month in review • DIARY
Bit of a stretch Li Ning
flounders with yoga; IKEa leverages Chinese
superbrats;
Unilever serves up suspect
soup statistics
more consumers are wearing smarter clothes instead of shell suits, and there have always been too many bad sports brands around. Li Ning is getting a particular pummeling, on the street and in the market – and the company deserves it. Te “Make the Change” ads are terrible. Doing yoga in Li Ning? Forget it – hardly anybody does yoga nowadays, the fad has passed. Te mighty Nike took a wobble a few years back af- ter mixing up images of performance sports with trendy fads like yoga. Consumers were left con- fused. Now Li Ning is repeating the mistake.
C T
alking of advertising, I’d be fascinated to know how consumers are responding to one of
IKEA’s new ads. Worryingly, they may like it. Here’s the plot: Regu- lation Chinese white-collar fam- ily (mum, dad, little emperor) come home from the shops. Te kid tries to hang up his water bottle but the hook is too high. He has to jump but he’s so fat he can’t reach. Eventually he throws his bottle on the floor, angry and exasperated. And what do his parents do at this display of tantrum throwing? Redecorate the house to suit the chubby little brat! Te messages about the current state of Chinese middle class think- ing, doting parents and S-generation brats to be gained from this ad are indeed legion.
I 6
The number of un- inhabited islands to be built up as tourist sites near Hainan
hina’s sports brands are getting squeezed, just like I predicted in this column. Te fact is that
FRENCH PAUL
THE DIARY
Paul French is chief China representative of Access Asia
themselves as anchor tenants, and now IKEA is following. (Whether the malls will be self-assembly, the instruc- tions in Swedish and come with mil- lions of little Allen keys, I really don’t know.) Te canny Swedes have lined up some good partners – French grocer Auchan, Chinese appliance king Sun- ing and cinema operator Jin Yi Film for three new malls in Beijing, Wuhan and Wuxi. It seems the DIY kings are now doing it themselves in China. Practice what you preach, as they say.
Whether IKEA’s China-based malls will be self-assembly and come with millions of little Allen keys, I really don’t know
KEA is doing well these days, but like Tesco and Jusco they’ve not found many friends in
the mall development community. Local develop- ers basically all go high-end – malls your mistress would design with the requisite Louis Vuitton flagship, overpriced Italian scoff, slippery marble floors... you know the type. So Jusco and Tesco have struck out on their own, building malls with
The size of China’s first-quarter trade deficit, the first in seven years
$1b 300
years I’d be a rich man. Apparently, opportunities for brands like Knorr and Hellmann’s abound. Really? Does China need more chicken stock? Has a Chinese shopper ever bought mayonnaise except by accident? According to Alan Jope, Unilever’s Greater Chi- na chairman, interviewed in the Financial Times, “Te soup mar- ket is 100 billion liters a year and that’s all made from scratch.” Is it? My local shops are full of stock cubes. One also wonders just how dim Jope thinks FT readers are… “Hefei, Shenyang and Chang- chun possess tremendous promise. Tese are all growing like a weed. And most of your readers have probably never heard of any of them.” Te many FT readers who
I
have heard of these places might be rather alarmed at anything that grows like a weed. Expect another Greater China chairman and another “Unilever targets China growth” story along in a year or so.
shelves! My tip – avoid shampoo inflation com- pletely by adopting the bald look. Sell any leftover shampoo to some idiot queuing up to buy gallons of it at Tesco.
B
The number of cows genetically modified in China to produce “human” milk
The estimated percentage of global luxury sales China will account for by 2020
44% $54.4b
China’s renewable energy investment in 2010
China Economic Review • May 2011 11
ut didn’t Unilever sell a lot of shampoo after inflation scares saw mad consumers clearing
f I had a dollar for every time I’ve read a “Unli- ever targets China growth” story in the last 20
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