China Consumer Trends 2018

Mintel is a world’sleading global supplier of consumer, product and market intelligence.

Mintel’s portfolio in China includes: Macro environment of markets. Consumer analysis based on primary research. Track marketing activities to interpret consumer behaviour. Powerful resource for NPD and marketing at product level.

Megabrain

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are being embraced by consumers as they increase productivity, efficiency and pleasure.

Mega Brain

source of the picture: Mintel

What’s Happening in 2018?

Consumers are:

•Gaining exposure to and positive experiences with machine learning

•Appreciating how it can learn individual’s personality and preferences

•Learning to like how it creates customised experiences

AI can be used to:

•Create improved environments to work, live and shop

•Read browsing preferences and offer alternatives to explore

•Offer easily personalised experiences and customised offerings

Why Will Consumers Buy Into This?

Consumers appreciate the power of technology in monitoring, analysing & reporting.

Benefits of a smart home:

The Comeback

Audi piloted driving brings joy to a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Spicy Snicker

Based on consumer data from Alibaba’s Tmall platform, Mars has developed a spicy-flavored Snicker bar.

Spicy Snicker

source of the picture:Mintel

Intelligent Fashion

Alibaba has developed Fashion AI, a tool that uses machine-learning to make clothing and accessory suggestions to customers based on the items they are trying on in a physical fitting room.

What About Data Privacy?

Brands should:

•Address information access and privacy issues to allay consumer fears

•Be transparent on data collection and disposal

•Highlight the benefits of convenience, personalisation & comfort

Where Next?

As AI technology progresses, consumers will:

•Desire a seamless lifestyle

•Incorporate machine learning in more aspects of life

•Demand more personalised services and customised products

•Still want to discuss privacy issues

Pressure Play

Higher levels of social stress are driving China’s youngest generations to demand more informal and playful interactions in both the virtual and physical world.

Online Game

source of the picture:Tencent Game

What’s Happening in 2018?

China’s younger generations are:

•Pressured to achieve academic and social success

•Becoming more conscious of their own behaviour

•Suffering higher levels of social stress

•Finding an escape in the virtual world to de-stress

•Looking for less rigid, more playful ways to relax in social circumstances

Why Will Consumers Buy Into This?

Shoot with Colonel Sanders

KFC’s latest campaign, which saw a Colonel Sanders character and KFC-inspired weapons being incorporated into the popular video game CrossFire, was launched via a range of activities, including a livestreamed event.

Interactive Coffee Cup

McDonald’s has unveiled a special edition coffee cup with interactive features.

Escape Train

Finnish Railways is putting an immersive escape room experience on a 13-hour train journey to Lapland.

Escape Train

source of the picture:Mintel

Where Next?

Young consumers will:

•Actively seek ways to deal with social stress

•Embrace more activities they can do alone, without other people

•Want novel and playful solutions to help strengthen relationships

•Seek playful, novel activities to relieve stress and enhance wellbeing

The Balanced Life

Consumers increasingly understand the balance between their own health and that of the environment, and are demanding greener, healthier life solutions from brands.

Balanced life

source of the picture:Mintel

What’s Happening in 2018?

Consumers want:

•Healthier, happier, more balanced lives

•Antidotes to stress, congestion and pollution

•Greener, people-friendlier cities

Their motives are:

•Not yet pursuit of egalitarian principles

•Still based on selfish benefits and health

Consumers want brands to:

•Offer products to help achieve health and wellbeing

•Lead in assisting them stay clean on the inside

•Contribute to a cleaner environment on the outside

•Demonstrate the benefits of better quality products

•Help consumers strike a balance: to society and to themselves

Why Will Consumers Buy Into This?

The effects of pollution on health and the environment is increasingly clear to Chinese consumers.

Urban Forest

In an attempt to improve air quality, a city in southern China is developing an entirely energy self-sufficient neighborhood where all buildings and constructions are covered with trees and plants.

self-sufficient neighborhood

source of the picture:Sohu

Urban Forest

Haircare brand Ultra Doux has launched a campaign that encourages consumers to send back their empty shampoo bottles, which the brand will use to build small furniture for children.

Ultra Doux is Recyclable

Haircare brand Ultra Doux has launched a campaign that encourages consumers to send back their empty shampoo bottles, which the brand will use to build small furniture for children.

Rhythm of Love Wall

In Taiwan, 7-Eleven has launched a wall that applauds when consumer donate coins to charity.

Where Next?

Consumers will want:

•Better quality products with life-enhancing benefits

•To support brands in balance with nature

•Brands offering health-promoting products

•Brands showing social responsibility & benefits to humanity

•Brands with both ethics & concrete benefits

•Benefits to themselves, their families & neighbourhoods

Being Me

In seeking to express their individuality, consumers are absorbing alternative lifestyle influences and experiences from a globally-connected community.

Being me

source of the picture:KiDulty fashion pioneer

What’s Happening in 2018?

Consumers increasingly want:

•To be themselves; discover their true passions

•To learn, work or relax the way they want

•To be creative, live unconventionally, choose flexible working

•To travel to unusual places; absorb new influences

•To use technologies to accelerate change

•To widen their opportunities

•To explore who they are

Why Will Consumers Buy Into This?

Sporty Grandpa

Reebok China has appointed an 80-year-old actor known as “the country’s hottest grandpa” to be its new brand ambassador.

Is It Okay For Guys to…

Lynx has developed a video ad that raises awareness around gender stereotyping.

Vintage Selfie Contest

Stella McCartney’s Christmas campaign is taking its WeChat followers back to the ’80 and ‘90s with a vintage selfie contest.

Where Next?

Consumers are already:

•Exposed to widening spectrum of lifestyle choices

•Using new tech and media to express their individuality

•Empowered to choose brands that help express their individuality

Brands can:

•Create products that consumers can personalise

•Provide channels to express individuality within brand context

•Allow them to experiment and express themselves how they choose

•Engage with consumers individually, through new technologies

•Be responsive to, and forge closer relationships with customers

All We Need is Mobile

Mobile devices are blurring the lines of formality and consumers are embracing this change for the convenience it brings.

mobile payment

source of the picture:Mintel

What’s Happening in 2018?

•Mobile phones fully integrated into modern consumers’ lives

•They like the speed and convenience mobile technology brings

•Mobile apps entering into formal spaces, replacing face-to-face interaction or physical, official documents

•Integrate smartphone biometrics for mobile identification and payment

Why Will Consumers Buy Into This?

Know What It’s Worth

Zhiduoshao is a new app that lets wary consumers have their second-hand luxury purchases authenticated by industry experts within 24 hours.

Dapper Deliveries

JD.com has launched a new luxury delivery service in China that features drivers dressed in suits and ties.

Smart Capital Airport

Baidu has signed a strategic partnership with Beijing Capital International Airport to provide smart and automated management solutions, including facial recognition at control centers.

Where Next?

Consumers are increasingly:

•Growing comfortable with everything (formal & official) done via mobile

•Questioning why brands not already providing this option

Consumers now seeing:

•Lack of mobile alternative as not forward-thinking

•Lack of mobile alternative as disinterest in customer support

Brands must think about:

•Making mobile interactions with customers the norm

•Offering physical services as premium option against mobile

•Integrating VR & AR into mobile interaction

•Using mobile tech to offer work-life efficacy and multi-tasking capability

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