“Make it More Stupid”: Elephant Digest Vol.3

 


Welcome to the Elephant Digest vol.3, a curated newsletter bringing you interesting and important stories about China.


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Happy Friday Beautiful People!

In today’s newsletter, let’s dig into China’s:

-Online Beauty Market

-The Boom of Digital Music

-Take-out Meals and O2O Delivery Platforms

-“The Belt and the Road”…and More

Before We Start…

Just a recap-

This week, we (Biyi and Yan) put up three stories on our little website, elephant-room.com. These pieces are in English,(thanks to our translation team) relatively lengthy, and very fascinating to read. If you are someone interested in a humanized and nuanced real China, definitely take a look and let us know what you think:

1.

The Beautification of Consumption Upgrade:

・Females are driving China’s Consumption Upgrade, and what are female consumers buying?
-the answer is, everything Beauty-related: lipsticks, eyeshadows, face creams, body scrubs and many many many more.

・95-after female consumers (currently aged 21 or under) have stood out as the most fierce shoppers by contributing over a quarter of last year’s total online beauty sales. They love trying new products, studying ingredient lists, and value functionality as much as sensation.

・Marketing wise, since last year, both Western and Korean beauty brands have chosen to work with mainland China’s young male stars,  aka “Young Fresh Meat 小鲜肉”, in order to attract ¥¥¥ from their fans’ pockets. It seems to have worked pretty well.

Explore
Source Language: Chinese
Reading Effort Level: 3
(From 1 to 5, based on linguistic style and analytical depth of the article)

2.

The last mile of your takeout lunch:

・In 2015, most of China’s O2O delivery platforms took part in the “money burning war” by offering free deliveries at the expense of hundred of millions loss everyday.

・It certainly worked. In the 2rd quarter of 2016, China’s online instant delivery market received 448.5 million orders, dominated by take-away meals, flowers, cakes and grocery services.

・Consumers are obsessed, platforms are competing hard, yet for delivery couriers, work is getting very rough. Almost all of these Chinese o2o platforms run a strict performance review mechanism for quality control: for every consumer complain, a courier could be fined for 200 RMB or more-that’s almost 35 times of what he/she could earn per order.

(And consumers complain about a lot of things, as we all know.)

Explore
Source Language: Chinese
Reading Effort Level: 4.5

3.

What is a CD anyway?

・China’s digital music market has been doing pretty damn well since 2015 thanks to its 95-after users. Paid download offically surpassed physical album in 2016 to become the consumption choice of China’s music fans.

・QQ music, a product of Tencent, stood as the biggest digital music consumption platform for the past two years. The platform’s revenue expanded from 30 million RMB in 2015 to about 120 million in 2016, a whopping 400% growth rate.

・Taste wise, 95-after teens now favor Korean and Japanese singers more than Taiwanese and Hong Kong ones. (Jay Chou doesn’t count, please!)

Explore
Source Language: Chinese
Reading Effort Level: 2

3.

The Curious Language for Political Correctness:・ what are some of the most-used phrases appeared in Renminribao, China’s ultimate politically correct newspaper?

・Well, according to a year-long research by Hong Kong University, “the Belt and Road 一带一路” surpassed everything else in the race. It was being mentioned for 2256 times in 2016-that’s about 6 times per day!

・Some of the other top buzzed phrases include “Supply Side”, “China Dream” and “Deepened Reform”. They were mentioned 1820, 1395 and 1388 times respectively.

Explore
Source Language: Chinese
Reading Effort Level: 4

An Image:


1969, A Public March. (Source: Tencent Photo)

A Conversation:

A Chinese video platform’s request to its director-

“Make it more stupid.”

“I don’t know how to make stupid shows.”

“Just try. Try to make it more stupid.”

A Chinese video platform’s request to director:


Source

A Recommendation 

<One Day in a Chinese Person’s Life>, Photography series
(Wechat ID: Chinaoneday)

Just Like Humans of New York, but more, well, Chinese.

A Phrase:

Hope you enjoyed today’s Elephant Digest
Do you have any suggestions? What other Chinese stories do you want to see? Please please interact through whatever channels you fancy as below:
Twitter: @elephantroomCN
微信公众号: 大象屋ElephantRoom
Email: biyi@elephant-room.com

Thank you and see you next time:)

 

www.elephant-room.com


 

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