Yesterday started off with an amazing morning at Wieden+Kennedy’s Shanghai office. For those who aren’t familiar,Wieden+Kennedy is one of the world’s premiere advertising agencies that works closely with Nike and is the agency behind the Old Spice commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa. We had the opportunity to look at case studies of innovative campaigns the agency put together for Converse and Nike geared specifically for the Chinese market. We also had a great conversation about the challenges of working with multinational companies to communicate their brand message to Chinese consumers. A key takeaway from the meeting is that the most important thing for creating a successful advertising campaign in China is to understand the culture. It’s a simple enough message, but incredibly easy to screw up. Interestingly, youth culture isn’t embraced in China as it is in the West. Businesses here are focused on who can spend money now.Wieden+Kennedy has been working to communicate with brands the importance of embracing youth in order to develop brand loyalty. Another interesting point had to do with the fact that rebellion, a hot selling point in the West, simply doesn’t fly here. The Chinese love their country, period. So rather than create “rebellious” advertising campaign’s,Wieden+Kennedy works to create campaigns that are a celebration of culture.

After a free afternoon to stroll the French Concession and munch on some baguettes and pastries, we loaded up on the bus to voyage to the far reaches of Pudong to visit with Columbia Sportswear at the YKK zipper company. I think a lot of us were a little skeptical about visiting a zipper company, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting visits of the trip. During the joint presentation, we learned about the supply chain relationship between the two companies. It’s an incredibly complex system that requires constant communication and relationship management. We then took a tour of the manufacturing facilities. While photos weren’t allowed on the plant floor, I can assure you this was about as high-tech an operation as it gets. For a zipper company, they are incredibly innovative. YKK, a Japanese company, invents its own machines to handle nearly every piece of the operation. Their focus is on quality and reliability, a recurring theme with nearly every company we met with. By focusing on excellence in manufacturing, YKK has gained nearly 45 percent of the marketplace value  of zippers worldwide. Columbia alone uses 80 million zippers a year. That’s a lot of zippers!

Tashi Dondup
MBA ’12

Written by UO Business

The UO Lundquist College of Business empowers an engaged community of students, faculty, staff, and stakeholders who create, apply, and disseminate knowledge that contributes significantly to their professions, communities, and society. The college delivers a dynamic learning environment where world-class professors engage and get to know students, where students work on real projects for real companies, and where alumni go on to high-powered jobs worldwide.