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| Suitable for Growth
it's not necessary to speak Chinese to understand the Chinese
A simple approach to getting a better understanding of the needs of a potential customer
is to do an interview. However, Chinese people, in particular the older generations, rarely
speak English, so the language barrier prevents a Danish project team from having direct
verbal contact to Chinese customers. An obvious solution is to use a translator or to turn
over the complete interviewing task to a Chinese speaking person. Another solution is
to use non-verbal approaches like questionnaires, where a translator can support in the
creation and analysis of the questionnaire. However, all these solutions suffer from creat-
ing a distance to customers, where essential information may be lost.
CASE
Customers are considered the property of the
sales organization
A company wanted to develop a lower cost product for the Chinese mid-
market, and the project team considered presenting the initial ideas to some
of their existing customers as well as asking the customers to test some pro-
totypes. However, in this company, the customers were "owned" by the sales
organization and the project team was not allowed access to the customers.
The reason given by the sales organization was that the company had only
a few, but very large customers in China and sales feared that such experi-
mentation could damage these precious relations. The sales company argued
that they already had sufficient market insights and no further investigation
was needed. The project team had to blindly trust sales and they never got
documented market insight.
ACCESS TO MArKET
CASE
Chinese employees are not trusted to have
direct customer contact
A company has had a subsidiary in China for almost ten years primarily
focusing on sourcing, but also with some sales to local Chinese companies.
Initially, the Danish General Manager for the Chinese subsidiary didn't allow
the Chinese employees to have direct contact to Chinese customers as the
manager was afraid that the employees would take over the customers and
start their own business.
Once a company has realized that getting close to the customer is valuable for busi-
ness, the employees closest to the customer in the value chain, e.g. the sales people,
will quickly realize their position of power, and they may not be willing to give away this
power to others in the company. This is obviously not optimal for the organization as a
whole; nevertheless, it happens in companies all the time.
Lack of trust in employees
The cultural barriers can be overcome by having Chinese employees in the subsidi-
ary, since their cultural values and beliefs are more similar to the Chinese customers'.
However, Chinese employees introduce a new barrier on the matter of getting close to
the customers as exemplified with the case below.
It's still common to see people in Shanghai
wearing pajamas in public, a comfortable
habit, which goes back to the 1970's when
having a pair of pajamas was considered a
status symbol.