French Fries for dessert?

You’d say I’m nuts. “Of course not” – you’d insist if you were a Westerner or had lived in the West for at least a few years. But, in China, anything is possible.

I was walking around the International Trade Center in Beijing just a few days ago and saw a place called “Chamate”. It is a tea place with some selected Chinese dishes including deserts. I walked into it and sat at a table near window looking out at the stores inside the Trade Center. I was very impressed by all the different teas they had – it was almost like a full bar cocktail menu. And a description for each tea reminded of me reading the poems from the Tang and Song Dynasty when I was little. And you didn’t see a single marketing word with the suggestion of “service, product, promotion or selling”. Instead, it was like a neighbor calling for a get together in the village backyard. And there were many people who walked in and out of this Chamate place. Business seemed quite good.

I was murmuring to myself “perhaps this is a master piece of how to do marketing in China.”

And as I flipped over the menu and reached the desert section, I was finding myself staring at one thing – French Fries, which was cast in parallel with some other Chinese deserts on the menu. And there was a boy with his mother sitting next to my left munching away at a plate of them.

The local Chinese people have no immunities against all the stuff dumped on them from the West. How vulnerable we are. No one told us that French Fries are actually just Western junk food. No one would ever place it on the table as a desert in the States, let alone in France.

Fascinating and sad! Fascinating - if the market can turn the French Fries into a desert dish, then anything is possible. Sad – as Chinese consumers have no guide for what to accept or not to accept. The only guide foreign companies have provided them is their marketing materials for product manuals. Chinese people have to do our best to make sense of them, with little to no context.

And it would seem that China is struggling. Or maybe innovating.

Comments

[Helen Wang]

Vida, this reminds me of the fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants in US. Americans consider them a "special treat" of Chinese culture, which virtually non-exit in China. Isn't it interesting?

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