:: March 15, World Consumer Rights Day, has been a big deal for several years now in China, and following all of the China-related product quality scares in 2008, the “day” has received considerable media attention this year. Although the promotion of consumer rights issues around March 15 heightens public awareness of the procedures individuals can follow to protect their legal rights, the most noticeable activity against companies and brands at this time of year is generated by Chinese government agencies and the media.

The number 315 has become a shorthand for consumer rights in China. Complaint hotlines often include the digits 315 (as in the national consumer complaint line 12315), and Web sites devoted to consumer product quality will often have 315 in the URL. For example, while the Chinese State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC) provides a fairly bare-bones Consumer Rights Web site offering legal information, it falls to other 315 websites run by trade associations (and for-profit companies) to initiate legal action if enough consumers file online complaints. China 315 Consumer Rights Net is a well-known example, but a simple Baidu search for “315″ turns up a wealth of similar sites, both national and local in scope.

In addition to merely filing complaints, netizens can pursue consumer rights issues in a variety of ways via special sections set up on major Web portals, ad-hoc complaint groups, blogs, and standalone sites set up for particularly intractable problems. At seeisee’s China IWOM Blog, Sam Flemming explained how companies can use these Internet channels to reshape their relationship with consumers.

Below are some online / social media examples of activities from this year’s “315″ in China. Despite my best efforts to identify examples or case studies of companies / brands embracing 315 as an opportunity to engage with consumers / target audiences online, I am very much left with the impression that everything surrounding March 15 on the Chinese Internet is designed to teach businesses a lesson about the power of consumer rights / complaints. Stick-it-to-the man booby-traps abound. Companies and brands operating in China, beware! Muh ha ha…

web portal channels / sections ::
As consumer rights features blanketed the traditional / offline media, China’s major Internet portals also launched special channels devoted to March 15 activities. Sina’s 3-15 section is a typical example, and is built around links to articles and videos about major cases involving fake and poor-quality products / services. In terms of netizen-related content, the channel features a prominent link to MarchPhone (三月电话), a blog written by a consumer information hotline operator who describes how the job picks up every year around this time. The blog’s posts have hits in the hundreds of thousands, and the comments section is filled with people voicing complaints about products and services. Sina also hosted a Web chat with China Consumers’ Association vice-president Wu Gaohan and China Quality Long March magazine (中国质量万里行) president Wang Quelin (video, transcript). QQ has a fairly active sub-section on its Auto Channel devoted to aggregating information about car quality issues. The channel draws its information from news reports as well as the Auto Complaint section of QQ’s BBS. In general, however, most portal offerings were fairly similar, and all of them included instructions on how to report consumer issues to the authorities, as in this featured BBS post on Sohu.

a place to share gripes ::
To draw netizen participation, web portals held contests for consumer rights-related writing: blog and forum posts could be entered by putting a key phrase in the title. Some of the most popular posts were “inside stories” about how customers get screwed in various industries, as in these taken from Sohu: High markups on clothing, upselling and bait-and-switch in the wedding photos business, and the impotence of product standards enforcers. For netizens on the outside, the event was an opportunity to share gripes about how they had been ripped off in the past. On the local BBS for Xiaogan, Hubei, one netizen described how a supermarket was offering 5-yuan in cash for empty 5L oil jugs, but actually handed out 5-yuan coupons for future purchases. The solution: “I took out my mobile phone to call 12315, and the employee got nervous and immediately changed his attitude and said I could exchange the coupon.” “315″ is a shorthand on most BBS discussion forums for the consumer rights Board / group, typically a place where people complain about inferior products and shoddy services. Tianya’s 315 board is very well-trafficked, and even Youku has a 315 video section, although it only seems to receive new posts in early March.

ongoing issues ::
In November of last year, new homeowners in Xiamen’s Best Base Diadem (百源双玺) housing development discovered ceiling cracks throughout their apartments. A post to the development’s online BBS proposed joining forces against the developer, and a few homeowners exchanged email addresses. As World Consumer Rights Day approached, the residents staged a public protest outside the development, and held up a long banner complaining about their ceiling issues. Traffic and comments to the original post surged during March. Nationally, there’s a growing effort among netizens to hold Johnson & Johnson accountable for allergic reactions its products have allegedly caused in infants. On Sohu’s 315 Blog Group, a community set up in January 2009 for bloggers to pool information about consumer rights activities, J&J-related complaints are currently the top-ranked posts. Bloggers have tagged their posts with “Lodge a complaint against J&J” (投诉强生) and have shared photos of their babies’ skin rashes. One blogger recently posted a call for parents to join together to pool results of blood tests and use them against the company to attempt to prove that its products were directly involved in causing their babies’ allergies.

loser: China Mobile ::
Personal privacy has been a big issue in the past year, and one major consumer rights case this month involved China Mobile and spam SMS messages. A CCTV expose revealed that China Mobile branches in Shandong were operating bulk SMS services and had sold customer information to third parties (transcript on Sina with 1773 netizen comments). Although the revelations drew angry responses from netizens (toward China Mobile and toward CCTV as well), there were others who hailed China Mobile’s swift response to the expose as a qualified success — the company had quickly communicated not only to the traditional media but to online media as well that it would investigate the problem and work to correct it. China Mobile customer service was the focus of a post made to the Tianya BBS on March 14 by a netizen claiming to be a receptionist at the company’s customer service hotline (10086). The post ran through a long list of complaints about the job — strict performance requirements, long hours, unpaid bathroom breaks, and rage from callers. The post was promoted to featured status and drew more than 200,000 views and nearly 1,000 comments. Yet another complaint about China Mobile — this time warning about possibly fraudulent billing practices in Tianjin — was put up Sohu’s BBS on February 26, and was promoted to “3.15” featured status in the wake of CCTV’s expose, where it has registered more than 8,700 views.

notable online efforts ::
Netizens complain about shoddy products and services year-round. In 2008, one notable example was Huang Jing’s lawsuit against Asus for getting her tossed into jail on blackmail charges when she sought compensation for a faulty repair job. This led to a 315 Web site about the case and an effort to drum up a boycott against the computer company. Public opinion is divided as to whether she’s an ordinary consumer who’s been mistreated, or a scammer who got caught, but her persistence in taking advantage of all available media channels has kept the issue alive much longer than otherwise. Also in 2008, seventeen netizens filed a lawsuit against Tencent over QQ IDs they’d lost and that the company refused to return to them. In October, when the Nanshan court finally accepted the case, only eleven elected to pay the 1,000 filing fee. The blogger who had been reporting on the case at his blog has since taken down all posts related to the case, and no resolution has been made public.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]