FHKI 60th Anniversary Commemorative Album

The Mainland market is actually very diverse and localised. One important consideration in licensing business is cultural discrepancy. “We have to develop emotional sympathy of our supporting customers towards the brand. If we apply our Mainland marketing efforts in the European or Southeast Asian markets, the sympathy factor will be missing. The essence of IP is to arouse the sense of empathy among our target customers and let them understand the messages delivered via our brand. Therefore, we engage local marketing people to do promotions to avoid cultural disparity. Marketing and promotional activities have to be integrated into the local communities, speak their language and know their preferences.” Hong Kong industrialists must change and transform. The Mainland is no longer a low-cost production base but an enormous market with great potential. The IP protection regime on the Mainland has improved in recent years. However, the Mainland is using the “first-come-first-served” principle for the registration of copyright and product design. In this aspect, Hong Kong companies should employ professional lawyers to handle the issue of malicious registrations and to fight counterfeit products. For example, different combination of materials are used on the design of B.Duck, making them difficult to be counterfeited. “To tap into this vast consumer market, our company has to keep up with the pace of market changes. We use e-commerce platforms and have tried using KOL to launch marketing campaigns and achieved surprisingly good results: 7,000 pieces of products were sold in 20 seconds! E-shops or online shops have nearly boundless coverage of area which physical shops cannot reach. Operating e-shops also allows companies to have access to the Big Data of consumers,” said Mr Eddie Hui. Federation of Hong Kong Industries 60 th Anniversary Commemorative Album 67