I timed myself after writing this, it took me 1:43 to read this. This is going to be the shortest post I’ve ever written here on Simplify and I’m going to try to explain to why Chinese consumers love to buy foreign Premium Brand in 1 minute & 40 seconds or less.
It isn’t a secret that “most” Chinese consumers love to buy foreign premium brand and this why China is floated with brands that aren’t really premium outside of China but somehow the positioning themselves as premium in China.
But why exactly do “most” Chinese consumers love to buy the foreign premium brand?
First, let’s tackle the foreign part.
The reason why most Chinese consumers like to buy foreign brands (premium or not) is that there is a total lack of trust of national Chinese brands because there is a lot of scams that happen in China.
This is why if you go to TMall, you’ll see many local Chinese brands with English logo (why?… this is why)
The mentally of get rich quick is predominant in China, and I believe it still is as it was explained in Evan Osnos his book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Because of these many Chinese businesses take a short cut because they believe that you’ll simply have to work way too hard and take too long to do it any other way.
Now, let’s talk about the reason why Chinese consumers love to buy premium brands
Contrary to what most foreign brands believe is that Chinese consumers don’t actually care about your brand story (not really that much anyway) unless it’s directly related to how your product is made and why it will benefit them.
Chinese consumers buy premium brands because of 3 reasons:
Safety & Trust: A lot of time its trust, they think that local national Chinese brands are bad quality and will cut corners.
Quality: They think it’s quality, so they get their money worth
Trend & Social Status: Finally, but also one of the most important reasons is social status. This is the reason why Chinese consumers buy BMW, Benz, Apple iPhone because 1) they think it’s a quality product & 2) it makes them look and feel rich.
That’s mostly the reasons why they buy a premium brand, of course, the 3 reasons will vary depending on what and where you’re selling but for the most part most Chinese consumers have no idea what your brand stories are and probably won’t ever bother to learn it.
If enough of their friends and family tell them it’s “good brand” that’s enough reason for them to buy it.
Wrapping up…
To be fair while, many Chinese consumer’s drive to buy premium brand greatly outweighs many other countries, the reasons why most people buy premium brands are pretty much the same with the exception of safety as there are less scams happening in countries such as Canada, UK, Australia, USA, etc..
The difference however is, while to an average American consumer the idea of a brand does not always have to mean premium and every brand may have certain attributes and characteristic for example Nike maybe associated with quality sports shoes and Sketcher may represent comfortable walking shoes
To Chinese consumers brand means premium and if they never heard of the brand then it’s probably low quality that’s how a lot of Chinese consumer think.
