COMMENT
In China, Internet chat rooms are a gold mine

SHANGHAI -- General Motors will spend 35 percent of the Chevrolet brand's advertising budget in China on the Internet this year. That's wise. The Internet is a key source of information for China buyers.

Any compliment -- or complaint -- can be immensely magnified. So any automaker, and supplier who like to know how a model they supply is perceived, ignore chat rooms at their peril.

GM's Internet strategy for one Chevrolet model, the Lova  small car, includes building an online community with a Web site, and designing a 3-dimensional Lova spokesman.

Steve Betz,  Chevrolet brand director for Shanghai GM, wants to improve the ratio of those who say they intend to buy to those who actually buy a Chevrolet. Chat room input is a gold mine of information on why people don't buy.

Betz says the communication department at SGM gives him monthly reports on chat room comments--he might want to up that to weekly.

Survey company The Nielsen Co. found that shoppers make chat rooms their final stop before making a purchase decision. Philippe Coquelle,  head of automotive research for Nielsen in China, calls it "a sort of disaster check." Some buyers change their mind based on what they read, he says.

Of course, some perceptions are hard to change, even if an auto marketer is aware of them. 

For example, many Web readers are not pleased that most Chevrolet models sold in China are based on platforms from Korea, according to data gathered by CIC Data, a Shanghai company that monitors chat rooms.

Some of those platforms started out in Europe then moved to GM's Korean subsidiary, Betz pointed out. But the European origin was not a distinction that Chinese Web readers made.

China's Internet chat rooms don't just pick on Chevrolet, of course. For all auto marketers, they are a window into customers' likes and dislikes.

Pictured: Alysha Webb is the China Bureau Chief of Automotive News

--Published: 2007-3-21