Chinese brands

China’s Brand New Brand Names

Ming Jiajing jar from China First Capital blog post

1837. That’s when the first and still grandest of all consumer brand companies got its start.  Procter & Gamble started off selling soap and candles, then in 1879, introduced its first major branded product, Ivory soap, which quickly became the leading soap brand in the US. P&G then gradually, over the next 130 years, added other brands that became market leaders, including Tide, Crest, Pampers, Gillette, Olay, Head & Shoulders. 

This same slow-and-steady pace characterizes most other well-known consumer brand companies, including: Unilever, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Mercedes-Benz, Gucci, Tiffany, Nike, Hershey, Crayola (http://www.chinafirstcapital.com/blog/archives/927), etc. 

The lesson: building brands takes time. Lots and lots of time. 

Except, that is, in China. Here, brands go from drawing board to market dominance in a matter of a few years, or less. The reason? Like so much else in China, economic and social change occurs so rapidly that time seems compressed. Three years of economic growth in China is faster than a generation’s economic growth elsewhere. No major economy in modern times has grown as fast, for as long, as China has over the last 30 years.

gdp

 The other reason, peculiar to China, is that there were few brands of any kind before the 1980s. Back then, a stolid proletarian China had a depressingly small number of equally stolid proletarian brands. Many have since disappeared. Those that are still around have often been overwhelmed into irrelevance by newer Chinese brands, or ones imported from abroad.

Good examples of this are Flying Pigeon bicycles and Bee & Flower soap. They were once near-monopolies in China, during Mao’s time. Today, they are bare remnants of their former, dominant selves. Neither has more than a 1% market share, if that. It’s hard to find any other examples outside China during the last 25 years of once-dominant brands losing so much market share so quickly. 

In the US and Europe, older brands often have cache. In China, they are toxic, for the most part, because they are the products of an era of scarcity and little to no consumer choice. So, the tens of thousands of Chinese consumer brands created over the last 25 years entered a market with few, if any, well-established incumbents. A few foreign brands have also done well in China’s mass market over this time: P&G has a great business here with Crest, Tide, Olay, Pantene. Other winners include junk food giants McDonalds & KFC, along with Coca-Cola, Nokia, Apple, Nike, Marlboro, Loreal.

But, in many cases, new Chinese brands have fought and won against competition from well-known imports. Protectionist trade rules have played some part in this, of course. But, a lot of the credit really belongs to smart Chinese entrepreneurs. Thanks to them, China’s consumer market has gone from brand-less to branded in less than a generation.

P&G’s kingpins, like Crest, Pantene and Tide, face a proliferation of Chinese competitors, priced both lower and higher than the global brands. In many other product markets, Chinese brands stand alone, including tissues and toilet paper (sold here in bulky ten-roll packs), bed linen, men’s and women’s underwear, and most food products.

Overall, there are few dominant brands with market shares large enough to discourage new competitors. In fact, new brands arrive all the time. In evolutionary terms, China is in the middle of a kind of Cambrian Explosion, with the rapid appearance of all kinds of new brands. Inevitably, the huge number of brands will shrink, as winners emerge, and has-beens die out. This process took decades in the US and Europe. It will almost certainly happen far more quickly in China. 

One reason for the especially rapid pace: lots of capital is now available to create and support new brands. Why? There is so much to be gained for any company that establishes a dominant brand in China. China will soon have the largest domestic market in the world. Grabbing a few points of market share in China will often equate to billions of dollars in revenue over the next five to ten years. 

In many of the most promising consumer markets, no brand has even emerged yet, with national scope and distribution. Here, smart entrepreneurs can build a brand in fertile virgin turf, rather than trying to force their way into an already crowded patch. If done right, you can turn a new brand into a billion-dollar household name in a short-time. 

I see this process very clearly with one of our clients. It’s still quite a ways from being that billion-dollar colossus, but it has a real potential to become one. The entrepreneur spotted a huge market opportunity five years ago, to create a brand to sell designer accessories to Chinese women from 20 to 35 years-old.

His key insight: the process of urbanization in China is creating an enormous group of working women in this age bracket, with the spare income to spend on not-too-expensive, but well-designed earrings, bracelets, necklaces, sunglasses. 

His business is now growing very fast, with over 100 stores in most of China’s major cities. Sales should double in 2010 to about $50mn, and keep doubling every 18 months for a long time to come. The best part: he faces no real competition, and so every day, his brand grows more and more known, and so less and less vulnerable to whatever competitors may one day come along. My guess is that this brand will be one of the quickest new consumer product companies in Chinese history to reach Rmb 1 billion in sales. 

Like many of the best entrepreneurs, this one makes it look very easy. It isn’t. He takes hands-on responsibility for the four key disciplines needed to build and sustain the brand: marketing, design, management and manufacturing.

That’s the other part about brand-building in China: it not only happens fast, it often happens inside smaller founder-run companies without the input of “specialists” or ad agencies.  I don’t know how many people in China have studied product marketing in school, but my guess is not many.

 

 

From China, a Plan to Topple One of America’s Most Dominant Brands

China First Capital blog post -- China private equity

Every list of America’s most valuable brands includes the same parade of names, year after year – Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Google. Every year, these lists also ignore what could be the single most dominant brand of all. This brand is known by everyone in America, enjoys a higher market share than any of those on the list, and is able to charge a price premium as much as 300% above its competitors. The brand? Crayola Crayons. 

That’s right, that most humble and low-tech of children’s toys. No one outside the company knows Crayola’s exact market share. A good estimate is at least 80% of the US crayon market. Maybe higher. In other words, Crayola is dominant enough not just to warrant an anti-trust investigation, but to be broken up as a monopoly. 

Of course, I’m partly joking here – about the anti-trust part, not about the market share. Heaven forbid the US Department of Justice should ever decide to police kids toys. But, Crayola really is astoundingly powerful and dominant in its market. It enjoys, according to the company’s own research, 99% brand recognition in the US. Its name is not only synonymous with crayons, but has more or less shut down any lower-cost competitor from grabbing much of its market share. How it does this is also something of a miracle, since as far as I can tell, they do comparatively little advertising to sustain this. In other words, they are not only the most dominant brand, they are also the thriftiest, in terms of how much is spent each year sustaining that position in parents’ minds and kids’ playrooms. 

We don’t know exactly how big Crayola is, or any other fact about its financial performance, because it’s a private company. In fact, even more impenetrably, it’s a private company inside a private company. Binney & Smith, the original manufacturer, was sold to famously-secretive Hallmark in 1984. It’s all educated guesswork. 

But, I’m lucky to know a Chinese boss whose guesswork is far more educated than most. David Zhan is boss and majority shareholder of Wingart, a manufacturer of children’s art supplies based in Shenzhen. David is one of the smartest, savviest and most delightful businesspeople I know. Wingart is also one of my very favorite companies – though they are not a client, nor an especially large and fast-growing SME. But, Wingart is exceptionally well-run and focused, with well-made and well-designed products, as well as the most kaleidoscopically colorful assembly line I’ve ever seen. 

Wingart makes crayons. They are better than Crayola’s. That’s not David’s pride speaking, but the results of some side-by-side testing done by one of the larger American art supply companies. I personally have no doubt this is true. I’ve seen Wingart’s crayon production. Not only are they better, but they are much cheaper too. 

Still, it’s almost impossible for Wingart to gain any ground on Crayola. Wingart mainly sells under other companies’ brand names in the US, including Palmers, KrazyArt and Elmer’s. They have good distribution for many of their products at Wal-Mart and Target. But, not crayons. Wal-Mart would like to start selling Wingart’s crayons – not just, presumably, because they are better than Crayola. But, Wal-Mart, famously, does not like to be reliant on a single brand, a single supplier, for any of the products it carries. 

For the time being, Wingart’s factory is too small to produce crayons in the quantity Wal-Mart requires. This should change within a year or so, when Wingart moves to a new and larger factory about two hours from Shenzhen. Then, perhaps for the first time ever, Crayola will begin to face some real competition. I can’t wait. I think Wingart has a realistic chance to build a crayon business, worldwide, that will compete in size with Crayola, which is pretty much a US-dependent company. 

I have a lot of admiration for Crayola – not so much the crayons, but the fact that a 106 year-old brand could be so predominant in its market, and enjoy such unrivaled – and largely uncelebrated — supremacy for so long. But, I’d still like to see Wingart knock them down a few notches, or more. Crayola has it too good for too long.  American kids deserve the best crayons – as, for that matter,  do European, Chinese and other kids on the planet.