Milo Chao | Auto vs. Infant Milk Powder Industries, the Importance of CSR to Brand Building, and Investing in Customer Service for Chinese Consumers

On this episode of The Negotiation, we welcome Milo Chao, formerly with TBWA China for over 4 years and an Expert in Residence at Chinaccelerator, and now the Co-Founder of Chao and Cao, a Shanghai-based strategic advisory firm established to help foreign brands grow locally and Chinese brands grow internationally. Milo has over 2 decades of marketing and branding experience, much of it in China, which inevitably led to this becoming our longest episode to date. We thoroughly discuss many aspects of China market entry, covering the difficulties of marketing in the auto industry to why the infant milk industry was surprisingly easier. We also talked about whether Chinese consumers care about a brand’s CSR activities and social impact status, the importance of maintaining or even investing further in customer service resources for China, and why brand’s need to invest in revamping their customer profiles from the beginning and re-learning customer empathy for the Chinese market.