Understanding China’s Youth Consumer Marketing

April 18, 2014 Posted by China Briefing Reading Time: 6 minutes

Interview with Kevin Lee, COO – China Youthology

China Youthology offers provocative insights about Chinese youth and facilitate the use of insights to spark actions, to help brands be part of youth culture, to be relevant and meaningful to today’s individual and society.

Please tell us a bit about China Youthology and what it does.

China Youthology is a consumer insight agency and one of the top quality research companies in China. Youths in China today are really striving to find meaning and we believe brands have a role to play in that. We focus on digging very deep into youth culture, understanding youth and their changing values, including their lifestyles, behaviors, what they say, what decisions they make, what they buy, etc. We take all that information and we help brands understand and bring them closer to young people today.

We help brands with market entry, branding and positioning, and determining marketing strategies, like campaigns to help them develop their key message and expression. We also assist with product and service innovation, so we help not only with localizing a product but changing and evolving it so that it [speaks to] young people in China. It is not just about selling products, but really about helping youth live a better and more meaningful life.

Our research is always ad hoc, meaning it’s customized to the individual and explorative. Every single company comes to us with a very different question, and so we construct a completely new research exploration to dive deep into that business question. In terms of our clientele, we have offered our services to a variety of sectors and well-known brands, from L’Oreal in the consumer household sector, Mercedes Benz, BMW and Audi in the automotive sector, Nestle, Bacardi and Pepsi in food and beverage, Tencent, Google, Microsoft and Intel in technology, to Nike and LiNing in sports apparel – basically everyone who is interested not just in the young consumer today but also in the next generation consumers.

How does your firm go about conducting research?

We are very heavy anthropologists. The large majority of our staff here are researchers who come out of international universities, usually with a Masters in anthropology or sociology. They come to China either because they are native Chinese or they have a real heart for China. The average age of our team members is about 26 or 27 years old, so we are a very young company because we believe it takes youth to research youth.

As anthropologists, we are quite heavy on ethnography, which is a way of research in which we immerse into the culture. This cultural approach to research contrasts with the rational and psychological approach, which asks people rationally why they pick something, choose a price point or like a certain function. The way we choose something is much more complex than just price point and utility – we make decisions because it either expresses part of who we are or because the meaning of it is something that we are aspiring towards or are attracted to.

To understand youths, we are in their homes, their work places, playing with them outside, and in class at school. When we live with young people and with them in their spaces, we observe and watch how they behave and develop their relationships with other people and with the environment around them, and then we interpret their behaviors and the way they live their lives. When we go deep into the history of youth culture – who they are, how they relate to their community, how the community relates to the macrosociety, and how society is changing – we are better able to understand and interpret what a young person actually means when he or she makes a decision or chooses something.

I understand you also have an openyouthology.com website, can you tell us a bit more about that?

We are a social enterprise and our key stakeholder is the youth. The only way we can get deeper into the youth culture is to build relationships and invest into them. We do a lot of investing into youth culture. We don’t just help brands – we go directly to youth and try to help them.

As a research company, what we do well is research, and so we offer our research freely to young people so that they have a mirror perspective, a reflection about who they are and what their generation is about, what is going on in this country and in this world, and what they can do about it. Every year we release one or two major papers and they always get published in major youth media, such as City Pictorial (City Zine), Modern Weekly, Leap Magazine, etc.

Beyond just research, we open up our space to them. Our offices are really youth spaces, spaces for young people to have conferences, workshops and parties. Young people come in all the time to hang out with us. They see us not as researchers, but really just as thought leaders and cool people and peers.

We have conferences on a monthly basis in Beijing and Shanghai, by young people for young people. For every conference, we choose the theme and we invite five or six young people to come and share their own stories about how they are pursuing a new dream or a new meaning in life, and those stories inspire other people. The talks that happen at those conferences are recorded and put up on openyouthology.com where you can go in and watch a lot of great videos. Youths are doing amazing things in China and other parts of the world.

Can you comment on the use of social media in China?

Social media is conversation and part of the fabric of how we communicate with each other. We don’t think of social media as just a channel anymore. Media is everywhere, it’s just around us, it’s the air we breathe. Nowadays you have multiple streams, e.g., computer, tablet, television and mobile phone, looking at you all at the same time, and they all have interesting content that is relevant to you. But you are still choosing what you are going to pay attention to at any moment. For a brand, it’s a huge challenge as to how it is going to stand out and be relevant – how does it have a conversation and capture the attention of a young person when he is interested in what his friend just posted on some stream somewhere that is more interesting? What can the brand say that is just as interesting? These are questions a brand needs to consider.

What suggestions do you have for foreign retailers contemplating coming to China?

If a retailer is coming to China, they are asking about things like geography and foot traffic. Foot traffic is just one way to measure a great place to open a space. You can go right into e-commerce where there is an infinite amount of space, so you must have a reason for having an offline retail space. The space should mean something and go beyond transactions and towards interactions. Why would the consumer be going to the offline retail space? What is the reason why they would want to interact with the brand in an offline space and not just interact with it online? Where in that city would that space be appreciated and identified with and loved? If you figure these out, then you can start to figure out where that space needs to be in that city.

Today young people do most of the purchases online. When they go offline, they have experiences. For example, they might go into a flagship store with their friends because the store might have something cool, interesting or new that they and their friends can talk about, and when they talk about it, they take pictures of it and then they post it online, and then they talk about it some more. But then when they want to buy something, they go to the actual brand’s official website, check the details and price of that product, find out if there are any deals, and then they buy it. Offline retailing is really just about the experience, they are conversation starters and conversations sparkers, but the transactions are happening more and more online.

Websites:

www.chinayouthology.com

www.openyouthology.com

Kevin Lee is COO for China Youthology, a leading consumer insights agency that offers provocative insights about Chinese youth and facilitates the use of insights to spark actions. There, Kevin is focused on business strategy, business development and corporate operations. Kevin is also a lead Insight Strategist. Kevin is a frequent speaker at international conferences and is a contributing writer at Forbes.com. In 2009 and 2010 Kevin (@kevinkclee) was named one of the top 25 Twitterers in China by AdAge China. Kevin holds an MBA from Canada’s #1 business school, the Schulich School of Business, York University. Graduating Dean’s List Honours, he specializes in Strategic Management and Arts & Media Administration.

You can stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends across Asia by subscribing to Asia Briefing’s complimentary update service featuring news, commentary, guides, and multimedia resources.

Related Reading

China Retail Industry Report 2014
In this special edition of China Briefing, we provide an overview of the retail industry in China and the procedures for setting up a retail shop, focusing specifically on brick-and-mortar physical retail stores. Further, we have invited our partner Direct HR to offer some insights on the talent landscape in the retail industry, as well as tips for recruiting retail personnel in China.