Why Gigi Hadid Is Not Welcome In China
And What The Backlash Teaches Brands About Navigating The Global Culture
What Happened
Back in February, celebrity model and Instagram influencer Gigi Hadid faced some online flak for squinting her eyes to mimic a “smiling Buddha” cookie in a Snapchat story, with many Western internet users calling her out on the racially insensitive impression. Hadid stayed quiet for a while, offering no apology or comment, and the internet quickly moved on, leaving the incident behind in the vast archive of internet’s outrage culture.
Fast forward to the week before Labor Day, when Victoria’s Secret announced that their 2017 runway show will be hosted in Shanghai for the first time, and confirmed that Hadid, who walked in the 2016 show, will be featured in this year’s show as well — the backlash was suddenly and fiercely revived.
The Instagram video that Hadid posted of herself preparing for the Shanghai show was quickly flooded with snake emojis (the universal symbol for problematic celebrities ever since Kim Kardashian used it on Taylor Swift) and numerous comments telling her to stay away from China. Hadid was forced to close the comment section of that post, but similar comments quickly spread to her other Instagram posts as well as Twitter.
Facing mounting pressure from the Chinese consumers, Hadid and her team finally posted a formally worded, bilingual apology on Weibo (China’s equivalent to Twitter) on September 1. The post quickly went viral, garnering over 15,000 replies and was a trending topic on Weibo for days. However, it failed to placate the public and the backlash raged on, with some Internet users now campaigning for an official revocation of her visa to enter China.
Update Nov. 16, 2017: It looks like the campaign worked as Ms. Hadid announced on Twitter today that she won’t be walking the show in Shanghai this year.
The objecting commenters on Weibo cited three main reasons for refusing to accept the apology, and together they reveal how important it is for brands to understand the nature of the global culture we live in today.
Why The Apology Failed
The top reason that many Chinese consumers did not respond positively to the apology is the fact that it was only posted on Weibo. Commenters were quick to point out the targeted nature of posting on a Chinese-only social platform and questioned its lack of visibility to the global social media users. In addition, they are also not too pleased with how impersonal the apology appeared to be compared to the handwritten apology note that Hadid posted on Twitter following her Melania Trump imitation in November last year. Lastly, some commenters rejected the apology on the ground that it is carefully worded to address only the Chinese, therefore leaving out the rest of the Asian audiences while the controversy has been framed as “Gigi Hadid mocking Asians.”
It’s easy to see where Hadid failed. While it may be understandable for Hadid’s PR team to choose Weibo to post the apology so as to go directly to the source and speak to the Chinese audience, they have seemingly forgotten that the main point of a public apology is an open acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Chinese internet users are fully aware of the audience gap between their domestic social platforms and those used by the rest of the world, and limiting the apology to a regional platform is simply no public apology at all. The fact that the wording, the bilingual form, and the publication channel of the apology are all designed to target Chinese consumers and Chinese consumers only further renders the apology overly opportunistic and insincere.
Limiting the apology to a regional platform is simply no public apology at all.
Ultimately, the apology failed because Hadid and her team failed to understand the Global Culture that we are now living in.
What Is Global Culture
Global culture is one of the major trends we highlighted in our annual Outlook report this year. It refers to the homogenizing consumer culture that is emerging on the back of those big, global-reaching digital platforms. With more and more people around the world getting online every day, predominantly via mobile devices, we are starting to see a global culture where the most popular media products and platforms, like Game of Thrones or YouTube, are able to attract a huge audience around the world. The audience behavior on those platforms and the content they consume are starting to transcend the language barriers and morphing into a cross-national online consumer culture.
Of course, China is a peculiar case in the landscape of global culture, as it stands out as one of the few countries where the global platforms actually don’t reach. With the Great Firewall (GFW) in place, most global-reaching social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are inaccessible in China. Yet, contrary to popular belief, the Chinese people are in no way completely isolated from the rest of the online world. Some Chinese internet users employ private VPNs to get past the GFW and access the blocked sites, while the less tech-savvy ones simply follow social media accounts that re-post and disseminate translated news and content from those blocked sites. Whatever the means, a small but significant fragment of the Chinese internet users is able to keep up with the happenings on the global social sites, one round of controversy and backlash after another, inhabiting the margins of the emerging global culture. This intersection of China’s own online culture and the global online culture is why the Chinese consumers have been able to quickly revive a six-month old backlash and leverage it to mobilize a larger Chinese public to join their online campaign.
A small but significant fragment of the Chinese internet users keep up with the happenings on the global social sites, inhabiting the margins of the emerging global culture.
What Global Culture Means For Brands
For brands, especially those seeking to reach a global audience, this new reality of media distribution and consumption is something that they need to learn to navigate. Whether for distributing owned content or advertisements, international brands need to choose partners who can leverage their scale to play into Global Culture, or platforms who can reach niches where their message will resonate. The fact that Victoria’s Secret has an annual fashion show that has been live streamed in China by the country’s major online streaming sites since 2014 is a testimony to the shrewd, global-facing content marketing strategy of the lingerie brand.
It is also important for brands to start strategizing on how to tap into that emerging Global Culture and create media events and branded content that would have global appeal and disseminate easily across borders. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show showcases beauty that needs little translation, and it’s no wonder it has drawn increasingly bigger viewership in China over the years, with last year’s show scoring over nine million views (source in Chinese) on Tencent’s streaming site alone. Similarly, Coca-Cola has been producing a singing competition reality show customized for Middle Eastern and African markets, and Red Bull has been producing adrenaline-pumping branded content around the world for a global audience.
Just because most of the global platforms are blocked in mainland China doesn’t mean that the Chinese consumers are completely cut off from Global Culture.
For brands, this incident highlights the danger of ignoring the global audience and underestimating the spread of global pop culture, especially when it comes to China. Just because most of the global platforms are blocked in mainland China doesn’t mean that the Chinese consumers are completely cut off from Global Culture. Victoria’s Secret is likely unaware that the February incident featuring one of their most high-profile models had reached the Chinese consumers when they confirmed Hadid’s attendance for this year’s show. Or perhaps that they were in fact aware of it, but figured that the 6-month-old incident has been done and dealt with. But when social media give celebrities and brands a global platform to reach their audience, they also guaranteed that the consequences of a PR crisis will need to be dealt carefully on a global scale.
