As a whole, Chinese brands going overseas have shown their flexibility to respond to the trend and openness for cooperative innovation.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Zhixiang.com” (ID:passagegroup), authored by Xie Xiaodan.
In recent years, the overseas industry has shown a trend of vigorous development. More and more Chinese brands have begun to use Twitter’s platform advantages and advertising solutions to enhance their influence in overseas markets.
On December 28, Twitter released “Going Global: 2020 Twitter China’s Leading Brands Going Global” (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”), and announced the “2020 Twitter China Going Global Brands List”. Based on the latest Twitter big data, industry research, Twitter expert opinions and brand success stories, the “Report” interprets the changes in overseas markets and user needs in the post-epidemic era from multiple dimensions.
This is the second consecutive year that Twitter has released its report on leading overseas brands. This year, looking at overseas markets, as the epidemic situation is still severe, home isolation and remote office have become the normal life of overseas users. The outbreak of the “home economy” has brought greater development opportunities for industries such as mobile games and stimulated overseas users to Consumption goes online.
Twitter noticed that under the stimulus of the epidemic, demand for new online services has blown out, consumer behaviors have changed, and user social activity has increased sharply. At the same time, Twitter also found that Chinese brands going overseas have shown overall flexibility to respond to the situation and openness for cooperation and innovation.
Recently, Weilun Lan, the managing director of Twitter Greater China, accepted an exclusive interview with Zhixiang.com. Lan Weilun pointed out that in the current context, Twitter also suggests that Chinese brands can maintain proactive communication with users and make efforts to do the right things: such as expressing the empathy behind the brand, showing the power of the brand, and the brand can continue Services provided to the audience.
Lan Weilun: This year’s report has expanded its focus to six major areas, focusing in depth on technology, games, mobile Internet, automotive, financial technology and advertising agencies, and launched case studies for different industries to share what Chinese brands are How to successfully use Twitter’s unique advantages to establish connections and interactions with target users with the highest overseas acceptance. The three latest areas introduced in the report also demonstrate Twitter’s keen industry insights-these three areas have shown an amazing growth rate in 2020, and more and more such Chinese companies are beginning to compete in fierce overseas markets. stand out.
Although this year we experienced the “black swan” incident, we are pleased to see that Chinese overseas brands, which are at the forefront of the era of change, are moving in response to the trend with openness and flexibility, continuing their steady pace. We have seen a great improvement in the speed and quality of domestic exports this year. At the same time, looking at overseas markets, since the epidemic situation is still severe, home isolation and remote office have become the normal life of overseas users. This change in users’ living habits has caused the outbreak of the “home economy” and brought greater development opportunities for the mobile game industry; At the same time, it has stimulated overseas users to develop online shopping habits.
Under the combined effect of internal and external factors, this year we have seen more and more Chinese companies in the mobile games, cross-border e-commerce, financial technology, automotive and other industries have increased their awareness of overseas consumers.
First in the Chinese game industry. Not only Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing Friends”, Sony’s PS5, etc. have received a lot of attention overseas, but the mobile games that are the easiest and fastest to attract players have also gained a user level jump-many major Chinese mobile game manufacturers, including Many emerging game companies have increased their efforts to go overseas this year. Among them, especially in the Japanese market, which is difficult to break through, Twitter has provided many domestic manufacturers with a variety of support including creativity, consumer and user player insights, and helped Chinese games to achieve greater release strength and user viscosity than previous years. Breakthrough. In addition, we have also seen more and more overseas users trust Chinese mobile games, including game creativity and game content quality. For example, Mihayou’s “Original God” has achieved very good results overseas, and we are also very happy about it.
The second is about the e-commerce industry, especially cross-border e-commerce in China. Due to the epidemic this year, consumers were unable to shop in physical stores. As a result, groups that did not use e-commerce for shopping (such as consumers in emerging markets or silver-haired people) have begun to accept this emerging shopping method. Therefore, this year we have seen that in addition to the leading companies, many brands with advantages in segmented areas, such as SHEIN, have made great breakthroughs in overseas markets.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the financial technology industry and the automobile industry newly added in this year’s “Report”. We have also seen that more and more Chinese financial technology companies have made obvious developments overseas. Their trustworthiness, goodwill, and reputation have all made great breakthroughs this year. As for the automotive industry, based on observations, we believe that 2020 is the first year of Chinese cars going overseas. In emerging markets such as the Middle East, and even in overseas markets such as Northern Europe where electric vehicles are developed, domestic first-tier auto companies have actively launched a variety of models overseas and achieved good breakthroughs.
Lan Weilun: First of all, for the advertising agency industry, more and more Chinese companies choose to cooperate with advertising agencies in the process of going overseas, relying on the marketing insights and creativity provided by advertising agencies, and cleverly Localize marketing locally and attract consumers through cultural connections. As the most real-time public dialogue platform, Twitter cooperates with many advertising agencies to provide high-quality services for Chinese brands going overseas. However, under the influence of the epidemic, Twitter employees cannot travel on business, and they need to cooperate more deeply with advertising agencies to promote business. This year, the advertising agency industry has been added to the “Report”, reflecting its important role in serving Chinese brands going overseas.
Second, although the financial technology industry is an emerging industry, it has the characteristics of high efficiency, agility, and low operating costs. Therefore, the industry has attracted many technology giants to join in recent years, and many emerging financial technology companies have also been born.
Chinese companies are making rapid development in the field of financial technology and pushing China to be at the forefront of financial services. China has now achieved rapid entry from the paper currency era to the mobile payment era, and has made mature breakthroughs in emerging technologies such as blockchain. In the future, China will continue to lead the digital transformation of finance.
The rapid advancement of technology is driving Chinese financial technology companies to gradually explore the huge opportunities contained in overseas markets. They are committed to bringing convenient and leading financial services to more consumers around the world. For these companies, the emerging overseas market is full of potential, but it also brings challenges. How to build trust with overseas target audiences and expand their fan base has become a major issue that these companies need to solve when they go overseas.
What is gratifying is that from this year’s report, we have seen that more and more financial technology companies from China are using the Twitter platform to make significant breakthroughs in their overseas trips, achieving their trustworthiness and favorability. And a substantial increase in reputation. The Twitter platform gathers the most influential users who are willing to accept new things. Fintech companies can use Twitter to connect audiences interested in finance, build trust, and use the influence of opinion leaders to establish connections with a wider audience; in addition, , Twitter also provides rich and customized advertising solutions to help financial technology companies respond flexibly to local needs and achieve overseas development and steady development.
Thirdly, for the automobile industry: Chinese automobile manufacturers have formed industry-leading technical reserves and a layout of the entire industry chain, which provides Chinese automobile companies with a core competitive advantage in going overseas. In recent years, especially under the influence of the epidemic this year, Chinese car companies have set their sights on the international market while establishing a foothold in their own countries. They plan to deploy diversified development strategies in developing and developed markets to promote sales and improve overall business. Operations. In addition, as China’s new energy vehicle technology leads the worldr is a “treasure house” that helps brands discover first-hand user insights. For many overseas companies, the most challenging thing is to clarify the needs of target users in different markets. Due to the different cultural backgrounds of audiences in different countries and markets, aesthetics and taboos are even more different. This requires companies to conduct adequate research, understand the local market and users in depth, and lay a solid foundation for the formulation of subsequent marketing strategies and the dissemination of promotional content. On average, more than 500 million tweets are generated on Twitter every day. These real-time interactive content can help brands accurately capture the focus of audiences and discover their interests.
Just like overseas brands entering China, Chinese companies going overseas need to formulate marketing content on the basis of a full understanding of local culture and users, and must not use Chinese thinking to “routine” overseas users. Only by using highly culturally relevant marketing content to achieve emotional links with target audiences can we build and enhance brand favorability. For example, on Twitter, from news, sports, entertainment, movies, games, and other popular topics of interest to users, brands provide fertile ground for “borrowing marketing”. Brands can customize suitable angles based on topics that local users are most interested in, or in combination with local culture and special festivals. Through topic implantation, etc., brand information can be related to these hot topics, and the brand’s voice can be increased, and at the same time accurately fit It improves the aesthetics and interests of local users, and narrows the distance with target users.
Lan Weilun: Based on Twitter’s years of experience in cooperating with outstanding Chinese companies going overseas, on the whole, we found that Chinese companies have obvious advantages in product innovation, as well as rapid response and execution capabilities in many aspects such as R&D and marketing. .
However, in the process of communicating with some brands, we found that some advertisers are still in the early stages of brand marketing concepts and awareness, and still set the goal of brand communication as short-term fan growth, conversion rate, downloads, etc. Indicators, while ignoring long-term brand investment.
At the same time, because the “Made in China” stereotype still exists, there is still room for Chinese brands to improve in terms of brand image establishment, loyalty and reputation cultivation. In particular, the impact of the epidemic has not faded. More cautious and keen consumers are more “critical” about brand value propositions. Trust has become the key to leveraging brands to maintain growth after the economy picks up.
In addition, just as many foreign companies have the problem of “ungroundedness” in domestic marketing, many domestic brands’ overseas marketing content still has the problem of insufficient localization, that is, how to understand local audience preferences and cultural characteristics, Carry out marketing and promotion according to local conditions, so as to match with local targets