From BusinessWeek:
Many marketers complain that the Chinese are not brand-loyal. Consumers in China, they moan, will latch onto a new brand one day only to discard it in favor of a competitor the next. Exasperated marketers argue that confronted with such mercenary consumption patterns, they cannot understand their core markets.
While there is some truth to the complaint that Chinese consumers switch brands frequently, it is not a function of Chinese culture, as some may suppose. Rather, Chinese consumers remain fickle because China is in a phase of its development where companies bombard consumers with vastly more choices than they had even a decade ago. Another problem is that multinational companies have not always done an adequate job of identifying and understanding their core markets in order to target them effectively….[Full Text]
