Cerebra

After 6 years of research into why businesses succeed or fail in China, Emily Chong, the AVP of Design and Marketing for Frog innovation specialists, tackles the subject of survival strategies for brands in China. The parallels and differences in marketing to South Africans were startling.

Here are some of the insights for anyone thinking of taking their products or services East, or for anyone venturing into new territories.

Stop thinking these are nascent markets

Lyn Jeffery from the Institute Of The Future has drawn fascinating correlations between the counterfeit goods industry in China and how their approach can help western businesses innovate faster. Their most lucrative market at the moment is technology, where the counterfeit mobile phone market is said to be worth $15billion, and the Shanzhai produce all of these handsets.

The Shanzhai (A collective network of counterfeit goods manufacturers in China) get products to market faster, in bigger volume and cheaper than anyone else, but how do they do it?

The Shanzhai work in highly effective agile networks, and there are five rules they apply to innovation:

1. Never build anything from scratch

A big discussion point at SXSW is the learning and innovation around social and television. The US pretty much leads the entertainment business and their social media integration into their television series, reality, sports and news has been quick to market. Stepping back to look at trends and what has worked shared her insight, as well learning’s from the social team at WWE.

The most tweeted about categories are still Reality TV, Sports, Series and One time special events. Interesting insights:

- Reality TV & One Time Events – The selection of hosts and the conversations around them show there to be more conversation on social media than the actual contestants. This could be a strategy from the producers

We’ve often heard that if it can’t be found on the first page of Google, then it doesn’t exist. Believe it or not, it does. I have identified several ways to optimise your searches on Google – through Boolean Operators, Phrase Searching and Google Search Tools.

If you’re searching for something specific the following tips will yield better results:

1. “Word word word”: This search will yield pages containing the exact search phrase you have placed in inverted commas. For example, if I had typed “Panda bear on a tree” into the search bar, only items with that exact wording would have shown up.
2. ‘-word’: The hyphen lets Google know you want this word excluded. I wanted to search for pandas, but I didn’t want to search red pandas, so I added the ‘-‘ before the word ‘red’.

In a previous post I shared my revelation on how an agency is similar to an orchestra. This is still very relevant, but I felt the need to dissect and delve into the role of an account manager more.

Account Managers. Client Services. Slave Drivers. These are all terms associated with those that sit in meetings for hours on end, write briefs, shout if deadlines aren’t met, and slay emails amongst various other tasks that they do. But seriously though, what do account managers actually do?