๐ฌ Skip the manifesto. Show the moment. That is the shift a growing number of Chinese brands are making right now, and it just got flagged as one of the trends set to define marketing in China this year, in a roundup of “11 marketing trends for 2026” published on Huxiu (่ๅ ็ฝ), one of China’s most-read business and tech media outlets. The trend has a name in Chinese: ๅบๆฏๅๅไบๅไปฃๅฎๅคง่ฅ้, or “scenario-based storytelling replacing grand narratives.” It sits at number two on Huxiu’s list of eleven, right after the trend on AI reshaping marketing teams, which tells you how early this shift is happening. In plain English: brands are dropping the big statements about the future and showing one small, specific, human moment instead.
The trend: two brands, zero big speeches
The Huxiu piece opens this section with a simple observation. Across very different consumer categories, brands are pulling back from sweeping, future-facing brand talk and putting their energy into narrower, more concrete scenes instead. Two examples carry the argument.
The first is Rokid, the Hangzhou smart-glasses maker. In a recent video, brand spokesperson Tim puts on a pair of Rokid AI glasses and says, out loud, “order 500 hot Americanos to the Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City academic exchange center.” The order details appear instantly on the glasses’ display. He says “confirm payment,” and the whole transaction is done. No phone, no app, no typing. That is the entire ad. Huxiu points out that tech companies used to sell the future by comparing specs and painting a picture of what life would look like years from now. Rokid does the opposite: it shows exactly what the product does, in exactly one situation, right now.
The second example is JD.com’s food delivery arm, JD Waimai (ไบฌไธๅคๅ), which launched an aggressive push into the delivery market last year. Instead of a big campaign about disruption or ambition, the brand built its story around the daily routines of couriers, merchants and users. Founder Liu Qiangdong himself showed up repeatedly in ordinary settings: wearing a courier’s uniform to deliver an order, taking couriers out for a meal, sitting around a fire pit with delivery-station staff after a shift. Clips of these moments were cut into short videos and spread online. Because the moments were real and specific, hard facts slipped through naturally: that JD Waimai pays social insurance and housing fund for its couriers, that its delivery net margin stays under 5%. None of that reads like a press release. It reads like something you would tell a friend, and Huxiu credits it with helping JD Waimai open the market fast.
Huxiu’s broader point is that this pattern is showing up everywhere: a piece of content built around one narrow category, one specific scene, one product’s single strong point, or just a KOC sharing a normal moment. The common thread is scale. These are light, direct, easy-to-feel touchpoints, closer to daily life, trending topics and personal experience than to any grand brand platform. As competition tightens in a market where most categories are no longer growing from scratch, Huxiu expects more brands to lean into this kind of scenario-first storytelling, not less.
There is a practical reason this fits China’s market right now, on top of the creative one. When a category stops growing in volume, brands stop competing for new buyers and start competing for the same buyers’ attention, category by category, sub-scene by sub-scene. A grand narrative about “the future of mobility” or “redefining what coffee means” does not help a buyer choose between five near-identical options on a search results page. A thirty-second scene that answers “what happens when I actually use this” does. That is a cheaper, faster message to produce than a full brand campaign, which is part of why Huxiu expects it to spread well beyond tech and food delivery.
Philip Chen’s take
I hear “we believe in quality” and “we are committed to excellence” in almost every brief that lands on my desk from a foreign brand entering China. None of it means anything to a Chinese buyer scrolling Xiaohongshu at 11pm. What works here is exactly what Rokid and JD Waimai did: pick one real situation and film it straight.
Say you sell kitchen knives and your instinct is to write “German engineering meets timeless craftsmanship” as your headline. Throw that out. Instead, film someone breaking down a whole chicken in under a minute with your knife, in a real home kitchen, with the sound of the blade on the cutting board left in. Caption it with the one fact that matters, “holds an edge for six months of daily use,” not “premium quality guaranteed.” That is a scene. A slogan is not.
I see the same mistake in the beauty category, where clients often want to open with “our formula is backed by years of research.” Nobody on Xiaohongshu cares how many years. What they want is thirty seconds of the cream going on dry, cracked knuckles right after a winter hand wash, with a timestamp showing the skin looking normal again by the next scene. One believable before-and-after, filmed once, beats a lab-coat photo shoot every time, and it costs a fraction of the price.
This works because of how people actually watch Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Nobody stops scrolling for a mission statement. They stop for something that answers one question: what does this actually do, for someone like me, right now. We cover the mechanics of building that kind of content for Douyin specifically in our guide to Douyin advertising strategies, and if you are still deciding which short-video platform deserves your first budget, our overview of China’s short-video platforms is a good place to start.
My practical advice for a foreign brand with a small content budget: stop writing manifesto copy and start a list of ten real, filmable moments your product creates, unboxing, first use, a repair, a returning customer’s second order. Shoot two of them this month with a phone and a KOC, not a studio crew. We walk clients at GMA through exactly this shift when we set up their short-video e-commerce content, and it is almost always the scrappy, specific video that outsells the polished one, because it looks like proof, not marketing.
Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency), which has helped more than 1,000 brands grow in China. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
