A concise yet holistic summary of March 2025’s key marketing developments in China, highlighting valuable insights and their implications for brands.

A concise yet holistic summary of January 2025’s key marketing developments in China, highlighting valuable insights and their implications for brands.

A concise summary of last month's key marketing developments in China, highlighting valuable insights and their implications for brands.

China Skinny’s review of key marketing trends and lessons we observed over the month of October 2024.

As the “lying flat” lifestyle grows among Chinese workers looking to unwind, more urbanites are seeing the allure of cruises return. This stress-free approach to travel fits perfectly with the cruise experience, leading more Chinese to choose cruises as their ideal escape.

Chinese travelling and studying overseas again, coupled with foreign brands’ decision makers returning to China is helping sentiment for foreign brands in China

Back in 2016, long before people’s hands were dried-out from sanitiser and faces indented from masks, there was a popular WeChat account that launched an initiative called the “4-hour escape from Bejing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.” Consumers had to get to the airport asap, where they’d receive a ticket to an unknown destination and a ¥300 ($42) hotel subsidy, and start travelling.

While some of our readers outside of China will be looking as beautiful or handsome as ever, many of you are likely to be a little unkempt, sporting a COVID-cut and just off a video call wearing your pyjama pants. That was the situation for many in China during its lockdown too.

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.

China Skinny attended the debut of ITB China, the latest B2B trade show specifically for the Chinese Travel Market. Growing on the success of the travel industry’s largest trade show ITB Berlin as well as ITB Singapore, ITB China looked to service growing demand for the world’s most important tourism market with its inaugural year in Shanghai. Below are our takeaways among the Chinese travel market.

A cute little penguin with a scarf, a curious pussycat and a floppy-eared pooch. Not the beginnings of a children’s story but the iconic logos of three gargantuan powerhouses in the Chinese market. A brief survey of China’s top brands and the gulf in branding ideology from the West is clear.

Every day this year, an average of more than 120,000 new Chinese consumers signed up to the Internet. Most of them on their smartphones, and many of them using it to run a big part of their lives.

Last week, WeChat's owner Tencent agreed to pay $8.6 billion to gain control of Finnish mobile games maker Supercel. This was less than two weeks after the game-to-movie adaption Warcraft stormed the Chinese box office with a record-breaking $156 million in just five days - more than Star Wars: The Force Awakens total haul of $125.4 million in China.

The act of shopping has spread across different countries in unique ways, and each market has adopted its own local habits, trends, influences and behaviours. China is a country where shopping plays a huge role in daily life, as consumers regard shopping a higher priority in their lives compared to other markets. The graphic below illustrates to what extent shopping shapes Chinese' lifestyles

As recently as 2012, most Chinese consumers considered international labels categorically better than local alternatives. KFC was a good example: although consumers knew deep-fried drumsticks weren't a super-food, they were from an American company so must be safer, and therefore healthier, than Chinese options that could be cooked in gutter oil, with additives like melamine. That perception helped fuel more than two new KFC restaurant openings a day in China that year.

Despite slowing GDP growth in China, continued income growth is seeing more Mainlanders reaching the necessary standards of living to engage in travel. In 2012, Mainland China surpassed both Germany and the U.S. to become the largest spenders on international tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organization released a report on Chinese traveller habits counting more than 83.2 million Chinese citizens travelling abroad, a 395.7% increase since 2002. The following buzzwords will help you understand the changes and massive influx of Chinese travellers, their habits and the latest trends going on in China’s travel market.

It's easy to spot grim news about China with a quick scan of the headlines these days.  News of plummeting stocks, slowing GDP and sales growth could be interpreted as the end of China's golden run.

If you're looking for a jaw-dropping illustration of China's growing presence in the world, go no further than the United Nations World Tourism Organisation's outbound tourism expenditure chart from the world's largest economies over the past 20 years.