China loves a brand – but now some Western companies are betting that China will love a Chinese brand even more than a foreign one.
InterContinental Hotels Group, the world’s largest hotel group by number of rooms (and China’s largest international hotel group), says some Chinese guests want a different hotel from what the West has traditionally offered.
“There is rising demand for something that is truly Chinese – and not the Western view of what is Chinese,” says Keith Barr, IHG’s Greater China CEO. So InterContinental Hotels is launching a new upscale made-for-China hotel, because China’s “emerging affluent class” -which could be twice the size of its US counterpart by 2015 – is not happy with standard Western hotel design. “They want the assurance of an international brand….but they are very proud to be Chinese,” he told a media lunch in Shanghai on Monday.
The lobby will be grander, the main restaurant will be more Chinese (and have many more individual private dining rooms); and where a Western hotel would have the bar at its social centre, the new brand will have a teahouse. The brand has yet to be named or launched; but Mr Barr says it will be “upper upscale”.
First to enter China as an international hotel brand in 1984, IHG expects to have more hotels in China than in the US by 2025 – but that cannot happen just by “translating” the brand into Mandarin, says Mr Barr. The group recently was forced to change the name of its Holiday Inn Express brand in China – because just translating the name made it appear to be a cheap budget hotel, competing with local rivals like Home Inn and Motel 168, instead of the slightly more premium brand position it occupies in China.
The new name translates as “Smart Choice”. Only time will tell whether that is an appropriate moniker for a company that tries to make money in China by trying to be more Chinese than the Chinese.