Core77

Brand differentiation in China is one of those topics that designers love to debate, but never seem to come to any conclusions on. Is it happening; is it not? Would it be an unprecedented new market for design services all over the world, or the end of the world as we know it? Core and BusinessWeek have addressed this one several times over the last few years, and mostly take a middle of the road stance: Chinese schools produce lots of designers, they're technically skilled and creatively lacking, and most of them will never get a design job because the domestic Chinese market doesn't value brand enough to pay money for it, unless it has the cachet of imported goods. Even Lenovo, one of the few companies to put the money where the mouth is, hired Ziba to do its IDEA Gold winning PC system for the domestic market.

An interesting alternative view came last week from industry blog PlasticsNews/China, in the form of this opinion piece by Nina Ying Sun. Interviewing the heads of several molding and tooling companies at a conference in Guangzhou, she finds that branding is very much on the minds of these guys, even in a relatively un-sexy field like injection press manufacturing

The difficulty of doing so in a market so driven by price and so averse to risk is also very much on their minds:

A popular slogan amongst Chinese entrepreneurs translates, "If others don't have the product, I'll have it; if others already have the product, mine is good; if others' products are good, mine is cheaper."

The familiar strategy of investing in R&D and new technology is an obvious path toward breaking this cycle of commoditization, but here it takes a different twist. Ningbo Haitian Group Co. Ltd. is a press maker with facilities in 5 different countries, and based their R&D center in Nuremberg, Germany, because "we don't use it for the Chinese market, of course!"

Now, the idea of a multinational tailoring its research (and design) efforts to fit its various markets has been good strategy for a while. What's eye-opening here is that Chinese firms are starting to learn the game of brand-building for the export market, but not necessarily bringing that game home. To anyone who's done much shopping in the developing world, this may not come as a surprise. The market for Chinese export goods is vast and diverse (Ningbo Haitian's foreign production facilities are in Turkey, Brazil, Italy and Germany), and what a Brazilian thinks of when you say "Chinese made flashlight" is much different than what a North American envisions. What Chinese exporters have always shown great aptitude for is finding what the market wants and giving it to them. In the case of the European and North American markets, this may very well be brand differentiation, and they may very well figure it out.