The war for talent is over

I recently came upon the following quote in my readings: “The war for talent is over. It has been won by talent.” (You’ll have to forgive me for losing the great mind who made this statement, I can’t seem to retrieve the document in which I read it.)

Indeed, the war for talent has been won by talent. Throughout the world, more and more companies are facing ever-greater challenges of finding the right talent at the right time. The competition is fierce, the consequences terrifying, the salary-bidding accelerating.

In China, the case is even more so. At a recent seminar, I heard Starbucks China’s main man talk about his employees as the coffeemaker’s number one priority challenge. Not the difficult retail-landscape of China, not its complicated logistics, not the competition from local low-cost chains, not the protection of Starbucks’s intellectual property. Finding and keeping qualified employees, that was his number one preoccupation.

Let’s run through this short thought exercise: Imagine almost half of your total customer base constantly on the look-out for competitive products. Imagine your whole customer base needing to be completely renewed every year and a half. Now imagine the strategy and tactics needed to keep your customers loyal in such a heated market situation. The corresponding communications, promotional and loyalty plan budgets are simply mind-boggling.

Well, I invite you to sit back and take in a few of these astounding figures. Over 40% of all current workforce in China is actively looking for a new job. The average job duration for under 30’s in my stepmother city Shanghai is just 17 months. China needs up to 75.000 world-class quality executives within the next 5 to 10 years, with universities projected to supply only 3.000 to 5.000.

Talent in China is scarce and extremely volatile. Finding it is a challenge, keeping it an even bigger one.

But why am I writing about talent, and the challenge of finding and keeping it, in a marketing forum, of all places? Quite simply, because employees are your brand. They live and breath it, they convey it onto your customers at all imaginable (and unimaginable) touch points. And Starbucks’s number one knows this.

Going about attracting the right talent is less and less the mission of only the Human Resources department. The employee base is becoming a corporate, top-level issue, with cross-functional ways of thinking, inspired by an ever more so marketing talk. Getting the right employee candidates to meet with your recruiters is only possible after a thorough segmentation of the employment market: which types of profiles can you expect to find where, and in which concentrations? How do you interact with them, and attract their attention towards your company in the first place?

Once your recruiter talks with them, all interviewees, both the hired ones and the rejected ones, will return to the employment market and talk with their peers. What will they tell them about their experience at your company? And how will that affect your power of attraction?



Once you’ve conquered a candidate’s heart, and he becomes an employee, how do you keep him? Nurture your employees, like you do your customers. Employees don’t tick to only salaries, like consumers consider more than price when buying your product. Build up a relationship with your employee, like you do with your customers, getting to know him, what motivates him, what frustrates him, what will keep him going strong. And then tailor programs to fit these needs: trainings, career path coaching, team building.

Talent has won, so get it on your side.

Catherine Crevels works for the Belgian marketing consulting firm The House of Marketing out of its Shanghai office.

Emotions all around

All over town, it’s emotions emotions emotions.

At a seminar on branding in China that I recently attended, various speakers from the advertising industry defended and promoted the use of emotional bonding in all brand communications. The general message was to communicate with your consumers on a human level about subjects that are relevant to them- creativity, simplicity, power, status.

The audience was overwhelmed with proof of this statement: an impressive overview of best-in-class examples of integrated, holistic campaigns in which the deeper emotional benefits of a brand were central. Nokia connects people, in all possible interpretations of those words. Sony delivers colour, sound, memories, like no other. Nike uncovers the hidden athlete in all of us, encouraging everyone to just do it. Coke spreads happiness and vitality in a bottle through its vision on the Coke side of life. BMW goes beyond the functionalities of a high performance vehicle, and invites us to enjoy the pure pleasure of driving.

Having spent a significant part of my recent past in multinational consumer goods companies, I too remember the value I attached to the emotional positioning of our leading coffee brand: cosiness and human warmth. We expressed these values through any way possible, always reminding our consumers that they were paying more for our brand because it provided them more than a good-tasting drink and a boost to wake up in the morning.

Looking at the examples discussed during the seminar, one could state that indeed, the emotional branding and strong campaigns of these world-class brands are the basis of their success in China. And building on this statement, we can conclude that also in China, emotions are key, right?

For me, this is the real question that remains: is China ready for emotional branding? True, global, best in class brands are successful in China, and these same brands globally play out their emotional card. But does the same apply to smaller brands, or to domestic Chinese brands?

Talking to quite a few people in the industry, and simply walking around Shanghai, observing shoppers’ behaviour, I’ve learned that for many Chinese, quality, price, value and practicality are the main reasons for purchasing a product. True, any international brand name offers status to China’s new and upcoming consumers, but to go as far as to say that they prefer Nokia’s “connecting” qualities over Samsung’s advanced product features is a leap I wouldn’t dare to take.

Going one step back into the value chain, talking to companies building and fostering brands in China, I notice that they are not talking purely about emotions. It’s about channel strategy, building up a sound distribution system, with logistics that keep up speed, delivering a stable brand promise with the same quality throughout the country, tapping into the sales potential of an increasingly large potential consumer base.

When it’s all about growth in a rapidly developing market, the important thing is to be there, and keep up. Emotions are nice, and crucial to a brand’s essence, but it is only really necessary to communicate about them in mature, saturated markets, where consumers no longer decide with their wallets but with their hearts.

Catherine Crevels works for the Belgian marketing consulting firm The House of Marketing out of its Shanghai office.

Simply the Best

Only the best is good enough in China. On asking a Chinese how many medals China had won 5 days into the Games, the answer was 17. Impressed as I was, I asked my contact how many of these were gold. Gold? Oh, all of them! In total they had won some 40 medals, but apparently only the gold count. That should help to explain the attitude of the heavy weight who recently won bronze, only to throw it to the ground in discontentment. This strategy of course led only to disqualification and a loss of the medal altogether.

The quest for the absolute best also goes for marketing. In our European home base, one of our most popular services is helping companies identify their unique selling proposition and positioning, and to help them differentiate themselves from their competition. Basic marketing strategy, right? Segment, target, position. Be unique.

Not right. Offering to help a Chinese brand differentiate itself will never work. Chinese don’t want to be different, even if it is in a relevant and sustainable way, tailored to a specific target audience. This target audience in turn also doesn’t want a different product or service, tailored to its needs.



Chinese want the best. Simply the best. And if this means copying a great idea, only to make it even better, so be it. As one China-connoisseur once put it, there is no merit to be gained by being innovative.

This helps explain why all premium brands, be it Kohler toilet seats, Garmin navigation devices or Pepsi cola, swear by testimonials for their advertising. Do we see any originality here? Any great consumer insights? Any right-on positioning? No. All we see is repetition of the same great idea, letting a famous person tell the world how good your product is. But who’s asking for originality anyway?

Catherine Crevels works for the Belgian marketing consulting firm The House of Marketing out of its Shanghai office.

Sporting rivalry turns cheeky

There’s nothing like a bit of old-fashioned sporting rivalry being played out in the media. Especially if the media is newspapers, and especially if it’s Australia and Great Britain going at it. It can get quite ‘clever’ at times, and lead to cheeky creative executions.

B&T Today carries the story of The Daily Telegraph hitting back at British tabloid The Sun’s attempt to poke fun at Australia’s gold medal haul. The Sun hired tray-top trucks in both Sydney and London to boast about Great Britain’s 19 gold medal tally to Australia’s 14, and accompanied by the Tourism Australia inspired tagline “So where the bloody hell were you?” against a back drop of the Union Jack.

24 hours later and The Daily Telegraph responded with its own take on the gold medal standings. The article says a truck has been driving around Sydney with the words “Where the bloody hell were we?” “Above you on the medal tally”, comparing Australia’s 14 golds to the 13 earned by athletes only from England – excluding Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Great stuff!! Too bad Singapore and Malaysia only have one silver medal each which doesn’t leave much room for the papers to poke fun at each other. Unless Malaysia brought up the fact that their Silver medalist was actually a Malaysian and not imported from China…

China, the promised land?

China, the land of opportunity. The promised land of retail. The soon-to-be biggest market for consulting in the world.

Be it leading executives of world-class brands, expensive reports by international research agencies, or small-time entrepreneurs venturing out into the world’s biggest developing market, they all seem to agree on one thing: China is the place to be.

With a middle class growing by double digits annually, millions of spend-happy consumers trying out anything new at any price, a youth culture increasingly built on brands, and a growing need to project personal achievement through material assets, China does indeed seem the place to be to bring in the big wins for companies in many industries.

But the question remains how to do it.

Our consulting company came to China last year. After concluding that also for us marketing consultants, China is the promised land, we set up shop in Shanghai and got out our forks and knives, ready for devouring some major business.

Because marketing is the next big thing, right? After being the world’s factory for decades, China is ready to step up the value chain. Beijing is increasing investments in R&D, emphasizing innovation as the way forward, even setting up the somewhat obscure China Top Brand quality label. China is consciously building 200 homegrown brands that are set to conquer the world (much like the country’s top athletes are bred and trained to top all Olympic charts). The next Sony, Nike, Nokia and McDonald’s are sure to be Chinese, and these companies have a long way ahead of them.

So the cake is huge, but how to get a piece of it?

The very first thing I read in different books in preparation to coming to China, is that you can’t just copy a successful business model and paste it in the Chinese environment: it never works. After 6 months in Shanghai, building up a marketing consulting business in an intercultural team, I can truly say that I’ve experienced this learning first hand. In order for something to work, it’s just not enough to “adapt”, “translate” or “Chinese-ize” your product, service or business. You need to throw everything on the table, distill the real essence of your business model, and then rebuild it, taking into consideration the specific Chinese market environment and business givens.

On top of the business-related challenges in redefining your added value towards Chinese companies, are the everyday interpersonal challenges of cross cultural communication. On the surface, modern Chinese life seems very similar to what we know in the West. Under the surface however, the differences are huge. I’ve experienced that the Chinese have another perspective of time, timing and deadlines. A deadline is set and worked towards, but if it becomes clear that the deadline will not be met, it is simply delayed, hence losing all its intrinsic purpose. I’ve also learned that the Chinese are very process oriented as opposed to task- or result-driven. It is the way something is done, the way people interact that is important, not the result that is or must be achieved. The Chinese have a greater appreciation than me for power distance: the boss can never be wrong, can never not know something, and must always be pleased, even if this is impossible. Straightforward reporting and honest feedback become rare luxuries in this context.

It’s clear that there’s no guaranteed recipe for success. The hundreds of self-help books on how to become a millionaire overnight only slightly overshadow the number of titles written around how to be successful in China. But the naked truth is this: it takes courage, hard work, patience and perseverance.

For my colleagues and me, every day sheds new light on the mystery of success in China, and brings us closer to our goals. Let’s hope our hard work and patience will pay off. And in the meantime, you can follow my experiences of living the economic boom in the fast evolving Chinese communism, in a city that for me is the most capitalist I’ve ever seen, where the essence of marketing is ever-changing.

Catherine Crevels works for the Belgian marketing consulting firm The House of Marketing out of its Shanghai office.