Opinion

Why you should ignore those who tell you, ‘Great idea – but it won’t work in China’

D. SriramIn this post, D. Sriram takes issue with those who say that success for marketers in China, in his case dealing with state-run broadcasters, is impossible because of bureaucracy, government interference and shady dealings.

I remember a hot afternoon in June 2012 – I was in Beijing, headed out to meet a major broadcaster to present the concept of a cloud based advertising delivery system. This was the very first time I was presenting the system to a broadcaster, so I’d rehearsed my presentation (in Mandarin) several times and I was on tenterhooks as people filed into the room, exchanged cards and sat down for the meeting.

A half hour or so later, I had finished my presentation and one of the people from the back of the room got to his feet and told me that our system was a wonderful thing, but that it would never work in China because TV stations were too security conscious to ever have anything enter their system from the outside.

A few weeks later, on another trip (I was still just researching the concept at the time so I was flying in and out and meeting people to gauge the situation) I met someone who ran a major FMCG account at an agency whom we wanted to bring on board as a foundation client – he too, shook his head and told me “This will never work in China because they’re too paranoid about censorship to let a system deliver advertising into a TV station.”

A few other ‘experts’ told me that if we wanted to succeed in China we’d have to change our business model and pay the stations to accept digital delivery or do other things to make this work. I met consultants who opined that this would never work unless we paid a lobbyist to get the regulatory bodies to mandate digital delivery of advertising.

Luckily for me, I chose not to accept any of  these opinions. We went ahead and launched the business at the beginning of 2013 and as of today, we’ve converted 120 broadcasters into users of a digital delivery system. That’s about 50% of the market and we expect to cross 90-95% in the next few months. Of course there will be a small number of hold outs, but once we cross 90% we can manage the rest using traditional methods – for all intents and purposes, at that stage we would have converted the industry to digital delivery. Our business model is exactly the same as it is anywhere else, and before you ask, we’ve never offered or even been asked to offer anyone a personal incentive to get things done.

Or course, our specific broadcaster conversion process was somewhat different than it’s been in the rest of Asia. We’ve had to spend time understanding the intricacies of decision-making in Chinese TV stations – and the details of that differ somewhat from other markets – but in any market we’d need to spend some time doing that anyway. And of course, China has hundreds of TV stations spread over hundreds of locations unlike other countries where you might have a dozen or so broadcasters all in the capital city, or at best spread across a few key cities. The details are a bit different, but it’s not fundamentally a different set of dynamics, or a different business model, or even a different set of motivations for getting people to accept a new way of doing things.

Now, think about that for a moment. We’re talking about China, about a state owned sector, and we’re talking about a very bureaucratic, hierarchical organization structure – all of which sound as different as possible from a lean, mean, privately owned, commercially oriented broadcaster in a more open economy like New Zealand, Australia or Indonesia. Yet our approach works in essentially the same way as it does in all those countries.

You might say this is an isolated example, or that I got lucky – but time and time again I find that business ideas, frameworks for thinking about strategy and ways of organizing businesses that work in most other countries around the world do work in China – you can’t apply them blindly, but coming in with a concept that works and looking for nuances in adaptation does work more often than not.

Some examples: Starbucks – I’m sure before Starbucks launched people would have shaken their heads wisely and said that China was a tea drinking country, and Starbucks should change to being a tea shop instead of a coffee shop (in reality I don’t think they’re really about the beverages but that’s a different topic altogether) – and also concepts like Google or You tube which don’t work in China in their original form but have spawned local successes around essentially the same concept.

Even simpler things, like outsourced sales calling, and a disciplined approach to sales that has nothing to do with the concept of 关系 (relationships) – people trained in making cold calls and succeeding in completing a sale to a complete stranger – works in China just as well as it does anywhere else in the world. And while we’re on that topic, warm calls are always better than cold ones, and the likelihood of selling to someone you already know is much better than it is to a stranger – but that’s true anywhere in the world, not just in China.

So the next time someone tells you, “Great idea, but it won’t work in China”,  grit your teeth and swear that you’ll prove them wrong if it’s the last thing to do, then go away and work at it until you do. And if you need inspiration along the way, pop into a Starbucks and see how long you have to queue to get to the counter. A nation of tea-drinkers, forsooth!

D.Sriram is CEO, China for IMD, an advertising delivery company headquartered in London. IMD has been in China since 2013, with operations in Beijing and Shanghai and 120 broadcasters connected to their digital delivery system, IMD Cloud. Sriram is formerly the COO of Aegis China and APAC CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group.

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