OPTIMISTIC OUTLOOK
One of the youngest publishers of an international magazine in China explains why his group sees so much potential in the Chinese market. Yang Yang reports.
When the president and chief digital officer of Conde Nast International, Wolfgang Blau, visited China in late 2017, Paco Tang, the 33-year-old publisher of GQ China, took him to a fresh food supermarket in Beijing for dinner.
There, customers can choose fresh vegetables, meat and seafood from all over the world, take them away, or ask for them to be cooked and eat the food in the dining area. This is a new trend in China. “And there’s no need to pay using cash. Just use your phone to scan the QR code to pay. After you order a crab or shrimp, the suppliers in, for instance, Canada get the information. It’s a business model that makes the most of the internet,” says Tang.
“Foreigners may feel strange about how common the cashless mobile-payment system is.”
But Tang and the magazine’s leaders in London realize that China is very different from any other country due to the rapidly developing internet industry.
The market is dominated by the internet and young people — and consequently is fickle and challenging and yet full of possibilities and potential.
That may be why one of the key words for GQ China under Conde Nast International, a brand with over a century of history, in 2017 was “young”.
For instance, its annual celebration on Dec 15 saw GQ China’s editorial team choose 10 people who have contributed to China’s social progress in different areas, such as moive and music, with the theme of “the possibility of being young”.
“Being young doesn’t simply mean it is about age, but about one’s attitude toward life,” says Tang.
One of GQ’s most popular digital products — the WeChat account GQ Lab — has been created by a group of people under 27 years old.
And Tang, its new publisher, is the youngest publisher of this international magazine family across the world.
Explaining why he was possibly chosen as the publisher, Tang says: “The Chinese market is big and important. So a brand with a long history needs a team that can keep proposing creative ideas to meet the demands of a market dominated by young people.”
By young people, Tang means those under 30 years old.
“China is changing fast, especially in the recent two years. And each month we talked about different topics when my boss visited China.
“One month, it’s shared bikes. Then it was apps for laundry.
“With the apps, people will appear at your door to collect your laundry. Or you can enjoy a manicure at your office via an app on your phone,” he says.
“It (the providing of the services) is not possible in many markets. But labor costs in China are comparatively low,” he says.
Chinese brands have already started influencing other markets.
“What you do (in China) is also attracting other people’s attention, and is thus having a big influence,” says Tang.
Since he took the job on Aug 1, Tang has reorganized the administrative and editing systems, so that interactions among the different departments — marketing, planning and editing — are smoother.
Now, the editorial team takes more interest in producing quality content for branding and marketing.
For instance, for the annual celebration on Dec 15, fashion editors at GQ China helped the 10 men of the year with their hair, makeup and outfits. And they filmed the process and shared the videos on WeChat.
They also built an on-site studio to collect videos of the men of the year, besides taking photos of them.
“It is more interesting for both the stars and netizens,” Tang says.
Before GQ China, Tang worked in marketing and branding for magazines for seven years, with stints at Bloomberg Businessweek and Esquire.
Tang, who is a Libra, advocates the idea that men should not only have a stylish look and an interesting soul, but also a profound understanding of the world.
He loves the in-depth features in GQ magazines, besides jogging, swimming and tennis to keep fit.
Describing GQ, he says: “Despite being a fashion magazine, we have an editorial team to do in-depth reporting because we want to provide Chinese men with something interesting and profound about our society.”
Explaining how the process works, he says that in one instance six GQ editors spent six months collecting 800,000 characters of material on rhinitis in China’s big cities, but in the final version, readers got only 10,000 characters.
“We invest a lot in such reports, but they give us a unique quality,” says Tang.
Finally, he says he hopes Chinese men, especially those who tend to stay indoors, such as those in the IT industry, pay more attention to their appearances.
“They are very interesting people, but appearance, which reflects one’s inner character, is also very important.”