A Facebook friend is actually concerned I’ve been missing for over a week! And for that I’m grateful but I’m constantly on the move visiting some distant kindreds in Swatow, China. Now that I’m back I want to share an insight into how billboard advertising goes in China.
Super-size billboards erected along highways are a rarity in little Singapore, so they easily get my attention whenever I travel. The loudest things about billboards are normally:
1) A picture of a model
2) The product in his/her hand
3) The product name
4) The tagline
(Unfortunately, most Chinese companies don’t often have a URL to display, but this would be a receding trend.)
The tagline is what I want to touch on because the way they are crafted is quite distinct in China. Perhaps stemming from its roots in Socialism, most taglines have a “social cause” overtone or imply a benefit to society in general. Contrast this to a consumerism-based tagline like McDonald’s “I’m loving it”, or “Tell me what you want and you can have it all!” which is about “I, me and myself”.
Another distinctive feature of a Chinese tagline is its ‘couplet’ or dui lian form. Anyone familiar with the Chinese language would know this: a couplet comprises of 2 verses with an equal number of characters for each.
So how does a tagline in China read like? The best I can think of as an example in English goes like this:
“An apple a day
keeps the doctor away.”
Let me loosely translate one tagline I saw as:
“A kilogram of milk
strengthens the Chinese people.”
See? It reads like a couplet and implies a social benefit about keeping healthy. It doesn’t say how crunchy or juicy the apple is. Consumerism-based advertisements do exist in the media like the TV and magazines, but I reckon you might have a better chance at tapping into the Chinese psyche if you can craft a couplet tagline, that is, if you’re going to do business in the Land of the Dragon.
Am really intrested in bringing our business to china , offering
countless free gifts.tell us more about the bilboard in china.please!
and the us.
The possibilities of China opening up and starting to allow more in China is a great item. This would open up many revenues of promotion possibilities for all Internet Marketers. Great topic….
To Your Success,
Brian Lawrence
bmlawr
I’ve been making friends with some Chinese young turks and my impression is they are not sold on American-style Internet Marketing yet. They are much more into Jim Collin’s portrait of entrepreneurship, and just as Americans may idolise Bill Gates, they idolise Jack Ma of alibaba.com, MonMilk (China’s no.1 dairy milk company) and the “Jack Welch of China” Prof. Yu Shi Wei, who is coming to speak in Singapore on August 2nd.
To my Singaporean friends, I have the rights to promote Prof. Yu’s event. Click here for details. If you are interested, drop me a mail at support@internetmasterycenter.com for your preview attendance.
Cut-and-run mini-sites are not part of the Chinese’s vocabulary. They want to see a real solid organization behind the websites which always shows through the screen.
I’m not getting much headway when it comes to actively doing business in China, but I definitely learned a lot about their sensibilities. I mean, I heard many stories of foreign companies jumping on the China bandwagon only to “get burnt” because they screw up their business relationships with miscommunication and misunderstanding. It’s more about the intricate details. Is the world getting smaller? Think again. But so far I like to speak to young people to learn about their hopes, dreams, ambitions and the future of business in China because it gets me to look forward and define new rules. Always apply my favorite Steven Covey mantra: “Seek first to understand and you’ll be understood.”
One thing’s for sure: Like in any big country, there is great diversity of people from state to state, but the Chinese are fervently nationalistic and united. Don’t super-poke them on politics. Of course with politics comes red tape and bureaucracy but like Michael Jordan you have to figure a way to penetrate through and get good friends to push forward together. One very good thing is I don’t see a hint of state-owned enterprise anymore in the places I visited. It’s full-blown capitalism in a way, but not as competitive compared to Hong Kong or Singapore. Only we walk faster than anyone else in the world :)
I also need to clarify I don’t know how to contact the management behind billboards (I’m like a deer in the headlamp about this) but it’s been an eye-opening trip.