Before doing deals with China, check your underpants

Things like picking up the newspaper one day and finding out that the product you have been importing from China contains enough toxic material to fell a herd of elephant or that the chairman of the company in China handling the distribution of your product has been executed for not reaching his sales targets. Not to mention using slave labour and other little brand killers of that nature.

Check your underpants

The best advice I can give right now to marketers who have been hyped up by the Olympics and want to get into the Chinese market is to read a book by Joe Bennett - an Englishman now living in New Zealand.

The book is called Where Underpants Come From.

In a nutshell, Bennett went into his supermarket one day and bought a pack of underpants for a ridiculously low price. He pondered over just how on earth anyone could make a profit and when he noticed that they were made in China, he set off on a mission to find out just where and how they were made. Not just manufactured but where the cotton came from, where the packaging came from, who designed them, who transported them and so forth.

Do's and don'ts

His book is not only highly entertaining and amusing but is, in fact, a very good marketing handbook on the do's and don'ts of doing business with China.

He found out, for example, that the New Zealand supermarket didn't just order underpants willynilly but did a lot of homework in terms of ensuring not only quality standards but also the various suppliers' standing with regard to child labour, wages and numerous other ethical considerations. Just to make sure that nothing would blow up in their faces.

It is a great book and a must-read for anyone wanting to do business with China. As Bennett points out, China and the Chinese are very different to people in the West. And it is understanding those social and business differences that will decide on whether an export or import deal succeeds or fails.