At a meeting with CEO of Lenovo Yang Yuanqing in China this year, CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk said he doesn’t like the conception of “marketing”, because it’s like “cheating people to buy something”. Instead, Yang Yuanqing defined “fans economy” as a kind of brand economy.
In China, marketing is taken as the top priority by IT companies, instead of quality or technology. Insufficient marketing can be dangerous.
A typical example is Meizu’s Smartphone, founder of Meizu J. Wong is a very low key man, unwilling to stand under spotlight, his MX series smartphones are among the best home products of China, but suffered low sales for years. In contrast, Xiaomi Phone’s founder Lei Jun is pretty high profile and good at marketing through social medias like Weibo.com; as a result, Xiaomi Phone has witnessed explosive sales.
J. Wong and Lei Jun
According to J.Wong, before founding Xiaomi, Lei Jun met him as an angel investor, and elicited a lot of business secrets on phone production from him. As you can see, student can defeat his teacher by better marketing in China.
Luo Pang and Lao Luo I mentioned before are also masters of marketing, or you can call it hyping. To some extent, such approach is inspired by Steve Jobs, whose personal charisma greatly contributes to sales of iOS products in China, and he is a god in eyes of Chinese Internet entrepreneurs.
However, maybe it’s much harder to copy the spirit and ability of technical innovation, Jobs’ entrepreneur fans in China seldom talk about technologies of their products.
Similar phenomenon also exists in Chinese Internet media world. Many journalists, editors and even writers don’t believe in quality of content; instead, they believe in gossips, hyping, wild guesses and false reports, the target of which is to raise attention and expand popularity.
Moreover, shortcoming of content can be remedied easily by translating articles from their foreign counterparts.
