The World: Insider's View - Hong Kong.(marketing to people with independent mindset)

Marketers would do well to take note of the increasingly independent voice of Hong Kong's seven million inhabitants, Neil Cotton says.

Marketers who think of Hong Kong and mainland China's consumers as placid Confucian collectivists would do well to take note of Hong Kong's ongoing 'Silk Revolution' and ponder marketing to people with an increasingly independent and demanding mindset.

Hong Kong people are nothing if not resilient. In the past ten years, they have weathered the Asian financial crisis; the handover to China; Sars and the threat of avian flu; and are today living in the shadow of the world's biggest market. All this with little fuss or bluster; like the Energizer Bunny, Hong Kong's seven million people just keep going.

Little fuss or bluster, that is, with one exception: their demand for greater freedom and democracy.

Long heralded as the world's most open market, Hong Kong's record on political freedoms has been less impressive. Today, the much-heralded 'one country, two systems' approach adopted by Beijing before the 1997 handover is showing some cracks.

Two-and-a-half years ago, in an unprecedented show of public defiance, half-a-million normally orderly and un-revolutionary Hong Kong folks - many of them middle-class families - took to the city's streets to demonstrate against Article 23 - a sort of shorter, milder version of George Bush's Patriot Act.

Taking the administration, and its now 'early ...