In McKinsey’s report, High Influence: China’s Social Media Boom, the author Cindy Chiu asserts that social media has a greater influence on purchasing decisions for Chinese consumers than those in other countries. It is because Chinese consumers tend to purchase products that are recommended by friends or family instead of trusting advertisements. And social media is where the “magic trust” happens.
Why social media is magical?
As an experienced Chinese social media user and an online-shopper, I totally agree with this opinion. I always think that China lacks enough regulation on marketing and advertising, which leads to large numbers of behaviors on cheating customers. After experiencing many frauds, consumers obviously choose to hide away from advertisements and are unlikely to show trust again. For example, we can read buyer’s reviews on Amazon to learn more information about the product we want to buy, because they are written by the third-party and should be impartial. But on Taobao, the China’s version of Amazon, customer reviews cannot be trusted all the time. Because many sellers will hire a group of people to write positive comments on their products and then the Taobao system will automatically give them higher grades. Wise and experience customers (like me) choose to suspect this information but this kind of tricks can also work on lots of customers, especially the elder generation.
The social media platforms, especially WeChat!
We don’t trust those sellers who we don’t know in real life, so we turn to ask our friends and family for recommendation. They like sharing user experience or stories with their favorite brands and we can get lots of useful information there almost everyday. And when you recognize that one brand has been mentioned by over three of friends, you are more likely to type it into Baidu for further information. (Not Google, because it’s in China!)
The McKinsey report listed several popular social media platforms in China: Qzone, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Renren and Kaixin. Each of them has their own distinctive features so they have different target audience to service. Actually I have personal accounts for all of these platforms and Renren was my favorite when I was in college. Now my favorite one, and I can say now it is most Chinese favorite one, is WeChat! Maybe because this report was written in Jan 2013, it fails to mention WeChat here.
I have briefly introduced WeChat in my previous blog, The Marriage Between Alibaba and Costco, and this blog also includes an interesting introduction video about WeChat from Wall Street Journal. WeChat becomes successful not only because it combines the functions of many other social media platforms like FaceBook and WhatsApp, it can also help consumers to do other interesting things at the same place: to read blogs, pay your phone bills, purchase movie tickets, etc. people from every class with any level of incomes use WeChat in China: my babysitter, my friends, my parents, professors, business people and politicians.
Which group are you in?
The report segments social media users into six groups: social enthusiasts, resenders, readers, opinionated users, QQ spillovers and Inactives. The authors think that this can help marketers to get better understand about Chinese social media users and then they can figure out correct channels to engage them. From my perspective, to segment your target audience is a correct way to do, but marketers still have many challenges to engage them or even utilize them to help marketing the brand.
The reason is that we cannot simply define a customer as in one of these six groups. Consumers may play different roles at different social media platforms. I will take myself as an example: in WeChat, I am a social enthusiast. I keep close relationship with friends here, read and even create UX and brand stories. In Sina Weibo, I am a reader. I followed many celebrities, fashion bloggers and my favorite brands. I always read what they have posted but never created my own content. In China, we call this behavior “diving”, which means always hide below the water and doesn’t want to get people’s attention. So as consumers may play different roles at different places, it becomes more complicated for marketers to segment them.
Another challenge I think is to utilize opinionated user. The article thinks these people are difficult and risky to manage, so in their minds, social enthusiasts are brands’ best friends, but I disagree with this point. As an experienced social media user and online-shopper, I prefer to trust opinionated users rather than those active bloggers, because the latter are easier to be bought by brands while opinionated users tend to be judgy but impartial and incorruptible. They have larger followers than social enthusiasts, especially in China where people tend to be skeptical of information from public.
It seems that marketers still have many challenges but also opportunities to deal with Chinese consumers!
Crystal Perspective 