By Gabriel Biller, Research Analyst
Who is the intended audience?
The audience for this article is primarily professionals in product management and development, innovation, R&D, product and product portfolio planners, engineers, and executives who are responsible for designing and creating technology products (hardware, software, services). In particular, those of you people above who feel perhaps a bit less informed about China than you’d like to be.
What this article is intending to convey are some key insights, lessons, or realities you should know about if you intend to develop, design, and market consumer products for China. Among the many considerations you’ll need to make as a business interested in entering or further penetrating the Chinese market(s), learning how to work and communicate well with the right officials and rainmakers, being unbelievably persistent, and understanding the varying and even appalling levels of corruption that may be involved will consume much of your time and energy (and, perhaps, your soul). Your challenges will range from building the right win-win argument, establishing long-term relationships with the right Chinese business people, power brokers, and partners, all the while not defying the rules or causing anyone to lose face. Another significant challenge will be distribution, as getting your product in front of consumers in China is not quite how it works elsewhere in the world.
In the spirit of full disclosure
I myself have never traveled to China, though I was in Hong Kong for 10 days in 2007 and studied some Mandarin and Chinese history in college. In researching and writing this article, I owe a tremendous amount of debt to the market researchers, strategists, cultural translators, user researchers, and Chinese graduate students and other Chinese professionals whom I interviewed for this article (Elaine Ann, Ash Bhoopathy, Ravi Chhatpar, Ian Donahue, Anjali Kelkar,Shuang Li, Lin Lin, Fei Qi, Erin Sanders, Pinxia Ye, and Lisa Yong among them).