What Messages Must Western Businesses Communicate?

By Matthew Harrison 

Successful marketing communicates to a target audience that its needs can be met by a particular supplier’s offering. Any marketing campaign should have at its core the communication of the target market’s needs. With this in mind, it is essential to consider what Chinese businesses require from potential Western suppliers. We have excluded ‘price’ from our analysis, taking this as ‘a given’.

Figure 5 – Main Chinese Requirements From Western Businesses (Other Than Price)

Communicating superior quality

Unsurprisingly, the main requirement Chinese buyers have from potential Western suppliers is to provide market-leading quality. Indeed, this is a ‘hygiene’ requirement, in that the minimum a Western company must do is justify its higher prices vis-à-vis the local competition. In other words, the company’s offering must add value in the eyes of the buyer.

Importantly, communicating superior value in Chinese business-to-business markets is far more difficult than even two or three years ago. Most Western companies target the top end of their markets, in no small part because their higher cost bases force them to. However, in many business-to-business markets the premium that can be charged for Western products is decreasing quickly. There are a number of reasons for this: firstly, increasing numbers of foreign companies are competing with each other, driving down prices; secondly, the quality of the local offering is improving rapidly, eroding Westerners’ competitive advantage; thirdly, the ability of local companies to communicate their offering is increasing; and fourthly, international companies based in China are recruiting more and more local staff into senior (buying) positions. Such staff are far more confident than their expatriate predecessors at ‘buying local’ and managing cheaper local suppliers.

Communicating experience and credentials

Two of the top four requirements of Chinese buyers and business owners – the need for Western companies to prove that they are ‘established’ in the market, and the need for them to demonstrate experience of dealing with similar companies (preferably in China), illustrate the difficulty many Western companies have in gaining the trust of their target audience. As discussed elsewhere in this paper, to a great degree ‘business’ trust is developed through relationships. However, important as these will be, the first thing any Western company should do is prepare and present comprehensive case studies and client lists for the potential Chinese customer. These should be leveraged to the absolute maximum, and from the earliest possible stage in the relationship. This is in contrast to many Western markets, where past experience is often mentioned in the vaguest terms and references are rarely followed up.

This need to communicate relevant past experience cannot be overstated, and relates to perhaps the biggest barrier facing any Western company (particularly new entrants) in China – the time and effort required to gain the target market’s trust.

Leveraging the brand

The challenge of gaining trust can be turned into an advantage if the Western company leverages its brand to the maximum. When approaching a potential customer for the first time, a company’s brand can communicate experience and credentials in the same way as a case study or reference. Even if the company is unknown in China, the brand of ‘The West’ can be a real plus, and at the very least generate curiosity in the company’s offering. In many cases, the Western ‘brand’ represents quality; therefore in at least one respect most Western companies enter the market at an advantage.

Of course over time, any company would want their brand to refine and develop a personality of its own in China. Nevertheless, Western companies’ cost bases are such that entering China without quality at the core of its branding strategy and other communications is virtually impossible.

Communicating reliability

Reliability is linked to quality, articulating to a large extent quality of service as opposed to quality of product. Chinese buyers are extremely demanding in terms of their service requirements, on issues as diverse as lead time (this tends to be shorter than in the West), availability after hours (a much more frequent requirement than in the West) and technical service (particularly when dealing with Western companies, Chinese businesses feel they are paying for top quality, and when technical issues arise they therefore expect them to be dealt with quickly and efficiently).

A key challenge in respect of such needs is communicating that the Western supplier has an established and permanent presence and infrastructure within China. There is a great deal of wariness regarding Western companies who are happy to export their products to China and charge significantly more than local competition, but who then have little interest or ability when it comes to aftersales service, ongoing relationships or even making good small issues with the product that has been sold. The latter point also explains the prominence of ‘local presence’ as a requirement from Western suppliers.

Communicating understanding, and willingness to meet needs

Chinese buyers state emphatically that they want Western companies to show an understanding of their needs, but also a willingness to listen to and learn from the buyer. A frequent comment is that Westerners ‘turn off’ buyers by spending far too much time talking about what they can offer, and far too little time building up their understanding of what the customer requires, and what is driving that requirement.

Chinese buyers do not expect suppliers to understand their needs immediately; in fact they tend to believe that to do so is impossible, and perhaps even belittles the uniqueness of their challenges and requirements. Rather they want suppliers to listen carefully to the issues facing the business, and commence a dialogue which begins to identify their needs and put forward ways of meeting these needs. Suppliers who claim to have the solution as soon as they begin talking to the potential customer are seen as crass, naïve and untrustworthy. On the other hand suppliers who listen, understand and suggest are seen as understanding the problem, qualified to give a solution and willing to work for the benefit of the customer.

Being easy to work with

As well as being reliable in a business sense, Chinese buyers state that they want suppliers that are easy to deal with, and who engage with them on a personal level. Business relationships in China can often be distinguished by the way they go beyond the workplace and impinge on the participants’ social lives. Companies that do not wish to take the discussion outside the workplace are often seen as unfriendly and – more significantly – hard to get to know, perhaps willfully so. The latter can be fatal to a potential business relationship, in an environment where gaining trust is fundamental.

Language and other barriers clearly make expanding relationships beyond the workplace difficult for many Western suppliers. However, this, as well as the requirement to show a general interest in customers as people rather than ‘just customers’, is often essential.

Matthew Harrison, Director of B2B International and B2B International China. B2B International is a business-to-business agency headquartered in Manchester, UK.  The company has a subsidiary office – B2B International China – in Beijing and an American office in New York.

This is the second part of the B2B international article Marketing and Selling to Chinese Businesses, next week we will publish the third part. Here you can find the full article and part 1.