FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
M P L I
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42 issue 24 may 2015
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taggering statistics and amazing facts go hand-in-hand with any discussion about China. Did you know, for example, that there are 35 million troglodytes living in China, or that half the world’s pigs
are Chinese, or that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure visible from the moon?
The last of those ‘facts’ is a myth that I (and the rest of the world) took as ‘god’s honest’ until it was somewhat ironically debunked by Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei. It serves as a reminder that truth can be an elusive commodity, particularly in relation to the second biggest economy in the world. However, absolute veracity aside, when
it comes to online the numbers are without doubt impressive. Of all the world’s internet users more than one in five of them is connecting from China, accounting for an average 1.3 billion hours surfing every day. And of those 676 million people, more than half are under the age of 29. That’s a hell of a lot of young people online. So how do you reach them?
As Western designers, developers and Dom Raban, MD at
marketers, there are some basics that we need to understand about China before we even begin to contemplate consumption habits, social channels and user experience. The most fundamental consideration is one of language, both written and spoken. Confusingly, there are two written languages commonly used in China and literally hundreds of mutually unintelligible spoken languages (or dialects) of which Mandarin and Cantonese are the most frequently used. Mandarin is spoken in most of mainland China and Taiwan whilst Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong Province. Don’t expect somebody who speaks Mandarin to understand Cantonese or vice versa. In written communication there is either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. Simplified was introduced by Chairman Mao as a move to improve literacy and is used in mainland China whilst Traditional is used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Again, somebody who reads Traditional
Corporation Pop, explains how to overcome the linguistic, cultural and behavioural hurdles when getting online in China, the second biggest economy in the world
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