Damian Holmes

Category: Business

  • Creating the right marketing material for the China market

    Recently I have seen some brochures from international design companies for the Chinese market. Some were good and others were down right appalling. I thought I would give some insights into what makes your marketing material good or bad for the China market.

    Lets start with the bad

    • Too smaller size font for Chinese text – I have seen lots of brochures with large English font and small Chinese font – who is the material for your home market or China? Make sure you use a nice Chinese font and that all the characters are correct – sometimes the fonts will have the wrong characters.
    • ‘Western People’ Stock Images and Graphics – Unless your Louis Vuitton with $$$ to spend on super models make sure to get stock photos with Chinese people or get a photographer to take some good photos with Chinese and western people using the product. Your product may be international but you need to make the consumer feel like they can obtain the product.
    • Irregular Graphic design – this goes for all markets not just China – unless your in-house team was trained as a designer and has some great InDesign skills you should outsource your graphic design. Putting out material produced in Word or Powerpoint is unprofessional and will do more harm in the long run. Also goes for brochures done in InDesign with irregular graphics and numerous fonts it just looks bad.

    The good

    • Brochures and websites in Chinese – engaging a local design house or a company with China experience makes a difference. The Chinese consumer has different tastes in the use of graphics and colour – you mightn’t like the design but its not the point; the point is to get sales of your product or service in the Chinese market
    • Use of images of company staff – Chinese like to know the people they are dealing with as business relationships are more like friendships. Using nice photos of your staff  and team photos with friendly facesmakes a difference
    • Chinese office contact details – make sure to include your China office address – people often talk about where your office is in China and relate it to their experience of the city
    • International calling codes remember to put only +86 or (86) or don’t put 011 or 001 in front of the country code it will confuse people . As an example of  a USA number +1 712 555 5555
    • Proof read chinese text – make sure your chinese text is proof read by a native speaker who is not your translator or translation company.
    • Good quality printing and binding – the best brochures have good quality print and binding – you may save a few yuan on cheap printing but is it worth it in the long run
    • Digital Format – make sure to have a digital copy of your brochures, price lists etc. – you don’t want clients to wait 7-10 days to get your promotion material in the post if your office is not in China
    • Country Name – Use P.R.C. or People’s Republic of China – its the official country title so use it on addresses, contracts, etc.
    • Formatting – remember to format dates, numbers, measurements, currency, etc to the regional standard allows for your customers to easily understand and eliminates confusion

    China is a market of opportunity and your promotion material is your ‘face’ in China and needs to be the best you can present.

  • Reading outside your field

    Reading is an excellent way to stimulate your brain and gain new insights and generate new ideas. We often get stuck in a rut reading the same newspapers, books, authors, blogs, and other media that our field of vision becomes too focuses and narrow. It may be good for your job to be up to date on all the latest news and information in your field. However, you often find that people in your company or profession are reading the same material and often authored in your country of residence. If you want to get ahead and learn more the best thing you can do is look for reading material whether online or in hard copy form that is outside of your field and in something totally different. Why? because often our jobs and lives are about solving problems whether small or large we are all looking to create better ways of how we do our job.

    Reading outside your profession opens you up to different ways of thinking and different approaches to problem solving. So, if your in finance maybe read an architectural journal; If your in engineering maybe read a logistics whitepaper; If your in architect read a biological science conference excerpts; Reading a wider range of material stimulates your brain and gives you more to think about but changes the way you may approach a problem next time or provide a solution for a problem you have been working on for months or years.

    I am always interested to hear from people and read their blog or material so send me an email at damian@damianholmes.com if you wish to send me something you think I might find interesting.

     

  • Where do you set the bar?

    I was reading Seth Godin’s post – Bar gymnastics about people who set a easy standard to meet but don’t wish to  push the bar higher due to the effort required.  A thought came to me whilst reading the Seth’s post that we often don’t raise the bar because there is no instant gratification, you need to raise the bar, meet that level and then consistently meet the same level until someone like your boss, coach or friends is convinced you can do it again and again and then gives you congratulations or encouragement.

    We are in an age of  facebook, twitter, texting and youtube were we experience consistent instant gratification and get a high from it. So, when we don’t experience instant gratification for doing something we often just set our standard to the easiest level. We also start setting the bar lower when learning  as children as soon as we realise that if we meet the standard there is no real gratification for raising the bar (ok maybe a gold star) and if we do raise the bar we can experience the  ‘tall poppy’ syndrome. So, if your peers are at a certain level, it takes a different type of person to raise the bar and go against the norm. These people who consistently raise their standard are often successful through life whether in business, sports or life.

    There is no one who is going to give you instant gratification for everything you do and there is no such thing as an overnight success.  Setting your own standard and then exceeding it is more satisfying and creates a sense of achievement which the results in more drive to continually raise the bar and to seek satisfaction in all parts of life.

  • Your learning and work environment makes a difference

    Think of your school, university or workplace unless you are someone fortunate enough to be in a interesting work or learning environment,  I am guessing the walls in your office or school are white, the floor is a some hue of grey or dark colour and the furniture looks like it came from an industrial designer who lived in the gulag. These environments amaze me that not more thought went into where we learn and work, we head everyday to minimalist and/or cheapest alternative when creating learning or working environments. How do we expect cities, states, and countries to be full of class leading innovators when the places they have to learn and work are boring and uninspiring.

    For me I often become inspired with ideas when I am travelling whether its locally or internationally. The new places, scenes, people, materials create new stimulus that sets off the innovator or thinker inside of us. So why not bring that to our work or school environments. It may be too costly for some but simple changes such as calenders, pictures and adding a few plants with coloured pots can make people feel more inspired. But you don’t have to wait for your school or workplace to do it, you can add a few things to your desk (of course within workplace regulations) that inspire you and change them often. Another way is taking a different way to work or a different mode of transport . The change will give you something to think about.

    So, if your a boss or manager of a school, university or workplace reading this post why not think about how you could make a few small changes to inspire people. It maybe something simple as painting doors, putting up some art or hiring plants on seasonal rotation. Another way is taking people out to the park or the roof top of the building or starting a running/sport group. The more you break up the monotony the more people will wish to stay for the long term.

    If your designing a new office or school think about how you can make small changes to improve people work/study life. Does the kitchen really have to look the same as the whole office? Can you make the desks different colours and interchangeable. Can the some of the break out/meeting areas just be a high table and stools to make meeting less formal. I sure you can think of different ways to make a difference – just put your mind to it.

  • Sustainable Landscape Architecture Part 2: Does Green = Sustainable Landscape Design?

    Often as landscape architects we are drawn into this belief that we are creating sustainable landscape architecture if we are creating a green landscape. We may be planting trees and plants but we wrongly assume that the landscape design we are creating is sustainable. Green does not mean sustainable.

    When working at BAU in Shanghai we often referred to landscapes that we mostly gardenesque or picturesque as “Beautiful Green”. A “beautiful green” landscape was often brimming with trees, plants and swathes of mown grass. Now, many will argue that a “beautiful green” landscape is sustainable as it looks green and is largely made up of soft landscape with trees and plants. However, are they really sustainable? from my experiences as a landscape architect and living in China they often aren’t sustainable. As an example the largest component of green space in cities is residential developments which are required to have 30% green space. However, 99% of the time these developments are only picturesque or gardenesque in nature, they serve one purpose and that is to create a garden for residents to look at from their villas or the apartment in the 100 metre tall building they live in. So, what is wrong with this you ask, well these landscapes require vasts amounts of energy from fertilisers to manual labour to keep the landscape looking as prestine as possible. However, most residents spend very little time in these landscapes around their buildings. Invariably, they walk to and from their building to the one or two guarded entrances of the residential compound or they get in the lift go to the basement carpark and drive their car out of the development. So if they are merely landscape to look at can they be really sustainable?

    I often hear that these landscape are sustainable in essence as they provide green lungs for the city. However, I find this a vast waste of resources. I can understand that a expressway or highway verge may need to be green and picturesque to soften the urban environment and provide green lungs for the city. But we can make these landscape more sustainable by using them as plant and tree nurseries rather than using farmland on the edge of cities for nurseries. Understandably we wouldn’t want the reverse to happen where urban green along expressways is used for farmland due to the toxic nature of the air and water that enters these landscapes. I will leave this point here and explore it further in another post.

    Green landscapes maybe seen as sustainable but residential and urban landscapes that are merely gardens with little or no facilities are not sustainable. I have seen acres of  parks and riverfronts in new and old chinese cities that are totally unsustainable. I am not speaking from a materials and maintenance stand point but from land use and community participation as I have often have few people in them. For landscapes that are surrounded by urban densities that often reach 4,000 to 10,000 people per square kilometre it is often astonishing the lack of people in these landscapes.So how do we make these landscape green.

    Modern people’s lives are changing and green space needs to adjust to suit those new needs and wants. Planning simple green and blue network landscapes achieves very little in the long term. Green or Beautiful Green does not mean sustainable it is just green. Green landscapes have their place but sustainable landscape surpass the relevance and need for just green landscapes.

    NEXT:
    Sustainable Landscape Architecture Part 3: Can Technology & Materials create Sustainable Landscape Architecture?