3 Things to Consider When Entering The Chinese Market

When entering the Chinese market, foreign corporation and businesses are known for being culturally insensitive, inadvertently so. This is simply due to little knowledge of their target market.

Besides making new content (in their own language) that targets locals specifically in a new market, following are some things to consider for foreign companies entering the Chinese market.

Make Your Share in the Large Private Consumption Market

While the 1950s and 60s marked the decade of high American consumption, since then this Asian superpower decided that it must not be left behind.

According to the Economist, China has become the world’s second-biggest consumer economy, with a potential of $3.3 trillion private consumption market. And guess what; it’s only getting started.

However, it isn’t easy to enter the Chinese market, with its incredible diversity and highly developed tastes of locals when it comes to food, technology, clothing or another industry.

There have been companies, however, who rooted themselves firmly in this market. Other than offering their product information and content in Chinese, they also focused on;    

Putting Sufficient Funds to the Chinese Branch (of Operations)

Importance and priority should be placed to operations taking place in China as this’ll make way for a smooth entry in to the market. Enough resources need to be allocated to the Chinese office, either monetary or skills-wise but adjusting to prevailing market conditions is also very important.

Remember this: expansion can only occur if more is invested in marketing efforts and local sales.

Asking for feedback from local customers and trying out new marketing strategies is a good idea for achieving this.   

Adapt Product and Content to Fit Local Market Demand

Companies that fail to make waves in the Chinese market often make the mistake of using an international strategy instead of a local one.

Additionally, the product must also appeal to the target audience but misrepresentation or not ‘selling’ the product often takes place.

Here’s an example of importance of local strategy in the Chinese Market; we all know how impressive the size of eBay in the U.S. consumer market is. However they couldn’t enter the Chinese market as well as its competitor, Taobao.

Why? Instead of making a separate web platform for Chinese customers (in their own language), eBay redirected online visitors to their U.S. platform.

Entering The Chinese Market: Adopt Chinese as Main Marketing Language to Increase Communications

Miscommunication is the biggest challenge and concern foreign companies’ face when entering the Chinese market. In addition to Chinese Mandarin, the diverse country speaks over 200 individual dialects which should make it difficult to connect with the target market.

Such a steep language barrier can be crossed however, with use of English to Chinese translation services that’ll place your content out there.

The importance of good communication with the target market can’t be stressed enough. Visit Limpid Translations and find out how this can be achieved.