During the 2008 Olympic Games, NBC aired a Coca-Cola spot featuring animated versions of Yao Ming and LeBron James facing off, backed by icons representing their respective nations. The tension is disrupted by an untranslated chant, tuanjie de liliang da, tuanjie de liliang jiushi da! (there's strength in unity, there's truly strength in unity!), as the two men exchange Cokes labeled in their respective native languages, clink bottles, and gulp them down to cries of “cheers” (Yao) and ganbei (James). This same commercial could easily be—indeed probably was—used in China. Such interpenetration of the local with the global, where “local content” proves successful beyond its target cultural audience, is but one of many advertising trends detailed by Jing Wang in Brand New China.
Branding the nation, the local, and the corporate product, each highlighted in the Olympic commercial, are the three topical axes of Wang's ambitious project. This timely, important, and intriguing study is challenged by the scope of its intended audience, identified in the preface as “industry, advertising, media, academic, and general readers interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of the rise of China from the vantage point of branding and marketing culture” (p. xiii). Writing for such different constituencies requires explanations of cultural theory for industry readers and of advertising protocols and buzzwords for academics. Wang often opts for breezy familiarity over clarity, yet her study provides a wealth of information on the past two decades of industry trends, case studies, and branding philosophies in China. As in High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), Wang embeds her interpretations of marketing, scholarly, and artistic phenomena within insightful descriptions of popular culture trends.
The book details, in seven chapters, the emergence of new consumer classes while acknowledging the indebtedness of post-Mao advertising to socialist propaganda methods and long-standing cultural practices of “face” consumption. Chapter 1 persuasively argues that the “local” is a construct embedded in the global, whether in product branding or nationalist polemics. Chapter 2 analyzes Ogilvy marketing campaigns developed to breed brand loyalty among Chinese women. Here, Wang's insider's perspective (she worked for Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing for two summers) is marred at times by a lack of coherence. For example, Wang cites Ogilvy's “360 Degree Brand Stewardship” multiple times prior to describing it, leaves other terms undefined, makes abrupt paragraph transitions, and uses passive constructions in her critiques, leaving the offending agent unnamed (pp. 98–100).
In chapter 3, Wang provides a very informative discussion of joint venture branding strategies and the trend promoting synergy between transnational and local ad agencies, drawing upon trade publications, interviews with advertising executives, and case studies to detail how a joint venture brand becomes “Chinese.” Conversely, she explains how a high-profile national brand such as Wahaha remains a “Chinese” brand in the eyes of the consumer despite its well-publicized merger with the French Danone group. In the process, Wang traces a shift in the long-standing national obsession with “Chineseness,” no longer manifested as combative anti-imperialism but as a celebration of synergy as “abundance” (p. 110). Indeed, one could argue a celebratory spirit of “Chineseness” as “abundance” was on display at the Beijing Olympics, and stands in stark contrast to discourses of Chinese modernity featuring “scarcity,” as shown, for example, by Duanfang Lu (Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005 [New York: Routledge, 2006]).
Chapter 4 features the storytelling associated with Chinese brands such as Haier and Lenovo as promoted by their chief executive officers and Internet blogs. Wang contrasts the Chinese corporate-centric paradigm with the Western brand-centric model and suggests that the former may become increasingly dominant globally. Chapters 5 and 6 draw upon sociology and popular culture literature to analyze assumptions about the middle-class bourgeois bohemians for China's branding revolution among consumers, with a particular focus on consumption habits of the single-child generation. From the Cell Phone (a movie) phenomenon and its associated corporate sponsor, Motorola, to Chun Shu's autobiographical novel Beijing Doll and Beijing punk culture, Wang details how advertising agencies research trends in popular culture and mobile data to target youth culture, such as marketing to the Generation Y “culture of loneliness” by using “metaphors of companionship” (p. 239).
In chapter 7, Wang focuses on product placement on CCTV, China's state-owned television media, and concludes from data generated by prime-time bids and reception ratings that the programming of CCTV remains hamstrung by political and total market control (p. 287). In her conclusion, Wang points to the 2008 Olympics as the defining moment for “Brand China” and to new advertising venues such as Web 2.0, the Creative Commons movement, DynoMedia, and 3D virtual worlds such as HiPiHi (haipishi), modeled on Second Life.
Throughout her study, Wang insists upon interdisciplinary approaches by adopting industry fieldwork findings as well as theories from cultural studies and business literature. The book's strength is its timeliness and its multiple entry points into China branding, providing fresh perspectives on advertising studies and China's rise. Interdisciplinarity also contributes to a shortcoming of the study, in that its appeal to such a diverse readership at times compromises its cohesiveness.
