Guangzhou challenge – Team aMBAssadors

Guangzhou challenge – Team aMBAssadors

by Team D (David, Claire, Fleur, Julie, Jared)

We visited two local chicken restaurants in Cheibei, the more traditional Great Chicken and a KFC.

KFC, leveraging their globally recognised menu with some local customisations such as rice and soup, garnered more custom by locating themselves on a busy street corner.

Great Chicken, however, served more traditional regional cuisine, catering for a local market in a second story restaurant with notably less foot traffic and customers.

We then visited 361 Degrees, a local sportswear store presented in a similar way to global brands such as a Nike or Adidas shop but with considerably cheaper product.

We found that marketing a cheap brand in a relatively flashy manner was unusual in our journeys through China, as often these budget brands put less effort into their marketing.

The store seemed out of place in the area, but are likely leveraging off the brand images to give customers the sense of a higher end shopping experience.

The long term sustainability and profitability for this strategy would be interesting to investigate in a New Zealand context. Interestingly the store stocked a range with 'Auckland' and 'City of Sails' printed on them.

During this exercise, our group was struck by the revelation that here in Guangzhou we are the local tourist attraction.

Many locals stopped to stare at us whilst we looked around and, although indeed we stood out as something different, it was ironic since locals live in a city, province, and country going through rapid continuous change.

The Chinese people appear to be extremely adaptable, and there is a lesson here for Kiwi entrepreneurs.

We cannot always shelter in our nail-house, hoping that those outside will be ready when we are as we carefully planning our go-to-market strategy. If we wait too long, then we may just risk finding that a smart young Chinese entrepreneur has already got there ahead of us!