outline of the speech (For more speech info,please feel free to contact us):

Successful outsourcing is impossible without successful marketing

Today I’ll talk about how Chinese manufacturing and services outsourcing companies can successfully promote their businesses to the world.

Let’s forget for a minute that you are an outsourcing company and look at why marketing is essential for ANY company wanting to work the global stage.

If you look at any one of 2012’s top 100 brands each one of them is recognisable anywhere in the world - and they’re recognisable because of the efforts of their marketing people. They have all invested millions and millions of dollars on marketing.

in 2010, on LinkedIn, there were 540,00 people on Linked in with the description”global marketing” next to their name.

Would these companies be anywhere near what they are now without great marketing? The answer quite obviously is NO.

Currently, many Chinese companies are going global and need to be able to market their brand effectively to an international audience.

 Over 65% of overseas consumers are willing to consider a Chinese brand, according to Millward Brown research, but in several key markets outside China,  83 percent of respondents could not name a single Chinese brand.

So here you have a great opportunity - but if no-one has ever heard of you how will China and its outsourcing companies achieve the stated aim of: Overtaking their Indian counterparts?

The first thing you’ll need to do is work out what differentiates your brand.

While it is true, as executive vice president of Chinese outsourcing company Pactera - Liu Chu Tzer - says - that ultimately businesses will choose their outsourcing partners according to bottomline considerations - it is not the ONLY consideration.

(Being cost effective is only one BRAND DIFFERENCE and if everyone is just being cheap then there is NO BRAND DIFFERENCE).

This has been starkly demonstrated to me on a couple of recent occasions.

The first was at a talk I gave at East China Fair in March this year in Shanghai to a large group of OEM’s about marketing.

The problem for most of these businesses is that recently in Chinese economic history they’d gone from being basically needed ONLY to MAKE THINGS.
Now, they were being told that they should be setting their sites on global markets and promoting their businesses to the world.

I felt kind of sorry for them because they had to go from MAKING things like train engines, to MARKETING train engines - and that’s a little bit like asking me to go from MARKETING train engines (which I would be very good at because that’s the kind of thing I do) to MAKING them.

As one woman in the audience said to me “my company makes clothing. But so do thousands of other companies in China. How do we start to DIFFERENTIATE our brand and market it?” I told her she needed to stop thinking about clothes for a while and invent a ‘NEW BUTTON’. If she came up with a better button she would have successfully differentiated her brand from the thousands of others and she would have something she could shout about to the world.

The second occasion was a recent conversation I had with a friend who runs Australia’s largest bollard distribution company - and outsources manufacturing to China. Recently he had asked his supplier to make a change to the bollards which would improve their quality. His Chinese supplier became scared and said “but if we do that, our prices will increase, and you will go elsewhere”. My friend told him ‘no, we have a very good relationship with you, we have worked with you a long time, we just need you to make this change and we understand that it will cost us more.’

The lesson from both these examples is that it is clearly not always about cost - it is about things like relationships and innovation - two extremely important requirements for marketing.

So where do you start? My advice is start with good quality marketing because if you have good quality marketing people will think you have a good quality brand. e.g. In 1985, Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin had staff with sledgehammers publicly destroy 76 defective refrigerators that didn’t meet the company’s new quality standards.

Through his dramatic performance, he communicated to every employee at Haier, and the rest of the world, that the company was serious about making good quality products and building customer trust.

It was an act of marketing genius. The white goods giant is now the world’s largest refrigerator manufacturer.

A very quick look at some of the world’s most successful outsourcing companies shows that they all take marketing extremely seriously.

We find a similar reliance on B2B marketing channels. A similar level of interactivity with their markets. Each of these companies spend millions of dollars on marketing - and this is why, even though their core business is about offering cost savings to other businesses - they absolutely need to DIFFERENTIATE THEIR BRAND.

So how do they do it? I’m guessing that not many of you have the multi-million dollar marketing budgets these companies have? If you do, you’re eligible for a private, one-on-one talk with me after I finish here.

So what are some of the ways they talk, or market to their customers when they’re not spending millions of dollars on traditional advertising campaigns in television, magazines, newspapers and billboards?
They are actively engaging in the new digital media such as Twitter or Weibo, they are writing marketing blogs, and have social and business network pages, they are tweeting, blogging, uploading presentations to Slideshare, posting on LinkedIn, broadcasting podcats, sponsoring sporting and industry events and actively engaging in PR, producing their own webinars, and videos and developing mobile applications creating RSS feeds and uploading images to sites like Pinterest and Instagram.   While they also spend money in traditional media - they understand that newer digital media channels can be incredibly cost-effective.

These are all digital marketing media that Wipro, Accenture, and do. And of course they have modern, interactive websites which are written impeccably in the language of the markets that they are appealing to.

As a case study, let’s take a look at Wipro - the India-based IT company that specializes in “Total Outsourcing.” They are one of the world’s top technology vendors and are widely considered the outsourcing partner of choice for IT - specific infrastructures.

Start with their website - well designed, contemporary, interactive, informative. This is the window into the soul of their business.

Look at how they use so many of the marketing channels that are available to them.

Apart from their extremely well-designed and maintained website, they blog about relevant topics that are of interest to their target market.

Blogging is rapidly taking over from traditional websites as the digital home for many companies, like CapoGemini

Social Media is crucial to their marketing strategy: they actively use FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Slideshare and LinkedIn.

They actively engage in social media such as Pinterest

They actively engage in social media such as Slideshare

Sponsorships - a proven way for successful Chinese companies to become involved in and make their presence known in other cultures.

Whatever outsourcing requirement your company is selling - you should try to explore as many of the many options that are available to you and then work out if you are differentiating your brand.

Research across over 1000 local and international brands showed that being considered meaningfully different produced a 37% higher contribution to brand value. Well-differentiated brands are also 12 times more likely to grow in value than brands with only average differentiation.