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China’s tea and coffee market is going through another shakeout, and the lesson coming out of it is one Western brands rarely want to hear. The era of blitzscaling, of opening thousands of stores as fast as possible and buying growth with discounts, is running out of road. A recent Meihua piece framed the shift […]
Every six months Meihua publishes a collection of the best advertising copy in China, and every time it is a masterclass hiding in plain sight. The latest edition gathered 45 standout lines from the first half of 2026. I read these lists carefully, because the difference between copy that works in China and copy that […]
There is a joke going around inside China’s big tech companies right now. Use AI too little and your boss scolds you. Use it too much and you burn the budget. A sharp Meihua article put it bluntly, asking how many employees at large firms are now being forced to use AI whether it helps […]
When most Western brands picture the Chinese senior, they picture someone counting every yuan. That picture is a decade out of date. The new Chinese retiree is better educated, better off, and done with austerity. A recent Meihua piece captured the shift in one line. “Making do” is turning into “being particular.” Seven premium categories […]
Louis Vuitton just won a trademark case in China against a milk tea brand called Molly White, with a court ordering 10.3 million yuan in damages over a pattern that looked too close to LV’s own. It sounds like a small story about two very different companies. It is not. It is a signal about […]
Decathlon spent years as the brand everyone in China trusted for cheap, honest sports gear. You went there for a twenty yuan water bottle and a reliable pair of running shoes. Now the company is trying something risky. It is reaching for the premium shelf. Cycling medals, community events, a more polished store experience, a […]
Two Chinese campaigns caught my eye this month, and together they point at something Western brands rarely think about. IKEA handed out a limited run of free meatball flavoured lollipops, and Ctrip teamed up with Jackie Chan to do a piece of “culture export” aimed at foreigners. Both were praised across Chinese social media. Both […]
I have spent close to two decades helping Western brands enter China, and few things have changed as fast as the way Chinese companies market around the World Cup. Ten years ago the strategy was simple and expensive. You paid for the logo, you paid for the boards around the pitch, you paid for the […]
Most Western brands on WeChat are still thinking about WeChat as a messaging channel. You post on your official account. You run a mini-program. You send push notifications to subscribers. That is WeChat from 2019. The WeChat of 2026 has an AI agent layer built into it. Tencent Yuanqi is the platform that lets businesses […]
Most foreign brands entering China build a product. A few build a community. The difference in long-term value between those two choices is enormous and most brands do not realize they made the wrong choice until it is expensive to fix. A product competes on features and price. A community competes on belonging, habit, and […]
I know brand teams in Europe and the US that have had “AI upskilling” on their Q3 roadmap for the past two years. I also know Chinese junior marketers who understood how AI models think within 10 days of their first job. The difference is not intelligence. It is method. Chinese teams learn AI by […]
Most brand content teams are still thinking about AI as a tool that helps them work faster. Write a caption faster. Generate an image faster. Draft a brief faster. That is last year’s problem. The shift happening right now in China is not about speed. It is about autonomy. AI agents do not wait for […]
