In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Janet Adamy reported on a novel exercise undertaken by Starbucks in pushing their products to the Chinese market. As she had it,
To familiarize Chinese people with Starbucks coffee, barista Stephanie Chen pours customers a one-ounce sample and invites them to join her for a tasting. Then she blurts out the first thing that comes to mind when the brew hits her palate.
“Dry land,” Ms. Chen declared recently after slurping a robust blend from a tiny white cup. “In the west in China, it is always hot and dry and it reminds me of those places.”
It wasn’t clear in the article if such exercises were meant to be a kind of focus-group research or just a gesture toward getting people to talk about coffee. As the article points out, the Chinese have traditionally spurned coffee for tea. But given the huge cultural differences, it makes sense that Starbucks would go even further and perhaps consider renaming certain products to appeal more to the Chinese consumer. In short, dry land might be more appealing than, say, Frappuccino.
Given the cultural and linguistic dissonance between China and the West, this could lead to quite humorous names. Take, for example, The Chinglish Files, a collection of awful translations for the instructions of how to use everyday products. We so much expect such dissonance and misunderstanding that we often mistake hoaxes for the real McCoy. Who can forget those phony translated film titles that The New York Times reported as real translations about eight years ago? There was The Crying Game, which became Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis! Or Batman and Robin, which was transformed into Come to My Cave and Wear this Rubber Codpiece, Cute Boy.
Funny, but alas, not real. There is no doubt a subtle (or not so subtle) racism at work in such humor, but there are so many examples of real-world misunderstandings between English and Chinese speakers, I’m sure the gate swings both ways. And in terms of marketing, there are tons of examples of Anglophone companies completely screwing up when launching products into new markets simply because the name of the product was not well considered.
The conundrum often encountered in cross-cultural marketing is neatly presented by Ms. Adamy, who writes,
Starbucks’s aspirations here underscore a dilemma facing many Western companies chasing the nation’s huge market: Should they change their offerings to have more local appeal, or attempt to change Chinese tastes?
Starbucks’s strategy seems to be one of hedging its bets, wrapping their coffee offerings in familiar cultural surroundings. It is at root an attempt to reposition coffee, both as a luxury item and yet something very ‘Chinese’.
The article does make me a tad jealous that Starbucks never used the name-association game when entering southern US markets. After all, it was not a commonplace for southerners, pre-Starbucks, to spend $4 for a cup of coffee. Oh, the possibilities that got away (I won't venture what those might have been...feel free to offer some suggestions by way of comment).
So it goes. Starbucks’s China strategy would seem to be built for the long term, not one that will yield blockbuster results right away. Maybe that’s why the company is loth to report in great detail its future plans for China or how to make its Chinese locations more profitable. We will have to wait and see if coffee takes off in China.
Until then, pass the apple fritter, or is that ‘crusty, sliced tree potato’?
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