🤝 Chinese marketers have a new favorite phrase this year: “求异业合作”, which roughly means “looking for a cross-industry partner.” Type it into Xiaohongshu and you get a wall of posts from brand managers, small business owners and independent creators, all asking the same question: who can I team up with to reach people I cannot reach alone?
The Trend: Brands From Different Industries Are Pairing Up on Purpose
This comes from a trend report published by Huxiu (虎嗅网), one of China’s most read business and tech media sites, in its roundup of 11 marketing trends shaping Chinese brands in 2026. One trend stood out to me because I see its effects in almost every client conversation right now: cross-industry collaboration, what Chinese marketers call 异业合作 (yi ye he zuo), literally “cooperation between different trades.”
The logic in the report is simple. Growth inside most Chinese categories has slowed. Winning a new customer purely through your own brand budget and your own user base is getting harder and more expensive every quarter. So instead of fighting alone, brands from unrelated sectors are pooling their audiences, their content and their retail moments to reach people neither one could reach on its own. Huxiu calls the result “1+1>2”: two brands, two fan bases, one campaign, a bigger combined audience than either could buy with ads.
Two examples from the report show how differently this can play out.
- Duolingo x Luckin Coffee (瑞幸咖啡): a language-learning app and a coffee chain, two brands with almost nothing in common on paper, staged a “wedding” between their mascots, Duolingo’s owl and Luckin’s deer. The stunt mixed both brands’ user bases, both brands’ physical touchpoints (Luckin’s stores, Duolingo’s app) and both brands’ content styles into one campaign, and it reached Chinese consumers who follow one app but had never heard of the other.
- Mixue Ice Cream & Tea (蜜雪冰城) x Chow Sang Sang (周大生): a budget bubble-tea chain known for 6-yuan drinks paired up with a mainstream gold jewelry brand. The pairing itself was the joke and the hook: “affordable national drink” next to “gold that represents a lifetime promise.” The contrast between the two brand images is exactly what made people stop, laugh and share it.
What both cases share is that neither brand tried to buy a bigger audience with more ad spend. They borrowed one from a partner instead, at a fraction of the cost of a solo campaign of the same size. Huxiu’s report frames this directly as a budget story: brands, especially the ones with limited marketing budgets, are actively hunting for partners on social platforms instead of relying only on paid traffic. The report describes this as a shift in mindset, from “managing a brand” on your own to “managing an ecosystem” of partners around it.
None of this is new as a marketing tactic globally, but the scale and speed of it in China right now is what makes it worth watching. When a coffee chain and a language app can generate this much conversation together, and a bubble tea brand and a jewelry brand can do it with almost no shared category logic at all, it tells you the bar for “does this partnership make sense” has dropped. What matters more is whether the two audiences overlap in an interesting way, and whether the contrast between the two brand images gives people a reason to talk about it.
What This Means If You Sell in China
I get asked about co-branding often, and almost every foreign brand I talk to starts from the same place: “what worked for another brand, in another country, that we could copy here.” That is the wrong starting point. Duolingo and Luckin did not work because owls and coffee are a natural fit. It worked because both brands already had a large, active Chinese audience that overlapped in age and habits, and because the contrast between “learning app” and “coffee break” was funny enough to share. Copying the format without matching your own audience overlap gets you a campaign nobody notices.
The way I tell clients to find a real partner is to start from the customer, not from the industry. List where your Chinese customer already spends money and time outside your category: what app is open on their phone right before or after they buy from you, what they order for delivery, what they scroll on Xiaohongshu at night. Then look for a brand serving that exact moment, one that is not a competitor and has a similar size to yours, so neither side is doing the other a favor. A foreign skincare brand does not need a luxury partner. It needs the gym app, the healthy meal delivery service, or the home fragrance brand that its buyer already uses the same week she buys a serum.
For a mid-size budget, the most accessible version of this is not a mascot wedding, it is a co-branded limited edition: a joint product, a joint gift-with-purchase, or a joint pop-up counter inside an existing store, split with your partner. We have set this up for clients on Xiaohongshu and Douyin using two mid-tier KOLs instead of one, one from each brand’s usual circle, posting the same content on the same day. The production cost stays close to what a single campaign would cost. The reach is close to double, because you are borrowing trust from a partner’s audience instead of paying to build that trust from zero. That is the real budget logic behind this trend, and it is one any brand with a modest China budget can use, not just the big names making headlines on Huxiu.
If you want to go deeper on how this works in practice, I wrote about the mechanics of it in Co-Branding in China: A Strategy that Pays Off, and the audience-overlap logic ties directly into how brands are choosing where to show up organically, which I cover in Xiaohongshu Organic vs Paid Traffic: What Works for Foreign Brands in 2026. On the merchandise side of things, our team at Ecommerce China Agency also looked at how brands are turning character IP and collaboration drops into a fast-growing retail category in The Guzi Economy: How IP Merchandise Became a 169-Billion-RMB Category.
Source
- Huxiu (虎嗅网): “2026影响品牌的11个营销趋势” (11 Marketing Trends Shaping Brands in 2026), published by Adquan (广告门Adquan) on Huxiu, section 06: “存量市场竞争，品牌异业合作加剧” (Competition in a saturated market is intensifying cross-industry brand collaboration).
Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency), a China digital marketing agency that has worked with more than 1,000 brands entering the Chinese market. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
