When I express that opinion to people experienced with marketing in China, they always agree. Yet Western marketers usually disagree with me.
Some background – I oversee Chinese-language digital marketing campaigns for Western clients. While we have the occasional ‘big brand’ client with a strong footprint in China, most of our clients are SMEs that are just stepping into the Chinese market for the first time.
It’ll be easier to explain with an example, so I randomly picked RichardsLaw.ca. They’re legal professionals in Canada.
They aren’t a client of ours, but they’re similar to common cases we see. Many companies that we talk to have close to zero brand recognition within China and wish to “test the waters” by seeing how many indonesia phone number list leads or sales they can get with a budget of under 10K USD. So they setup their website and drive some traffic and… not much happens. Not what they expected anyways.
One of the most common problems in these situations is a lack of consumer trust in the brand. I not only think a new brand needs trust to make sales, but I think they even need it to start getting leads. Most Westerners never get this because they don’t understand life in China.
So, I’ll try a new way of explaining it. Trust in a brand isn’t just about the brand itself. It’s about trust in systems, government and other humans.
Table of Contents
Brand Trust Profiles
How to Build Trust for a Brand in China
Brand Trust Profiles
We could imagine a brand trust profile to look something like this:
china-brand-trust-new.png
In these images, I show what I think would be likely levels of trust that Chinese & Canadian consumers would place in this legal company if they were to find it online for the first time.