Strategy, platform deep-dives, and lessons from real campaigns in China.
For years the story of feminine hygiene in China was told through people like Simon Lai. A businessman from Guangdong, he bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of tampons and pads in Los Angeles, shipped them back, and sold them at a fat margin on Taobao. His shop, Puff House, sold $180,000 worth of imported […]
For ten years, selling an air purifier in China meant selling fear. You showed a grey skyline, you showed a child in a mask, and the product sold itself. That pitch is dead. The air in Chinese cities got much better, and the brands still running the smog argument in 2026 are watching their conversion […]
Philip Chen is the CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency). He has spent over a decade helping foreign F&B, fashion, and retail brands enter and grow in China, including several through franchise and distributor networks. Are you a foreign brand looking to grow in China? Franchising is still one of the fastest ways to get […]
Hair care in China stopped being a commodity aisle. It is now a category worth around RMB 68 billion (about USD 9.4 billion) that behaves like skincare: diagnosis first, active ingredients second, price per millilitre third. The volume growth is modest, 3 to 4% a year on the total market. The money is in the […]
Vietnam is no longer a rising destination for Chinese travellers. It is the destination. In 2025 the country welcomed 5.28 million visitors from mainland China, up 41% in one year, which put China at 25% of all foreign arrivals and ahead of South Korea (4.33 million). Total international arrivals hit 21.2 million, an all-time record, […]
Are you a foreign brand trying to break into the Chinese market? Then you need to understand user-generated content, or UGC: the videos, photos, reviews, and posts made by real people, not by your brand and not by an agency. In China, this one category of content decides more purchases than your ad budget ever […]
We help international brands enter the sunscreen and sun-care market in China with clear insights, local strategy, and proven digital marketing execution.
The Chinese furniture market is no longer a growth story you can describe with one number. It is a big, mature, oversupplied market that changed direction after the property crisis. Demand did not disappear. It moved: from furnishing empty new apartments to replacing what people already own. If you sell furniture and you are still […]
China’s aviation industry keeps creating openings for foreign companies, but not the ones people talked about ten years ago. Back then the story was simple: Chinese airlines bought American and European aircraft, and the whole supply chain benefited. In 2026 Beijing wants its own narrow-body aircraft flying, its own engines under the wing, and a […]
Philip Chen is the CEO of GMA (Global Marketing Agency). He has spent the last decade helping foreign brands sell to Chinese consumers, and women are the customers his team studies the closest. I get asked about China’s “she economy” (她经济, pronounced ta jingji, literally “her economy”) almost every week now. Brands want to know […]
In early 2025, a small neighborhood café in Shanghai posted a simple lifestyle article on its WeChat Official Account. Nothing unusual: a few photos, a short story about the owner, no promotion. Within 48 hours the article had reached ten times its usual readership. Most of the new readers had never followed the account. They […]
China is the largest car market in the world, and the most software driven. The old story about connected cars in China was a hardware story: bigger screens, more sensors, faster chips. That is no longer where the money or the difficulty sits. In 2026 the connected car in China is a software, data and […]
