China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park — untold story #4 ： Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Promotion to China in the aftermath of Asian Financial Crisis, the challenges and techniques developed from Singapore (Part II)
Marketing in both English and Japanese to foreign investors to invest into SIP was one of the most challenging tasks because each and every detail of the projects landed in Suzhou had to be translated to Mandarin and roping in the local government officials, known as SIPAC (Suzhou Industrial Park Administrative Committee) that was set up especially in SIP to oversee the entire development of the park. Given that Singapore was then attracting many FDIs, the key message was to provide what we termed as a “plug-and-play” environment to the foreign investors and also to explain to Chinese colleagues and officials who worked alongside with us from Singapore to explain the attractiveness of SIP beyond China and Suzhou City. “Plug-and-Play” sounded almost easy to be understand by western country investors, but to explain this concept then to Japanese was a tough one. Even translating “Plug-and-Play” in Japanese made me scratched my head, and I had to coin out my own “Japanese” interpretation to illustrate the similar meaning to the Japanese. However, thanks to my university major in Computer Science, “Plug-and-Play” was a lingo that was only started to be known back in 1995, when Microsoft launched Windows 95, a “Plug-and-Play” concept, which for the very first time, OS (operating system) was made visually easy to use, without the necessity to know computer languages. That helped me to articulate the entire concept to the Japanese who were then one of the major producers of computers in the world. Yet, this concept and idea when translated to Chinese sounded weird, which literally was “即插即用”. It was still a relatively new concept in China then just like “off-the-shelf” perception of buying products from supermarkets or departmental stores, which was still nascent behaviors in China. (Remember those early days, 2nd tier cities were still buying from sales assistant, who stood behind counters, and had to bring products from the shelf to show to the customers who wanted it. One could not just pick up products from the shelves directly to see unless one got the help of these sales assistants). Of course, the literal Chinese translation of “plug-and-play” when we translated initially caused some people to giggle.
This task of managing bilingual and bicultural business communications were never thought in classrooms, lest someone like myself who was young and had to find my own interpretation. However, this technique that I had learnt was that being trained as an engineer was probably one of the key advantages to explain some key marketing messages to the foreign investors then, and then communicating the same message to the local Chinese people too, using the similar engineering concept, and endorse the entire marketing message of the unique features of SIP.
That was when I appreciated communications were not based on language only, but the past training and ability to explain the same words using interpretations with engineering concept. This had avoided many misunderstandings and swayed the key decisions of investment. It had also benefited in some way the good working relationships with our investors and the host government as well as local colleagues to ensure smooth implementation of the projects in the industrial park.
