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A Deep-Dive into the Lives of China's Young Men
The project partnered with a multinational consumer goods company in response to the cultural shift of Chinese youth ‘lying flat’. 平躺 This phenomenon influenced the decision making and consumption behaviors of young men.
BACKGROUND
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China’s young adults are lying flat.
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This trend is particularly true for the young men in the country who face significant economic pressures as they progress through society’s traditional life stages. These expectations have similar conditions to what we see globally. You need to have a college degree, have a high paying job, purchase a car, purchase a house while taking care of your family financially. With economic growth in China slowing down, universities pumping out tens of millions of graduates each year driving incredible competition coupled with a rapidly aging population that requires economic support from only one grandchild, China’s youth are under more pressure than ever. These crippling expectations left them choosing to ‘lie flat.’ A term describing the phenomenon of young people rejecting society's expectations, walking away from their careers and simply refusing participation in the economic system.
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THE ASK
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A multinational consumer goods company that had operated in China for decades, built a vast physical presence where the majority of their product awareness and sales occur offline. The company began to notice a rapid shift to online purchases and in-home consumption. China’s youth was spending more time at home by themselves and with friends, but why? The company’s current operation in China was not geared towards this new reality and started to lose market share to competitors. With a rapidly aging customer median age where 96% are men, they reached out with the desire to build a foundational understanding of what was going on with China’s young men today.
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Working with their head of Innovation, their ask was:
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Immerse into the lives of young men and build a foundational understanding of what they are going through.
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Understand how this evolving feeling amongst young men is influencing their decision making and consumption behavior's.
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Understand how this trend of societal rejection is driving the shift to online purchase and in-home consumption.
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Identify the challenges and opportunities for this brand to better serve them.
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Develop innovation platforms to stimulate the next 5 years of product development in conjunction with a new go-to-market strategy.
This project ask was not a trivial one, this was a very well-established brand within China that served a huge customer base in the country. Any suggestions for a shift in direction for the product offering would be met with significant internal inertia. The research aspect of the project presented a number of challenges for the team including:
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Delving into personally sensitive topics for young men would require a high degree of trust between the participants and researchers.
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To get a full picture of what was going on would require approaching our research from multiple perspectives, what we like to call ‘with them’, ‘be them’, ‘about them’.
WHAT WE DID
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We identified five cities across China to run the research: Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Changsha.
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In the context of young men in China navigating well-established life milestones, our client partner expressed a keen interest in comprehending how these milestones shaped their consumption behaviors and decision-making processes. To address this, our initial desktop research led us to identify and recruit four highly specific participant profiles.
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We embarked on the task of compiling material that portrayed the type of people we wanted to recruit for. Whether you are doing immersive ethnographic research or conducting an ideative focus group, our work was only good as our participants. Our approach ensures we speak with people who are engaged, people who have a story to tell and are excited to be part of our project. We don’t recruit from databases; instead we use our network and creative approaches, and then we screen and screen them before they are cast to take part.
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The project entailed significant time and team commitment — our team of seven people dedicated ten consecutive weeks to the task, four of those weeks were spent actively in the field. The goal was to cultivate a profound foundational understanding of these young men, to steer the direction of sales channel strategy, brand positioning efforts and the early stages of product concept development.
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One of the key insights derived from this project resulted directly from our immersive approach. Instead of confining ourselves to brief interviews, we took the initiative to immerse ourselves in the lives of our participants, spending several days alongside them. Through this, we discovered that young men often faced challenges in finding opportunities to discuss the problems they were encountering. They felt too self-conscious to directly ask a friend to "just talk." However, they found comfort in inviting a friend over for a drink and some food, turning such occasions into opportunities for meaningful conversations about their well-being. This revelation opened up an avenue to explore how products consumed at home could enhance a sense of occasion, providing a better pretext to invite friends over and share moments.
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This extended interaction also revealed a crucial observation about the brand and product under investigation. We discovered that the brand's remarkable sales channel distribution, which contributed to its success in offline settings, was not seamlessly translating to the online landscape. With the rapid surge in online purchases, the brand and product portfolio struggled to maintain relevance. In the online sphere, where consumers initiate their consumption by searching for specific brands or products, this particular brand found itself overlooked. The offline distribution model, where availability coincided with consumer desire, did not seamlessly transition to the online realm.
DELIVERABLES
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Following the half-day synthesis workshop with our client team, we then ran an intensive insight-sharing and concept ideation workshop with their China leadership team in order to download and communicate some of the key challenges we had identified out in the field. With this injection of urgency, we channeled the client team’s energy to really imagine a new role for the brand and what this would look like as a product portfolio. A team of designers were on-site to facilitate envisioning, bringing to life ideas to aid the necessary difficult conversations.
The extensive research learnings provided rich stimulus and resulted in a robust product roadmap. Although the project scope and time frame were intensive, the project demanded tough conversations in order to translate the great work into reality
THE TEAM
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Alex Lessard, Elaine Liu, Guy Wingfield Horan, ZiCong Wang, Daria Dzi, Kriss Taylor and, of course, much deserved credit to our client partners, recruitment team, along with a thank you to all of our participants.