CMS's suite of services is structured around the Market Development Cycle. Whether you are new to the China market or already active in it, we can tailor our services to help you achieve your China market objectives.

Effective marketing is based on a deep, ethnographically-driven understanding of the consumer landscape.

Our services help you to gain actionable insights into the world of the fast-emerging Chinese consumer, as well as to develop a solid grounding upon which to build your business strategy.

Our Understanding the Market services include:

Marketbridge®: China Readiness Audit

How ready is your brand for the China market? Is your brand strategy well-structured to engage the Chinese consumer?

Is you organization--front-end to back-end--aligned to support your brand promise to Chinese consumers?

The MarketBridge®: China Readiness Audit consists of a broad assessment of your company's ability to deliver a brand experience and promise to the Chinese consumer. Our audit process is based on the well-established Capability Maturity Model for auditing and assessing organizational readiness. The final deliverable consists of a report that covers key areas including:

• Marketing and Brand Strategy
• Management Strategy
• Communications
• Sales & Support Readiness
• Internal Control Systems
• Intellectual Property Risk Management
• Legal & Regulatory Issues
• Supply Chain

If you have not yet fully engaged the China market, the MarketBridge® audit will serve as a roadmap for getting your China brand strategy right.

If your organization is already active in China, the audit will benchmark your current practices and positioning in an objective and arm’s length approach.

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InsightBridge®: Building Brands Across Borders

CMS' market research services take a unique approach to insight gathering across cultures, languages, and markets.

What is InsightBridge®

The core of our research services is InsightBridge®, an insight-gathering architecture that brings you deeper into the world of your target customers. It provides brand managers the deepest possible insight into their target customer's world--across languages, cultures, and socioeconomic factors.

InsightBridge® enables you to understand the Chinese customers' motivators, buying decision drivers, cultural determiners, habits and trends that shape their brand experiences and drive their buying decisions.

As a dynamic research tool, InsightBridge® is unparalleled for its reach, flexibility, and innovative use of established market research practices.

InsightBridge® results help drive:
Customer Insights
Marketing Strategy
Branding Strategy
Concept and Copy Strategy
New Product Innovation
Positioning
Communications Strategies
Product Usability
Competitive Intelligence

In addition to InsightBridge's® customized research, CMS has a proprietary market segmentation tool, China Market Profiles® that provides thorough 360 degree descriptions of China's key consumer segments.

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Brand Experience Gap Analysis

"The brand is the experience; the experience is the brand."

A consumer's experience is grounded in the culture, milieu, values, and socioeconomic factors that make up their world. The creation and management of brand experience must be informed by and localized to the consumer's cultural context.

How well does your brand "travel" to the Chinese consumer? Does your brand engage the Chinese consumer and resonate in the Chinese culture? In what ways should your global brand be localized to create a compelling brand experience in China?

CMS's Brand Experience Gap Analysis measures your brand's effectiveness across an array of scales designed to gauge brand experience. Our "Seven Gap" scale will provide you with information to localize your brand in a cost-effective manner.

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China Consumer Competitive Modeling Index®

Our China Consumer CMI® is a modeling tool that helps you optimize your brand position in China with an eye on the Chinese consumer as well as the competitive landscape.

The CMI® is composed of consumer focused scales that determine how you and your competitors rate in the eyes of the Chinese consumer. Our unique process consists of five steps:

1. Develop a Brand Value Model based on a set of value scales that capture your brand category's most relevant attributes vis-á-vis Chinese consumers. Our consumer-centric approach ensures that the Brand Value Model is about the brand category and the consumers' relationship with it, not simply about your brand. Then, we "overlay" specific, identifiable trends in the Chinese consumer and social landscape that may affect or influence the brand positioning, now and in the foreseeable future. This critical component captures the dynamic state of brand categories in the Chinese consumer landscape, thus:

• ensuring that the model is both dynamic and scaled to incorporate rapidly-evolving or "morphing" consumer categories;
• enabling scenario planning (see below).

2. Conduct a Valuation of your company's brand positioning against the Model.

3. Conduct a Competitive Analysis of Your Competitors based on the Model to provide you a clear picture of how you rate against your competitors.

4. Develop a Brand Scenario Plan and Position to optimize your brand's effectiveness, differentiation, and consumer relevance based on Chinese consumers' perception and understanding of your brand or category attributes.

5. Monitor and Optimize the brand position you've established by tracking and monitoring your and your competitors' positions against the Model to ensure that your positioning remains relevant, differentiated, and clear in the Chinese marketplace.

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