Costa, Starbucks, Mann Coffee, 85 Degrees, Blue Gulf Coffee, UBC, Maokong Coffee; the list is almost endless. The Chinese have embraced coffee drinking just as much as almost every other civilised nation, except that in China’s case, this happened over an incredibly short period of time. At least, short in the grander scheme of things. And it was all down to advertising.
Back in the 1980s, there were almost no Western products in China, much less a luxury product such as coffee. Yet, across the Hong Kong border, the multinationals were watching.
If vultures could salivate, these would be them.
Ever since the official opening up of China in 1979, the big boys and girls had been figuring out how they would ever manage to start selling their wares to the world’s most populous nation, and to people who had never even heard of their products. Nevertheless, they knew there would come a time when this became a reality.
Barred, at the time, from opening offices and conducting business on the mainland, a handful of clever chumps figured out that did not mean they could not advertise their products. Put another way, raising brand awareness, but only for those with extremely deep pockets. So while half of a big firm worked on how to get their products into China, the other half worked on making sure the Chinese people would know what these products were when they finally saw them on the shelves, and why they needed to buy them.
Likely the best example of this in operation came from Nescafé, what we know as the instant coffee specialist arm of Swiss behemoth Nestlé. Their mission was no more complicated than to take a nation of tea drinkers and turn them into coffee drinkers. To do this, they were going to advertise. Advertise a lot. As a vehicle, they were primarily going to use the most effective medium in China at the time, one that also happened to be the cheapest; radio.
I know this, because I came to China to help them do it.
Through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, radio was the dominant media in China. Television was very under developed, print distribution costs made it expensive and there was no Internet. Radio on the other hand was universally popular. Over the airwaves, one could find news (censored and three weeks old, but news nevertheless), drama, opera and the odd bit of music (revolutionary, of course).
Radio stations also commanded giant audiences. With little else to watch or read, China’s people were still doing something that fell by the wayside in Western countries half a century ago; they really listened. A 50 mega watt FM transmitter was not the cheapest thing in the world, but it could reach millions of people. With cheap distribution costs and a captive audience, Nescafé became very interested.
After a pilot programme was broadcast by Radio Shanghai in 1989, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Thousands of letters flooded the radio station, all desperate to hear more of this exciting new type of programme.
The format was simple. Melodic Western pop music, carefully chosen to appeal to Chinese tastes, was introduced by local presenters but only after they had been taught to have fun while they are doing it. Add in a sprinkling of English from the foreign presenter and five 30 second commercials for Nescafé, and you have a winner.
Nescafé was over the moon. Immediately agreeing to expand the programme into other cities, over the following 6 years, Nescafé Music Time (NMT) was to be broadcast in 14 major cities and provinces, at its peak reaching over 100 million people per week. In short, it was the most listened to radio programme on the planet, ahead of even the BBC World Service.
In “China Coffee Part Two: Who’s drinking it?”, on the website The World of Chinese, Stuart Eunson, a founder of Arabica Roasters, a foreign-owned specialty coffee roaster and supplier established in Beijing in 1994, notes, “It was Nescafé, he says, and the Columbia Coffee Grower’s Association, that laid the groundwork for increased knowledge and awareness of coffee”.
Acknowledging the radio show’s impact on the rise of coffee culture in China, Eunson went on to say, “Anybody who is late 20s to mid-50s would be familiar with 雀巢音乐时间 [Nescafé Music Time]”.
While I personally would challenge Eunson on his suggested age range, there is little doubt that the large majority of Chinese people who went to university in a major city during the 1990s (so they are now in their mid forties) would be familiar with the programme.
With their newfound power, Nescafé also became hungry for data. Encouraging us to perform market research into two different audience segments; students (their future customers) and the general populace (current consumers), the results were staggering. Among university students, in many cities the programme had a “reach” (the number of people who actually listen expressed as a proportion of the total potential) of over 90 percent. Over the years we began to understand why; many thought they were doing something a little wrong of which their parents would not approve. Listening to Western pop music was tantamount to counter-revolutionary; that fact that they were listening on a Walkman’s headphones as an escape from the blues of dreary dormitory life only served to enhance the attraction.
Among the general populace, the figures were much lower and varied widely by region, but at 20-30 percent still very respectable in radio terms. Most fascinating for Nescafé, though, was the revelation that showed listeners to NMT, on average, bought three times more coffee than non listeners; powerful figures indeed.
This is where it is important to take a breather, and look a little more closely at this. When we say “bought three times more coffee”, we should remember that three times zero is still zero.
I went to a Nescafé conference/workshop in Beijing in 1995. It was entitled “One More Cup”. At the time, per capita coffee consumption in China stood at 0.7 cups per year. With its catchy title, excited participants plotted how they could be part of turning that figure into 1.7 cups. Off to one side, the older executives noted that there was not enough coffee in the world to make this a reality.
Even they themselves would end up being impressed at just how much supply would be able to rise to meet demand. With this, our work was done, as I received a one page fax from Nestle in November 1998 advising that their marketing was moving in different directions and as a result, they would not be renewing the contract for the following year.
As I became redundant, the last song played was The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun”, while the entry for Nescafé Music Time on the very Chinglish shared encyclopedia website e97.com was left to note, “NMT in 1990s Chinese … is not only a gorgeous waves, more is left to us on the memory of youth”.
There can be little doubt that NMT also helped Nescafé to sell a lot of coffee. In short, they succeeded in their original quest, at least in the 1st – 3rd tier cities; to turn a nation of tea drinkers into coffee drinkers. And who says advertising doesn’t work?
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, October 2016 issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link.
