ACBA09 flyer, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.  Illuminant’s Chief Executive Simon Cousins and Director Catherine Davis are pictured front-and-centre.

The 17th Annual AustCham Australia-China Business Awards were held in Beijing for the first time on Thursday 3 December 2009.

Illuminant was the fortunate winner of the ACBA08 award for entrepreneurial excellence. We want to congratulate all the winners of the 2009 awards, and especially Galaxy Resources, who won the entrepreneurial award this year.

The full media release issued by AustCham Beijing can be read here.

Think with foot. GWEAT

Brand is an interesting thing. Brand is many things, including the personification of a product or service.  Brand is like the name or nickname of a person for the product or service.

Branding gives others something to remember and address this very person by, especially when he has done something great and expect others to be grateful.  Thus the fundamental purpose of brand marketing is to make consumers remember it, consume it, and continue to consume it.  This should be very easy in theory.  Just expend your effort build something really fantastic, and go around shouting “hey guys, please be aware that this piece of work is proudly brought to you by [insert your brand here], and we will do even better in the future!”  But in the China marketplace, things always have some tendency to go wrong, especially in a market where everyone speaks a language very much different from most other languages available.

One such occasion is when one company has too many brands. In a recent market research project for an Illuminant client, I was surprised to learn that most consumers we interacted with did not know that Gatorade is a Pepsi brand. This isn’t necessarily bad, but in China, attaching a small brand to a globally respected name could have even better effect.

Or on other occasions when there are so many brands involved, it’s rather hard to maintain one single brand from the hellish brand warfare.  An example would be the computer industry in China.  In early 1990s, when Great Wall was the dominant PC brand, everyone was referring to computers as “386” and “486” (as in 80X86).  Manufacturers such as Great Wall and Compaq were so easily overshadowed by the processor maker. Things didn’t go better until, according to my observation, the coming of Lenovo (then named Legend: they changed their name years later when sued). Even “Intel” and “Pentium” went lost in the initial communication where the new processor brand was simply called “586” for habit’s sake. The problem was later solved by Intel’s carpet-bombing campaign of “Intel Inside” advertisements. And that’s good.

Things get even more confusing as time goes by and global collaboration becomes commonplace. Still taking our power-eating buddies for example, smart phones are the big thing right now. Currently there are brands for RAM, processors, OS providers, OSes themselves, phone manufacturers, cellular carriers. Putting them together, the a given handset’s brand profile could get really chaotic.

Take Android phones. The OS is called Android, and the maker goes by the name of Google. The ground-breaking phone manufacturer is HTC, and HTC’s phones are sold under a wide range of carrier brands such as T-Mobile (America), TIM (Italy), MTN (South Africa), and HTC itself. Product model names could also vary such as the first generation is called “T-Mobile G1” and “HTC Dream”, the second “T-Mobile MyTouch” and “HTC Magic”, while the latest two generations are simply “HTC Hero” and “HTC Tatoo”.  The chaos redoubles when it officially gets into China under HTC’s sub-brand Dopod. Consumers can now buy a Dopod A6188 (in other sense “HTC Dream”) and Dopod A6288 (in other words “HTC Hero”).  Arguably, the problems are: A) Too many brand names blind people. The brand-blind could be very serious when there are multiple mega-names among them. B) Language barrier. Chinese consumers are not so sensitive to English words or letters.

In many countries this shouldn’t be much of a problem since most people only care about their local version. But this is China, where local release, especially for phones, tends to be an expensive undertaking with newness equating to premium pricing, while consumers simultaneously have wide access to a black market. The brand war turns out to have an interesting effect. Here people always address all phones that works upon Android platform as “Google Phones”, and HTC’s great works are named in an unintended fashion as G1 (HTC Dream), G2 (HTC Magic), G3 (HTC Hero), G4 (HTC Tatoo). With HTC announcing or leaking new plans, I’m already expecting the wide usage of G5, G6, and probably G7. Gadget collectors are talking about the difference between “T-Mobile G1”, “TIM G1”, “MTN G1”, oh, and “HTC G1” only when they don’t know how this particular phone should be categorized. Poor HTC becomes the invisible man, and everyone is feverishly thanking Google for the hardware as well as software. This isn’t so great, by my standard, when HTC is selling phones under its own name and the Dopod alterna-brand.

The point here is, it’s necessary to have a brand identity, but it’s also important to make sure the brand is put into proper usage. You’ve got to pay attention to how people are talking about your stuff. Not only comments, but also how they recognize it. Advertising and other above-the-line marketing is one way to sort that out, however effective management of media exposure and other below-the-line techniques are of high importance. A failure media management program could result in something like this:

iPhone. This is the name that completely changed the smartphone business. Even before it’s much belated release in China, there were already around one million smuggled units running on the GSM networks of various carriers here. For traditional lack of creativity and marketing-oriented thinking, both China Mobile and China Unicom now are busy developing their home-grown (although technically on Android) smart phone OSes called “OPhone” and “UPhone” respectively in order to catch up with the trend begun by Apple. Intended unimaginative branding caused a brand avalanche. Since there are “iPhone”, “OPhone” and “UPhone” already, Chinese journalists begin to automatically re-brand every other player in the field on their own accord. In this fashion, Microsoft, who so proudly announced its “Windows Phone” campaign not so long ago, is now called “WPhones”. And Android is now commonly addressed as “GPhone”. Multiple tech portal websites (Chinese) have worked out thrilling big headlines going like “FIVE [X]Phones fight to be king of the hill in China!”

Although every bit true in OPhone’s and UPhone’s cases, this isn’t so good for Microsoft or Google (well, and HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, etc passively represented by these two giants) because such unofficial branding renders them instantly, in the minds of millions of consumers as little more than iPhone copycats. You will see this concern stands when you see so frequently Chinese netizens commenting like “to hell with WPhones and GPhones. Our iPhone is the first and best!” A fundamental rule to market competition is, if you want to do better than iPhone, you first declare very clearly “we are definitely not an iPhone, and we don’t want to be”. Things will look much better if vendors are more serious about their media work, and spend 5 more minutes talking to the journalists which can simultaneously influence public opinion and help clarify these muddy waters.

Another solution to achieving brand integrity in China includes defining a real Chinese brand name that makes some vague sense rather than being plain transliteration. Then, and the most important, ensure that brand name is correctly used. Contributing all your good reputation to a partner is bad, but making yourself look like a no-brainer is worse.

So, behold, BlackBerry and Palm. You guys are talking with China Telecom for China entry right the moment. Do not make yourself into “BPhone” (or “BBPhone”) and “PPhone” by doing nothing! This is China, where many things could go wrong at the least unlikely point. Know what you are dealing with. Keep yourself known in a preferable way. And make sure the message is delivered correctly through the whole process.

Authored by Illuminant’s Head of Research, Kane Gao

Sino-Austrian Economic Forum 2010 (1), originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

Sino-Austrian Economic Forum was held in Beijing on 20 January 2010. Illuminant Partners was proud to be engaged by the Austrian government to support and photograph the proceedings.

Translation Center, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

As we all know, language is, in most cases, far more than just a number of symbols and expressions. Instead, language is a reflection of a nation’s civilization, its unique thinking and behavior patterns and its geographic location as well.

我们都知道，在大多数情况下，语言不仅仅是一系列象征和表现形式。相反，语言能够反映一个国家的文明程度、独特的思维与行为模式以及地理位置。

As a result, translators must do more than merely translating from one language to the other. Translators are also playing the roles of editors and copywriters, as they need to polish their translated work and make it sound as natural and elegant as possible in the target language. Here arises an inevitable dilemma for translators, as they are expected to be faithful to the original language and are usually not encouraged to change the content and sentence orders in the original language and are thus influenced by the original language. That’s why many knowledgeable Chinese call translators “dancers with shackles”. Most of the time, translated texts are slightly, if not too much, different from those directly written by a native copywriter due to different ways of thinking and structure development. At Illuminant, to maintain the high quality of our translation work, our language team always tries its best to offset the abovementioned influences by polishing the text afterwards and by always having a designated internal third party to contribute as a polisher to proofread our finished translation work in an objective manner.

因此，译员要做的不仅仅是将一种语言翻译到另一种语言。他们同时还发挥着编辑和撰稿人的作用，因为他们需要润色自己的翻译成果，从而尽可能地使翻译的目标语言变得自然而优雅。而译员在这里就难免陷入一种困境，因为他们仍然需要忠实于原文，不轻易变更原文的内容或是语句的排列顺序，所以他们将或多或少受到原始语言的影响。这就是为什么人们将译员称为 “带着枷锁的舞者” 。在大多数情况下，翻译出来的文本与直接撰写的文案，二者有一定的区别，这是因为不同的语言总是有不同的思维方式和文章构架。为了尽量减少上述影响，在朔光，我们翻译团队总是尽力保证在翻译完成之后对译文进行润色与审译，并在交稿之前让其他同事以客观的角度再次审查译文，从而保持翻译工作的质量。

So our translation procedure is usually consisted of three parts: translatio； internal proofreading and polishing； external polishing, before we hand our work over to our clients, and from time to time, post-translation communication with clients is carried out to best understand and satisfy our clients’ specific needs and requirements.

因此，我们的翻译工作程序通常包括三个部分：翻译；翻译团队内部的校对与润色；其他同事的审译（有时是我们亲爱的媒体部门的同事）。另外，我们会不时地与客户展开积极的沟通，从而更好地了解并满足他们的特殊要求与需要。

Also, the Illuminant language team takes pride in a number of house glossaries we have compiled for each of our major clients based on their specific fields, such as architecture, mining, high-tech, tourism, and other sectors which our agency is expert in. Glossaries are very important for all of our language-related work at Iluminant, because most of our clients are long-term retainer-based and thus keeping our copywriting and choice of words professional, accurate and consistent is a key priority for our language work. That’s when our glossaries come into play: ensuring accuracy and consistency.

此外，令翻译团队倍感骄傲的是我们针对主要客户以及他们所处的领域而汇编的词汇表，这些领域涉及建筑、矿业、高科技等等。这些词汇表对朔光而言，是一种非常重要的语言工具。这是因为我们的大多数客户都是长期客户，所以保持语言服务的准确性、一致性与专业性是语言工作的重中之重。而通过使用我们所编撰的词汇表，我们就可以简易地找到过去使用的所有专业词汇以及它们的特殊用途。

Graceful language and elegant wording is always appreciated and enjoyed like a refined art. But there are occasional cases where clients don’t want their copywriting – words that powerfully represent themselves and their products – to be “high-brow”. In other words, they want “plain” language to represent them (in the Western sense, this might be thought of as “tabloid” language). When this happens, we will actively communicate with them to know about their specific needs and “play down” our choice of words accordingly, in order to cater to their special requirements. After all, clients’ needs and satisfaction form the priority. But the good news is: most clients LOVE beautiful language the way they appreciate refined arts.

优美的语言、典雅的措辞，如同精致的艺术一般，是一种愉悦的欣赏与享受。但是，有时有些客户却不希望我们为他们撰写的文案太过“风雅” 。换句话说，他们希望用“平实”的语言来表达自己。在这种情况下，我们将积极地与他们展开沟通，从而了解他们的具体需求，并在措辞方面为他们量体裁衣，以满足他们的特殊要求。毕竟，客户的需求与满意是市场经济的重点所在。而好消息就是：我们的大多数客户，正如喜爱精致的艺术一般，也喜爱美丽的言辞。

Article by Illuminant’s head of language services, Monica Lin （林敏）

“I am excited about this partnership with Illuminant Partners. They are an independent PR firm of a similar age to that of SinoTech Group and have a very professional approach to their clients. I am pleased that SinoTech Group can provide Illuminant Partners with digital solutions such as Online Reputation Management, Search and Social Media Marketing as well as Online Analytics and Measurement tools,” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, Chief Executive Officer of SinoTech Group.

“With a trend towards more digital integration within PR, especially social media, we are one of a movement of new-style PR agencies offering highly-digitally integrated campaigns to our clients. Staying ahead of the digital curve is the differentiating factor in our ability to achieve superior communications outcomes for our clients, so it is important for Illuminant Partners to work with likeminded strategic partners” said Simon Cousins, Chief Executive of Illuminant Partners, “SinoTech Group has an outstanding history of innovation and creative approaches within the digital media market, and we expect their approach to add tremendous value in achieving and exceeding the communications objectives of our clients.”, continued Mr. Cousins.

For media enquiries, please contact Ms Chen ZHU at Illuminant Partners, +86 10 5879-4050 or chen.zhu-at-illuminantpartners.com

Ends.

Beijing, 1st June 2009 – The Green Office Alliance has appointed Beijing-based Illuminant Partners as its PR and strategic communications agency. The Green Office Alliance is the world’s first multi-company green building and furnishing products alliance.

Following a competitive pitch, Illuminant Partners’ appointment – for PR, corporate identity development, digital marketing and experiential marketing – was made in order to support the GOA’s market introduction, strategically position its brand and publicize the initiative to key opinion leaders and decision makers in China’s architecture, building construction, interior design and real estate industries.

The GOA consists of four global leaders in sustainable commercial interiors: Haworth, InterfaceFLOR, Owens-Corning and Philips. It is has been formed as a collective of like-minded companies promoting sustainability and green practices in the workplace. The GOA’s primary objective is to elevate the levels of sustainability in commercial offices and buildings.

The official launch of the GOA will be made at Beijing’s Eco Expo on June 17th, 2009.

The GOA offers designers, owners and users of commercial interiors a continuum of a high-quality, cost efficient and environmentally sustainable furniture, fittings and building products. Used together, a commercial interior which utilizes products from the GOA helps to reduce negative impacts on the environment as well as achieving excellent occupant satisfaction.

Illuminant’s Amy Meng, an expert in innovative and environmental-friendly construction sector marketing services in China will head the account from Illuminant’s Beijing office.

About the Green Office Alliance’s member companies

Haworth, Inc.

Haworth partners with local suppliers, environmental experts, customers and the community across Asia Pacific, The Middle East and Latin America to innovate world-class practices in product design and sustainability.

As a leader in office furniture and architectural interiors with a worldwide presence, Haworth products are informed by a lifetime of global learning. We have nurtured a corporate culture committed to superior customer service, environmental responsibility, and engineering innovation.

Haworth has been a pioneer in the China market as the first multinational office furniture company to establish its own manufacturing facility eleven years ago in Shanghai. Haworth made another first when we moved our Regional Headquarters from the Puxi zone of Shanghai to the fast growing Pudong zone. The Haworth Organic Workspace is now in the tallest building in Asia, The Shanghai World Financial Centre. Haworth Ideation Group is Haworth’s research unit that aligns organizations with their goals and visions.

www.haworth-asia.com

InterfaceFLOR

InterfaceFLOR is the largest modular carpet manufacturer in the world. With over 30 years of global experience, our goal is to provide you with innovation, beauty, performance, service, value and environmentally responsible products and processes in every 50cm*50cm tile.

At InterfaceFLOR, we’ve made it our mission to go way beyond green product
attributes. Every creative, manufacturing and building decision we make is intended to help us achieve zero environmental footprint by 2020 and give you the most fashionable, high performing and environmentally well-rounded products in the industry. And we call it Mission Zero.

www.interfaceflor.com

Owens Corning

Owens Corning, the inventor of fiberglass, is a world leader in building materials systems and composite solutions, delivering a broad range of high-quality products and services.

We define sustainability as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the world that we leave to the future. This approach to business energizes our people, creates growth opportunities for our customers and drives value for our shareholders.

To accomplish that, we focus on three strategic initiatives:

1 Greening our operations- achieving specific environmental footprint reductions
2 Greening our products – continuously improving the life-cycle impact of our products
3 Accelerating energy efficiency improvements in the built environment

Sustainability at Owens Coring is a journey of continuous improvement. We believe that the world is a better place thanks to our many products and services that help conserve energy and other precious resources. Owens Corning makes the world more energy efficient.

www.owenscorning.com
www.owenscorning.com.cn

Philips

Philips is no. 1 in the global lighting market, and part of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI). As a world leader in healthcare, lifestyle and lighting, Philips integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions, based on fundamental customer insights and the brand promise of “sense and simplicity”.

Sustainability is one of the focal points of our strategy, and we use our expertise to help combat global challenges – i.e. climate change – by offering business solutions in all markets that reduce our ecological footprint and enhance social equity.

Philips was the first to introduce the energy-saving light bulb back in 1980. Our latest EcoVision program, which is our fifth multi-year plan, seeks to make our product portfolio ever more efficient, and sets targets to expand our investments in Green Innovations, increase revenues from green products, and improve the energy efficiency of our facilities.

www.lighting.philips.com

Ends.

Story at Marketing online here

Story at Media online here

Yesterday the Chinese internet search giant announced its brand new product, 百度老年搜索 (literally “Baidu Senior Citizen Search”).  An exciting day for increasing numbers of Chinese silver surfers!

According to Baidu, China has around 14 million silver surfers. They’ve been dubbed silver surfers, of course, due to hair which is often rendered silver-white by the flowing years, however they still like to keep up with current technology.  A great many of China’s silver surfers have been enriched by new China’s economic miracle and the part their kids’ have played in it, so to marketers, they’re actually a pretty interesting consumer segment.

At the launch of “Baidu Senior Citizen Search” Li Yanhong, the company’s CEO said “Despite their age, our parents, just like us, need to absorb information from the web. As the search engine provider which owns 90% of Chinese market, we must offer more convenience to silver surfers. So [Baidu] decided to make a new search engine, specially designed for them. Aside from information, the new engine is utterly easy to use, enabling our fathers and mothers to surf the web without relying on a mouse. Meanwhile, considering there are 14 million silver surfers in China, it’s quite a remarkable market.”

[Illuminant's summarized translation - read the original Chinese here]

Okay. Great idea, Baidu.  China now has a search engine to specicially serve retired netizens.  Lets now leap into this modern-as-tomorrow future and see how the service works!

Hmm. The new search engine is a little bit hard to find. It seems to us that it can only be visited from a small text link on the front page of Baidu.com. A single click took me to a yellow-page with very, very, very huge fonts. The big font is a good idea (well, a no-brainer, actually.  What else does the specialist search engine provide?  Somewhat disappointingly, we couldn’t find anything innovative, or even new.

Firstly, a yellow web-page is nothing new to Baidu. Years ago the company acquired a catalogue (name: hao123) of the most frequently visited websites to help web starters who are not yet familiar with a real search engine (this, of course, was originally a Yahoo! innovation back in the 20th century). The new Baidu “search engine” for silver surfers looks pretty much the same as hao123, only with a ton of stuff for youngsters removed. The catalogue includes weather, tourism, hospitals, traditional arts, senior citizen communities, web portals, and so on. But… despite the convenience of a heirarchichal link aggregation, is this by any standard a “search engine”?

At the top, beside the Baidu logo, there is a textbox emphasizing the facility of a search engine. The textbox, like everything else, is also extra large, of course.

According to Mr. Li’s speech, one might be led to believe that there is a great deal of new code behind the page to generate optimized and carefully selected entries to silver surfers. So, we tried the new engine with something tricky: a Mandarin-Chinese slang term in current use amongst China’s young netizens. This slang term is definitely not something silver surfers would be interested in. We expected that the search results would feature an explanation of the term, and several news stories addressing the rise of netizen slang. OK, type the term, click the button, and see what we’ve got here.

If my computer works all right, what I’m look at now is a very long list of the term being put into normal daily usage. Say, if I’m born long before the information era of China and only got to use computer in my old age, this list will confuse the hell out of me. Out of curiosity, I tried the term in the regular Baidu search engine. And… what the… I’ve got a completely identical list here.

Our inexpert conclusion is: except for super large fonts, the “new” search engine is nothing but a magnified version of old stuff. We’re scratching our heads.  Why would a good company bother spending money on creating buzz for an advanced new technology solution which could be easily replaced by buying my Mom a pair of glasses?

Interestingly, we’ve found that the new silver surfer’s “search engine” is (at the time of writing) totally advertisement-free. To be fair to Baidu, this is actually a pretty good thing: presumably China’s silver surfers possess minimal internet security understanding as well as high trust in new technology.  Silver surfers would be easy targets of the Chinese web’s ubiquitous phishing-attacks, Trojan horses, and virus-bearing malware.

Perhaps fault lies with us, for expecting too much of a leading Chinese web business.  After all, CEO Li did promise “a new search engine, specially designed for them“, and no court or judge would penalize Baidu for its “over-promise under-deliver” approach to this “new product” launch.

As a marketing agency working in China, we really shouldn’t be surprised at any part of yesterday’s buzz-creating activity, except at the lack of advertising on the “new search engine”.

Baidu, we’ll gladly be proven wrong.

Article by Illuminant’s head of research, Kane Gao

SARFT.Headquarters, via Flickr

Last year China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) caused a great deal of panic among the mainland’s video sharing websites by threatening to kick any operator without an online broadcasting license off the intertubes. Eventually, every video sharing website had a license granted, and the initial climate of panic tapered off and quietly died.

Yesterday, SARFT again unleashed its power, announcing a new set of regulations to further govern China’s online video sharing sector. Under the new rules, all films, TV series, cartoons and documentaries must obtain offline broadcasting licenses before being transmitted via internet media (and yes, mobile networks are included), even if the broadcaster has already licensed necessary copyrights from distributors. For the full story please refer to this helpful overview from Pacific Epoch, who we beleive scooped the story.

The new regulations instantly caused another panic amongst China’s netizens. Unlike YouTube, which relies on short video clips and user-generated content, its many Chinese clone-sites mainly live on (pirated) films and TV series. Obtaining an offline license for every single film would take more time than is left until the heat-death of the universe. Needless to say, offline licenses are based on the correct licensing of copyrights, which in many parts of the Chinese web do not outweigh the low cost/huge profit charms of piracy. If SARFT is really serious about this, then the whole business seems to be pretty much terminated.

But from my perception, we don’t have to be too serious about SARFT’s latest moves. Parallel with the new regulations, there is something called the “haven principle” in the whole Chinese internet sector (including video sharing). The principle works like this: an online broadcaster does not have any responsibility if any user-uploaded content causes trouble (such as violation of intellectual property rights). So long as the offending content is simply removed from the website, on notification, every problem is solved in a civilized and harmonious way.

This “uploaded-protested-notified-removed” principle has saved many Chinese video sharing websites from lawsuits they absolutely could not afford to defend.

From our perspective, it seems pretty obvious that in pursuit of almighty page-view, a large number of “helpful users” who upload tons of  stuff on daily basis are actually website editors in disguise, taking advantage of the haven principle to dodge ethical, legal and moral responsibilities. Personally I’ve formerly worked for a market-leading WAP site whose main business is was to “share” pirated (dumped, cracked, regged) mobile phone games totally free of charge, much like video sharing websites. An eye-catching disclaimer was placed on every download page saying “all content is uploaded by users, thus the provider has no responsibility for violation of intellectual property”. But guess what? They didn’t even have a user upload interface. All editors worked on a 8 hours/6 days schedule to collect, upload, and organize pirated games. The WAP site even established different servers and purchased different domain names for file storage to enhance the impression that all those games were located by its fictional “super advanced game search engine”. Gaming, indeed.

Sorry for spinning off topic.

Back to China’s haven principle. Under the user-upload umbrella, China’s video sharing websites do not have to pay anything for violating SARFT’s new regulations. On the other hand, SARFT has to manually monitor every single video on each website to check if there’s any illegal broadcasting activity. In a country of 243 million broadband users, this is a monstrous job. And considering the normal slow speed for takedown notices to be generated, there will be enough time for users to have their fun and for websites to gain almighty page-view between the video’s upload and a demanded removal (if it ever gets found and put on notice).  Of course, even if an offending video upload is terminated, another “helpful user” will upload the video again under a different URL.

Some observers believe that SARFT should be extra-careful in the implementation of its new regulations. Practically all YouTube clones in China are launched, nurtured and generate page-view via pirated content. An overdose of administration may easily snuff the whole business out, and we don’t beleive that China would want to deliver this unto the nascent sector (which employs thousands) given the current condition of the world economy.

Disbelieving?  If you’re feeling in an IPR-violating mood, you might enjoy the 213th episode of popular Japanese cartoon Bleach, uploaded on April 1st 2009, which does absolutely not have an offline broadcasting license. Thanks, Tudou.com, for sharing!

NB: Imagethief’s view, well worth reading, is here.

Kane Gao, Head of Research, Illuminant Partners

]]> http://illuminantpartners.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/03/sarft-again-visiting-harshness-on-chinas-video-sharing-sites/feed/ 0 http://illuminantpartners.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/11/illuminant-wins-the-australia-china-business-entrepreneurial-award-2008/ http://illuminantpartners.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/11/illuminant-wins-the-australia-china-business-entrepreneurial-award-2008/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:37:29 +0000 A source of light http://illuminantpartners.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/11/illuminant-wins-the-australia-china-business-entrepreneurial-award-2008/

Illuminant’s chief executive, director of operations, and Australia’s ambassador to China

Illuminant Partners wins 2008 Australia-China Business Entrepreneurial Award

November 10th, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hong Kong — Illuminant Partners, a Beijing based multi-disciplinary public relations and strategic communications agency has won 2008’s AustCham Australia-China Business Entrepreneurial Award.

Announced by CNN Hong Kong anchor Andrew Stevens at the Awards gala dinner on Thursday November 6th, Illuminant Partners was one of more than sixty entrants to the awards, now in their 16th year. The ACBA Business Entrepreneurial Award is given annually in recognition of an Australian-originated business which has demonstrated entrepreneurial excellence in greater China.

Australia’s ambassador to China H.E. Dr Geoff Raby described the award as “the most sought-after award of its kind outside of Australia”. Illuminant’s chief executive Simon Cousins said “Our ACBA award recognises entrepreneurial excellence in China, and to that end, we are honoured to have been elected this year’s winner by our peers. The award belongs to our entire team and also to our fantastic clients, without whom Illuminant would not have been able to develop and implement such interesting and effective campaigns over 2008.”

Roger Wolfe, Chairman of the Australian Chamber of Commerce Beijing said “AustCham Beijing extends sincere congratulations to Illuminant Partners on winning at the 2008 AustCham Australia-China Business Awards. Illuminant’s innovative team proved they have the passion, vision and commitment needed to overcome stiff competition and come up trumps.”

Illuminant is based in Beijing with operations throughout China’s mainland and Hong Kong. The agency’s core team first began working together in 2004 and began life as Illuminant Partners in June 2007. Illuminant supports the public relations and strategic communications needs of many of the region’s best brands, including the world’s largest insurance broker Aon, 151-year-old global design and engineering consultant Hyder, China’s largest foreign gold miner Sino Gold and dozens of foreign government agencies and SMEs. Illuminant employs a staff of 25 across its Beijing and Hong Kong operations.

The 2008 Australia-China Business Awards were announced at a gala dinner at Hong Kong’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on November 6th in the presence of Australia’s ambassador, all of Australia’s consuls-general, Austrade’s senior trade commissioner and more than 150 guests from across China.

About the AustCham Australia-China Business Awards (ACBA):

Since its inception in 1993 the AustCham Australia-China Business Awards is a means of recognising companies that have worked to deliver Australian products or services to the greater China region. The awards have grown in stature over the years and are now recognised as a high profile celebration of business success among Australian business communities in the region.

The organizers of the ACBA include the Australian Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong & Macau, AustCham Beijing, AustCham Shanghai, AustCham South China, the Australian & New Zealand Chamber of Commerce Taipei, the Australia-China Business Council and the Hong Kong Australian Business Association. The ABCA is fully recognized and supported by the Australian Government and the Australian Trade Commission.

Tourism Austria and Travel Channel China, originally uploaded by Illuminant Partners.

Dr. Petra Stolba, CEO of the Austrian National Tourism Office, visited Beijing as one of her major stops on her tour throughout Asia. In cooperation with our friend and Head of the Austrian National Tourist Office Beijing, Josef Stockinger (who amazed journalists and travel agents with his witty speech in fluent Mandarin), Illuminant Partners had the pleasure to arrange an interview with Travel Channel China and Dr. Stolba during a tourism workshop at the Landmark Hotel today.

Austria, which ranks among the top ten tourist destinations in the world, welcomes more than 170,000 Chinese tourists every year, making China the third largest overseas tourist market for the beautiful country in the heart of Europe.

In 2009, Austria will focus on marketing the 200th anniversary of the death of the outstanding composer Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), who started his career as a member of the oldest boys choir in the world, the Vienna Boys’ Choir. The Austrian city of Linz will also be the European Capital of Culture in 2009.

In her interview Dr. Stolba was confident that an ever increasing number of Chinese tourists will discover the beauty and cultural heritage of Austria and invited the audience of Travel Channel China to come and see the home of “Sisi gongzhu” and “Sound of Music” themselves and to discover how Austria has changed in its more than 1,000 years of history.

Blog posting by Illuminant’s Director of Account Services, Anja Knass.