ROCA Chinese Market Strategy

ROCA Chinese Market Strategy Overview

ROCA, a venerable bathroom brand with a century-long legacy hailing from Barcelona, Spain, has established a robust commercial presence spanning across 135 countries. In response to formidable global rivals such as KOHLER and TOTO, coupled with the emergence of cost-effective local competitors, ROCA strategically embarked on its roca Chinese market strategy. This initiative aims to localize the brand image, enhance awareness, and fortify its position in the dynamic Chinese market.

The initial step in executing the roca Chinese market strategy involved obtaining a comprehensive macro-level understanding of the sanitary industry and competitive landscape. This included discerning the preferred perception of Roca products among target consumers to effectively influence purchase intent. Subsequently, efforts were focused on consolidating Roca’s brand message and establishing a strategic brand positioning, reinforced by key visuals tailored to resonate with the Chinese market. As part of the strategy, a compelling slogan was crafted to spearhead nationwide campaigns for the intelligent product line, “ALBA.”

Roca toilet. (Source: Roca)

Insights about industry trends, target customers and the competitive landscape were gathered to define a brand positioning for Roca to guide all future communications and behaviours, including Roca’s brand key visual and Chinese campaign slogan for “Alba”.

By analyzing the industry, the customers and the competitors through desk research, leveraging both internal and external resources,  market opportunities were identified. What was unveiled through the research was that customers want more than just bathroom products. 
The bathroom is where they release tension, emotions, and experience important moments in life and reveal their true self. They need a place to feel secure safe and cared for.

We explored carefully each territory’s potential by considering Roca’s brand essence in comparison to its competition.
From there we were able to develop the brand positioning direction: to become an industry pioneer.

Roca toilet. (Source: Roca)

By digging into Roca’s design philosophy in this positioning, the target customer, value proposition and brand values were further identified.

Following our insights into the market, the brand key visual for ROCA was created. Behind this Key Visual stands the creative idea, “Personal treatment”. It translates well into the key strategy point of “authenticity” and to a direct “skin to skin” contact with the ceramic, allowing the bathroom to play a role that presents people with sensorial pleasure the moment people come in touch with the product.

The new Key Visual design showcases the bathroom product making its function intuitive, offering people the immersion with simple touches, as a personal treatment for the body and soul.

With these insights, we identified an opportunity space for ROCA, which is to build emotional bonding with its target consumers. 

Final recommendations were made after taking into account the linguistic check results in terms of readability, sound, memorability, uniqueness and overall evaluation. 

The Chinese slogan “慧心·悦享 “ [huì xīn yuè xiǎng]  is a very graceful tagline with symmetric wording structure: 慧心 [huì xīn] refers to the intelligent functionality and the considerate care, while 悦享 [yuè xiǎng] can be understood as enjoying the comfortable, pleasant bathroom space.