Written by Huiqin Wang
April 18, 2005
The processes of Chinese companies moving globally has been accelerating these years, and the multinational companies acquisition achieved a peak while Lenovo bought IBM PC business at the end of last year. Recently, Ms. Aedhmar Hynes, CEO of Text 100, world’s No. 1 technology PR agency, has visited China. Text 100 has been IBM’s global partner on its PC business for years. The reporter has had an interview with her and discussed how Chinese companies could build up their brands after acquiring overseas companies.
Aedhmar said that the Chinese market has been opened to the world and a lot of foreign companies have already entered this market. Chinese companies should energetically expand their overseas markets, which will also help them compete with those alien brands in China with richer experiences and stronger competency. However, Aedhmar believes that the most important point for Chinese is how to establish their own brand character and how to better get along the local markets.
<China Business News>:
How do you think about Lenovo’s brand image in the overseas markets?
Aedhmar:
Lenovo is a Chinese company that shares quite high reputation and has already caused great interests at the overseas market. In the past five years, the global market has mentioned that Lenovo is a strong brand from China and seen its significant business growth. Therefore, the recent announcement of Lenovo acquiring IBM’s PC business and speeding the entry into western markets hasn’t beaten all. Contrarily, many people comment that this decision is extremely important for Lenovo to join the global market and competition stage. For Lenovo, a Chinese brand, it is a wise strategy.
<China Business News>:
What suggestions will you provide to companies that enter the new market by acquisition?
Aedhmar:
In fact, the key point is not the way you enter the new market. No matter by establishing brand step by step or acquiring another brands, from the point of market communication, the principle of building new brand in different culture environments is the same, which is veraciously positioning the brand with different features against other congener brands. This means, if you want customers to find out your products among many brands, you need to clearly understand competitors’ products features and positioning first, and then define the unique features of your products and consider whether the differences between your products and the competitors’ can give customers a clear positioning of your brand which is exactly what you want.
These differences could be in different layers, e.g. the design and purpose of products, product quality, product price, the advanced technology applied to the product, or the brand’s own features such as the Chinese background of Lenovo - by an appropriate positioning strategy, this can also become a brand character that attracts costomers. But the companies must seriously consider and define the uniqueness of their products before entering any new markets. So, I think all companies must follow this rule when entering new markets, no matter through step-by-step approach or fast acquisition.<China Business News>:
Is there any successful case to demonstrate this viewpoint?Aedhmar:
For example, Sony’s brand represents the uniqueness of appearance and using experience. Appearance design of Sony’s product is always modern, which indicates that they are hi-tech stuff. And at the same time the using experience is emphasized as well. Therefore, when you mention Sony with consumers, they can always bring out some characters which make Sony different against other products in the market. No matter Sony or Samsung, both of them have secured a long-term coherence of brand characters and enhanced the characters in all products. This makes it possible for them to build a successful brand.
<China Business News>:For Chinese companies, how to make up the lack of experience on the aspect of overseas brand building?
Aedhmar:
The answer is people. During the progress of overseas brand building, every company needs many talents who can make the best of various communication methods and at the same time understand local market, culture background, consumer bias and value system. Actually, this is not the problem that only Chinese companies are facing; all companies who want to globalize its business have to resolve this problem.
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