B2B & Industries
Ask a Western brand what “doing business in China” means, and most will describe a consumer story: Tmall flagship stores, Douyin livestreams, red envelopes on Singles’ Day. That story is real, but it is only half the country. The other half, B2B China, runs on entirely different rails: fewer buyers, longer relationships, and decisions made […]
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Sectors
Chinese travellers are packing again, and they are packing better than before. Outbound tourism has moved past the sharp reopening bounce of 2023 and settled into what the World Tourism Alliance calls a shift from “recovery-driven growth to structural optimisation”: fewer dramatic swings, more sustained volume, and a traveller base that spends with more intention. […]
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Sectors
China buys food supplements the way other countries buy insurance. The purchase is defensive. People are not chasing a performance edge, they are trying to protect something they feel is slipping: a child’s immunity before winter, a mother’s iron levels, a father’s knees, their own sleep after a fourteen-hour week. Understand that defensive instinct and […]
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Wechat Marketing & eCommerce
WeChat is not a social media platform, and treating it like one is why most foreign brands get poor results from it. It is closer to an operating system: messaging, payment, official accounts, mini-programs, customer service and loyalty all in one app that Chinese consumers open dozens of times a day. Last updated: 27 August […]
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Sectors
China’s lingerie shelves looked completely different five years ago. Padded cups, heavy underwire, push-up structure everywhere: the whole category copied a Western silhouette that Chinese women were buying because there was nothing else on offer. That is no longer true. Wireless, wire-free, “no-wire” bras (无钢圈内衣) now account for more than 58 percent of online bra […]
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Sectors
China makes most of the world’s furniture. Factories in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Shandong ship sofas, wardrobes and dining tables to every continent. So when a foreign furniture brand looks at China and sees a huge consumer market, it needs to accept an awkward fact first: it is selling into the home of its own supply […]
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Social Media in China
Most brands entering the Chinese market build their content plan around Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Both make sense for visual, impulse-driven categories. But a buyer researching a health supplement, a B2B software contract, or a wealth management product does not want a fifteen-second video with a trending soundtrack. That buyer wants an argument. Zhihu (知乎), China’s […]
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Uncategorized
Western marketers hear “private domain traffic” and reach for the nearest familiar label: email list, CRM, loyalty programme. None of these quite fit. 私域流量, private domain traffic, is a distinct way of thinking about audience ownership that grew out of a specific set of constraints in the Chinese market, and brands that treat it as […]
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China e-commerce
Vip.com, known in Chinese as 唯品会 (Weipinhui), is the platform Western brands tend to overlook when they draw up their China e-commerce shortlist. Tmall and JD get the attention because they are built for full-price brand building. Vip.com was built for something else entirely: flash sales. If you are considering it, the first thing to […]
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Food & Beverage
Nuts are no longer a niche health food in China. Walnuts, almonds, pistachios, macadamias and cashews sit on the same shelf as chips and biscuits, bought weekly by office workers snacking between meals and by parents stocking a child’s lunchbox. The category has grown past “imported treat” status and become a routine purchase, which changes […]
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