The Chinese Market: not so naive

I picked up a good book this week: China’s New Culture of Cool, by Cynthia Chan, LiAnne Yu and Christopher Ireland (who, by the way, is a woman) who all work at Cheskin Consultancy. (And they all write blogs - but not very often). Anyway… I was interested in their idea that the days of being able to market a product in China by sticking a dragon on the side of the box are over. Chinese consumers are becoming more sophisticated so marketing localization has to become more sophisticated too, to keep up with them. But I think the next step of sophistication will be when the dragons work again because people think they’re “kitch”. They’ll be like Mao t-shirts are these days – ie, so bad they’re good!