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Luxury Goods: Meet the Experience Hunters

March 1, 2013 By
Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills

Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the Hutong
Warming-up a little
1453 hrs.

The Chinese New Year holiday is a period where many of China’s well-heeled consumers travel abroad, so it was no surprise that CCTV ran a story on how many Chinese consumers use their trips not just for sightseeing and relaxation, but for buying luxury goods. The national broadcaster took China’s 80 million international travelers to task for spending $30 billion abroad last year buying luxury goods, and criticizing them for not spending that money at home.

Laurie Burkitt at The Wall Street Journal picked up the story, noting that Chinese duties raise the price of Rolex watches, Gucci shoes and Louis Vuitton purses between 30% and 50%. One can see why the government is concerned: that’s somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion in lost import duties, plus the lost value of rents, income taxes for shop workers, etc. The brands are starting to realize where the bread is landing: Gucci is apparently halting all domestic Chinese expansion plans.

Luxury is an Experience, not a Purse

The media coverage of this transnational luxury buying spree implies that a hunt for bargains is all that sends these buyers abroad. Yet while price is doubtless an important motivator, there is more to it. What most analysts – and probably a few brands – are missing is the unarticulated value luxury consumers place on the experience, those intangible factors that makes buying the purse, the shoes, the watch, the dress so deeply satisfying.

One factor for Chinese in particular is mental comfort. It is not much fun consuming conspicuously in an environment that heaps growing opprobrium on bling buyers. Better to go somewhere where your purchase is at least taken in stride, if not celebrated. These days, that means buying in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, New York, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, or Milan – not Beijing or Shanghai.

But there are other factors that make up the luxury buying experience, factors captured in such post-buying questions as:

  • Where did I buy this?
  • What was the service like?
  • Did the salespeople make me feel at home?
  • Why was the experience special?
  • What was different  about buying there than in China?
  • What was I able to get there that I couldn’t in China…or anywhere else?

Any and all of these factors have the potential add greater meaning to the purchase, make its acquisition more gratifying, and deepen the relationship with the brand. Equally important, they add to the “show-off” or “shai” value of the item. The new owner not only gets to show-off the bauble to her friends, she also gets an excuse to relate the trip, the circumstances, and the feelings she took from the purchase process itself, all to the admiration (or envy) of the people whose respect is important to her.

Some Brands Get It

On a vacation trip in 2008, my wife bought a limited-edition LeSportsac Tokidoki handbag designed by Simone Legno at the LeSportsac store on Waikiki. The store was a delight, the location superb, the service was so good that even my son and I felt good about coming into the store, and that is saying something. My wife had never heard of Tokidoki  before, but the whole experience of buying the bag was such a delight that she came back the next day to buy one for her mom. To this day, five years later, she still talks about the bag, and has a deep affinity for LeSportsac.

Christine Lu of Affinity China is out ahead of the industry. She has begun leading luxury shopping tours of the U.S. for Chinese ladies that go beyond high-end store-hopping. Shops on Rodeo Drive, Park Avenue, and Waikiki are prepared in advance, provide engraved invitations, put on private fashion shows with Chinese narration, serve champagne and chocolates, and arrange to have purchases taken back to hotels while the ladies continue their day. As a bonus, Christine will bring along a Chinese celebrity or two, and tweet/blog/weibo aggressively, raising the profile of the trip and making mere attendance prestigious. The stores who work with her get it: the experience is every bit as important as the quality or design of the items that go in the bag. Expect these kinds of events to grow into a trend, traveling trunk shows where the groups come to the stores.

So all of this is interesting to be sure. Here is why it is important.

Today, it’s Price, but Tomorrow it Won’t Be

Understanding the non-price factors that drive Chinese to buy abroad is going to grow in importance. At some point the Chinese government will figure out that it needs to take steps to keep the luxury dollar at home beyond lame propaganda campaigns to shame buyers as unpatriotic. That will mean eliminating the price difference for buying at home. Either the government will have to start levying duties at airports and ports of entry (insanely hard to do and guaranteed to cause congestion at China’s overwhelmed airports and borders,) or they will need to eliminate duties altogether.

It is anyone’s guess on which course Beijing chooses, economic logic notwithstanding. When that happens, luxury brands will have their own choice to make: they can either play the zero-sum game, doing nothing and watching overseas purchases slowly leech back into China; or they can play the growth gambit, sustaining patronage overseas while building sales in China.

I’m betting the brands will want to do the latter, so I expect to see them taking steps to improve and even differentiate the buying experience for Chinese luxury consumers. At the very least, we will see more luxury stores with Chinese speakers and creating the kind of buying experiences that Affinity China is teaching them to offer.

I expect it will (or should) go beyond that. The brands will realize that simply offering a cookie-cutter experience in every store worldwide misses the point for their clientele. Each city, each store has to offer a different but equally compelling experience that reflects the brand in a unique way. This starts with store layout, but also speaks to decor, merchandise, and layout that reflects the location, and even offering items that are exclusive to that store. Let’s face it: even Disneyland has learned to differentiate its parks worldwide. Can luxury brands be far behind?

It is a truism (or should be one) that long after the price of an item is forgotten, the experience is remembered. Price will bring China’s increasingly sophisticated luxury customers in your door, but the experience will form the basis of a lasting relationship.

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China and the Rightshoring Movement

December 4, 2012 By

In the Hutong
Monday Morning with Chinese Characteristics
1112 hrs.

Back in February I posted an article here (“The Beginning of the End of Outsourcing“) declaring that the thirty-year trend that had shifted jobs and manufacturing to developing countries had hit its apogee. I focused on the Apple-Foxconn relationship, but the point was not about either company. Rather, it was that this powerful partnership, one that has defined the limits of what is possible with contract manufacturing in a developing economy, was also quietly drawing the high-water mark of the offshoring/outsourcing trend. The pendulum was starting to swing back toward corporate control of manufacturing as a core competency and a return to manufacturing close to markets, rather than at the end of a trans-Pacific supply chain.

Entrepreneurs, Stay Home

Proving once again the value of a subscription to The Atlantic, James Fallows and Charles Fishman deliver a pair of superb features in the December issue that offer some more anecdotal examples to suggest that we may be witnessing the beginning of a tectonic movement in manufacturing. Fallows surveys Foxconn and finds its working conditions much improved but sees in those improvements the subtle signs that China’s traditional comparative advantages are in decline.

He then talks to a group of manufacturing entrepreneurs in San Francisco (of all places) who explain that global supply chains are simply not nimble enough to support many businesses. Offering the example of DODOcase, the guys making some of the most stylish smartphone and tablet cases anywhere, Fallows quotes co-founder Patrick Buckley as saying “To figure out all the things we needed to do, and design the product, and launch, and fulfill orders within one month—that meant that outsourcing to China was not ever a feasible option.”

One month. That’s the speed of business. The founders were quoted nine months from design to fulfillment to work with China. Would it have been cheaper? Maybe. Would it have lost them huge opportunities? Absolutely. Would it have exposed them to early knockoffs, possibly by their own contract manufacturer? Hell yes. And Fallows apparently spoke to several companies in the same predicament as DODOcase.

Made in Louisville

Interesting indeed, but a couple of guys in a loft making semi-custom luggage is a very different animal than a Fortune 500 company.

This is where Fishman steps in, telling the story of the revival of GE’s Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky. Five years ago the place was the definition of rust belt, a facility built for six production lines and 16,000 workers that had lost nearly everything to China. Things were so bad that GE tried to sell the division, but nobody would buy. As it turns out, that was a good thing. Today there are four production lines making high-end appliances and components for GE products that used to be made in either China or Mexico. One in particular, the high-tech, low-energy GeoSpring home water heater, became a corporate revelation.

So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up.

GE wasn’t just able to hold the retail sticker to the “China price.” It beat that price by nearly 20 percent. The China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299.

Time-to-market has also improved, greatly. It used to take five weeks to get the GeoSpring water heaters from the factory to U.S. retailers—four weeks on the boat from China and one week dockside to clear customs. Today, the water heaters—and the dishwashers and refrigerators—move straight from the manufacturing buildings to Appliance Park’s warehouse out back, from which they can be delivered to Lowe’s and Home Depot. Total time from factory to warehouse: 30 minutes.

As it turns out, the factory floor is a core competency. What is more, some things can actually be made better and cheaper in America by U.S. labor, especially if those products are destined for markets nearby. Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer quoted in Fishman’s article estimates that as much as a quarter of what is made offshore for the US market could be made more cheaply in the US than overseas. After reading Paul Midler’s excellent Poorly Made in China and going back over my notebooks from my own four years as a factory inspector for a U.S. furniture importer, I am betting that not only is Moser onto something, he may actually be underestimating. The GE case proves something that I and Midler have long suspected – that too many companies have outsourced their production to China because they lack the imagination or intelligence to do anything else.

Whose Factory?

We can’t get carried away here, though. The idea that China is reaching the end of its stint as the world’s factory floor is getting tired, and it is too tempting to see in a few examples a trend of factories re-opening across America. Not only would believing either meme be unrealistic, it would miss what is actually going on. We are witnessing the beginning of two trends, rightsourcing and rightshoring.

Rightsourcing, as its name implies, is the science of deciding whether to make something or buy it. That decision used to be such a simple one that the “build or buy” formula was taught in first year managerial accounting. What we have discovered in the past two decades is that there is more to the decision than just the math, that there are attendant risks and variables that make the formula far more complex. Is somebody going to steal my designs and formulas and sell them to my competition? Can I really trust somebody else to help me avoid quality or labor issues that could hurt my business? Am I pouring away a hidden competitive advantage by getting out of manufacturing?

Rightshoring, by contrast, is the science of deciding where to make something. We used to think that making things in a country where people worked for less money would be cheaper. But that difference is dissipating, and more questions arise. How much is it costing me to keep a transpacific pipeline full? What are the opportunity costs involved in a six- to nine-month product development process? What are the hidden risks in making something six thousand miles away from the customer? And what happens if there is an uprising or the price of oil goes up 5o%?

We are going to hear a lot more about these trends in the coming months, but it is important to emphasize that this does not mean the end of manufacturing in China, or anything close to it. These trends do point to a future where manufacturing begins to seep back into the world’s great companies, and where products are made closer to where they will be consumed. China will still make a lot of stuff, but it will make less stuff for Europe and America and more stuff for China and the rest of Asia.

At the same time, Chinese companies will set up factories closer to their customers. Think Haier in North Carolina, Lenovo in Europe and Brazil, and Great Wall Motors just about anywhere it sells cars. China will remain a hub of manufacturing as long as consumers in China and the rest of Asia are buying products. But the percentage of goods in the American or European shopping baskets that will be marked “Made in China” looks set to decline over time.

I’ll examine what this means for several specific industries in later posts. In the meantime, it would do many of us a lot of good to start reading up on manufacturing and operations management.

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Business and The Xi Team: Focus on the Drivers

December 3, 2012 By
Xi Jinping 习近平

Xi Jinping 习近平 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the Hutong
Information coma
1958 hrs.

Over the last couple of weeks, several people have asked me what the changeover in the Communist Party leadership will mean for international business in China. The short answer is that if I knew, I’d be wealthy. The longer answer is a bit more helpful.

Many years ago I had a mentor and boss who taught me that the parade of personalities and the flow of policies were fun to watch, but that sticking your finger up to feel the political winds would never offer the insight a business requires to make decisions beyond a six month threshold. What you need to understand, she told me, were the fundamental drivers of policy, not the policies themselves.

By fundamental drivers she meant the five or six issues that the nation’s leaders worried about the most, overlaid with the three core goals of the party at any given time. Add to that a general understanding of the climate in the country, and any relatively educated person could at least have a general hunch about a company’s horizons.

For example, I believe the thee core goals of the Party are:

  1. The continuance of Party rule
  2. The social stability of the nation
  3. China’s rise to global economic and political leadership

No rocket science there. Beyond this, though, things get tricker. What are the five things the members of the Politburo Standing Committee worry about when they wakes up at four o’clock in the morning?

Here is my list of the top five.

  • Controlling corruption without blackening the entire Party in the process
  • Getting the economy stabilized and on track for continuing growth
  • Keeping the PLA in line while retaining its political support
  • Cleaning up the environment without disrupting the economy
  • Keeping expressions of popular discontent from coalescing into a coherent anti-party front.

These are certainly open for debate, but what all of this suggests is that global companies will be welcome in China to the extent that they address (i.e., demonstrably take into account) these five priorities. What is more, given that domestic attitudes about foreign investment in China have, in the past five years, gone from “generally positive” to “generally ambivalent,” companies are going to find themselves compelled to make a case to their local stakeholders that they have something unique to offer just by being here.

Mind you, I’m not necessarily talking about approvals to do business, although that is an issue. Instead what I mean is that with every audience, from regulators to consumers, every business would do well to remember that being foreign no longer buys you much, and that in the current environment there is no particular priority placed on letting foreign firms into China.

In short, the outlook is not exceptionally good in the near term, but there is as yet little cause to be pessimistic. All of us need to stay tuned.

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Filed Under: China Rewires, Current Affairs, Policy & Governance, Public Affairs Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A Cloud with Chinese Characteristics

November 20, 2012 By
Software as a Service

Software as a Service (Photo credit: Jeff Kubina)

In the Hutong
Doctor, Doctor, Gimme some news
0917 hrs.

In addition to the matter of whether China remains a suitable regional headquarters for international firms, the recent government-imposed internet clotting also points to major changes that are taking place in the global topography of the Internet. Despite the long-treasured hope of Internet Libertarians that the ‘net would remain unified and self-governing, Bill Bishop’s prognostications of an internet fragmenting along national lines is looking increasingly likely.

Earlier this year I moderated a panel on the Cloud in China at the 2012 Roundtable on Intellectual Property Rights Protection convened by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. There were representative of both foreign and Chinese entities on the panel, and while the focus was on the Cloud and its role in either helping or exacerbating the problem of copyright piracy, a few interesting bits came out that are relevant to the recent blockage.

First, the panel understood that there are two Clouds: one for China, and one for everyone else. The reason is not technical, but regulatory: the government has built a policy framework  that hampers access to Cloud-based services based offshore to the point where they are not viable alternatives to local storage. You don’t see very many ChromeBooks in China (I haven’t seen even one,) I can’t get workable access to Amazon Prime Videos, and downloading a movie from iTunes takes 16-20 hours – on a good day.

Second, that international firms seeking to offer software as a service (SAAS) in China must either base their offerings onshore or not bother. As the Google affair made clear to all, however, data based onshore remains particularly vulnerable to local compromise. Why do the cops need to bother with hackers when they can just show up at the door of the server farm and demand access?

Third, all of the panel participants noted a growing willingness on the part of Chinese businesses and consumers to pay for SAAS and Cloud services. There is an irony in that for the foreign SAAS providers, but there is an insight as well. Government policies that restrict access to foreign SAAS providers are functionally protecting local Chinese companies who want to get into the game.

What we face, then, is the development of a parallel Cloud sector in China that will mirror the SAAS business outside of the PRC. That sector will likely consist of two elements: local companies (i.e., Baidu, Tencent, Sina, and service-specific start-ups) that will provide Cloud/SAAS offerings; and international firms who find ways to address the challenges of latency and government access restriction, usually by setting up a subsidiary in China with localized offerings (i.e., Evernote.)

For the international providers, this means figuring out how to operate two separate services while still offering the advantages of a global service to customers in China. This adds yet another degree of operational complexity to an already challenging market.

Yet for the local Chinese SAAS/Cloud service companies, it means a doubling of their home court advantage. Not only are they arguably better suited to offer more culturally relevant Cloud services than their foreign counterparts, they will also be playing inside of an electronic fence built for them (inadvertently or or otherwise) by government policy. Long term, though, this will make the effort to compete overseas more difficult.

Whether the meiosis of the Internet continues beyond the split twixt China and the rest of the world is unclear, but for the SAAS industry, the world now has at least two separate internets, and it needs separate clouds to go with it. Long term, the SAAS and cloud companies that succeed will be those who can thrive in an internet with increasingly high walls.

Filed Under: China Rewires, Internet Business, Software Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Silicon Hutong 3.0: The Merchant and the Dragon

October 3, 2012 By

In the Hutong
Where have I been lately?
0740 hrs.

If this forum has been silent for the past month, we* have had good reason. It is now evident to anyone watching that China is on the cusp of change so large that its own leaders likely still do not grasp it. We’ve spent the last month trying to do so, and we’ve realized it is time to make some changes.

The End of Harmony

The particulars have been summed up at great length and eloquence elsewhere. In short, China has enjoyed 35 years of relative harmony enabled by acquiescence at home, accommodation abroad, and consensus within the Party. The past five weeks have made clear that this period of harmony is now at an end.

In fact, China is entering a period of great disharmony. The implicit promise of growing, shared prosperity looks increasingly difficult for the Party to keep, just as revelations emerge that suggest widespread malfeasance among the Party’s highest ranks. The willingness of Chongqing’s citizenry to accept Bo Xilai’s microwaved Maoism hints at a national mood that continues to sour. Suggesting that China is on the verge of a new revolution would be hyperbole, but the days of acquiescence are over, and the days of a more vocal, demanding populace are here.

The consensus-building approach that has characterized Party decision-making for the past 25 years appears to have reached its limits as well, and for good reason. When the way ahead was sustaining the status quo, consensus was easy to establish. The way forward is now unclear, and different political end economic visions are battling for precedence. Building general agreement among all leaders, even within the Politburo Standing Committee, will become difficult if not impossible.  The choice will be between paralysis and the end of the consensus-based system. Either direction will have vast repercussions.

As China takes its place among the leading nations of the world, especially in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the nation’s leaders have begun to address the world based on two implicit assumptions. First, that as an emerging world power China is entitled to change the rules of the global system to suit its needs, or ignore those rules if they obstruct China’s goals. Second, that the rest of the world will – or should – continue to accommodate China’s growing international assertiveness, even to the point of appeasement. That such assumptions place China at loggerheads with the rest of the world is of little concern. Japan, Europe, and the U.S. are too saddled with domestic troubles to effectively oppose China’s ambitions.

The Tale of the Merchant and the Dragon

If you watch China, none of the above should come as a surprise. And unless we’re living under a rock, we have to take notice. And we have. As we have done occasionally over Silicon Hutong’s decade in publication, we have taken a strategic pause in order to assess how we need to evolve this forum in light of China’s development. You will begin to see the results immediately.

First, you will see an evolution in our focus. Following the direction of my clients, this space has been moving beyond the original confines of technology, media, and public relations for some time now. We will now take the next step. Whether you do business in China or not, China will alter your playing field, and understanding why that is the case and what to do about it will be essential to everyone’s success. Our focus will become that why and the what. To that end, our five major topic areas will be:

  1. China’s Breakout: The emergence of China, Inc., and its role in global industry;
  2. China Rules: The effort by Beijing, Chinese companies, and Chinese executives to alter business norms, practices, and regulator behavior to favor Chinese firms;
  3. China Goggles: The globalization of China’s media industry and how that will enhance China’s economic and political influence;
  4. China Rewires: China’s consumers are going to alter the world’s business landscape, both for companies and consumers;
  5. Strategy, Action, Behavior, and Communications: Ideas and approaches to help executives and entrepreneurs deal with challenges of China’s rise.

Some of this, especially the last, is a recognition of the direction we have been taking for some time. The other four themes match the major directions I’ve taken in my own research and advising since 2008. It is now time to start delivering those insights.

Discussions about China’s national security, politics, arts, culture, history, and international relations will shift to The Peking Review, and will be delivered in the context of reviews of books, articles, and scholarly works about those topics.

There are more changes as well, but this post is long enough. Expect periodic updates in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, thanks for reading, and keep the feedback and comments coming.

Best,

David

* When I use “we” here, I do so not in the sense of the “royal ‘we,’” which would be a nauseating affectation, but “we” in the sense of myself and my wife and partner. While she does no writing for this forum, she is and has always been my sounding board and editorial adviser. Also, my time is our asset, so any expenditure of that asset needs sign-off. Finally, she has become a deep supporter of this forum (and The Peking Review). For those reasons, any major decision is ours, not mine alone.

Filed Under: China Breaks Out, China Goggles, China Rewires, China Rules, FITG, Strategy Tagged With:
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