Navigating the Chinese Fashion Market with Jimmy Robinson & PingPong Digital

Navigating Challenges in China's Digital Landscape: Brand Localization

Join Jimmy Robinson, CEO of Ping Pong Digital, as he navigates China's unique digital landscape shaped by the Great Firewall. We explore the evolution of the Chinese Internet, emphasizing its mobile-centric growth, prominently characterized by app-based infrastructure. Jimmy takes us through the challenges faced by Western brands, emphasizing the need for authentic localization and the imperative to resonate with the local audience. He emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural nuances, embracing local platforms, and the art of crafting authentic narratives tailored to Chinese consumers.

The Fashion Digital Marketing Tech Stack

We focus on the 'Tech Stack' that fashion brands should use when developing a story for the Chinese market.  Shedding light on the country's experimentation with metaverse technologies, VR fashion shows, and its pioneering role in adopting innovations, Jimmy predicts a forthcoming demand for authenticity and moral stances, particularly from the emerging Gen Z and Alpha consumer base. 

Listen to PingPong Digital's podcast, 'Insight China' here.
Connect with Jimmy on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jrr87

Transcript

Peter: 0:02

Hello, I'm Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form. The Chinese market and consumer have captivated the western fashion industry, especially luxury brands, seeking explosive growth for over a decade. However, 2023 has seen that grow slow down dramatically. So why is this? In this episode, I'm joined by Jimmy Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Ping Pong Digital a specialty Chinese marketing agency. It comes as no surprise that China is its own tech ecosystem, and reaching them using tactics from the worst certainly doesn't work. Having worked with some of the fashion's biggest brands, Jimmy takes us through the digital platforms that work best, how Chinese customers behave on the different touch points and what he thinks brands should be doing when defining their marketing tech stack.

Jimmy: 0:51

The Chinese internet was basically born through mobile devices. They didn't necessarily have a big desktop internet infrastructure, so the majority of the Chinese internet has grown up being an app-based internet system, Whereas in the west we've gone from a desktop system and we've been migrating that over to a mobile experience. The mobile app infrastructure in China is far more sophisticated than pretty much any other marketplace that exists.

Peter: 1:20

Let's get the chat underway with Jimmy on this episode of Venturing Into Fashion Tech. How are you today, jimmy? I'm doing very well. Thank you, Peter. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I am looking forward to today's conversation. So it's going to be the first time when we're going to have a tech-related talk, but my business and market one, and specifically the China market, which Ping Pong Digital does actually deal with. So this is going to be very interesting for our listeners that want to go into this specific market. If you're a fashion brand, if you're a tech company, this episode is going to be very interesting.

Peter: 1:57

But before we get into it, I just want to set the scene with a little bit of context to actually what's happening in the China market. So China's fashion revenue is expected to show a compound annual growth rate of 8.51% between 23 and 27, resulting in a projected market volume of $368.10 billion. So it's a huge market by 2027. That's according to a statistic. China accounts for over 15% of the total smartphone users globally. Again, there's a lot of people connected in this specific market and we'll have a little bit of a conversation about that a little bit later on as to what that does in terms of tech and commerce and fashion retail. Social commerce is huge in China compared to the West, where people use apps like WeChat and Xiaohuangshu. It's rapidly growing in China, accounting for 16.3% of online retail e-commerce sales in 2023. Tech is key in making all of this happen. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this, jimmy, now. But let's start with Jimmy. Tell us a bit about your background. How did you become a digital marketing entrepreneur?

Jimmy: 3:09

Gosh. So this is a story that I've actually only told, I think, a couple of times. So this is some, I think, relatively exclusive content you've got here for your listeners. So after university, I think, as most people do have no idea, have no idea what it is that I actually wanted to do upon graduating Started putting my feelers out there, trying to identify different career path opportunities for me.

Jimmy: 3:40

I stumbled initially into the world of headhunting, as one does, naturally, but my headhunting career took an interesting turn when I actually begun my headhunting career out in China, in Beijing. So I applied for a job in London. I technically got offered the job in London, but not really in London. So I immediately went out to China, started my professional working career and life out in China, did headhunting for about six, seven months or so, realized it wasn't necessarily the fulfilling career that I personally was looking for and my boss at the time basically recommended advertising and marketing to me. He felt that would be a very good fit for me. I agreed.

Jimmy: 4:30

I had a big interest and a passion in this area and so from that I went and started working for an advertising agency out in Beijing. So all of my background and knowledge in marketing was around China and helping, in particular, Western brands understand the Chinese marketing landscape and helping them to localize and adapt their marketing materials to communicate better with Chinese customers. After doing that for a couple of years, went on afterwards to found my own agency, pingpong Digital, which is still the agency that I'm heading spearheading to this very day, and we specialize in helping Western brands reach out and connect with their Chinese audiences. So I've been doing this now, for my gosh, almost a decade. Actually, no, it's been a decade.

Peter: 5:28

It's been a long time and just for context for our listeners, you can speak Mandarin. You studied it, so it's not like you've just popped up in Beijing, started to do a job in Beijing. It's not as easy as that is.

Jimmy: 5:42

Yeah, for sure I'm oversimplifying something that was obviously. You know, it's not something that anybody can just turn up and then, instantly, you're going to be able to get a job in this area. No, that's not the case. I already studied Chinese beforehand. I had a strong understanding of not only the language, obviously, but also the culture, and that helped obviously not only to be able to get a professional working career going in China, but has also allowed me to be able to build a professional working career that involves China outside of China.

Peter: 6:14

And what is it about China that led you to this specific market?

Jimmy: 6:18

That's a really good question actually. I think at the time. I think now people would probably be like, yeah, china. Of course that makes perfect sense. When I started learning Chinese, it was back in 2007. So it was still kind of early-ish days, I guess, of this China coming out that we've kind of seen in the past decade. For me, the main reason why I wanted to do this is because I saw that China was going to be the next big thing. If you go back into the 80s and stuff, it was going to be Japan. That was one of the key markets that everybody wanted to learn more about, to focus on, to understand. For me, when I was looking at deciding what degree I wanted to at university, I wanted to have some foresight with that. So I wanted something that was going to be the next thing, not something that had already kind of like happened.

Peter: 7:11

So what does PingPong actually do? So you went to Beijing. You've now Got some experience in digital marketing. You then returned back to the UK's. That correct.

Jimmy: 7:21

Yes.

Peter: 7:21

And you decided to launch Ping Pong Digital. How did that come about?

Jimmy: 7:25

Also nice question Again, probably another exclusive for you. So when I returned back to the UK so the reason why I returned back in the first place was the agency that I was working for kind of went through a merger and acquisition process and essentially the majority of us were essentially kind of made redundant at that time. So I was offered to be relocated to Australia or Singapore at that time. But I thought, well, if I'm going to return to an English-speaking country, I'll just go back to my English-speaking country. I hadn't been back to the UK for a couple of years, keeping in mind that originally I wanted to work professionally in London. So I wanted to work in the UK after I graduated. So went back to the UK, ended up having mild reverse culture shock actually when I was there.

Peter: 8:09

Like you've been just missing so long from the UK that you missed the fish and chips. Is that correct?

Jimmy: 8:15

It was the fish and chips, obviously. Things like that drew me back to the UK, but the main reverse culture shock that I had was when I got back to the UK. I now was so used to the way things worked in China, so I was used to when you want to call for the check, for example, or get the bill, you just wave your hand up in the air. You shout yeah, get someone's attention, they come over, it's easy, yeah.

Peter: 8:42

I love that too, to be honest.

Jimmy: 8:43

It's so convenient. We've all had those situations where we very politely got to wait for somebody to catch their attention, get their eye and just wave them over so we can ask for the bill. So I had this weird thing no one was able to relate to me in the UK. None of my family or friends that I had were really able to relate to this weird reverse culture shock that I was going through. So I put out feelers with a bunch of my friends In China. I used WeChat, of course, to do this. So on WeChat, I basically said hey, does anybody know any Chinese people that live in and around Birmingham, which is where I was based, just outside of Birmingham and, at the time, near my hometown? And yeah, someone just said oh, they have a friend who's just moved there from Cardiff, from Wales, and they can help to link us up. So ended up linking up with this person. His name was River. You will know this, of course. River is my current business partner. So the world and the universe, I guess, have a funny way of working sometimes, because the first person I met back in the UK ended up being my current business partner.

Jimmy: 9:54

Initially I wasn't necessarily looking to start up a company. I had interviewed around with a bunch of different companies back in London in the UK and my goal was to build my career now at a larger agency, because I'd just come from an agency and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be back in a big agency again, but when I was applying for jobs in the UK at this point I'd only had a couple of years worth of work experience. Now in China. My title was Account Manager and I was working with some big domestic brands in China and big international brands as well.

Jimmy: 10:35

But when I got back to the UK the experience that I had from China wasn't really valued. So they basically offered me an internship and at the time I still am, in hindsight, offended that they even thought that that's all I was capable of Fools on them Literally. Yeah, they missed out. I could have helped to build so much for them, but instead I got to build that myself. So in a part of my language, but in a few moments I was like no, if you guys aren't going to give me the job that I know I'm qualified for, that I have the skillset for and the capabilities to be able to do, I'll just go and do it myself, and that's literally how the company basically got started. And meeting River, who also had this passion and enthusiasm to set up and run a company as well, he had the entrepreneurial spirit and drive we thought, why not? And so that's literally how it got started and it was an FU moment really, and what is the specialism of your agency Then?

Peter: 11:36

why is it so difficult for Western brands to go into that market?

Jimmy: 11:40

Sure, I mean I most people would have heard of, like the Great Firewall of China, and the Great Firewall of China obviously is created in a completely different ecosystem out in China. So the New York Times actually has a great quote that I like to use on why the Chinese internet landscape, I guess, is quite complicated, and the quote is this it's almost as if the Chinese internet is a lagoon. In that lagoon there were swamp monster apps that bear some resemblance to the creatures in the ocean but have mutated in some ways. So what this essentially means is that you know you go back in the day. You go back to when I was living in China. You know they had a Facebook knockoff all of the apps that we were used to using here you would basically just see like a knockoff version with a different name that existed out in China.

Jimmy: 12:33

That changed a lot over the last like decade or so. We've seen this entire new internet landscape and infrastructure be built out of a different need and general trend or tech trend, I guess. The Chinese internet was basically born through mobile devices. They didn't necessarily have a big desktop internet infrastructure. So the majority of the Chinese internet has grown up being an app based internet system, whereas in the West we've gone from a desktop system and we've been migrating that over to a mobile experience and a mobile environment.

Jimmy: 13:14

So you will find that the mobile infrastructure, the mobile app infrastructure, in China is far more sophisticated than pretty much any other marketplace that exists out anywhere else in the world at the moment, and so because of that, there are a lot of complications when brands end up wanting to enter into the Chinese marketplace because the experience and the knowledge that they have is just so different from what happens out in China. These swamp monster apps don't look like the same apps that we use here in the West. The websites don't look the same. They have mutated and they've become, you know, entirely different beings. They're entirely different creatures now. So when you're looking at this marketplace, it's just a whole new world.

Peter: 13:59

I'm just getting visions right now of like a massive lagoon in China and all of these monster apps, as you start calling them, like roaming around in this lagoon, basically eating up everything, and I think it's very interesting there how you think that they do have their own ecosystem of apps, software devices that we still have here in the West, and many times that I have been to China as well, it is just like a completely different world as to how they approach using their handheld devices and how they use their apps actually in their daily lives. So, as I mentioned there in the introduction, the fact that 15% of you know users connected to smartphones. It's globally in China. That's a huge amount.

Jimmy: 14:42

In addition to that as well, you know, another great statistic here is that one in five people who accesses the internet on this planet is Chinese. One in five.

Peter: 14:54

So 20% basically. So that's a lot of people considering. You know the market of Chinese over a billion people. That's a very large nation. So it's known that Chinese consumers are very tech savvy. They're hyper connected, as you've already discussed already. How does this affect the way fashion brands should approach, crafting and narrative to the Chinese consumers and specifically, what Tech should they be using?

Jimmy: 15:30

We've all heard of some of the mistakes that fashion brands have made In China. Right, I think you think back to Dolce and Gabbana. We, of course, actually have our own podcast, by the way, in site China, and that very first episode that we ever did was talking about this Dolce and Gabbana scandal that happened in China. So if anybody wants to check that out in site China, I'm sure people include the link of it. Yes, I will include the link. Thank you very much.

Jimmy: 15:58

And it's a great example, though, of how the arrogance of some brands in thinking that they can just take what they think is true about China and then try and make that work in this marketplace. So, rather than actually trying to truly understand, to localize and adapt to Chinese habits, chinese tastes, they will just take what they think to be true about this and then try and push that into the marketplace, and that is an approach that, for a very few brands, might work for them, but for the vast majority of brands, it doesn't work for them, and they have to localize and adapt everything to Chinese tastes, to Chinese customs, and to understand, most importantly, chinese culture. And this is the issue that Dolce and Gabbana Encountered with their ad campaign, where they had the model eating pizza with chopsticks.

Peter: 16:55

That was just a really bad Campaign, to be honest. I remember that from a couple of years ago. That was a proper faux pas. No, no.

Jimmy: 17:02

It was terrible. You know, this was just a case of not understanding things from a creative standpoint, right, if we're talking about things from a tech standpoint. From a tech standpoint, there are, you know, some companies that do this very, very well in big fashion brands. Burberry is a great example of this. Burberry, actually, was one of the first fashion brands to work very, very closely with WeChat in order to adopt all of the new Features and functions that we chat kind of wanted to experiment with. They hadn't really launched these features out just yet and Burberry went up to WeChat and said hey, we'll experiment with you on the latest and greatest new features and functions that you've got and we'll launch that through our own WeChat channel.

Jimmy: 17:43

So Burberry went into China, not thinking we're just going to use the same brand assets, the same tech, the same strategies. It have worked well for us in the West. They didn't do that. They went up to Chinese Platforms and went up to the Chinese experts and basically said what can we do to make sure that we are going to be the forefront of what's going to work in China? And because of that, burberry, still to this very day, has done, you know, fantastic out in China, and it's a brand that holds a lot of prestige Amongst Chinese customers. They kind of saved Burberry. So they did such a good job in the China market that it ended up saving, you know, burberry the main brand itself, because they adopted Chinese platforms, new Chinese technologies, and we're willing to experiment with those things as well. And I think that's really important in China is to try to be someone who does something different, rather than just trying to always do something that's just being done everything Every six months. What you knew about China has already changed, so you've constantly got to be innovating.

Peter: 18:47

So obviously Burberry is a mega brand. They have a lot of pounds to spend on marketing, trying to penetrate new markets, but all of our listeners are smaller companies. Do you need a lot of money to enter the market, or can it be done at a much smaller scale?

Jimmy: 19:04

There's a way to do things organically, right. You can try to grow things through interacting, engaging with influencers and things like that. The most important thing, number one for China, is to make sure that you have a presence there. So you know, do you exist on all of the main social platforms out in China? Can you begin to communicate to audiences out there?

Jimmy: 19:21

One of the biggest things in China, or one of the biggest trends that we're now starting to see in the West, is in the category of social search. What does that mean? That means that consumers, when they want to research a new brand or product in China, they go to social media platforms to research those products. They're not going to, you know, your traditional Googles and things like that. They're not going to search engines anymore. They're going to social media platforms and they're researching you through those social media platforms. So if you don't have any presence on there number one they're not going to find you at all. If they do find you on there and they find that the account itself is not active and you know nothing's going on there, it just doesn't look great, right.

Peter: 20:01

Yeah, you just basically let them instantly.

Jimmy: 20:04

It's just not going to look great. So you want to make sure that, from an organic standpoint, you've actually got some good, the right organic platforms for your target audience and you've got some good quality content on there. That content must be in Chinese as well. You can't post things in Spanish or in English or any other languages and think that that's going to be acceptable in the marketplace. It's just not acceptable. That's the way that a brand will get cancelled, and you don't want to be cancelled before you're big. So avoid that. If you can, make sure that you do try to localize and adapt as much as you possibly can do for the China market, because you're selling to a consumer that speaks Chinese. Right, they want to be able to see themselves reflected in the marketing materials in the brand that you're pushing out and positioning there. So it's not only important to make sure that, from a creative standpoint obviously you're taking that into consideration.

Jimmy: 20:51

Being on the right platforms is very important as well. Smaller brands can do this, but you've also got to remember as well that you're entering into one of the most competitive marketplaces on the planet. They're the biggest luxury spenders you know in the world and they're one fifth of the world's internet population. There's a lot of noise. This is not a quiet space. This is a very busy internet space in China, but the next 10 years is going to be in Asia. You know, every brand who wants to be successful over the next 10 to 15 years has to have a presence out in Asia, and the biggest, the most important market for them in Asia at the moment is China. So, in order to make sure that you are securing that success for the future, china is a market that's very important for you to understand.

Peter: 21:35

When we're talking about fashion, though, in general, the fashion space is just saturated, no matter where you are in the world. You know we're currently recording this live from New York City, which you know my first time here, so I'm very happy to be here. Welcome, thank you. But yeah, it's just so saturated wherever you are in the world when it comes to fashion. You know I alluded to earlier in the introduction that it's nearly a $370 billion US dollar market out in China, so it's still a huge market and I imagine there's quite a lot of opportunities still to be had there.

Jimmy: 22:07

For sure. There are still plenty of opportunities to have out in China and you will still get brands who enter the marketplace and will have a lot of success in the marketplace. The most important thing is just making sure that you're not going in there blind. Don't go in there assuming that the strategies that have worked for you elsewhere are going to work for you out in China. You need to recognize and understand what strategies are going to work best for you in China, who your target demographic is in China and how best to reach out and connect and communicate with that demographic out in China.

Peter: 22:36

So we've talked a lot about WeChat, weibo and social media platforms. Obviously because ping-pong digital forte is social media. But when we're talking about just marketing and crafting narratives, it can now go much more beyond social media, especially when it comes to technology. So, for example, we can create beautiful, engaging worlds in the metaverse via VR. We can create interactive experiences in AR. How can such technologies now evolve, the way these narratives are being built?

Jimmy: 23:08

I think China, here as well, genuinely is leading the world. So you know, for Shanghai Fashion Show I think it was earlier this year they actually held a metaverse fashion show and they had a bunch of big brands that participated in this. For some of the big shopping festivals They've turned your creator, I should say these giant big shopping malls in the metaverse where you can go in there and you can go and shop actually in different brand stores and purchase things in this virtual reality. And this is with the current technology that we have in this space, which kind of sucks a bit. You know, you look at what's coming out from meta and stuff like that. It feels like something like from second life, if you remember second life, which is 20 years old.

Peter: 23:52

Exactly, that's a very retro, brings back a lot of memories as well, but it was like the first version of the metaverse really.

Jimmy: 23:58

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's showing your age here that you remember that. Thanks, so you know it's. It's that's literally what we still have now. It's rubbish. It's not very good.

Jimmy: 24:09

China is still leading the world in this way, so it's still adopting these metaverse technologies, these web three technologies, and trying to make them work in different ways. It's still an experiment. Have they figured things out yet? Not necessarily, you know. Is the experience great? It's okay.

Jimmy: 24:31

What's it going to be like next year? What's it going to be like when the Apple vision comes out, for example? And all of a sudden now we're going to be presented with a whole new version of what VR and AR, what web three, what the metaverse could actually be, what it could look like for consumers. I would say that we're going to be looking to see what comes out of China to lead the rest of the world in these areas, and I think there will be some exciting things coming out of this space out in China and, like I said, they're already doing it. Who else has been running fashion shows in the metaverse that actually gets any real traction? Nobody. It's like this weird vanity project that people do that doesn't really have any traction in reality, but in China it's something that actually has real tangible traction and I think that's only going to evolve over the coming years.

Peter: 25:20

Are you yet in the metaverse? Do you spend time in there? I do not, because it sucks right now. So you still want to get the headache of putting your Oculus Quest on and wandering around for hours?

Jimmy: 25:30

I get motion sick Me too. Yeah, they're really. They're really not very pleasant and they're not great. I don't enjoy them very much but I get the same. You know, I get car sick or sea sick, and I'm not good with video games either if the character is always jumping around. So I struggle a little bit with all of these different things. So VR headsets are not great for me personally.

Jimmy: 25:50

It's one of the challenges. Again, right, because I'm not alone in this space. I know a lot of friends who, when they put their VR headsets on their plate for like 10 minutes, they take it off, like oh, I'm feeling a bit nauseous. So you know, it's something that people have to figure out. How can we overcome these kinds of difficulties and challenges? How can we make it so that when you're sat on the sofa and you're in a stationary position, that you can still experience everything but and stay in that world for a significant amount of time? And I think the amount of time that people spend on this will decide whether or not it can be successful or not. If you can sit there and spend hours on there comfortably, you'll be successful in that, just as you are with your smartphone. You sit there, you spend hours on it, the smartphone is successful. Anything where you can get people to sit down and spend a lot of time on will be successful, and that's what is needed with VR and AR technologies.

Peter: 26:37

Not necessarily China specific. This could be anywhere in this world. What do you think is the future, then, of digital storytelling and creating marketing campaigns?

Jimmy: 26:47

I think now people want something more true and authentic. Long gone right Other days when influencers would have these overly produced beautiful pictures that they would just post on Instagram right, we've got like a flowy dress or something. You still get those sometimes, but now people want true, authentic voices. You know Gen Z, and now we should even be talking about Gen Alpha, because they're coming up very quickly. They're online and it's terrifying. I don't know if they should be necessarily online just yet, but they're already there and we can't stop that from happening.

Jimmy: 27:21

This is the generation that use apps like Be Real right. They want things to feel true, to feel authentic. They don't want to like be sold to. The things that they care about are evolving and changing. They're more into sustainability, into green technologies. They want to understand what a brand's ethos is. What are your moral stances on certain things? This is what the new generation is going to be demanding. This, obviously, will play into the kinds of technologies we'll be using in the future. How can we begin to have more authentic voices? We can use applications, obviously, or social platforms like TikTok, to have maybe more authentic voices and have more authentic conversations with our consumers, rather than just posting up a picture and hoping for the best. We'll see what happens, I guess, with the advent of these new technologies that will be coming out of the next few years.

Peter: 28:14

I just want to finish off this episode with a quick fire round of questions. The first answer that comes to your head are you ready? Go on? Favorite Chinese ad campaign by a fashion brand Do you know what?

Jimmy: 28:28

There's a brand called Leaning. It's kind of like the Nike of China. They are doing some really cool stuff. Just now They've been on a few different catwalks appearing in different fashion shows around the world as well. They've got some super cool campaigns that are out there. I'll just say Leaning, the brand itself, because I've been a fan of a lot of the stuff that they've been pushing out there.

Peter: 28:50

Favorite platform to launch a campaign on.

Jimmy: 28:53

Oh, I think the current one that I would kind of recommend to people is Xiang Shuo.

Peter: 28:59

For our concepts of our listeners, who probably don't know what they do. What is it?

Jimmy: 29:04

Red is an influencer-driven social media platform out in China. The thing that I like about Red is that it feels a lot more true and a lot more authentic. Red themselves, as a company, have made sure that their influencers aren't just constantly they're selling, but are producing really good, high quality content for their audiences. It's a great platform for brand advocacy.

Peter: 29:25

Online or offline campaign? Online One mistake that fashion brands always make when trying to craft a story to the Chinese consumer.

Jimmy: 29:33

Oh God, Back to what we just said earlier, thinking that they already know all the answers and that they understand China.

Peter: 29:40

One piece of advice to give to a budding entrepreneur Just do it, just do it. We get that quite often. Just do it, do whatever's inside your head and take the leap of faith.

Jimmy: 29:51

I think most people think that some people have all the answers to things. The reality is that none of us have oh, none of us had the answers before we began something. We all set sail on the open oceans without a map the same thing. You don't know where that treasure's going to be. Just make sure that you're being smart as you are sailing these waters.

Peter: 30:12

Thank you very much for your time, Jimmy. You're most welcome. Thanks for having me, Peter.