It is no wonder that with such a huge potential market, the taste and needs of the Chinese consumer has encouraged many of the large international companies to look at the area of design to make their products more attractive. According to a report in BusinessWeek, Sony set up a design centre in Shanghai in August 2005 to help them understand the minds of the young Chinese consumer. It is a sign of growing importance of China that corporations are prepared to go to such lengths and create products especially for the Chinese. The results of this bold move will be seen early this year when a new range of Sony products will be launched in China.
Made in China, copied in China
It is however, the China firms who are giving the major impetus to the growth of the design business within their country. While many Western products are being manufactured in China, the design comes from talent based in firms located in San Francisco or London. The locally-created goods have been, up until now, poor imitations of Western products or unabashedly copies of popular electronic goods and even motorcars. General Motors are currently suing China’s Chery Automotive Co. They feel the Chery QQ compact is a compact of GM’s Chevrolet Spark.
Two factors have brought about a change. The gradual introduction and implementation of copyright laws which recently resulted in a fine for a Shanghai company imitating the Starbucks name and logo is one pressure point. Now that Chinese firms see their own brand design being copied internally, the Government has an added incentive to crack down on such violations. A replica of Motorola phone designed in China was on the market just eight months after launch.
However, the real impetuous has come from a strong desire for Chinese companies to follow the success of the Japanese Sony Corporation and, more recently, Korea’s Samsung brand.
The Chinese want to compete on the world stage and have realized that their products must match those coming out of Europe and the States in terms of design. Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou are now hosts to hundreds of design companies. Many young ambitious designers from the West are coming to cities like these are they see more opportunities in this buoyant market. Other Chinese companies are giving projects abroad to the very firms who are helping the established international brands to stay abroad. According to the same BusinessWeek report, Lenovo has doubled its design team since 2002 and has already won international industrial design awards for its ET960 smart phone.
Haier, who manufactures white good has 120 industrial designers on staff and a further 25 people working in the research area.
Meanwhile, giants like General Motors who once thought what was right for the USA would be right for China, have revised their perceptions and created a design team within China to help create vehicles which have more appeal to the Chinese. Currently, this means tinkering within existing models. Their China team took the US model Chevrolet Venture and turned it into budged Buick car for chauffeur-driven executives. Currently, it seems this section of the market like ostentatious design which displays their wealth. This is not uncommon. It is reported that while German customers. These differences are common in all newly-developing markets with the nouveau rich and it is not until consumers grow more sophisticated that more understated design becomes the preference.
Sony also realized that it needed to understand the market better. Last August when they opened up a design centre, the three designers based there gave 50 digital cameras to young Chinese people and asked them to document their daily lives. The feedback they got has been integrated into Sony’s new designs for China consumers market and these will be market soon.
[ Extracts from the ‘Designer’ magazine December 2006 Education Special Edition ]
