Those challenges touch on wide ranging issues, including corporate governance, management vision, investment foresight and, as many participants agreed, the willingness to revolutionize the established mindset that has dominated Chinese corporate culture for years.

To succeed in the international marketplace, Chinese enterprises must strive for originality in design and excellence in quality, the experts said.

They also must learn to respect intellectual property rights as rampant piracy of ideas and of products has virtually choked off major investment in research and development by many mainland enterprises.

The question raised repeatedly at the conference was why would a Chinese enterprise want to develop their own products to benefit unscrupulous pirates?

Despite the daunting challenges, the need for brand building is reverberating through many corporate boardrooms in China. As Professor Wang Zhile, director of Research Centre for Transnational Corporations under the Ministry of Commerce, said, the production process at the bottom of the smile curve makes little value, while design and marketing processes stand at the upper-end of the curve and have much wider profit margins.

Citing Nike as an example, Wang said that Nike mainly engaged in design, marketing and sales activities and outsourced all of the production process. Typical Nike shoes are sold at about 700 yuan (US$84) in China, but the production cost is estimated at only a few yuan, Wang said.

Despite the earnest desire to establish famous brands, Chinese companies can hardly make their way to the recognition of globally well-recognized brands. Furthermore, Chinese brands are even less recognized and respected than their foreign peers in China.

According to Wang, Haier, the country's leading electrical appliance company, was ranked 95th earlier this year on the 100 most influential global brands list issued by World Brand Laboratory, a world brand evaluation organization. It is the only Chinese brand listed in the ranking so far. Another brand ranking conducted by Fortune China in February this year showed that only two Chinese brands Haier and Guizhou Maotai made their way into the top 25 brands in China, with foreign brands filling the remaining 23 positions.

Wang outlined a number of reasons for the absence of famous Chinese brands on the international market. "Many Chinese companies are struggling to survive in a fiercely competitive market and rarely think of setting up their own brand names, while other big companies have little experience in establishing brands," he said.

In addition, State-owned enterprises usually turn to local governments for protection when they are confronted with competition from foreign rivals, while numerous private firms are copycats and never have their own designs

By Jian Er

They were promoting Chinese brands.

Maybe you didn't notice, but Wang Weiqun, editor of the Beijing-based trade journal Successful Marketing will tell you, the footware for the US and Spanish basketballers was furnished by Li Ning, a mainland sportsware manufacturer named after its founder, China's accomplished gymnastics champion who won three gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984.

Nike was the sponsor of the Chinese basketball team.

But Li-Ning was just one of the Chinese brands learning to compete with overseas rivals and brands by taking advantage of the Athens Games.

Now that marketers have turned the country into the largest advertising market in Asia, they are ready to take Chinese brands from the domestic market onto the global market.

And Li-Ning certainly deserved a medal for its luck in supporting players who remained in the focus of television cameras and in sports news headlines for a long time.

One of the bitter lessons that many other Chinese marketers learned from Athens was that sportsmen and women who were expected to win gold medals there didn't.

Thus they suffered losses in advertising money in hiring or endorsing those players. Expensive television commercials that those companies shot in advance never got to be shown after the players they featured lost their way.

This was like betting on the wrong horse. But it was not surprising as the most competitive sports event in the world was full of surprises.

Of course, building brands takes much effort, not just advertising and sponsoring athletes. From the ways they used the just concluded Athens Olympics, we can tell that many Chinese marketers are just learning about brand building and brand management.

In the arena of brands, China has to learn a lot and practise a lot. And the learning process can take place along several lines at once.

Drawing up a branding strategy

At the strategic level, no one can replace the manufacturers' top executives in developing the overall plan based on the balancing of the company's strengths, constraints, and ambition.

By You Nuo