Guest post from Alex Geertz, who is attending the Fifth China Branding Roundtable in Beijing on September 18 and 19.

As Sam mentioned yesterday, we will be covering key highlights from “The Economist’s Fifth China Branding Roundtable: A New Brandscape: The shape of things to come” over the next two days. Today’s sessions opened with presentations from the co-chairs of the conference — Xu Sitao: Director of Advisory Services, China at Economist Intelligence Unit and Chief Rep of China Economist Group and Professor Sun Baohong: Associate Professor of Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University and Visiting Prof of Marketing, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.

In her opening remarks, Professor Sun stressed that as China changes, it is important for brands to change as well and integrate new strategies for engaging consumers, with new media representing an important new channel to explore.

For more on Professor Sun’s thoughts on the influence of web 2.0 and the Internet on brand strategy, here is an interview from Tangos’ interview with her taken from his awesome blog China Web 2.0 Review.

CWR: The discussion of the Internet and new media play an important part on the agenda of the Roundtable, do you think the web 2.0 has changed brands strategy and practice online a lot? what’s the main challenge of using new media for brand management and promotion in this wired era?

Professor Sun: Definitely. Internet and related technologies provides consumers abundant information and allow consumers to make highly informed and rational purchase decisions. Consumers may no longer be willing to pay the brand premium to resolve uncertainty about the product quality. This creates opportunities for new brands to quickly establish themselves if indeed they offer the best products.

The wired era provides highly customized and highly interactive marketing environment for the companies. One opportunity for companies to take is to fully take advantage of customer information and tailor their marketing effort to each individual consumer. This is the customer-centric marketing which can help companies to improve both effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing campaigns.

CWR: Is there any difference between utilizing new media for marketers in China and in the US and Europe? Anything special in China’s online market which brands should pay attention to?

Sun: In China, more new medias and new ways can be explored as marketing media in China. For example, cell phone is widely accepted by Chinese consumers as a promotion tool, comparing to the US or Europe. Viral marketing and social network also plays important role among Chinese consumers.

CWR: Many surveys show that Internet users tend to spend less time on portal sites, but more on social networking sites, how will this change of online behavior affects the brands?

Sun: This means customer experience and word of mouth become more and more important. It implies that company should focus more on delivering consistent product quality to maintain a consistent brand image over time and across users. It should also learn to identify opinion leaders in the social network and recruit them to help the company build brand image. In the meanwhile, the company should learn to manage crisis and mitigate damage when negative word-of-mouth is going around.