Rosalynn Tang looks at the implications of our Return of the Product study for Chinese and Japanese brand owners.
Brands may increasingly be the same all over the world but the ways
people relate to those brands can dramatically differ. Are brands more
important as private talismans or as display objects? Do customers
simply want a brand they can trust, or one that cares for them too? Get
it wrong and you could alienate your audience.
Research International’s Return of the Product study asked 1200 people
in 43 countries about the intense relationships they form with brands.
This global qualitative study uncovered four basic modes of
consumer/brand relationships, each satisfying different needs. The mode
of relationship people form with brands tends to vary according to
culture, lifestage and product or service category.
The first mode is security, where the brand acts as a guarantor of
product performance. In the second mode, affiliation, the brand is a
badge of belonging to a particular group or social class. The third
mode, expression, finds the brand being used for individual
self-expression and in the fourth mode, experience, the brand is a
private amplifier of the product experience.
The study found that in many Western markets this fourth mode is
growing in importance, with more people seeking an internalised,
intense product experience from their brands. But what about markets in
Asia Pacific? How do people there relate to the brands they use? In
this article we’ll examine China and Japan, first of all considering
how the modal structure applies in these markets, and then looking at a
recent quantitative study of cosmetics users.
First of all it’s important to note that the four different modes of
consumer/brand relationship are found in all cultures. Lifestage,
product category and brand marketing play important roles in
influencing which mode a particular relationship settles into. But the
four modes do find ‘centres of gravity’ in particular markets, where
the cultural norms of a society help give rise to the needs which a
mode fulfils. So, for instance, a market with a rigidly hierarchical
society may find its consumers relating to brands in the affiliation
mode more often than in the less socially-rooted experience mode.
So where are the ‘centres of gravity’ for China and Japan? First of all
we must make a distinction between the larger Chinese cities and the
third-tier and rural areas of China, which show different attitudes to
brands. For example, as Gilbert Lee discussed in a previous edition of
The Issue*, global companies in the mobile phone sector have pitched
their marketing in China towards a status-conscious, aspirational
audience. But this only works in the larger cities – in other parts of
the country many consumers buy local brands which come recommended by
salesmen face-to-face.
This is because in larger cities the affiliation mode – based on brands
as a badge of status – is most common, but in rural areas and
third-tier cities consumers often operate in the security mode. Word of
mouth is fundamental for this consumer segment as it lends brands the
authority needed to create strong relationships in this mode. Brand
owners should try to create brand advocates that will help promote and
push the brand.
The affiliation mode is important in Japan as well as China, but many
Japanese consumers also operate in the expression mode. Both of these
modes relate to how the brand is used in a social environment, but
there is a key difference between them. Research International’s Kazuko
Ohye has written2 about the early 00s shift in Japanese consumer
attitudes from a ‘me too’ culture, where everyone felt they had to have
the latest brands, to a ‘me-only’ culture, where individuals choose the
brands that they best feel reflect their own values and personalities.
“I wish I could find the one and only product, because then I would be
the only one”, said one Japanese consumer. This in a nutshell is the
difference between an affiliation mode relationship, where brand choice
has a meaning that can be understood by everybody, and an expression
mode relationship, where brand choice is an act of individuality,
intended only for friends or a peer group.
At the same time as we were running the Return of the Product study,
Javier Culva and Goutam Mitra conducted a quantitative study into
cosmetics brands in Japan and in larger Chinese cities.3 This study
used our Equity Enginesm proprietary tool, which measures brand equity
within a market and also breaks down what is driving that equity. Every
market is driven by a combination of functional and emotional factors –
how well the product performs, and the irrational associations the
brand might carry. The Equity Enginesm tool assigns weights to each of
these factors.
For both the Chinese and Japanese cosmetic markets emotional factors
slightly outweighed functional factors as drivers of brand equity. In
both markets the major functional criteria were that the cosmetics
moisturised well and that they looked natural. In Japan their
suitability for everyday use was also a factor. None of this is very
surprising, but when we look at the emotional factors that drive equity
we see more intriguing differences between markets. In China, the
single biggest determinant of equity was whether the brand was seen as
a good choice by others. In Japan, it was whether the consumer felt
personally comfortable with the brand.
This is precisely what we would expect to see from the Return of the
Product study, with urban Chinese consumers forming affiliation-mode
relationships with brands while their Japanese counterparts are more
likely to form expression-mode bonds. When we look at the specific
brands that emerge with high equity among consumers we can see how this
works in practice. In China the most-favoured brands were Maybelline
and L’Oreal – global names. In Japan, though, local brands like
Shiseido and Kanebo performed best with L’Oreal in particular being
poorly perceived.
So among urban Chinese the cosmetics market seems to be an aspirational
one whereas consumers in Japan see their cosmetics as a means to
express a specifically Japanese identity. Our cosmetics study suggested
that this reflected differing attitudes to the idea of beauty – in
China beauty is something perceived by others; in Japan beauty is
something innate and internal that can be expressed. These insights
clearly have strong practical implications for how brands are
communicated in these markets.
The four modes of consumer/brand relationship do not in themselves
explain how to market specific brands but they provide a broad
framework for research and marketing efforts. For instance, a marketer
may be aware of the importance of affiliation-mode relationships in
urban China. They can then look out for patterns in their data which
suggest how these relationships are being created and expressed by
consumers. They can also analyse competitor communications in the light
of the modal framework and can adjust their own communications
accordingly.
And finally, what of the experience mode, which the Return of the
Product study concludes is becoming dominant in Western markets? Might
it find more than a foothold in Asia? The answer is – possibly. The
highly individualised expression mode has already become common in
markets like Japan and Hong Kong. This mode is still concerned with a
brand’s social potential, but the study suggests that it is easy for
consumers in this mode to also enter the experience mode, where an
intense and private product experience becomes the main focus of
branding. This may yet happen in the Asian markets, but until then the
social modes will remain the dominant ones for sophisticated consumers
in the region.
* The Shopping Issue, Research International, 2004
2 The Global Brands Issue, Research International, 2002
3 The brands featured in the study included L’Oreal, Maybelline and
Shiseido in both China and Japan; Yue-Sai and Chen Ming Ming in China
only; and Kanebo and Kose in Japan only.
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