LEADING FOLLOWERS

Objective

To Help Global Brands Connect with Local Consumers to Create Better Cross-cultural Design for the Local Market

After some desktop research about brands who succeeded or failed when entering Chinese market, I found that the major reason of their failure was because they didn’t learn the cultural background that well to cater to the local taste, while unfortunately they didn’t have a strong enough identity to lead a trend in the market either. Thus, to understand the local life style and cultures in depth is the very first step to a successful localization for global brands.

Discussion Guide

Staying on Topic and Focusing on Human Story

I planned on two rounds of conversations with different topics as I wanted to take both the direct and analogous methods. The first round will be more intensive which takes users’ personal growth as the major focus; while the second round will be more casual which talks about different interests/expertise like education, music, cooking, food, travel, sports etc. The interviewees will have at least one of characteristics as the following - multi-cultural living experience, unique cultural experience, closely connected to brands from different cultures, or cares either a lot or nothing about brands. And they are from different age groups.

Interview & Interpretation

Understanding the Behaviors through Highlights in Personal Journey

For the first round of the interview, I talked to 6 people originally from China but with different cultural background. Some of them have never lived abroad, while some have lived in other countries since very young. In these conversations, I focused a lot on the moments and events when they are heavily influenced by cultures and surroundings, because I want to identify the “cultural behavior”. It was very fun to hear about people’s different point of views towards same topics and their personal stories.

I took their occupation, interests, locations they have lived in, along with some key takeaways and quotes from the conversation as the information board for each interviewee. They each has a summarized growth journey with highlights as well to mark out the biggest changes in their life. With all the information up in front, I was able to start gathering some interesting points on post-its and interpret from there. 

The second round of interviews were more of casual small talks to focus on the interests of different interviewees. I have 8 people for this topic and again, each of them are different in the cultural background. I took the most impressive quotes and information to the wall of information from the first round, where I was trying to rearrange and find their overlapping patterns. I was able to group a few of them and create the information clusters. The new post-its were strengthening the existing pattern or forming a new topic, which made the connections even clearer.

With the information gathered from 2 rounds of interviews, I started to map out the user connections as well. The 6 main interviewees were chosen as the samples since they could typically represent different users. I put them on a scale of 3 groups of different characteristics from the perspectives of mindset, reaction towards surroundings and personalities, and tried to find some rules which could better catergorize them. They were very different individuals at first glance, but with the mapping I started to see their common patterns. No matter how different they are in mindset or personality, the real differentiator is their decisions and reactions when facing the influence from people around, which could possibly be a cultural influence. Thus, 5 of them were grouped as followers while one of them was a leader on the other hand. It basically tells the current situation of the Chinese market - most of the consumers are followers and easily influenced by others, which was reflected a lot in our interview highlights.

Synthesis

To Dig into Reasons and Make Informed Leaps

Having the concept of consumer groups “follower V.S. leader” in mind, I was able to transfer the information clusters summarized from the post-it wall to some connected patterns as common situation, followers and leaders. There were still some details and facts after a few rounds of synthesis, so I had to keep my eyes for the very key elements among different group of users in China. 

Finally, I got to narrow down all the informations to 4 keywords which are fundamental and/or unique to the consumer group, leading to the 4 insights about Chinese culture and market.

INSIGHT #1
Chinese rely largely on people in their network and the social environment of public opinions to distinguish between various information.

INSIGHT #2
It ensures followers the feeling of safety and authenticity by taking the directions from role models they admire and people around them.

INSIGHT #3
Followers’ confidence in what they are doing majorly come from the acceptance and compliments from others. 

INSIGHT #4
Leaders would appreciate the opportunity to be themselves while still value the experience of staying connected with friends a lot.

While synthesizing the insights from previous patterns, I also realized that as the major group of Chinese customers, followers share two identical needs, which are directions and positive feedback from outside. In order to understand this large user group better, I put the 6 representatives onto another scale with “directions” and “positive feedback” as the measurement. It turns out that, depending on the level of needs, this big group can be divided into 4 different kinds of users as follow:

• Traditional Follower, the most typical follower type who need both directions and positive feedback a lot to make decisions;

• Easy-going Follower, the ones who are easily influenced by others and they like the way of staying on same track with others;

• Aspirational Follower, who thrives for success a lot while they need the recognition from others a lot before moving forward;

• Independent Follower, the leader type is actually the extreme of this group. they have their judgement system but they are willing be influenced only because they care a lot about the relationship between people, like friends and family.

Towards the specific user types from the reshaped framework, I came up with a few criteria based on the insights, which could possibly be the directions of the future solution.

HOW MIGHT WE...

• Leverage the importance of network for Chinese to create a trustworthy environment for local consumers?

• Find the right people and social circles to influence the decisions of easy-going followers?

• Encourage aspirational followers with something they care about to trust their own choices ?

• Empower independent followers to bypass all obstacles to stay different while connected?

Opportunities

Connecting Findings with Solutions via Inspirations

Understanding the local market and target users is only one part of a cross-cultural design project, but also the very fundamental first step of the project. Thus, it is a pretty good starting point to gather some inspirations for the final solution.