Connecting China – You know these magazines are screened



“Hey, I get that magazine for free,” says marketing manager Scott Shi when I show him a copy of the Chinese edition of Newsweek. Scott got it last week for the through his bankcard at the Bank of China. “I was really amazed they gave me a free subscription for a whole year.” It is a nice story on how high-end print publications try to increase market share among the wealthy Chinese, and will probably fail.
First, Scott has many bank accounts and bankcards. Brand loyalty in China is not very important and most Chinese I know have larger numbers of cards with a large variety of banks. The Chinese edition of the Harvard Business Review was on of the publications that now lands in Scott’s mailbox.
The last thing Scott will do is pay for such a subscription. “The Harvard Business Review costs at least 70 renminbi per issue,” Scott says. “I cannot imagine anybody paying that for a publication. You know these magazines are screened, so I mostly do not even open the envelope.”
“Why should I pay for a print publication, while I can get the unscreened information for free on the Internet?” he wonders.
The problems for foreign publication, eager to reach do not stop with a Scott Shi who even does not take his free goodies out of the envelope. He knows they are screened, but only because he assumes so. He can get the information also for free from the internet, but does seldom do so. Foreign brand names do not have an appeal among the Chinese internet users that would gurantee them instant success.
Connecting China is an irregular feature that tries to introduce Chinese internet users to the outside world.