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China’s Top 100 Brands: Chanel The Most Wanted Again

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Campaign Asia-Pacific

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This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit
The luxury company plays by its own distinct rules when it comes to marketing. Elsewhere in China’s Top 100 Brands chart, Apple slips a few spots, while Uber plummets down…

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

The luxury company plays by its own distinct rules when it comes to marketing. Elsewhere in China’s Top 100 Brands chart, Apple slips a few spots, while Uber plummets down the list.

Luxury brand Chanel tops China's Top 100 Brand list for the second year in a row, maintaining its brand value on the back of Chinese consumers' desire for 'experiential luxury'.

Privately-owned Chanel's companions in this high-end section of the market are Gucci, which is up seven spots on the list to 21st position, and Armani, up eight places to 25, but Louis Vuitton dropped 13 points to rank 80 this year.

Chanel, notably, was one of the only brands to topple Samsung in Asia: the electronics giant ruled the roost in 11 other markets.

Chanel is one of the last luxury brands to sell online, with no official presence in mainstream B2C e-commerce and luxury verticals in China like JD/Farfetch's Toplife, Alibaba's Tmall Luxury Pavilion, Net-A-Porter China, Secoo, or Mei. This has fostered a prolonged perception of exclusivity and scarcity. Even on social media, Chanel follows back precisely none of its 48 million followers on Instagram and Twitter (and only 159 on its Weibo account). Aloof, much?

This strategy appears risky, given that recent marketing trends in the mainland gravitate strongly towards interactivity and engagement, but Chanel makes up for it offline through clever experiential marketing. Its latest Mademoiselle Privé travelling exhibition, a reimagination of the French couturier Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's life through Chinese artist Wu Guanzhen's eyes, touched down in Shanghai earlier this year to much fanfare.

Unlike Coco's bon mots, Uber's snappy slogans no longer appear to echo in the minds of the Chinese. This brand slid down more than 600 spots in the list, from 25th position last year to 683 today. In its heyday, before Uber sold its Chinese operations to rival Didi Chuxing (which jumped up the list from 48 to 5) in 2016, following a bitter fight for market share, Uber teamed up with folks like Ctrip (down from 241 to 403) to launch a series of co-marketing campaigns titled "one is enough". But Uber's slide down the list now is predictable.

What is less obvious is how big clothing brands like H&M; (down 49 places to 365) and Adidas (down 10 places to 24) got mixed up in the Chinese government's indoctrination camps for the Muslim Uighur people in China's Xinjiang province. As revealed by the Wall Street Journal, these camps essentially supply slave labour for factories manufacturing for H&M; and Adidas. That this entanglement in such a controversial topic resulted in consumers 'punishing' the brands in our ranking seems farfetched, but not impossible.

On a lighter note, Centrum, the multivitamin brand owned by Pfizer, zoomed all the way up from being unlisted in China's Top 1000 last year to 184th position this year, thanks, we assume, to British actor Tom Hiddleston's recent ad for the brand. Slammed by Western fans for being creepy, it was deemed brilliant in China, especially among female buyers drawn to Hiddleston's 'husband' persona in the creatively shot video.

Meanwhile, good news for Samsung (up from 4 to 3), Nestle (from 5 to 4), Sony (from 9 to 8) and Heinz (from 10 to 9) which added further international sparkle to the China portfolio with their strong brand recall and positioning.

Apple, however, may be dying a slow death, dropping three places down to 6. It not only suffered collateral damage amid trade tensions between the US and China but also disdain from Chinese media for its lack of innovation.

Article originally published on Campaign Asia, republished with permission.

Cover image: Fashion Gone Rogue

Campaign Asia-Pacific
Campaign Asia-Pacific

Providing insights and intelligence into the ideas, work and personalities shaping the region’s marketing-communications industry, Campaign Asia-Pacific dives deeper into important subjects and presents the most compelling information that matters to businesses in the fastest-growing and most exciting communications market in the world. Campaign Asia-Pacific serves the marketing elite, those that are pushing creative advertising and communications to new boundaries, redefining brand experiences through multiple touch-points, both on and offline.

RETAIL

China’s Top 100 Brands: Chanel The Most Wanted Again

by

Campaign Asia-Pacific

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit : This is the featured image credit
The luxury company plays by its own distinct rules when it comes to marketing. Elsewhere in China’s Top 100 Brands chart, Apple slips a few spots, while Uber plummets down…

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

The luxury company plays by its own distinct rules when it comes to marketing. Elsewhere in China’s Top 100 Brands chart, Apple slips a few spots, while Uber plummets down the list.

Luxury brand Chanel tops China's Top 100 Brand list for the second year in a row, maintaining its brand value on the back of Chinese consumers' desire for 'experiential luxury'.

Privately-owned Chanel's companions in this high-end section of the market are Gucci, which is up seven spots on the list to 21st position, and Armani, up eight places to 25, but Louis Vuitton dropped 13 points to rank 80 this year.

Chanel, notably, was one of the only brands to topple Samsung in Asia: the electronics giant ruled the roost in 11 other markets.

Chanel is one of the last luxury brands to sell online, with no official presence in mainstream B2C e-commerce and luxury verticals in China like JD/Farfetch's Toplife, Alibaba's Tmall Luxury Pavilion, Net-A-Porter China, Secoo, or Mei. This has fostered a prolonged perception of exclusivity and scarcity. Even on social media, Chanel follows back precisely none of its 48 million followers on Instagram and Twitter (and only 159 on its Weibo account). Aloof, much?

This strategy appears risky, given that recent marketing trends in the mainland gravitate strongly towards interactivity and engagement, but Chanel makes up for it offline through clever experiential marketing. Its latest Mademoiselle Privé travelling exhibition, a reimagination of the French couturier Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's life through Chinese artist Wu Guanzhen's eyes, touched down in Shanghai earlier this year to much fanfare.

Unlike Coco's bon mots, Uber's snappy slogans no longer appear to echo in the minds of the Chinese. This brand slid down more than 600 spots in the list, from 25th position last year to 683 today. In its heyday, before Uber sold its Chinese operations to rival Didi Chuxing (which jumped up the list from 48 to 5) in 2016, following a bitter fight for market share, Uber teamed up with folks like Ctrip (down from 241 to 403) to launch a series of co-marketing campaigns titled "one is enough". But Uber's slide down the list now is predictable.

What is less obvious is how big clothing brands like H&M; (down 49 places to 365) and Adidas (down 10 places to 24) got mixed up in the Chinese government's indoctrination camps for the Muslim Uighur people in China's Xinjiang province. As revealed by the Wall Street Journal, these camps essentially supply slave labour for factories manufacturing for H&M; and Adidas. That this entanglement in such a controversial topic resulted in consumers 'punishing' the brands in our ranking seems farfetched, but not impossible.

On a lighter note, Centrum, the multivitamin brand owned by Pfizer, zoomed all the way up from being unlisted in China's Top 1000 last year to 184th position this year, thanks, we assume, to British actor Tom Hiddleston's recent ad for the brand. Slammed by Western fans for being creepy, it was deemed brilliant in China, especially among female buyers drawn to Hiddleston's 'husband' persona in the creatively shot video.

Meanwhile, good news for Samsung (up from 4 to 3), Nestle (from 5 to 4), Sony (from 9 to 8) and Heinz (from 10 to 9) which added further international sparkle to the China portfolio with their strong brand recall and positioning.

Apple, however, may be dying a slow death, dropping three places down to 6. It not only suffered collateral damage amid trade tensions between the US and China but also disdain from Chinese media for its lack of innovation.

Article originally published on Campaign Asia, republished with permission.

Cover image: Fashion Gone Rogue

Campaign Asia-Pacific

Providing insights and intelligence into the ideas, work and personalities shaping the region’s marketing-communications industry, Campaign Asia-Pacific dives deeper into important subjects and presents the most compelling information that matters to businesses in the fastest-growing and most exciting communications market in the world. Campaign Asia-Pacific serves the marketing elite, those that are pushing creative advertising and communications to new boundaries, redefining brand experiences through multiple touch-points, both on and offline.

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