🍃 Chinese brands are shrinking their ad budgets, and it is working better than the loud campaigns did. A trend piece from 广告门 (Adquan), one of China’s top marketing trade sites, calls it brands “going light” (品牌开始变「轻」). Instead of hiring a celebrity face and buying every screen in the subway, brands are handing out five-cent printed cards, filming honest conversations, and letting real people carry the message instead of actors. Here are the two cases Adquan uses to make the point, and what I think they mean for your own China budget.
Source: 广告门 (Adquan), “2026营销新趋势：品牌开始变「轻」” (“2026 Marketing Trends: Brands Are Going Light”), published July 14, 2026.
Heytea stopped acting like a luxury brand
For years Heytea (喜茶), China’s top new-style tea chain, built its image the expensive way: elaborate collabs, viral flagship stores, a grand aesthetic narrative that turned a cup of milk tea into a status symbol. That built the brand, but it also built distance between the brand and the people drinking it.
When Heytea launched a new drink, Longjing Nuonuo (龙井糯糯), it tried something different. Instead of another polished campaign, it pointed a camera at Yanyu (燕语), the woman who actually tends the tea garden. Her WeChat Moments already showed ordinary things: how the tea leaves were growing, the weather that week, a rest break between picking rounds. Heytea printed those small, real moments onto “inspiration cards” (灵感小卡) tucked into every cup, so customers could taste the tea and read the story behind it at the same time.
The cards use what Chinese social media has started calling “拙趣风”, a clumsy, hand-drawn style: wobbly lettering, unfinished pencil lines, even a drawing contributed by a 5-year-old from a grape-farming family in Yunnan and tea copy written by a yak herder. Customers can submit their own drawings too. It looks unpolished on purpose, and it works: people now recognize a Heytea card even with the logo covered, because the clumsy, warm style has become the brand’s real signature.
Adquan breaks the strategy into three layers, and I think they are worth remembering as a checklist:
- Light content. Heytea did not produce content, it found it. Yanyu’s WeChat Moments were already there, updated every day. The brand’s job was just to “pass the microphone.”
- Light carrier. A printed card costs a few cents and adds no shipping cost. But people pin it on a wall, tuck it into a planner, or photograph it and post it on Xiaohongshu. That is free, voluntary reach a TV spot could never buy.
- Light posture. Heytea talks with customers instead of at them. Less grand brand statement, more everyday participation. Less self-promotion, more room for the user to join in.
浴见: the product shows up last, not first
Personal-care brand 浴见 (Yujian) applied the same logic in April 2026 with a TVC called “一身轻快” (“Light and Easy”), featuring actress Wuxin (吴昕). The ad is a conversation, not a pitch. Wuxin talks about feeling pressured by outside expectations, then trying livestreaming, a podcast, and other new things until she found her own pace. The product only shows up near the end, framed as something that helps her relax, not as the reason for the story. Yujian’s tagline sums up the idea: “身体即自我，身体即自由” (“the body is the self, the body is freedom”). The brand is not just selling a lighter product texture, it is selling a lighter feeling.
Why this is happening now
Adquan points to three shifts behind the trend. First, AI has made big, polished content cheap to produce, so cheap that it stopped impressing anyone. What is scarce now is the opposite: a real, slightly imperfect voice. Second, Chinese consumers are subtracting instead of adding: simpler visuals, lighter gear, less pressure, rather than more features and more famous names. Third, brands are talking with people instead of at them. Adidas jokes along with “进城办事” internet memes, Duolingo’s owl mascot nags people to study in increasingly ridiculous ways, and food-delivery rivals Meituan, JD.com and Eleme trade banter in public during their price wars instead of only running ads against each other.
Adquan makes one point I want to underline for any foreign brand reading this: “light” does not mean “less work.” A small, well-placed idea usually takes more thought to find than a big, generic campaign does. You are not skipping the effort, you are moving it from media spend into observation and craft.
Philip Chen’s take: what this means for your China budget
I read cases like this and think about the foreign brands I have worked with over the years who assume a China launch needs a seven-figure budget and a celebrity face before anyone will notice them. That was closer to true ten years ago. It is much less true now.
A brand entering China with a modest budget does not need to out-spend Heytea’s marketing department. It needs to find its own version of the tea-garden card. What real, slightly rough material do you already have? A supplier with an interesting story, a founder who can talk on camera without a script, a worker on your factory floor who has an honest opinion about the product. That material is nearly free. Turning it into something a Chinese consumer wants to screenshot and share, that is the actual work, and it is the same work whether your budget is 10,000 RMB or 10 million.
This connects to something I wrote after this year’s World Cup: Chinese brands have shifted from buying exposure to co-creating value with their audience, and the same shift shows up here at the small-budget end of the market. It is really the logic behind KOC marketing: a handful of ordinary, credible voices instead of one expensive one.
If your China budget is limited, here is where I would spend it first: one honest video or one printed insert that tells a true, specific story, distributed through the channel your buyers already scroll, usually Douyin or Xiaohongshu. Skip the studio lighting. Keep the rough edges. A shaky video of a real factory floor beats a stock-footage brand film almost every time in China right now, because Chinese consumers can tell the difference between a performance and a person, and they reward the person.
Small and honest travels further than big and polished this year. That is good news if your budget is the limiting factor, because for once, the winning move does not cost more.
About the author: Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency). He has helped more than 1,000 brands enter and grow in China. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
