In China's current box-office-leading film Lian Ai Zhong De Bao Bei (Baober in Love) main character Liu Zhi is bored with modern, materialistic life. He confesses his antipathy to this video camera while he waits for the girl with whom he wants to fall passionately in love. Baober finds his video tape and the man she's been searching for. Baober and Liu have grown up in a city transformed by bulldozers and cranes. This massive cultural earthquake has shattered Babao's spiritual world.
Disenchantment with modernity and consumerism sets Baober and Liu apart from their peers. Most young urban Chinese have proved enthusiastic shoppers and consumers of luxury products. Better educated, higher earning and bigger spenders than their parents, China's teens and twenty-somethings are being targeted by marketing executives worldwide keen to corner what they see as a vast and lucrative market for their brands. They have good reason to be optimistic: a 2001 survey by international market intelligence agency AC Nielsen found that Beijing youth aged 10 to 22 accounted for 1.4 billion yuan in spending every month. Teens accounted for 60 percent of that total spend.
According to a recent survey by the Sociology Department of Shandong University, student spending on food and basic clothing has fallen 20 percent since 2001 to 60 percent today. Students are spending more on mobile phones, magazines, computers, cinema tickets, travel, and gym gear. Many students have taken on part-time jobs to finance these extra luxuries. Hair colorants, cosmetics and trendy clothes were must-haves for female students questioned for the survey.
Academics and cultural experts have been drawn to the race to explore what China's young spenders prefer to spend their money on, what's cool and what's not. “It's great to know what is cool but the million dollar question is, what makes something cool,” says Dr Carl Rohde, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Utrecht in Holland. Rohde worked with international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to map the spending habits of young spenders in several nations worldwide. A team of “cool-hunters” under his direction spread out across Beijing and Shanghai to explore what's “cool” and what's not among China's urban youth.
The coolest things for Chinese youth, according to the Hill & Knowlton cool-hunters' findings, are g-strings and extreme sports, along with tattoos and piercings – the “ultimate cool” according to cool-hunters' findings. G-strings symbolize sexual freedom and choice, according to youth questioned by the cool-hunters, while extreme sports such as mountain climbing and bungee jumping represent a healthy alternative lifestyle and adventure. Tattoos and piercings meanwhile “defy tradition and exemplify rule of the body,” according to answers to the questionnaire.
“Empowerment, personalization and being independent” are the words preferred by trendy Chinese youth to describe themselves and the reasons they buy specific products, according to Rohde. “With empowerment you want to produce your best efficiency and add to your physical and psychological confidence...” Western brands' success in China depends on their ability to appeal to Chinese consumers' needs for empowerment and personalization. “Puma as a brand is hot at the moment because it empowers a sense of individuality and personalization.” Chinese brands such as the Li Ning sportswear label meanwhile have good distribution networks but they're not so good at marketing, at making themselves cool.
International cosmetics brand Avon depended heavily on young Chinese women for its US$125 million net sales in China last year. The company has also latched onto Chinese youth's preference for personalization, recently launching a product line titled UP2U (“It's Up to You”) which is aimed specifically at “trendy Chinese teens and young adults,” according to a company spokesperson. “The brand is aimed at young women aged 16 to 24 who love to experiment with new things...These are women who dare to be different and trendy; and who aspire to personal freedom of expression and choice. UP2U is simply an expression and experience that is truly personal.”
“China's generation of single children each wants to be unique and each thinks they should be celebrities,” says Hung Huang, publisher of Qingchun Yizu, the Chinese edition of US mass-selling Seventeen Magazine launched in 2001. Hung targets the magazine at 15 to 22 year olds in the 47 cities around China where the magazine is sold.... “China's youth is much the same as the youth of London, New York or Paris in how they perceive brands. What sets them apart is that they feel neglected by brands as a consumer group.”
When this writer questioned a group of late-teens students in Beijing they listed sportswear label Nike as their favorite brand. Nike sponsors a school sports ground program, donating money towards the construction of sports grounds in Chinese secondary schools. But the company has plenty of competition: Adidas and Puma were close behind in the choices of respondents to my mini-survey. Published in Shanghai to harvest advertising from multinational cosmetics and sportswear firms, the popular Urban Magazine is stuffed with adverts from Reebok, Nike, Puma and other international brands targeting a wealthy strata of Chinese youth.
“This generation hates fake copies of their favorite brands. They're more sophisticated than any other generation about brands.” Their emotional axis is their mobile phone. “I feel naked if I go out without my mobile phone,” one of the cool-hunt respondents said. The mass-popularization of DVDs brought on big changes, opening Chinese youth up to Western influences, suggests Hung Huang. So too Western fast food and coffee chains. Starbucks is “cool” among American youth yet is seen as too mainstream by young Europeans, says Dr Carl Rohde. “But in Asia Starbucks is on its way to being cool.”
One of the young professionals interviewed by the cool-hunters, 24-year-old Ziping, said short, edgy hair, preferably multicolored, was the most fashionable hairstyle of young Chinese women. Skincare is also a prerequisite of sophistication. That's good news for Corey Lindley, president of China operations for US cosmetics giant Nu Skin, who predicts a 100 percent growth in his company's business this year. “We market two lines of products. Our prestige Nu Skin product range sells at an average unit price of US$20. We also sell a value brand of products which we brand as Scion that sells at an average unit price of US$5.” Nu Skin's best customers are young urban women aged 18 to 30, says Lindley.
A survey conducted by banks in the eastern city of Nanjing last summer showed that 65 percent of respondents were prepared to finance purchases through bank lending. The Nanjing branch of the People's Bank of China issued 22 billion yuan in personal loans in the first five months of 2003 alone. Nearly 70 percent of loans took the form of mortgages. Keen to spend their expected future income now, young locals were borrowing for cars, houses, home appliances and education. Typically, local young professionals borrowed 80,000 yuan to purchase an apartment and 20,000 yuan to buy a car. Only 11 percent of those surveyed, all of whom had received higher education, said they wouldn't borrow against their future earnings for houses and cars.
The expansion of this sector of China's population will depend on the continued prosperity of the broader economy and the urbanization process underway in the country. It also depends on expanded access to higher education. If any of these falter, Dr Carl Rohde's cool-hunters may move on. In the meantime, readers, go watch Baober in Love for a hint at why some young Chinese don't want to be sitting targets for brands and cool-hunters.
(China Today April 25, 2004)