CEO Positioning in China - Essential for Effective Communications
Henrik Bork, Managing Director of Asia Waypoint, talking about CEO positioning in China during maxcomm Shanghai 2019.
I have just enjoyed participating in “maxcomm Shanghai 2019”, the international marketing and communications forum organized by the German Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
Invited as one of the panelists, I was told before the event that the topic was “Winning the Customer - Turn Customers into Fans”. In China, that is.
How to better engage your audience in China
So how do you do that? Turn customers into fans? I decided to focus my presentation on one of the fundamentals of effective communications - the importance of good positioning, and, more precisely, good CEO positioning.
The idea in a nutshell: With new communications and marketing channels growing in China as fast as bamboo shoots in the spring rain, communicators are often left wondering what they should focus on first. My answer:
Before you communicate left and right on all channels, you need to find your own voice, your focus.
That is why CEO positioning is so important, and why we at Asia Waypoint are working with a growing roster of CEOs and country presidents and their communication teams in China to get it right.
Let's take a step back, discuss very briefly why this is so essential for anybody who truly wants to “engage” stakeholders in China.
The social media landscape in China is especially agile. It is a confusing array of old and new channels, and the game seems to change each year - no, every few months.
We are all drowning in messages
Weibo, WeChat, Tiktok, the “Little Red Book”, Jinri Toutiao - it just never ends, there is always something new, leaving communications and marketing professionals and their CEOs in China feeling that they are constantly playing “catch-up”.
During that process, even very successful companies sometimes forget to lay a solid foundation for their communication strategy. The need to clearly define who you are, what you want to say and to whom, has never been greater. If you want to be heard, you need to have a razor-sharp understanding of your desired niche. Channels are secondary.
With the communication noise level rising day by day, positioning is becoming more and more important. There are methods and tools available to achieve a clear positioning, and I will outline a few of them later.
But first let's dive just a little bit deeper into why clear positioning is so important. A few figures help to explain: Worldwide, there are now more than 4,4 billion internet users and 3,4 billion social media users (as of May 2019), and those users create and consume billions and billions of messages via, on average, 7,6 social media accounts per person.
In China, the channels are different, but the trend is the same. Just consider the number of WeChat posts that are now created each single day: at least 38 billion. (Note: This is the latest reliable figure I could find, published by Tencent with their 3rd quarter results in 2017).
Discussing effective communications in China with Evelyn Engesser (Unicepta), Mark Tanner (chinaskinny), Falk Fuhrmann (Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide) and Stefan Justl (Storymaker)
In short: All of us are bombarded with too many messages. “Deep fakes” and misinformation may make for good headlines, but the real problem for corporate communications is the sheer overabundance of information. We are all drowning in messages.
Let´s cut through the noise!
Brands and communicators who want to be heard in China, who want to “cut through the noise”, therefore need to find their own, unique voice. It is as simple as that, and that is where positioning comes in.
Positioning can be done for companies, brands, and - more and more importantly - for CEOs and key spokespersons in China. In the era of social media, stakeholders like customers, the media and government officials all expect a company to communicate with a “human voice”. More and more, they expect the CEO or country president to be visible, to talk to them directly, in person.
Positioning is a strategic communications project where leadership and communication teams have to work together. Let me share a few of the methods and tools that Asia Waypoint uses in our positioning workshops with CEOs and country presidents of MNC, SME and international organizations in China.
First step: Once our client has agreed that it is important for his brand to speak to its stakeholders with a personalized, human voice, we use tools like our “Leadership Compass”, internal interviews and workshops with the CEO to develop a brief Executive Profile.
The second step is clear stakeholder mapping and a definition of stakeholder expectations. The stakeholders for a CEO positioning usually overlap with the company´s stakeholders, but are not identical. Simply put, even the smartest CEO or president can not talk to everybody about everything. We employ the “CEO 360°” model to map both stakeholders and their expectations.
The keyword “expectations” is important here. Your audience is, sorry to tell you this, most likely not very interested to hear about your great products, your latest investment in China or your recent localization effort in this or that province. Most companies in China talk too much about themselves - and fail to talk about things that their audience is interested in.
In a third step of the positioning project, the profile, the “CEO compass”, the stakeholder expectations and important communications and strategy documents are combined to develop a “key theme set” for the CEO. This means to find a clear focus for the CEO to talk about throughout the year, to bring the positioning to life.
Do not, repeat, not talk too much about your products!
Let's take an example from the healthcare industry in China. If your company is selling medicines or medical appliances, you don’ t want your CEO to talk about your latest regulatory approvals or factory openings.
CEO positioning is also highly relevant for crisis communications in China. When a crisis hits, you will need all the credibility you can get.
At least not only. You want your CEO to talk about three to five key themes that are of interest to your stakeholders in China, for example: 1) How do we bring good, affordable healthcare to China 2) How do we support the Chinese government's strategic healthcare plans and 3) How do we demonstrate our commitment to China.
Once such a “CEO theme set” has been defined, there is of course much more work to be done. it is the communication team’s job to flesh this out with concrete topics for speeches at industry conferences or town halls, articles in trade media, content campaigns on WeChat and Linkedin, or whatever channel the team wants to employ.
The concrete topics used should be in sync with current discussions that your various stakeholders are interested in. To employ the healthcare example again, you could talk about the worldwide trend in personalized medicine. Your own product or service will only be mentioned “en passant”, in a short paragraph that is part of your speech or article.
You better focus on what your stakeholders are most interested to hear about, not on what you would most like to say or sell.
In today’ s landscape, where everybody is broadcasting, a CEO needs to establish thought leadership before he can expect customers or other stakeholders to trust his brand.
Please note that during this process the discussion about the channels comes last, not first. The biggest budget spent on the hippest new communication channels in China achieves nothing if you keep your audience wondering who you really are, what you stand for, and what you can do for them.
Don’ t get me wrong. Of course you have to develop an effective, “integrated” multi-channel communications and marketing strategy in China, and that includes using all or some of the latest channels, various formats - with video getting more and more important - and techniques for interactive audience engagement ranging from answering questions in real-time to gaming, chatbots and the use of artificial intelligence and big data.
I don’ t want to suggest that all of these don’ t count. I only want to say that your communications will be so much more effective if you spend some time on finding your own voice first.
To come back to our initial question: If you want to “win the customer, and if you want to turn consumers into fans”, it is a good idea to start with CEO positioning.
What do you think? Do you agree that positioning is growing more and more important in the age of content marketing? Do you disagree? Please leave your comment below.
