Burberry's topic page on online community Baidu Tieba.
Thanks to rampant safety and counterfeit scandals, many shocking discoveries about consumer goods have been brought to light in China in recent years. As a consequence, Chinese customers are one of the world’s most distrustful consumer groups when it comes to their attitudes about brands. To make sure they're educated about brands, they have turned to many specialized websites with user reviews as well as their experience of a brand’s products—and luxury goods have not been left out.
A study from Accenture has found the following:
Indeed, our research revealed that 97 percent of Chinese consumers told others about a bad customer service experience in 2011, and 52 percent posted comments about the negative experience online.
In order to control your online reputation, you need experts paying attention to comments posted about your brands. So, should there be any bad comments toward your brand, they could react quickly by vouching for it. Meanwhile, adopting a humble position and saying that you will make sure that things go back to normal as soon as possible is very important to Chinese customers. You show them respect, something critical when it comes to e-reputation, and more globally in Chinese culture. Adapting to your customer is the key to a successful marketing campaign.
Trying to watch the whole Internet is too vast, however. You need make your priorities and target the key websites. Listed below are three of the most popular Chinese online review sites that discuss luxury, fashion, and beauty brands.
Baidu Tieba#
There are several features in Baidu that you need to pay close attention to when you do community management on the Chinese Internet. The first is Baidu Tieba (百度贴吧).This is where you need to go in order to find the biggest, most active, and easiest to control Chinese community. These netizens will comment, give advice, and provide some feedback to the brand. Because of the platform design, it is very easy to control your e-reputation there despite the size of the community. You only need one task manager to oversee everything that is being said about your brand and control the posts to avoid junk, spam and bad comments from tarnishing your brand image.
In addition, there are more targeted websites whose audience is more specific that can be chosen according to your product and how you want to position it in the market.
Yoka#
Baidu-invested fashion site Yoka wants to be the standard when it comes to Chinese luxury. You can find everything as long as it is a high-end product: smartphones, cosmetics, or clothes.
This website has been specifically tailored to give the visitor a sense of luxury to attract and appeal to him or her as much as possible, as well as over 7 million user-generated tips.
Kimiss#
This is the biggest online community for cosmetics with:
- 1 million daily users
- 3 million weekly users
- A user base of mainly 20-35 year olds
This website is the first place cosmetics consumers will think about to check cosmetics and other users’ impressions and reviews. This has become a reflex as much as Google in the West for someone who doesn’t know something.
Therefore, if you sell high-end cosmetics, Kimiss is the place to be. To be successful, you have to have both a strong online presence, and be quick to respond should someone post bad reviews of your products.
Olivier Verot is the founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency, and specializes in digital marketing solutions for the Chinese market. Find more information about the author on Google Plus or LinkedIn.