If you're living in a developed country, there's a chance you may have seen a few robots since the pandemic began. In the US, labour shortages, coupled with robots being covid-free has driven the recent adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered robots for everything from coffee delivery to making fresh, hot pizzas and customised hamburgers in minutes from deep inside a vending machine.

Visitors to a stunning old vineyard in China represent the increasing sophistication in tourism and general consumer purchases in the market

The best performing brands in China all have an uncompromising use of data to steer opportunity analysis, marketing and NPD decisions.

An omni-channel approach, adapting data-led insights and optimising sales structures are areas foreign brands are falling behind in China

China's tech giants have read the tea leaves from Beijing resulting in pledges of billions to charity, with PDD making the smartest donation

Magnum's brand has grown in China on the back of strong marketing campaigns every summer, yet "double standards" are likely to hit the brand this year

China's fan clubs have become obsessive, and with changing family dynamics are on track to become more so, but Beijing is seeking change

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

Here's how and why bricks-and-mortar retail experiences can surpass the experience consumers get shopping on a smartphone

The 618 mid-year shopping festival is now in full swing and is breaking more records, which seems to happen with every subsequent online shopping festival these days in China. Yet one of the traditionally least-sexy components of ecommerce – delivery – has come to the fore this festival and captured our imagination.

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…

2003 was the year that China surpassed the EU for greenhouse emissions. By 2019, emissions from China were more than four times that of the EU’s 27 member states combined, and over 30% more per capita. In 2019 China accounted for 27% of global emissions, exceeding the entire emissions from the Developed World for the first time.

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.

Throughout the ages people have engaged in commerce to exchange goods and services for payment. Yet it wasn’t until around 1,100 BC when China introduced the first standardised currency. The money was miniature replicas of tools cast in bronze, before being replaced by more-practical, rounded metal pieces. This was followed by other iterations including leather, such as white deerskin bills a foot in length. Then around a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, China introduced the world’s first paper money.

Beijing and Shanghai may be the first cities that most people associate with China, yet no city embodies the meteoric rise and confidence of modern China quite like Shenzhen in the south. Pre-China opening up, Shenzhen was described as a ‘backward fishing village,’ but after being designated as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980, its proximity to Hong Kong’s entrepreneurs and capital, coupled with the ambition and scale of China’s migrant workforce have seen it transform into a dynamic metropolis at a scale that is unmatched in world history.

Following up from our 2016 study into how foreign brands are performing in the dairy category in China, utilising our Dairy Tracker, we have analysed performance for the first eight months of 2020. The results are likely to continue to surprise you…

These are some of the claims camel milk powder brands have used to launch their products onto the Chinese market. While some have been proven to have a lick of truth, the evidence has been derived from unsubstantiated scientific research, non-transferable animal experimentation, industry financed research or anecdotal experimentation.