive, massive piracy). Apple retains its pricing strategy (read: too expensive), and the benefits don’t connect with consumers. Basically, people don’t have enough money to be pretentious…zing.

Taobao is an online shopping platform that can be compared to eBay and Amazon. It’s so big that it’s currently beating Amazon in 2009 receipts.

Baidu is the major player in search, with over 70% market share. Google hovers 20% share.

Entertainment

The Lakers and the Rockets hold a significant mindshare here, due to fascination with Kobe and Yao Ming. PPS is a P2P app where you can watch tv shows and movies (works similar to KaZaa) and YouKu is the equivalent of the banned YouTube.

Connecting

Facebook never really took off here (and is currently banned). In its place we have two local giants in the SNS scene, RenRen and Kaixin (top right). The way it was explained to me was that RenRen is for “everyone” while Kaixin is for “white collars”. They were built as Facebook clones and are currently engaged in a membership count race.

QQ (middle, penguin) and MSN dominate the instant messaging scene, while everyone constantly texts with China Mobile, operator of the world’s largest mobile network.

The Land of The Clones

Brands are slowly and surely creeping into China. Local Shanghainese often tell me about how different everything was even just 5 years ago. Westernization is kept on a tight leash and there are cheap local alternatives to almost everything. Tech and Web companies are going to have an especially tough time, because of the nearly nonexistent IP laws in China and the home-court language advantage.

Globally, some things are the same, such as the constant need for connectedness. MSN spaces actually has a bit of a following here and it seems like everyone from the ages of 15-45 has a QQ instant messaging account. Pictures and statuses get thrown on the web on Kaixin and RenRen, just as we love doing on Facebook.

You can’t be caught flat-footed in the web these days, even if your brand only has a finger dipped in the sea of social media. Here are 3 examples of how Gen Y can blindside you and your brand, all inspired by the recent hoopla around Kurt Greenbaum, the latest target of the Internet Hate Machine™.

Kurt Greenbaum

Social Media Director (actual job title) Greenbaum took issue with someone leaving a vulgarity in his comments, so Greenbaum put on his best hall-monitor sash and sought out commenter’s employer. Commenter lost his job and Greenbaum gloats in his blog. Blog comments then fill with shock and anger over his breach of privacy policy (and smugness).

Anger snowballs until it hits social news sites, where at this point various people start to slander his name on twitter, novelty blogs and the like. In the course of about a day, his personal contact info (like his home address and his personal mobile) has been published on the web ad nauseum and his blog comments and Flickr account have been overrun with negative feedback. His Google results will forever have a permanent stain.

Fortunately for Greenbaum this is a fairly nerdy violation that this is restricted to social-media-savvy networks on the web (my mother has no clue what a privacy policy even is). But since his job is a “Social Media Director”, I hope he has learned a thing or two about damage control.

The Lesson
Be accountable for everything published on your website. Greenbaum wasn’t familiar with his own privacy policy and has incurred a lot of wrath.

HabitatUK and the Hashtag Spam

The marketing team at Habitat, a UK furniture firm, had a chat one morning…

Nigel: We need to be on Tweeter.
Geoff: You mean Twitter?
Nigel: Right! Whatever!
Geoff: I think my nephew uses that…
Nigel: Great! Throw some money at him and get him in here!

That is probably miles (or 1.6 kilometers) away from what actually happened, but it might as well be true. The company soon started spamming Twitter hashtags for completely unrelated topics. In short, they used the popularity of topics like the Iran election protests and iPhones to advertise a sale. Their tweets showed up at the top of the heap for these hot topics, at which point everyone called them out for spam on an ugly scale.

The Lesson
You target in the real world, you should target (even more) when using social media and relating to Gen Y.

United Airlines

United breaks some guy”s guitar in transit. Guy makes a music video about poor customer service and zero restitution. Gen Y digs the message and spreads it throughout social networks (see: How Things Get Popular On the Internet) and ends up reinforcing the stereotype that United Airlines has awful customer service.

The Lesson
Don’t break anyone’s friggin guitar. United really could not have done anything here outside of improving their customer service, which they said they would do in predictable, standard corporate-speak. The real lesson here is that with the web, you don’t know who the influencers are, so you better step up your customer service game and make sure everyone is happy.

photo by Cathérine

I was watching a video on YouTube the other day, you know, one of those videos where a text ad in the lower-fifth of the screen pops up. With sharpshooter accuracy, I hovered the mouse over the small, boxed “X” and clicked. It all happened in less than an instant and I went back to watching my video.

Afterward, I reflected on all the ads that were thrown in my face that never even got a chance, thanks to my shark-like instincts to kill anything that looks like an ad. The year 2002 was an especially good year to hone this skill, as it was around that time that those annoying spy-cam ads spawned instantaneously all over the web.

Who actually clicks these ads?

I tried to visualize who was clicking those slap-the-monkey, punch-the-boxer ads. And who was clicking those unbearable inline text ads (the kind that creates links from random words in a blog post).

A rough answer to that question is as follows:

• people ages 25-44
• sub $40’000 income
• frequent auctions, gambling, career services sites

I found it strange that these were people who spent 4x more time online than regular users, and yet they were clicking more. Wouldn’t they develop banner blindness? That just goes to show that exposure doesn’t equal savvy.

Are they stupid?

Is it really fair to say that they are stupid? From the comScore piece, this “clicking” demographic strikes me as the same type that compulsively buys lotto and sweepstakes tickets. These folks don’t know how to handle their money, are lower-middle-class, and spend way too much time on the internet.

Their wanton clicking (with no commensurate increase in purchases) would certainly lead some advertisers to call them stupid, as in, those darn people who cost me money but never buy anything. The real losers here are the advertisers: clicks buy traffic, not intentions.

Gen Y, The Anti-Clickers

Word-of-mouth and Google are basically all you need to know when Gen Y is looking to buy a product. When I was in the market for a DSLR, I asked around, got some opinions and went to look up reviews on the cameras I shortlisted. After some searching, I went out to a brick-and-mortar store and bought it. Ads never played a part in the entire process.

It can be said that previous advertising had thrown Canon and Nikon as the two main contenders for my money, but I could have easily been swayed by good reviews for a Sony on a third-party, neutral website. (I ended up buying a Canon).

It’s incredibly hard to reach Generation Y through online ads, even when you hit them where they hang out.

I’m definitely on-board with those that say that the pay-per-click model is dead, or needs to die.

Further reading:
The end of the free lunch—again (The Economist)
Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet (TechCrunch)

Photo by Davichi

I’ve always been amazed at how things get popular on the internet so quickly. I remember watching Evolution of Dance skyrocket into pop culture in 2006. This year, the internet transformed the letters FML from meaningless acronym to hilarious punchline.

How do things get popular on the internet?

I’ve created the graph below to help explain the phenomenon.

The answer, put simply, is nerds.

The word nerd gets a bad rap. Basically, anyone who frequents a social news site is a nerd. Nerd just means that you are tech-savvy and internet-literate. I’m proud to be a nerd. Nerds have first-dibs on information, and information is power.

In the graph, coolness is a reference to when you are laughing at the joke. Have you heard the joke before, did you get the joke right as the punchline was delivered, or did you laugh once the comedian left the stage?.

The graph shows that nerds are the ones telling the jokes.

David After Dentist: A Case Study

Let’s take a quick look at a real-life example of this model: David After Dentist.
You can watch the video here.

DISCOVERY
David’s father uploads the video on YouTube on January 30, 2009.

SOCIAL NEWS
Video is picked up on Digg on February 4. It gets 10,000+ diggs.

FACEBOOK
Social news site users then pass it on to the general population through instant messages, Facebook walls, emails. It gets talked about at coffee breaks everywhere, Did you see that video of the kid after the dentist?

MAINSTREAM NEWS
Wall Street Journal writes about the video on February 9. Time Magazine does an article on the video on February 11.

SOCCER MOMS
On March 26, The Today Show interviews the family who made the video.

Why Nerds are so important

For every David After Dentist, there are a million non-starters that never even come close to pop culture stardom; they get filtered out during the Social News stage. Nerds whittle away all the meh content and highlight the gems. When it comes to the internet and user-generated content, nerds are the gatekeepers.

In previous generations, the ones doing the content filtering were mostly corporations and Big Media. With Gen Y and its connectedness, that influence has trickled down and spread out. Social news and networking sites have democratized the process, making Generation Y the first generation where broadcasters can actually be the last to hear about newsworthy items.