Brand New China: Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture (review)

Brand New China is a cross-disciplinary examination of media advertising in China. Jing Wang shows that transnational and local advertising agencies in Beijing are at the forefront of shaping the brand identity of China itself, along with its many exports and imports. Drawing on two summers of fieldwork examining the production culture of Beijing advertisers, during which the author did some consumer ethnography, the book places brand theories and a variety of Chinese marketing practices in dialogue with British and American cultural studies. Wang demonstrates the innovative potential of cultural studies unlimited by area studies and open to production analysis. Her chapters explore brand theories, joint-venture strategies, corporate product branding case studies, consumer self-fashioning stories, and television media advertising practices, as well as digital media opportunities. Speaking simultaneously to practitioners, academics, and general readers, the book makes bold strides in the direction of an emerging "Global China Studies."

Wang, who is the author of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China, has written another insightful study of a major phenomenon involving media and popular cultural trends.¹ The culture craze in recent years has shifted into name brand consumption, making Wang's study of brand engineering a timely window on the marketing tactics that reach out to a billion consumers. Lively examples in the book show how the Chinese state, media, corporations, manufacturers, and ad agencies make brands out of events as momentous as the 2008 Olympic Games and as mundane as provincial TV drama advertising. In two consecutive chapters, Wang relates competitive localizing strategies and joint-venture complications involving Western transnational corporations and native manufacturers. Her examples of imports include Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Danone, Wahaha, and Future Cola, and her two Chinese corporate legends include Lenovo and Haier. Wang reveals a synergy that refutes binary notions of global domination and local resistance: branding processes for transnational products depend upon a high level of marketers' awareness of what up-to-date "Chineseness" entails. There is also an absence of consensus among com-petitors: for some, branding must consider autonomy in a company's own global future while making a deep appeal to localness; for others, branding should place emphasis on the targeted audiences' subjectivity along with an appreciation of the crossovers between the local and the global.

Wang's examination of aspiring global brands of Lenovo and Haier also takes note of their residual "Red Chinese" characteristics: the entrepreneurial spirit speaks in commercial and global idioms while the organization head engages in the Mao-like military speak of social control. The complexities of corporate China go beyond this legacy, however, and Wang delves into a whole corpus of advertising literature research. Not surprisingly, the book's bibliography of Chinese-language advertising studies shows that the latter has become a major field in communication and media studies in China's universities.

The chapters on "Bourgeois Bohemians in China?" and "Hello Moto: Youth Culture and Music Marketing" may well be the most engaging parts of the book with their combination of advertising research, consumer ethnography, cultural analysis, and commentary on visual imagery. Wang discusses the concepts of "tribes" and "neo-tribes" that have traveled from anthropology research to the marketing field, and uses the volatile trend of "Bobo Fever" in three southern cities to examine marketer-induced consumer self-validation. Unlike post-affluent Western prosumers, Chinese consumers still take the display of tastes and consumption habits as an important practice. But "Bobos" and neo-tribes are invented market segments rather than social formations, and are therefore distinct from social classes in China. A discussion of "xin xinrenlei" (neo-neo-tribes) and Japan's "otaku" and "kogal" as well as a Hong Kong–style "Sammy" devil brings the social imaginaries of East Asia into the picture. While the chapter's intention is to debunk the idea that existing terms can keep their connotations once they show up in various...