Objective/Challenge

Entering the Chinese market with any international brand is never a simple or fast process due in part to consumer awareness and attitudes, bureaucratic requirements and the local market dynamics. No matter how well known a brand might be in the west, when it initially arrives in China or is considering entering the Chinese market to some extent the marketing effort and strategy must be developed from scratch, and the way the brand communicates must be totally localized.

Our challenges when bringing a British luxury fragrance brand to China were many and included defining its all-important Chinese name, taking the brand story and localizing it to resonate with the Chinese consumer, establishing a social media presence on multiple platforms, ensuring trademarks are in place, developing marketing and presentation materials to be used during off-line events; in effect everything from a market entry strategy to execution planning.

As a luxury British brand, we wanted to work with other brands of the same level where we could jointly benefit both parties, and to leverage consumer groups. We aimed to be able to do this using our networks of UK and international brand leaders, in addition to targeting potential consumer groups via our own network of affluent Chinese consumers. The fragrance brand being niche has both positives and negatives, being rare and not mainstream would make it attractive to those with a desire to have what others didn’t, but being niche also meant that it would take time to raise awareness and trust in a brand that was unknown.

Outcome/results

As the brands team in China, our initial objective was to raise brand awareness within the correct consumer groups to drive business through international channels such as the UK, Europe and the USA. We did this through bi-weekly social media posts on multiple platforms, the brand story was told through the luxury print media in order to give the brand status in the eyes of potential consumers, and monthly offline fragrance education and experience events were held. These events would often be cohosted by us as the brand and another UK luxury brand such as Bentley, Maclaren, Aston Martin etc. Many events were run with non-British brands across sectors such as luxury watches, whisky and wine for example.

As brand awareness increased, Chinese consumers asked to purchase product in China rather than when traveling, based on this demand we managed the retail approvals process for perfume fragrances, established an online store and started selling product directly to consumers. In parallel the brand saw more purchases by mainland Chinese at their points of presence around the globe.