Doing business with China, a marketing perspective

The goal of this book is to provide useful information to companies that do business in China, or that are considering doing so. We chose to apply a marketing perspective. Marketing, by definition, mediates between the customer and the brand (or the organization hosting the brand, figure 1) (Alsem, Kostelijk,2008). The main goal is to get customers and preferably to retain them. As a consequence,marketing deals with the demand side as well as the supply side of markets. Therefore, in this report, information is provided about Chinese customers and about Chinese companies. A central role in this report is for branding issues. Questions such as ‘Which brand values are important in China?’ or ‘How do Chinese companies do their marketing?’ are answered. Marklinq publication no. 9.