I came back from Shanghai with a phone full of WeChat contacts and a lesson in what exclusivity is worth.
Very few people at the China Toy Expo wanted my business card.
They ask for your WeChat instead. They scan the code, you scan theirs, and then the flow of messages starts. I’m back in Bangkok and my phone still hasn’t calmed down.
It’s efficient, I’ll give it that. In three days you build a contact list that would take weeks in Nuremberg. But WeChat makes it very easy to talk, and it doesn’t make anyone more likely to tell you the things you actually need to hear.
From Shanghai I went on to Hong Kong for a few meetings. I skipped the Mega Show. The last time I went it was a ghost town, and to be honest I’d seen enough in Shanghai. I already have plenty to follow up, most of it sitting in WeChat.
Which brings me to the meeting I’d really gone to Shanghai for.
The exclusivity that wasn’t
Earlier this year I landed a serious order for some collectables. When I went to confirm it with my principal, they told me they had given exclusivity for that territory to someone else. We had been discussing it for weeks, message after message, and that new player had never once been mentioned. Painful, and really annoying, because by then the customer was ready and so was I.
They had a booth in Shanghai, so I walked onto it with one thing on my mind, and it wasn’t the new range. Some conversations shouldn’t happen on WeChat.
No apology. Instead they offered a workaround. The exclusivity stood, but I was welcome to buy from them in China and ship the goods to my customer myself.
So their exclusive partner gets protected on paper, my principal still gets the order, and the only people left exposed are me and my customer. Not really my way of doing business.
I don’t expect the whole industry to work the way I do. But if you give someone exclusivity, tell the people you’re already talking to. And if you sell me exclusivity, mean it, or don’t bother selling it at all.
