Just as Shanghai people in the 21st century made "Winter Red Wine", "Blue Bottle Boutique Coffee" and "Omekase" hot consumption trends, Shanghai people in the Republic of China were also trendsetters in consumption. In fact, by the early 1930s, Shanghai had become a national comm

to 1937, the Japanese army invaded Shanghai, and Crow was forced to leave Shanghai and return to China, handing over the company's business to his Chinese colleagues' agent. He has been engaged in advertising in Shanghai for nearly twenty years. In the process of studying Chinese consumer behavioral psychology and working with Chinese people, he has become a veritable "China Communication". When he left China, Crow published two books about China: "Hundred Million Customers" and "I Speak for the Chinese ", speaking for the Chinese people in suffering and calling on the United States to lend a helping hand to China. "Four Thousand Customers" quickly became popular, and was translated and introduced to many countries and reprinted many times. When American soldiers returned to Shanghai after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War in 1945, each of them had a pocket-size book "Four Thousand Customers" as a guide to stationing in this strange city.

The subtitle of "Four Thousands of Customers" is "A American's joys, sorrows, sorrows and joys in China and what he learned from it." In the preface, Crowe said that a good advertising agency does nothing less than an anthropologist—he needs to pay attention to "any message about the country and its people" and "study the Chinese and their character, history and customs." Through this series of humorous prose, he carefully described the unique characteristics of Chinese consumers, exposes the common myths and prejudices of many contemporary foreigners towards China, and also makes a unique analysis of the certain nationality of the Chinese. Even today, the analysis is vaguely familiar and intimate to make us smile.

Chinese in the store: loyal and smart, impulsive and rational

"As long as people from one country are still making things to sell to others, as long as sea transportation and international trade still exists, the golden illusion of selling goods to hundreds of millions of diligent Chinese people has always had a strong temptation.No matter what you sell, you can make a big profit in China, provided that the Chinese who should buy your stuff is indeed willing to pay for it. "

To this day, Chinese consumers have grown from 40 million to 1.4 billion, but Crow's words of hope and warning still apply. This is a valuable experience he has immersed in the Chinese business community for many years. As an advertising agency, after witnessing the successes and failures, abnormalities and exceptions of the Chinese market, he joked:

"Our work has always been full of fun. Although we have often encountered hallucinations over the years, we still silently have this idea: Perhaps next year, a considerable number of these 40 million customers will buy our things. "

According to Crowe's observation, Chinese consumers are probably the most unpredictable consumer group in the world. First of all, the Chinese market is absolutely worth developing - if you can make Chinese consumers like a certain brand, they will become the most loyal consumers in the world and be loyal to the brand in unison. "This kind of neatness and loyalty will definitely make manufacturers shed tears of joy. "He used a cigarette example to illustrate the outstanding brand loyalty of Chinese consumers: Because Chinese consumers are accustomed to British cigarettes, Crow Advertising Company tried his best to help American cigarettes open up the Chinese market, although based on the experience of the US and some other markets, mixed cigarettes made by big American brands are more refined and more suitable for consumers' tastes, but Chinese consumers are not buying it.

Why can old brands whose quality may not be as good as new brands firmly grasp the hearts of Chinese consumers? Crow has no definite answer to this question. The only thing he is sure of is that this is not the credit of advertising. "The dominance of foreign goods in China is almost entirely due to their long-standing reputation; before any decent advertisements appear in China, they are already making profits in sales. "The first brands entering the Chinese market enjoy a huge first-mover advantage, but according to his observations, Chinese consumers have an extremely clear understanding of what they like and what they don't like. They often draw conclusions independently before they have the opportunity to choose between different brands.

Crow believes that once they get used to a brand, Chinese consumers begin to show an almost extreme stubbornness. They will be suspicious when they see any changes. "It seems that they are always worried that manufacturers will use this trust to use inferior products as good ones, or that someone will fool them with high imitations. "Crow found that Chinese consumers are very keen to observe changes in product details. Even if the address and door number on the packaging changes, it may cause them to refuse to buy the product again - it is not hindered to not know foreign languages. Many Chinese actually use counting the total number of letters as a means of fraud prevention. One side effect of this is that the brand has no motivation to improve the outer packaging of the product, while advertisers should pay special attention to whether the advertising pictures are exactly the same as the actual product. He told a small story: the cigarettes sold in China are usually ten boxes, and cigarette posters are usually displayed and exposed. A cigarette box for Huang Cancan tobacco. A Shanghai manufacturer once printed hundreds of thousands of posters, but found that only nine cigarettes were exposed in the box. In order to avoid misunderstandings, the posters had to be destroyed.

This shrewdness of Chinese consumers was to some extent caused by the business environment at that time. Crow pointed out that emerging industries such as manufacturing, publishing and export trade have not yet established professional ethics standards, so that Chinese manufacturers are almost always in a vicious cycle: "At first, manufacturers used new equipment to create high-quality products and goods sold well. After achieving this goal, he seemed unable to resist the temptation of doping inferior materials, and the quality became worse, sales decreased, and the company went bankrupt. Then someone bought his factory and then entered the same cycle. "Forgery of popular foreign goods is also a common way for Chinese manufacturers to make quick money. Crow's company once represented a men's hair oil with good sales. A few weeks later, imitations began to appear, and then several types appeared on average every month. He paid attention to collecting it and found that 21 imitations appeared on the market during the peak period of counterfeiting.

Chinese consumers also have their own characteristics in their response to marketing methods. In the United States, salesman is a very important profession, but he is unable to gain weight in China. In Crow's view, the reason why Americans can form an unprecedented sales force in the world is that Americans are willing to comfortably allow an excellent salesman to come to their doors and talk nonsense to them. With the mentality of "I want to see what you have the ability to convince me", they enjoy the psychological tug-of-war between the buyer and the seller. But Chinese people can't do it. First of all, Confucius said, "Clever words and despicable words are rarely benevolent." More than two thousand years ago, the sages taught Chinese people to be vigilant about any form of eloquence, because such people often have no principles and conscience. Therefore, sales are a job that loses their identities in China - salesmen are not only not more decent than hawkers selling along the street, but are more worthy of being vigilant, because their work is more deceptive and they cheat more money. Secondly, Chinese people are not used to doing business with strangers. It is almost impossible for a person who has nothing to do with them to open an office door and home. "A Chinese person most wants to do business with his own family, and secondly, he will firmly avoid strangers whenever possible." Another marketing method that Chinese people cannot accept is to distribute samples. Some manufacturers send samples to retailers with hope, but often find that retailers turn around and sell samples to customers. For example, most buyers of a certain toothpaste brand are regular customers, and the clerks will sell the samples to them at extremely low prices. They not only make extra money, but also get affordable. In the end, the manufacturer will suffer because the sales of formal toothpaste has declined.

Chinese people understand the hardships of life and follow the virtues of making full use of the goods. This inspired Crow to propose a marketing suggestion that is particularly suitable for local conditions: designing low-cost, high-resale prices packaging boxes or other packaging containers will help product sales. Because he noticed that if a store stocks up two brands of sardine , the clerk will give priority to selling the brand with higher resale of the packaging box so that it can make a little more money when handling the packaging box. In Crow's view, Chinese people can almost always discover the meaning of using things that are not originally commercially valuable. For example, flyers and advertising posters can be used as wrappers or glued together to form insoles; flyers printed on a single page can be written or made into beautiful envelopes; monthly advertising paintings have good sales, and Chinese people will use these monthly advertising paintings as decorative paintings to decorate homes, whether they are painting cigarettes or cod liver oil.

Although foreign goods are popular, Shanghai is also the base camp of the domestic goods movement. Given that its company has represented many foreign brands' advertisements, Crow naturally pays great attention to the frequent boycott of foreign goods by Chinese consumers. Crow noted that this wave of boycotting foreign goods and smashing foreign jobs once a year on average, Japan attracted major firepower—the every move of Japanese militarists stimulated the Chinese to respond fiercely with a rising national self-consciousness—but other countries will also be subject to sporadic, regional, and usually limited to specific categories of goods. The goods arbitration operation is usually very popular for a while, but it is difficult to last. It is no wonder that "China Communications" like Crowe is no longer surprising.

He also observed that the domestic product movement is usually initiated by Chinese manufacturers severely impacted by foreign products, using it as a way to save themselves, but such practices rarely make Chinese manufacturers profit. "Although it is easy to incite the masses and make them hate brands created by foreign competitors, it is two different things to turn these masses into customers of another brand," he wrote. "A Chinese are just as rational as most people in other countries and will not buy inferior or high-priced products just because they are produced by their compatriots."

Chinese in the workplace: diligent and small calculations, can do things, but fear of taking responsibility

As a boss and have worked with Chinese people for many years, Crow also has a lot to say about the performance of Chinese people in the workplace. The first thing he noticed was that "Chinese boys in Shanghai all want to join foreign companies, just like American boys in Los Angeles want to enter , Hollywood ."There are many reasons for working in foreign companies, with higher salary and broad room for promotion. More importantly, shorter working hours and more holidays. He observed that Chinese companies over 9/10 never close except for the Chinese New Year, and work hours are very common every day for 10-12 hours. Foreign companies in Shanghai have two hours of lunch break every day, close at noon on Saturday and rest until Sunday. There are also many legal holidays and two weeks of summer vacation. He cites a set of comparative data: foreign companies work less than 1,800 hours a year, while China The company has as many as 3,000 hours.

English proficiency and typing ability are necessary conditions for joining a foreign company. Every boy in Shanghai who has this plan will start learning these skills as soon as possible. If it really doesn't work, just flip through the second-hand English letter manual and cram it temporarily and barely piece together an cover letter . Crow found that a Chinese cover letter may be exaggerated in other aspects, but the only thing "diligence and loyalty" is the most sincere - "Employees in other countries may stop here, but Chinese employees start with this. Chinese employees more or less believe that these virtues are just basic qualities, and after being hired, they will become your right-hand man by deeply learning and mastering various methods. "

One of the important ways to prove that they are indispensable in the office is to make themselves "irreplaceable people". Therefore, Western workplace values ​​such as learning from each other and helping each other are somewhat unacceptable in China, because Chinese believe that the ideal office order should be "If the office leaves, he will fall into chaos, and he will not be able to operate normally until he comes back to settle it." He found that Chinese people are often proficient in their work responsibilities, but they cannot expect them to teach their colleagues out of kindness. In addition, Chinese people are not willing to take a vacation (because they are afraid that others will take their place after leaving for a period of time), and are also unwilling to hire strangers who are not relatives or old. If they really need to hire new people , they would rather recruit their nephews, younger brothers or "other relatives who are ambitions to be bound by kinship." The result of preferring to recruit "owners" is that Chinese companies can easily become family businesses of some form, and their tribesmen occupy high-paying important positions, but they often reduce the quality of the team and work efficiency.

Perhaps because of their own political relationship at work, Crow was surprised to find that Chinese people would consciously divide their labor and create more positions as much as possible. For example, the drawing of an advertising painting can be broken down into faces, body shapes, backgrounds, and border decorations. "As a result, the finished product of the month's advertising not only has several different textures, but also shows several different styles. This is a trade union system formed according to the skill level. "

Another discovery that confused and funny made him feel is that Chinese people love overtime:

"Chinese people like to show their activity in a lively manner, and they often ensure that their activity is fully displayed. It is important to make the office look busy in their eyes, which is to give all the staff a face. If the office isn't busy enough, they'll find ways to make it look busy and even do some unnecessary work to achieve this. They don't mind working overtime at all, and it would be even better if the employees of a recession small company could see them still working hard when they get off work at five o'clock. In fact, they seem to enjoy working overtime occasionally. "

Crow's company stipulates that employees have a two-hour lunch break, and most employees will pack their lunch back to the office to eat; they could have done the extra work casually, but they will definitely spend the two hours of lunch break leisurely, stay for a few hours after work at five o'clock, and show off to their friends: "Our company is very busy." I was busy until 8 o'clock last night. "He told a story that made him laugh and cry: Once he heard rumors that the landlord thought they had too much electricity to work night shifts and wanted to raise rent. He traced the source of the rumors and found that it was his employees bragging to employees of competitor companies. Crow concluded, "Doing busy and pleasant superficial work can bring confidence to Chinese employees and the companies they work for.”

In the common terms "Rinzun" and "Wuyi" in the official documents of imperial China, Crow realized a certain habit that the Chinese have formed over a long time - when the emperor asked his ministers to "take action quickly! Work hard! No excuses! Behind the complex double order of "the Chinese are willing to act according to the order but are afraid to take responsibility. For example, during the meeting, Chinese participants will instinctively avoid making decisions. Since everyone thinks so, everyone talks in circles, making the meeting more and more lengthy. Unless it is urgent, it is almost impossible for a Chinese to complete one thing quickly. In Crow's view, it is also caused by the mentality of avoiding responsibility. He also believes that it is precisely because Chinese people are disgusted with taking responsibility that many foreigners have the opportunity to be hired in China to do things that Chinese people can do but are unwilling to do. "In any business in Shanghai, Chinese people are very willing to implement all work. In fact, they will insist on doing it themselves, but require foreigners to make decisions and take responsibility, and the same is true for even the smallest things. "If a company has no foreigners, then you will find that decisions are often made by the collective, so those few and courageous Chinese people can often stand out in the workplace in China quickly.

Correspondingly, Crow also noticed that Chinese people always strictly distinguish factual data from ideas and opinions. For the former, Chinese people can be accurate and true, but for the latter (such as asking him whether something can be sold well in China, or whether the packaging of a certain product should be replaced), Chinese people tend to avoid arguments and fool them with an answer that he thinks will make the questioner happy. In his opinion, "(Chinese people) have no fixed or mature views on theoretical issues that are not related to their actual interests, and require him to make decisions or comments on things that are not related to himself or he himself does not have to be responsible, which in his opinion is an infringement of personal rights. ”

Despite all kinds of puzzling and ridiculous experiences, Crow is still full of unprejudiced affection for this land that can be called the "second hometown". As he said, “I hope readers can accept my explanation, and I hope that this new perspective can give readers a new understanding of the Chinese and see the Chinese in my eyes: interesting, annoying, confusing, but always cute. ”