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Page 1 of 2 Brand differentiation in China is one of those topics that designers love to debate, but never seem to come to any conclusions on. Is it happening; is it not? Would it be an unprecedented new market for design services all over the world, or the end of the world as we know it? Core and BusinessWeek have addressed this one several times over the last few years, and mostly take a middle of the road stance: Chinese schools produce lots of designers, they're technically skilled and creatively lacking, and most of them will never get a design job because the domestic Chinese market doesn't value brand enough to pay money for it, unless it has the cachet of imported goods. Even Lenovo, one of the few companies to put the money where the mouth is, hired Ziba to do its IDEA Gold winning PC system for the domestic market. An interesting alternative view came last week from industry blog PlasticsNews/China, in the form of this opinion piece by Nina Ying Sun. Interviewing the heads of several molding and tooling companies at a conference in Guangzhou, she finds that branding is very much on the minds of these guys, even in a relatively un-sexy field like injection press manufacturing |