An Innocent Abroad
A Marketing Adventure in China
A Marketing Adventure in China
I don’t like to examine my life too closely because whenever I do I end up cringing at what I got away with.
Now in my early 70s and feeling settled, prosperous and content, I ask myself how I managed to navigate, negotiate, and survive all that drama of the past six decades: 11+ failure; unqualified 15-year-old school leaver; unemployment; bankruptcy; city centre pub landlord; malignant melanoma; five marriages/four divorces; five children spread around the world; a PGCE, MA and PhD; several careers; 13 books (with more on the way); athletics coach; local politician; Buddhist monk; university professor in gender studies; educational consultant; and, today, a British expat living in northern Thailand and writing this article for EDDi.
As I say, don’t ask me how, just share my amazement at the fact that I am still standing.
And, all that life drama did teach me a thing or two.
One lesson which has come in very handy this past twelve months is to make no assumptions about that of which you have no experience.
This particular story begins with a very close friend of mine, now living in Canada. With over a quarter of a century of experience at Directorship level of international schooling (Hong Kong) behind him, my friend and I agreed that now was the time to join forces and set up our own international educational consultancy. With experience and funds behind us that wasn’t too difficult. The company quickly got established and within a few months we’d expanded our team of international educational experts to 10.
We knew our market – international and independent schools around the world, but with a particular focus on East and South East Asia. And that included China. Fair enough, most education companies would like to be a part of the China gold rush, and we are no exception.
But how to actually get into the market?
Maintaining our independence and control over our operation was (and still is) paramount, so that required us to go it alone into China – no agencies. Fair enough, but what none of us had was direct experience of digital marketing in China, me least of all - and I was the Director leading on this.
What followed was basically a catalogue of errors and mistaken assumptions, mostly made by me, from which I (and my company) was only saved by the intervention and good advice of an excellent Chinese digital marketing firm.
So please take what follows in the spirit intended: Advice on how to avoid the same pitfalls we fell into.
Assumptions and adventure
My first wrong assumption was that my company could actually undertake a digital marketing campaign in China.
No chance. Well, not unless you open a company in mainland China.
If you’ve ever tried to open a company in mainland China then you can skip to the next paragraph. You’ll know it is not just a massive task, but one which will quickly lead to an unending series of massive headaches. Even International corporations blissfully operating in most parts of the world are unprepared for the China company experience.
As one such company representative put it:
“the problems never go away, they just continue and continue – as do the changes in Chinese company law. In the end you have to accept that this is the price for having a physical presence in China.”
And then there is Covid-19.
If your company is like mine, with Directors of different nationalities locked down in different parts of the world and therefore unable to physically travel to China to sign documents and open bank accounts, then good luck with opening a company there.
My next assumption I have no excuse for.
It’s not as if I’ve never been to China – I’ve experienced trying to get Google, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp even in a relatively open city such as Shenzen. Only going to happen if you use a VPN. Which is against the law.
In which case, you better get used to using Baidu, WeChat, Weibo, Bilibili, Zhihu and the rest. My learning curve is now getting steeper because not only do I know nothing of these platforms, I don’t speak or read Chinese.
Enter then my Fairy Godmother, or more accurately, a Chinese (Guangzhou -based) digital marketing company. How did I find them? Simply by Googling ‘Chinese digital marketing company’ and up they popped – along with hundreds of others. I contacted the first five on the screen and my Fairy Godmother was the most on the ball. So off we flew together, with me holding on very tightly to her skirts.
First destination was a new company website, to be written in English, Mandarin and Thai. Never mind that we cannot actually promote the website directly in mainland China (no company) let us get the site up and running and take it from there.
My assumption was that the experience of having a website designed by the Chinese would be very similar to the experience of having it designed by my friends back in the north of England. Wrong again. Whereas the latter will approach the task creatively, the former appear to operate only to templates. I and my fellow Directors must choose a design template. Done. Let’s hope it looks okay once all the material is up on it (fortunately, it does).
So, a tricky start but then we get some wind behind our sail.
First off, how many website companies in northern England could produce your website in perfect Mandarin and in perfect Thai? Not many. But my Fairy Godmother can – she is a ‘hyper-polyglot’ and can fully communicate in pretty much every prominent language under the sun.
Second bonus is equally unexpected – cost.
My company gets all this done - website in three languages and finished within four weeks, plus a year’s maintenance and updating - for just over USD2,000.
And aside from the two weeks of Chinese New Year, when the whole of China stops work, I get immediate responses to all my queries, concerns and website updates.
I know China is supposed to be a communist country, but there is a lot about my China Marketing Adventure which feels more California than, well, California.
Don’t bank on it
But then the wicked wolf enters the story and suddenly it’s not so much a fairy tale as a nightmare.
Not that I hadn’t been warned – the wicked wolf could be heard at times, howling in the distance. The warning came in the form of an email from the Chinese company informing us that our payment for the website design and creation hadn’t gone through to their account.
Why?
I had made a slight error on the transfer payment document – I hadn’t written the name of the Chinese company in the exact way it should be written and so the Chinese bank was withholding payment to the Chinese company.
Irritating for everyone, but not disastrous.
I quickly contacted our UK bank, and they arranged another payment – though it did mean that for two weeks we had two payments debited from our business account while we waited for the first payment to be returned by the Chinese mainland bank.
I’ve been using banks for a good many years but this is a new experience for me. But hey, one never stops learning. Then my fellow Directors and I decide to use our Thai bank account for any further international payments, including those to China.
Big mistake.
The next payment coming up is a larger one – to cover several months global digital marketing; website optimization, google ads and Western social media. The Chinese company put together a really superb package and it’s well within our budget.
This time, the payment is made personally at the local (Chiang Mai) branch of our Thai bank. A bit labour-intensive but at least we get to see the actual transfer document is written correctly so no withholding by the Chinese bank.
If only.
Ten days later and the Chinese company is asking if the payment has gone through.
Yes, it has.
Only, no, it hasn’t.
Why not?
Because some clerk at the Bangkok Head Office of our Thai bank made one spelling error on the transfer document. In the Chinese company name she typed ‘TEACHNOLOGY’ rather than ‘TECHNOLOGY’.
This is starting to get annoying.
A fellow Director (who happens to be my Thai wife - she can be fearsome) blazes round to the local branch and demands it get sorted immediately. Hasty phone calls to the Bangkok Bank HQ, the verbal humiliation of some poor clerk, and the form gets rewritten and resubmitted.
Over a week later and still no payment has been made.
What on earth is the problem this time?
Problem is the transfer payment form now has a missing word for the Chinese company’s address.
That all kicks off just before Chinese New Year, at which point everything and everyone shuts down in China (or so it seems).
Meanwhile, my wife doesn’t know who to blame or how to get it sorted. So, she blames everyone. And then she calls our lawyer – which quickly speeds things up.
Investigations eventually reveal that three banks and six bank branches are involved in this single transaction of ours; our Thai bank, a German bank based in mainland China, and the China mainland bank. And most of the conversations between them are not in English, well, not a version of English that I can readily understand.
All of these banks get contacted, along with the Chinese company accountants and a Director of the Chinese company. Dozens of emails, and it seems endless scans of documents. It is now six weeks since we made the payment and no one can tell us where our money is. But threats from my wife and our lawyer seem to do the trick.
Of course, the missing money is not missing at all – it is sitting comfortably with the Chinese mainland bank HQ, which for whatever reason have decided to withhold payment to their Guangzhou branch and thus to the Chinese Company’s account. They’ve had our cash for nearly two months during which it’s been earning interest. Our Thai lawyer tells us this is a common problem with money payments to Chinese banks – the slightest error on a transfer document and the money doesn’t get paid. But nor does it get returned to the payer very quickly.
Eventually, this stressful situation only gets resolved by the Chinese company accountants, who inform me; “after our many solicitations to our bank they have confirmed to us they will unblock the payment and credit the money to our account in the next few days.”
Thank goodness for that.
And get paid it does, which means my company, Whitehead, Lee and Associates, can look forward to the start of its digital marketing campaign – you may have spotted it on Linkedin.
Lots of lessons learned in this particular China Marketing Adventure one of which is to move our company account from a Thai bank to a more international bank.
Hope that works.
Though I will still be expecting that dreaded email from the Chinese digital marketing company asking:
“has the payment gone through yet?’
INTERESTED IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION?
The Teacher’s Guide is getting around! Seen here up a cliff face in Thailand. When we said ‘a companion to your international adventure’ we didn’t quite mean literally!
Grab a copy to take on your own adventure.