Mrs. Wang is a friend and colleague of mine in her late 40s who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But when she got crappy service at a car mechanic shop, she posted a long complaint and a warning to other car owners in a discussion forum on the web. Some sympathy posts and a pissed off car mechanic later, Mrs. Wang belonged to a new breed of powerful consumers in China, gladly sharing their shopping experiences on the net.
Mrs. Wang’s revenge sprang to mind earlier this week as I listened to Ola Spannar from Springtime, the Swedish PR and communications company. He gave a talk on his upcoming book about the Internet in China and the culture of using bulletin boards (BBS) - discussion forums to check out and chat about products and companies. China is estimated to have around 50 million BBS users, compared to 20 million bloggers.
In one of the latest issues of Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) you can read how the bulletin board is the most important part of any China-based website. In a country where all information is under government control, people are starved for information from their peers, information they find more authentic and trustworthy.
The ongoing discussions are ranging from baby care to mobile phones and they are already having an impact on business. These discussions, argued Spannar, are crucial for companies to monitor in the future, giving numerous examples of brands being praised or dissed by Chinese consumers online.
He’s right that this is something to watch out for. You don’t have to look far to see where the Internet savvy upper middle class in China turns for consumer information. Here in Beijing, the restaurant at IKEA got flooded with people after a man living in the area posted on his neighbourhood chat forum that the extremely cheap Gongbaojiding chicken (4 Y) “was not bad”. At the time I ran into one of the IKEA managers at a party who was getting concerned that the restaurant areas in the second largest IKEA store in the world were perhaps too small.
Mrs. Wang who revenged herself on the car mechanic, had consulted the same bulletin board a couple of months earlier when deciding which car to buy.
Then again, Chinese companies already know this. FEER reports that as a rule new sites in China “manufacture BBS traffic by hiring rooms full of students to post or else by buying traffic from other sites and posting it as their own”. This in the end might leave the Chinese consumer surfing the net as bewildered as when buying a Gucci wallet. Fake or real?
Looks like good advice can be as counterfeit as Prada slippers in the local market.
