Heard on the Conference

I was at a regional advertising and marketing conference last week and learned a few things about the newest developed in the world in the industry. And here are the few things I remembered from it:

1. Neural scan on the head in order to actually "see" consumer behavior with real, hard, visible, colorful scientific evidence, looks really cool and finally provided evidence of the importance of brand, e.g. when tasting a can of Coke unbranded, certain part of the brain lighted up and when tasting a can of Coke branded, different part of the brain lighted up! This is cool stuff, but how to make apply it in practical marketing remains to be seen.

2. "Fear and Guilt" are the big words to touch consumer phyche in economic recession. It is said that one brand of hand sanitizer increased its sales by more than 100% by playing to the "fear" factor with an advertising tagline "It takes 15 second to catch a deadly virus" as well as the "guilt" factor with another line "Do you dare to let your children leave home without it?" This is particularly amusing to me as I look around and decide that here and now in China, people have very little fear and absolutely no guilt.

3. A lot of talk on ROI and marketing effectiveness. Some ten years back, when I was working in advertising, it's all about "Big ideas". Now with the crunch of recession, the cutting of budget and the increasing scrutiny of the marketing spender, even the most flamboyant advertising people are now humbled and even invited their long-fighting foe on the table: the corporate procurement people who always try to cut the agency fee.

4. Do people really hate China now? This is my personal question which they didn't really discuss on the stage. I just got this impression reading the recent Wall Street Journal and Economist and it seems there is a growing negative sentiment on the part of the West, towards China. So I raised this question at the lunch table to a senior executive at a major advertising firm, a British one by the way. And he's been based in Beijing in the past four years. So the informal Q&A went as this:

Q: Is there indeed a growing negative sentiment against China now?

A: I think it's just in the media

Q: Then where did the media pick this up?

A: I think it's just the American… I'm a huge fan of China and I have lived here only four years… it's the Americans who never travel… and the Americans are blaming China for currency manipulation, if they would just save more and spend less…

Q: Yeah, actually I won't be surprised if the Western companies are sometimes unhappy about our government, but still you need to make your money here. We are unhappy all the time too! Still we need to make our living and try to make a better life out from here…

Who wants to buy a house in Shanghai?

Witnessing first-handedly the Shanghai real-estate price taking a ten-year long rocketing trajectory, I have developed an obsession of price-comparison between the housing price in Shanghai and what's like in the desirable places across the developed world.

I was at this tiny Swiss town Ascona on the shore of Lake Maggiore in September 2006, just had a most lovely stroll along the Lake and a very enjoyable dinner in a courtyard with Palm trees and I was waiting for the bus to go back to my hotel at Locarno. By the bus stop, there was a real estate agency whose windows adored with housing advertisement. I was at leisure and thus made a good study of those advertisements and to my biggest surprise and deepest dismay, I came to the realization that to buy a house or an apartment in this region cost roughly the same as to buy a house or an apartment in Shanghai.

Since then, I have got this obsession of housing price comparison across continent: wherever I travel, along the Mediterranean coast of France, Italy or Spain, or in the major cities of Paris, Rome or Vienna, if I spot a real-estate agency along my way, I would stop to have a good look and once again console myself that not-buying an apartment in Shanghai is the right thing to do: if I could buy an apartment on the Mediterranean coast or in Paris, why do I buy an apartment in Shanghai?

How about America? At the beginning of the recent recession, there was a topic among the media that we Chinese could do better with our money buying a house in America where the price for a house in most cities roughly the same as the cost of an apartment in Shanghai. Of course it remains a talk coz it's inconvenient and impractical.

Then I was reading this novel "Lipstick Jungle", written by Candace Bushnell the author of "Sexy and City" somewhere after 911 and before the Credit Crisis. In this novel, one of the most successful women in New York, the chief of the magazine division of a big media conglomerate � this widely successful woman at 45 had a 4-story house in Upper Town New York which cost her 2.5 million USD and she occasionally felt the pressure of housing loan even with her big salary (the novel didn't specify, but with other reference, the guess is around one million). And here in Shanghai, any acceptable apartment costs 2.5 million RMB and everybody who's earning a good 250,000 RMB is bravely buying up and taking up a loan up to 2 million for 20 years.

Finally, we come to the top real-estate in the world in the newest novel from Candace Bushnell: One Fifth Avenue. This fictionary landmark building is the showcase of premium downtown N.Y. real-estate. The counting of the residents including a Pulitzer winner, a movie star, a socialite and column writer for the New York Times and above everything and everybody, the top three levels was an amazing apartment owned by a legendary old lady who head the N.Y. elite sociality for more than half a century. At the end of the novel, the old lady had died at 100 years old and the apartment became the property of the wife of a young hedge fund manager hence completed the transition of an era from the old money to the new money.

Anyway, this historically important, culturally mystified, most desirable apartment in the entire New York cost the hedge fund manager some 122 Million USD, which is precisely the same price for a 10-year old luxury penthouse apartment overlooking the Huangpo River at downtown Shanghai.

I think the point is pretty clear here. Who want to buy an apartment in Shanghai, if you could buy it at any "Rich and Famous" place around the world?

Interpreting God

You may call our time a postmodern era, but a Chinese, even one speaks English and works on a Sony Vaio, still can not resist the temptation of peering into a Fortune Book to get some foresight into the ups and downs in a year and on some day to day level, still tries to interpret the will of the God.

By the "God", however, I do not mean Jesus, or even the Budda. Strangely enough, we Chinese are actually the world's largest population without a religion. While having no religion, however, we do have enough of "Dao"s to direct our thoughts and acts in the world, and many of us believe in a general, unknown God in an unspecified way. And when we're faced with some big choices or questions, we still try to interpret the will of the God.

Before this March, my God have always granted my way and I have always been able to get whatever I wanted, or wanted to do. Nevertheless, I have always come to regret all my decisions and thought the other choice could lead me closer to the destination as I later defined.

I went to the university of my first choice and I later regretted and thought I should choose another university in another city; I got the job I dreamed of after college and I later regretted that I should work in a different function in the same industry; I got a full scholarship for a graduate study and I later regretted and thought I should choose another school on another continent. I got the best job I could dream of after graduate school and I later regretted and thought another job I could lead me closer to the kind of work and life I now aspired to.

There was this time when I left an interview, it started to snow in a sunny Winter day in Shanghai, which is quite rare, and I took it for a good sign coz there's a Chinese saying "a good snow is a good sign for a good year". However, that job turned out to be a mis-step and it took more two more years to get back to a position I should be on without that mishap.

So the sign from the God is actually a far more complicated art than what one sees on the surface. And last year, there were a lot of signs pointing to totally different directions and I was quite puzzled. By the end of the day, I come to an realization that perhaps there's nothing like the will of the God, or the way of your destiny, the seeming signs are actually questions instead of answers. And you're the one to make your answer and then your fate is an interaction between the questions and your answers. Moreover, instead of getting the answers right, one perhaps need to get the questions right in the first place. Like Gertrude Stein, a legendary American woman who hosted the most inspiring dinner parties for the likes of Hemingway and Picasso in the 20s' and 30s' Paris � when asked before her death, "what is the answer?", she was reported to reply "what is the question?"

 

Anyway, now that my God has for the very first time stopped me to do something I really wanted to do, perhaps this time I will be finally doing the right thing and I won't come back to regret it, for the first time in my life?

Can I be a Citizen of the World by just sitting square in my living room in Shanghai?

 I always have this thing about being a Citizen of the World. It all came to me at seven or eight reading a book on the history of the World. On the second page printed a fine line from some Ancient Greek Philosopher "Be a Citizen of the World". And it was like that, ever since then, being a Citizen of the World become the highest aspiration of my life.

When I grew up, I realized there's nothing like Citizen of the World, coz you have to have one specific and definite passport. While there's no World passport, an American passport, or for that matter, an Canadian or Australian passport, could be a proxy, in terms of geographical mobility. 

However, I was never sure I like to be living in U.S., or Canada, or Australia. America is OK, but not really exciting, Canada is too cold and Australia too much sunlight for my skin. So I settled to be living in Shanghai, where I could watch Sexy and City almost simutaniously as it went on show in U.S., I bought books from Amazon, travel to Mediterranean Europe for vacation, play Dianna Krall and Leonard Cohen on my iPhone, read Wall Street Journal and Economist online and catch up with a few overseas friends on facebook. This would be my proxy of being a Citizen of the World I thought.

This worked for me until some time last year, I was suddenly ceased by a frenzie for a wild plan: immigration to Europe, where I find life's best of nature, arts, great cities and small towns. When it didn't work out, however, I began to see the folly of my plan, especially, how it goes against the global economic trend.

Accordingly to what I have been hearing allover, all the Western world is still recovering from the Credit Crisis, they are expecting zero or meagre growth in the foreseable future. And for Europe more specifically, they're right now trying to handle the Greece problem and may have more problem from Spain and Italy. Therefore, even if my plan had worked, the job perspective won't look necessarily pretty over the lovely continent. What surprised me most however, is that I came to realize the salary I could expect if my plan had worked, might not be significantly more than what I could earn in China. So all the advantages I would have, would be really only about purer air, purer water and less traffic.  

I guess it's a common sense across cultures that if you go with the current, you'll get the go and if you go against it, you may well stuck. Therefore, the right HR now is from the developed countries to the BRIC countries, just like all the big MNCs are doing dispatching their people allover (upon which, the dispatched all can't wait to jump). While my plan of a reserse flow from China to Europe is stalled for good reason.

Last month, there was a corporate Mass Mailer from our U.S. Headquarter that there would be no salary increase this year. An hour later, China HR send out an email saying that actually for China, we still will have our increase because of the importance of this market and the growth we're targeting at. Bear this in mind, I am suddenly more tolerant of the construction site along the way coz I realized no matter how ugly the construction site looks and how noise it is, in the economics, it comes alongside with my 8.5% merit salary increase. And when there's absolute peace in the city as the Europeans have in their city, the merit increase will go too.

And who knows, with all the funny talks of "G2", with the expection of China economy become second largest in the world soon, perhaps I would, in some way, become a Citizen of the World just by sitting squre in my living room in Shanghai.