Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

I was thinking about some of my more prolific blogging friends lately, truly prolific and consistent e-scribes like Dan Harris, Chris Brogan, Julien Smith, Damjan DeNoble & James Flanagan, Marc van der Chijs, Jeff Wasserstrom, Will Moss, and David Wolf. It got me wondering what exactly differentiates the frequent writers from the occasional dabblers? Why do certain bloggers maintain such a torrid pace while others can’t be bothered to lift a typing finger, when lightning-quick dispatching is the very thing they do best?

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Jon Reiss‘ Think Outside the Box Office has so far turned out to be an excellent read. Yesterday I happened across an interesting passage from his “Rethinking Marketing” chapter (the sixth, if anyone’s counting) which sounded uncannily similar to something I’d heard Loren Feldman opining about three weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Global brands like Nike, Apple, Adidas, Burberry, Gucci, and Tag-Heuer are justifiably very concerned about Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Brazilian product piracy, but according to author Max Lenderman, they shouldn’t be all that concerned.

Really?! What’s this, you say?

Lenderman does the yeoman’s work in his new book, Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates, and Oligarchs and Shaping Business explaining the nuances of another way of looking at the whole counterfeiting plague that will shock most mid- to large-tier brand manufacturers. Rather than suffer heart palpitations due to how much revenue brands might be leaking to the shanzai (Mandarin for counterfeit) collectives in places like China’s notorious Silk Street Mall, they should rather revel how their brands are receiving even more exposure than they might othewise receive through standard marketing techniques and budgets.

In a recent brands study furnished again by Lenderman in his stellar book, Nike, Burberry, and Microsoft were showing whopping revenue gains of 45, 68, and 57 percent respectively since 2001 as a result of their greater “market mind share” from the proliferation of their knockoffs in Chinese and Indian consumer markets.

These are truly startling figures for what Lenderman refers to as no more than a handful of twenty-five MNCs who admit in statistical studies to being most concered by pernicious brand piracy. So the new consensus opinion seems to be: rather than scramble to bite their collective finger- and toenails down to nubs, brands should salute — if not outright gooily embrace — how their goods are proliferating throughout developing markets with a reach and depth not even their tried-and-true marketing efforts could ever achieve.
These remarkable gains are a fortunate consequence of the absolute Chinese disregard for intellectual property protection, and I doubt any MNC marketing wing could run scenarios which could accurate account for this phenomenon. Tell me the last time when a major brand marketer could tabulate metrics on revenue their firm might directly receive from rampant piracy?
If any of this is remotely interesting to you, I’ve been gaining all sorts of insights this past week from Lenderman’s truly engaging study, his call to action for global manufacturers and marketers to stop, sit, and listen to the several other ways they might successfully counter the priacy threat, which in any event shows zero signs of abating.
In fact, in the case of Chinese shanzai violators, the more aggressive an international brand is about policing their universal brand equity, the greater the incentive is for the Chinese pirates to abuse it, almost akin to children cruisin’ for a bruisin’ from their parents. What Lenderman seems to be saying is that it’s far from a lost cause; there are ways of working in concert with pirates, rather, by utilizing their rampant audacity as a kind of high-octane boost to the millions of dollars in marketing budgets already spent by mega-brands. With this reinvigorated perspective, suggest Lenderman, brands can cease burning through their scarce resources currently spent on global policing efforts to better spent them on doing what MNCs do best: rapidly innovating and prototyping, bringing exciting, useful new products to market quickly.

Brand New World is welcome infusion of pure oxygen during these current crisis times. Rather than despair at those who wantonly disregard your brand’s inherent equity, there exist alternative ways to work alongside the violators by bolting your pre-existing efforts onto theirs, turning their profligate efforts into direct advantages for you, the innovator, changing the rules of the game yet again.

A coup even the likes of Sun Tzu himself would appreciate…

My review of Paul Midler’s Poorly Made in China (affiliate link)

arrives well after the majority of critical and supportive reviews have already appeared at this site, and I admit in advance that much of what I’m about to say has been influenced by the discussions I’ve held at Facebook (/therealadm), Twitter, and of course from what I’ve read here. Without going too deeply into a review of the book’s blow-by-blow contents, the likes of which have already been capably done by my peers here, I’d like the focus of my review to be on the following: the book indeed supplies a ready-ground for further discussion on the topic of the Chinese manufacturing industry in a fulsome manner.

Critics of Mr. Midler’s work have abounded — the majority of the them ranging from his unfair attribution of blame squarely and solely upon the shoulders of Guangdong’s small factories, while less of his bromide focuses on the foreign businessmen and women who engage said factories in the oftentimes dirty work of making stuff in China. If it wasn’t for the fact that our author is a recognized Old China Hand with the linguistic skills and impeccable professional credentials and track record to match, one might think that Midler has sort of axe to grind. Naturally, this falls by the wayside and easily dissolves when one realizes that the agency game is the very income which puts the proverbial bread on Mr. Midler’s dinner table.

The book has strengths and weaknesses, to be sure. Among the narrative’s strengths are (as cited by other reviewers here) the accessibility of the prose, given how it wasn’t loaded up with industry-specific jargon and — ugh! — statistics which aim to factually support the author’s contention. Another is the occasional asides Midler intersperses between the major sections, which not only brakes up the potential monotony of overall factory-speak, but which demonstrates, at least to this reviewer, that Mr. Midler is less agenda-less than might be initially imagined, given the title of this work. Its thinness was also a welcome item. Midler’s contention is driven home resoundingly well, with the major takeaway, at least for me, being that doing business in China — as in any foreign market — is a treacherous path hardly for the meek. Those without a penchant for the smell of napalm in the morning and gunpowder might wish to think twice about investing their capital in the Chinese market, given how potentially quixotic — given the experience of some of the author’s clients — the market can be. It’s more than just caveat emptor — buyer beware — in China’s Factory Towns. It’s that not being fully apprised of this reality well in advance is something expatriate businessmen will feel at their peril.

On the weakness side of things — which other reviewers have noted and which I fully subscribe to — is the fact that Midler doesn’t cast his net as widely as he perhaps should. He milks the Johnson Carter/King Chemical debacle to the hilt and supplies little in the way of comparative case study analysis other than the occasional peppering in of an anecdote or two from similar-scripted incidents with some of his other clients, or those of his professional colleagues, and this is likely the reason some have accused him of having something of an agenda. Also, Midler’s personal biases trickle into the story which other than revealing Midler’s position on certain things — likely the reason for editorial left them in the final galleys — are sometimes mildly offputting and wondering why his censure didn’t extend to other so-called “ethnic” groups who are readily present in the Chinese foreign business community which yet don’t receive similar extended treatment. I refer to the two cases of Jewish businessmen — both Johnson Carter’s idiosyncratic Bernie (at least as Midler paints him) and then the family of Belgian diamond merchants — as ready examples. Why should Bernie’s habit of covering his head to recite a thanksgiving blessing after a lavatory visit be any different than tossing “chance sticks” in a Buddhist temple? Where is the equivalence?

While others might find it entertaining and instructive, I did get “emotionally-involved” at certain stages of the story given how this happens to people with less ambitious China plans who are just looking to achieve a measure of increased profitability given the globalized context of how business works in this day and age. People have also criticized Mr. Midler for taking a political stance on the PRC, but I know this only too well from my expatriate existence that after living for a significant period of time in a foreign nation and having learned the nuances of its language and culture, a transference should ideally occur at a certain stage with the host country eventually accepting the erstwhile “guest” as one of their own. While Midler recounts the single case of his Chinese airline seat companion assuring him that despite Midler decade and a half of residence in China the latter can hardly be counted as a local, it makes one wonder whether this opinion is more widely held across a broader spectrum of the Chinese collective. Given that I don’t live in the PRC, I myself would be hardpressed to challenge this but I’d like to hear from others more qualified to do so.

All in all, however, I relished this read and like most of the reviewers have said themselves, I blew through it eagerly and nearly in one sitting and Midler’s message was tremendously well-articulated and his writing style can be best described as fun.

This was a business book which didn’t have that business book-y look and feel, for that — given how many of the latter I read — I was most grateful.

Five stars.

–Adam Daniel Mezei

ps Paul Midler’s website can be found here.