With Christmas upon us next week, this is the last Skinny for 2013, providing a good opportunity to reflect on the year that was. It’s difficult to do justice to China’s past 12-months by squeezing them into a few paragraphs, but we’ve done our best.

In 2020, if an affluent Chinese consumer buys your goods and services, they’re three times more likely to be from a lower-tier city than a megacities like Shanghai or Beijing. Should you be targeting the middle class masses, there’s even greater chance they’ll be ‘small-town’ folk.

China can be a tough place to be a youngster. As the only child in most cases, they are the single hope for their parents and two sets of grand parents, to be successful, marry well, and make their fortune to provide for their elders in their latter years.

Many luxury brands in China haven’t been smiling much lately. In years gone by, the world’s big peddlers of luxury have been broadcasting double digit annual growth in China – this year, the market is picked to grow just 2.5%.

In the first four weeks of January this year, the air quality in Beijing was 16.6% worse than the shrouded confines of an airport smoking lounge. Last month in the Northeast city of Harbin, pollution led to visibility at less than 10 metres in places.

20 years ago at Nanjing University, a group of students decided to celebrate their bachelorhood by creating a festival called ‘Singles’ Day’ on 11.11. The date was chosen because of the connection with single 1’s, which carried through in celebrations such as eating four Youtiao, deep fried dough sticks that resemble a ‘1’, with a baozi steamed bun.

There are new stats and figures coming out about China every day. They are often staggering, and regularly inconsistent. China’s diversity and opaqueness means there’s often a few stray figures, but after studying enough China research and data, consistent trends and themes do come through.

If you were to take a straw poll asking how the Internet is changing the way Chinese consumers buy products and services, the majority of people would likely make reference to online shopping.

Mention Shanghai to a Beijinger, and there’s a good chance they’ll scoff. Talk about Beijing to Shanghainese, and there may also be some jeering. Northern Chinese like noodles, southerners have a preference for rice. Travelling between regions in China, differences are evident in people’s appearance, diet and aspects of their culture, as well as climate variations. Whilst most of us are aware of this, curiously a lot of our marketing efforts still treat China as one big homogenous land, or at best, separates sophisticated high tier city consumers from the smaller ones.

Few things are changing the way Chinese consumers communicate, build brand preferences and shop than mobile phones. With feature-packed smartphones such as the XiaoMi Hongmi selling for ¥799 ($130), smartphones have become accessible for every middle and upper class Chinese consumer.

Welcome back to our China readers, we hope you had a good break. If peak hour crowds at People’s Square or Xizhimen subway stations are your thing, then let’s hope you managed to get out to see some of China’s tourist attractions over the golden week just passed.

Anyone looking for a view into how Chinese consumers differ from those in the West, should pop down to one of Ikea’s 12 stores in China on an idle Saturday afternoon.

The cases are packed. The flights, trains and buses are booked, and the cars have had a polish, in what will be another period of Chinese tourism en masse. Aside from the Spring Festival, there’s no bigger movement of Chinese travellers than the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day-Golden week combo which starts tomorrow.

WeChat has become hugely popular in China. The smartphone app has an estimated 400 million users in China– not bad given there are 464 million Internet-connected mobiles in total.

It wasn’t long ago when virtually all Chinese consumers assumed the more expensive a product, the better quality it must be. Marketers would create premium brands just by raising prices, and in many cases, they’d actually sell more than if their prices were lower.

China Skinny is pleased to announce a partnership with British research and strategy agency CrowdDNA.

China is growing at an exponential rate, both in terms of the middle class population and their purchasing power. However the majority of this growth is coming from China’s lesser known cities.

Anyone who has walked down the street in China, eaten at a restaurant, taken public transport, been in a shopping mall, or even a workplace, will be well aware of the significance of mobile phones in Chinese consumers’ lives. 464 million, or 78.5% of China’s 591 million Internet users, go online with their mobiles.