China needs brands to build its brand

ATAHK reads from China Daily that Professor of marketing and innovation in UK says Europe is a promising strategic partner for Chinese companies

Wang Qing says China will find it difficult to become a technology leader without brands.

The professor of marketing and innovation at Britain's Warwick Business School says brands of the power and reach of Apple give companies breathing space to do research and development.

"If you don't have a brand as a cushion, you only have technology and the problem with technology is that it is hyper-competitive," she says.

"People will grab your technology now and they won't come back for your next because they will go somewhere else. Apple has great technologies but the reason why it really dominates the market for mobiles is because of its brand. People will go back to it."

Wang, who was speaking at the Kerry Hotel in Beijing on one of her many annual visits to her native China, says the lack of global brands, not just in technology but in almost every sphere, was a real problem for the world's second-largest economy.

She cites that there were no Chinese brands in the Inter brand top 100 best global brands survey in 2015.

"When we look at these league tables, for a long time there have been no Chinese brands."

She believes the lack of brands is undermining the country's technological efforts and achievements even though it overtook the United States and Japan as the world's largest filer of patents in 2012.

"It has also overtaken everyone else in the numbers of papers published in top journals," adds Wang.

The major question though is how far China - once light years behind at the time of reform and opening up in the late 1970s - has to go in catching up with the West in terms of technology.

"I think China in some areas already is very close to what is cutting edge and, maybe in a couple of areas, they might even be more advanced."

One such area is high-speed rail. China opened its first line in 2007 and now has 19,000 kilometers of track in service, more than the rest of the world's high-speed rail networks together. China will be a likely bidder for construction contracts on the UK's HS2 high-speed rail link.

"They actually started in high-speed rail by borrowing Japanese technology but because of a lot of unique problems they had to do lots of innovations on top because of what they learnt.

"Because of the scale of the country's high-speed rail development, they have also accumulated experience that some other countries would not have."

Qing, 54, was born into an academic family in Shen yang in northeast China. Her father taught philosophy at a military college and her mother taught Chinese literature.

Her father was branded a "landlord" and lost his job at the height of the "cultural revolution (1966-76)", which meant the family was sent to the remote southwest Chinese province of Yunnan to a labor camp for intellectuals.

"I was a child but even though it was an extremely stressful and painful period for my parents I went to some sort of school and it was almost normality for me."

When the universities reopened in 1978 she was accepted by Xi'an University of Technology at just 16 to study engineering. She was one of only four women in a class of 30.

"I loved to read books and maths and did a bit of learning from school but I was taught a lot by my parents, who were obviously a good influence."

She then went on to study management science at Tianjin University before being accepted on scholarship under a technology cooperation scheme between the British Council and the Chinese government to study in the UK.

"At the time what was the most scarce resource was the ability to speak English and so they looked at your English score. I was told that I was selected and I was going to study not in China but in the UK."

So in 1988, she arrived at Warwick University to study for a doctorate in marketing and has lived in the UK ever since.

She went on to teach at John Moores University in Liverpool and after a spell at Sussex university in Brighton went back to Warwick University, where her specialization is a combination of marketing and innovation.

Along with others such as Peter Williamson at Judge Business School at Cambridge University, she is pre-eminent in combining these two disciplines.

"There is a tendency to keep the two apart. So researchers and scientists don't talk to marketers because they speak different languages. They have different perspectives, cultures and timescales.

"The researchers want everything perfect before anything is released to the consumer and the marketing people want it today."

Wang, who is engaging but with a steely determination, also specializes in Chinese marketing on the advice of Robin Wensley, the former dean of Warwick Business School.

"He said if I was to study marketing, I should study China marketing because it would give me a USP (unique selling point) in the in the UK," she laughs.

She says that it was a new subject in China because in the 1970s there wasn't even a word for it.

"It was a planned economy so there was no need for marketing. Nowadays the word is ying-xiao, which means selling, but there wasn't one then."

Wang has been quite evangelical in trying to get across the message in China itself that brands and marketing are important. She addressed the Pujiang Innovation Forum, organized by the Ministry of Science & Technology, in Shanghai as far back as 2000.

"People there were talking about innovation and I went there to talk about brands because I wanted to raise the awareness among Chinese companies and the government itself that they should really understand how to build brands."

She says when China first began to rapidly develop, many Chinese companies found their brands were killed almost at birth by Western companies.

"Some Chinese companies were very nave. They had brands that could have been quite promising but they allowed themselves to be acquired by Western brands who basically discarded them," she says.

Wang, who has held a number of posts at Chinese universities, including Sun Yat-sen, Tongji and Tsinghua, says the problem many Chinese brands face today is the negative association attached with being from China.

"Unfortunately, it means cheap and that is not just for Western people but the Chinese too. So Chinese companies often try to give their products Western-sounding names."

She, however, believes Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei have made huge strides.

Chinese infrastructure companies are also moving from markets such as Africa, where they are now well established, to Europe to be involved in major projects such as HS2.

"I think Europe is a very promising strategic partner for Chinese companies and I think they are very receptive to Chinese involvement. I think it is much more objective about this than the United States."

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