Chinese brands' strategies are markedly different from in the West, and if the success of Shein in the US is anything to go by, we should pay attention

Beijing-driven policy has seen Chinese consumer brands flush with capital, which is largely being allocated to marketing initiatives

Earlier in May, after a month-long delay, China released much of the population statistics from its once-a-decade census. Whilst there were no real surprises, the data quantified many trends that can help shape China marketing strategies. At a personal level, tracking the changes from the 2010 and 2020 censuses gave us a reason to look back and trace the past 10+ years that China Skinny has been consulting in the market, and provided another reminder of the dynamism of China. Below are some of the snippets that we found interesting…

Besides Covid, the three terms that cemented themselves in the Chinese vernacular last year were PPE (个人防护), lockdowns (隔离) and livestreaming (直播). Over this time, there have been few articles talking about marketing in China that didn’t praise the wonders of livestreaming. The buzz around livestreaming has been infectious for both consumers and brands, with 30,000 new Taobao Live accounts opened by merchants in February 2020 alone.

Digital advertising has dominated media spend for some time in China. By 2019, brands were spending more than one and half times of their advertising budget on Alibaba platforms than they spent on television commercials. Once Covid hit, ad spending shifted further to online platforms, with digital ad revenue growing 23% last year in China, against an overall 15% fall in media spend in the 9-months to September.

Not long after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, Chairman Mao declared motherhood to be a patriot duty to build manpower. Whilst there was no official policy, government propaganda rallied couples to reproduce. It condemned contraceptives and even banned the import of some. By the 1960s the average Chinese woman had six children.

Back in August 2018 we were happy to report that China’s seemingly impenetrable ecommerce duopoly had fallen. In less than three years, ecommerce platform Pinduoduo (PDD) had come from nowhere to surpass JD.com’s daily user count.

It’s been three weeks since Singles’ Day smashed records with sales topping $116 billion just from Alibaba and JD. At China Skinny, we’ve been busy analysing the results and trends – many of which apply to year-round marketing strategies to reach and connect with Chinese consumers.

Tomorrow is the night that Chinese believe the full moon is at its brightest, shining on farmers for the mid-Autumn harvest. To celebrate, many of China’s 1.4 billion people will have hung lanterns and gifted sweet mooncakes filled with red-bean or lotus-seed paste. It is also the beginning of the much-anticipated 8-day national holiday.

China's bottle water giant Nongfu Spring provides some good lessons on how to succeed in China, even after its share of scandals

The global pandemic has brought about much soul searching. Lockdowns and general uncertainty has given consumers around the world the impetus to reflect on what is important to them. This reflection has been echoed by businesses and we have even seen this at a government level in some countries.

“Sex sells”. For any marketer it’s an adage as old as time. Even through waves of body positivity movements and #MeToo campaigns the western marketing world has and will continue to fall back on the familiar staple of sexual allure.

The telltale sign that China had contained the coronavirus was when children were allowed back to school. It began out west as early as mid-March as schools in Xinjiang started opening their doors again. It was a little longer before schools in China’s wealthy coastal cities were operating again – in April, one Beijing mother whose child had been at home for almost three months noted a popular sentiment in her WeChat mums group was “if the scientists don’t hurry up and develop a vaccine, the mothers will!” Thankfully, by May, most schools across China had welcomed students back, albeit with reduced class sizes, shortened lessons, staggered arrival times and the looming presence of thermal scanners.

Xinliangji is a Beijing-based seafood supplier, founded in 2015. Until recently, the company had earned a pretty penny supplying products like frozen crayfish and basa fish to restaurants such as fish hotpot chain New Spicy Way. But like almost every business in food service in China, its income sources fell off a cliff from mid-January with the abrupt closure of China's restaurants.

China isn't out of the woods yet, but there have been a number of positive developments over the past couple of weeks reinforcing China as one of the most, if not the most, promising market this year.

Every crisis drives the need for creative solutions to solve newfound issues. COVID-19 has provided many examples where businesses have been forced to re-think their go-to-market strategy. The most agile businesses, who have done what they can to look after their employees and customers, are likely to come out ahead when this is all over.

The start of the year has been accompanied by the usual slew of big China numbers and never-ending growth stories in China. Yet while 'China' and 'growth' have been synonymous with much of the last four decades, one rather large category just clocked its second year of contracting sales dragging down China's overall growth story - the good old-fashioned automobile.

It wasn't long ago when doing any daily task in China was a chore. Queues at banks rivalled wait times of popular Disneyland rides, supermarket checkout staff seemed to work in slow motion, and buying a train ticket felt longer than the journey itself. Then, almost overnight, day-to-day activities in China became some of the most convenient on the planet.