Marketing China

Marketers who know Facebook well tend to assume WeChat is its Chinese cousin. Same idea of a feed, a friend list, a way to reach an audience without buying ads. That assumption is the fastest way to waste a marketing budget in China. WeChat and Facebook look similar from the outside and work on almost opposite mechanics underneath. The gap between them has only grown since th...

This article used to argue that Chinese money would keep flooding into American real estate, that the trend was structural, and that anyone selling to the US market should get ready for more of it. That was true in 2016. It stopped being true in 2017, and it has not come back the way anyone expected. If you are still pitching Chinese investors on the story from a decade ago, ...

Thijs runs a small Dutch company that builds industrial filtration systems for chemical plants. Two years ago he hired an agency to “do social media in China.” Six months and one WeChat account later, he had 40 inquiries and a lot of enthusiasm. He also had almost nothing to sell to. Two of those 40 were real buyers. The other 38 wanted a free quote, a catalog, or a reason to...

Philip Chen is a China digital marketing expert and co-founder of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency) in Shanghai. He has spent over 10 years helping international brands enter and grow on the Chinese market, specializing in brand strategy and reputation management in China.

China is a low-trust society. Building your brand in China isn’t just about visibility—...