It was the Boxing day, I was sitting with a friend in a PizzaHut here in Sheffield, UK. The food is OK, but minutes later, we started talking about the PizzaHut in China, the Chinese KFC and Macdonald’s, then came the conclusion, those food in China is so great and much more tasty! I don’t know if you agree with me on this if you are from western, actually such conversation and memories always happen here between Chinese.
Google is not rocking China, neither does Yahoo and some others, but KFC, Macdonald’s and PizzaHut are definitely into Chinese life style. They are probably nothing to do the Web2.0 industry, but in terms of Localization, there is something we should learn. Here is a simple study:
| Web2.0 | Restaurant |
| Management | Local teams in local branches |
| Look-and-feel of the website | Fancy Chinese style websites with happy Chinese faces; |
| Offline promotion | Organizing local events, competitions and parties; sponsoring local events; |
| Online activities | e-voucher, customer communities , RSS feed, WAP service etc |
| Contents | Food in Chinese recipe, e.g. Peking Chicken Roll of KFC, Afternoon Tea of Pizzahut and many other fantastic local food |
| Local Partners | KFC partners with Mengniu (milk product supplier) |
Hehe, any idea inspired by this? What an easy lesson, but seems nobody in the Internet industry learn it very well…Hey, make your business tasty for Chinese.
You make a good point, both my (Beijing born) wife and I would agree that the quality of the fast food chains products are better in China. I’m not sure why, maybe because they are positioned as more upmarket products here. Or their overall costs are lower but prices about the same as in the west so they can afford to serve better food.
Other western brands have also managed to position themselves as being more upmarket in China, for example Holiday Inn hotels (much better in China than in the U.S.) or Clarks footwear.