The Cognitive Leap of Chinese Consumer Brands
From Tactical Thinking to Strategic Core: Three Phases of Chinese Brand Building Over the Past Decade—and the Deeper Logic Behind Them
Unlike many academic authors or books, my perspective on China’s brand evolution comes not from theory but from ten years of ground‑level experience and observation.
The current wave of consumer brands with genuine global ambitions traces its roots to the VC frenzy of 2015–2019. To me, that’s no surprise—political headwinds simply delayed what should have happened earlier. What many call a “sudden breakthrough” or a “quiet boom” was, in reality, not an accurate words, its more like the “overdue result of relentless trial and error”—stumbling from one obstacle to the next - and it is still on the way of exploring and growing.
For more context, I’d suggest reading my previous piece before diving into this one.
Side note: Consumer electronics and automobiles are mainly not part of this discussion—they’re durable goods that build trust heavily through specs and performance. But FMCG can’t rely on rational parameters alone; they need more emotional connection—aesthetics, culture, and shared values.
As with my earlier coffee piece, I see a real absence of insider perspective in the market — so here’s my take. And trust me, you won’t read this anywhere else—so go ahead, dive into what’s actually unfolded for Chinese consumer brands in the last ten years 👇
The Three Phases of Chinese Branding Over the Past Decade
Phase One: Branding = Visibility = Communication (pre‑2015)
Keywords: Saturation Attack, Super Symbol, Massive Coverage
This isn’t an example I enjoy citing, but it’s a typical pathological specimen.
For a long time, Western brands were worshipped like gods in China. They had powerful brand impact, cool products, and targeted the middle class and above—with a condescending attitude, as if consumers were inferior beings in need of education.
To compete from a position of weakness, Chinese companies at that time largely aimed at lower‑spending demographics or addressed the needs that global brands cant solve. That’s how “white‑label” 白牌 products emerged.
But many companies refused to settle; they wanted to build real brands that could stand shoulder to shoulder with Western players.
To that end, many companies started to accept a new concept — called “saturation attack 饱和式攻击”—originating from the West but deeply resonating locally, based on the agrarian philosophy of “hard work plus brute force.” 大力出奇迹.
Simply put, on top of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) theory introduced by the west, they applied overwhelming force to win over rivals — Good logic.
Hua & Hua 华与华, a well‑known strategic consulting firm specializing in local branding (don’t underestimate them—their consulting fees run into xx millions of RMB per case), precisely captured the needs of a crude — they introduced a theory called “ super icon 超级符号”, the idea comes from the west, but amplified by this wild agency in China — putting big icons or KVs with big reach and big voice, most importantly, repeatrepeatrepeatrepeatrepeat.
In their vocabulary, brands didn’t need sophistication or respect; the secret recipe was “no afraid of losing face 做生意不能要脸” The key objective was to make viewers remember through repeated exposure, whether they liked it or not. They believe even if you find someone annoying at first, sticking around long enough will eventually make you accept or even like them.. emmm. again, good logic.
Such strategy highly resonated with local entrepreneurs who are anxious about expansion and sales. And they have been told “this is branding.”
See the Chinese brands that heavily collaborated and consulted by Hua&hua 👇
Mixue is a classic case — and it's exactly that vibe. I'll spare you the visuals or the earworm here. You can find it online everywhere.
And, seriously, they practice what they preach —their own ads are everywhere too. Chances are, you’ll see them as soon as you step off a plane, even outside China. For ex, Singapore👇
Yes, you might despise it—this marketing doctrine that bends over backward to cater to poorer taste just to move product. It stumbles in a world of picky consumers, and a middle class that now craves emotion and beauty. But it’s not going anywhere anytime soon—especially now, with corporate sales pressure mounting and aesthetic education still largely absent in China’s domestic market, it remains surprisingly effective.
Joking aside, Hua & Hua’s impact on Chinese enterprises is far greater than most realize. On the one hand, they’ve helped many companies achieve massive scale and profitability; on the other, they’ve inadvertently delayed the broader upgrade of Chinese brand-building under the global context, especially for many who actually have a cross-nations’ ambitions.
Phase Two: Brand-building as a Tactic (2015–2020)
Keywords: DTC Arbitrage, Tactical Mindset, Path Dependency,
The driving force of this phase was the plateauing of digital economy. Everyone was hunting for the next growth engine, watching U.S. DTC brands seemingly overtake incumbents with low‑cost traffic, and wanting to copy the formula.
While the U.S. model was “independent website + media spend,” and China’s was “Taobao as official site + social media spend,” the underlying DTC playbook was remarkably similar: capital‑driven internet traffic arbitrage, cutting out intermediaries, and rapidly building a closed‑loop marketing machine.
What made this phase particularly interesting was the composition of founders.
Most front‑runners were either tech‑savvy professionals from the internet industry who understood digital marketing better than others, or disciples from ad agency/FMCG backgrounds, well‑trained in Western theory.
Some of these brands survived into the next cycle; others died just before the final dawn.
This is because though these brands bore obvious internet‑symbiotic characteristics and began to show some brand and aesthetic awareness, most of them also shared glaring, common weaknesses 👇
Strong in visuals, operations or branding, starting to care about aesthetics —but weak in product, supply chain, and R&D.
Unlike Hua & Hua’s “Big Big Big, but everything is ugly” play book, this generation of consumer brands was particularly good at developing visual identities that resonated with younger consumers digitally.
This was largely because international agencies had created an oversupply of graphic designers while tech companies trained too many digital-savvies.
However, their common trait was placing too much weight on “visuals, well-structured marketing digitally, with many big ideas ,” while still lacking holistic thinking as a cross-functional leader 👐, especially within product design and supply chain sectors.
They all share the same creed: marketing above all else.
And they’ve successfully sold that belief to investors—many of whom only realized too late that the real game is about product, supply chain and the sustained operational capacity — throwing money at ads is easy; but heavy back-end and operational excellence can’t be built overnight.
Well, there’s the other camp: the ones indoctrinated by Western in‑house brand teams. They know the tough process of brand building—from consumer insights, to product development, to brand-building — and in that regard, they’re a step ahead of the previous group. They think more holistically, more maturely, and they have patience.
However, most of them also have a common weak‑point: little grasp of genuine innovation. Most figure, “Why bother with too much innovation? It’s too tough.” They’d rather mine the “historical case studies ” of Western giants for inspiration and call it a day.
Obviously, the corporate training at Western giants is highly polished, yet it doesn’t teach you how to compete with the very companies you’ve been trained to emulate.
As a result, the second camp’s products are typically much better in quality than the first camp’s. But they still lack real innovation and strong moat—so in general, product homogeneity was impossible to ignore across all of them.
The bottles and jars may have looked different, but their contents and formulas were often remarkably similar. It was therefore no surprise that brands had to work hard to differentiate themselves through visual presentation and storytelling.
In fact, there’s also another significant force at that moment — the Ivy‑plus crowd—especially Stanford, Harvard... They’re brilliant at telling mind-blowing stories and raising capital, but they’re often clueless about the local market and hands-on works. They may be the victims of the VC-faded environment — rules have been changed, because without big money, most of their game‑changing ideas never get off the ground.
Branding was “tacticalized.”
Some founders treat branding and brand‑building as just one marketing tactic among many—a function they see as complementary to performance marketing or sales—and never elevate it to a strategic level. Under this mindset, branding work becomes overly dependent on skilled employees, agencies, and even gig workers.
For example, Seesaw’s most critical brand upgrade during this era, as I recall, was handled by Ogilvy professionals on a short‑term contract. Once the contract ended, they left—leaving behind nothing but an empty brand shell.
At that moment I already knew this brand was in big trouble—because something as crucial as brand strategy, which the founder should have personally owned, was handed to a temporary worker. Unthinkable. It fully exposed not only a misalignment in understanding brand building, but also a likely flawed view of the entire business.
Of course, a significant number of marketing‑background founders do possess sophisticated brand‑building skills—they understand positioning, category dynamics, product strategy, design, brand architecture, and modern consumer‑centric brand theory. Yet many of them fell into another trap 👇
“Chinese brand fatalism.”
As mentioned before, many well‑trained founders who had drunk deeply from the Western well fell into severe path dependency.
Beyond what I mentioned earlier, they had not thought deeply about product or brand innovation. The deeper reason was that they were afraid to. Whenever the conversation turned to a brand’s ultimate ambitions, someone would inevitably ask, with deliberate emphasis: “Do you know how old L’Oréal is? How old is Chanel? How old is Nike (looks young but is already 60 years-old )?”
The unspoken second half—“Forget it, we’re only good for being an alternative or getting acquired—we can never surpass them, ever”—was always swallowed back, leaving a thin veneer of decency in the room.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Starbucks’ products are mediocre at best—some are downright bad. But ask a Starbucks China employee, and they’ll never admit it. Even if they recognize the problems deep down, they have no idea how to address them, because they simply aren’t trained to think that way.
Heytea, ChaGee, M Stand, Luckin, and Manner are all capable of taking on Starbucks. But take a senior Starbucks employee—at any level—and ask them to compete with Starbucks or, more visionary, change the coffee industry to a better vision? I guarantee most of them will give you a long list of reasons why it can’t be done.
The result: many people took VC money to experiment, but never bought into breaking superstitions, more ambitious strategic beliefs, or more first‑principles thinking.
P.S. Of course, this is the story as we understand it today. If U.S.–China relations had not evolved the way they have, I imagine the story would have taken a very different path. But I won’t spend time exploring that counterfactual—there is no “if.”
Phase Three: Brand-building as Strategic Core (2020–present)
Keywords: Return to Product, Supply Chain Amplification, Cultural Translation
After 2020, the pandemic, weak consumption, and capital retreat forced companies to shift from “how to grow” to “how to survive.”
Many outsiders saw this as a disaster for Chinese consumer brands — but the opposite was true. It was a critical moment for the sector to reshuffle, collectively reflect, iterate, and figure out who they are and where to go.
To survive in China internally — or abroad amid policy headwinds—you definitely need “two brushes 两把刷子” as we say in Chinese—meaning real killing-points. In other words, core competitiveness.
So what is the core competitiveness of Chinese consumer brands?
Undoubtedly, product and the supply chain behind.
In today’s China, cultural brands with weak products are bound to suffer — especially now that Western ideology has been almost all “neutered.”
People here have become much more aware of the weaknesses in many Western products. As I’ve said repeatedly, I may still feel an emotional attachment to Nike and Starbucks, but I can’t deny their products no longer offer any clear advantages over those of their Chinese counterparts.
I wouldn’t rule out the influence of state / CPC -led academic research and guidance, but that is beside the point.
What matters today is the conclusion and shared consensus internally:
As I mentioned, many leading American brands are powerful cultural brands, and American academia tends to treat the brand as something distinct from the product itself.
However, given China’s supply-chain advantages, and booming design talent pools, but comparatively weaker cultural power, it makes more sense at this stage to build strong product brands rather than primarily cultural brands.
Indeed, brands relies on supply-chain advantages may face intense competition at home, precisely because everyone is operating with access to similar capabilities. But once these brands expand internationally, their advantages become much more visible: most other countries simply do not possess the same combination of scale, speed, flexibility, and manufacturing depth.
This echoes something I have written elsewhere: national strength determines brand strength. Great brands never emerge in isolation. They are products of a nation’s rising power—the ultimate expression of its factor endowments and the commercial extension of a strong civilization.
This is exactly the hidden force behind the rise of a new generation of Chinese brands. And, we are seeing both:
Efficiency-driven supply-chain brands: SHEIN, Pinduoduo/Temu, and Luckin
Quality-driven supply-chain brands: Pop Mart and Songmont.
I assume my readers are already familiar with the efficiency of China’s supply chains, since I have repeatedly used SHEIN, PDD, and Luckin as examples in my previous articles. So here, I would like to explain more on the quality dimension.
Take Songmont, for example.
One of Songmont’s advantages lies in its ability to draw inspiration from Shanxi’s folk craftsmanship and visual traditions, then incorporate them into the standardized production of modern leather goods. Its products are neither purely handmade nor purely mass-produced. Instead, they embody what might be called “scalable scarcity 可以被量产的稀缺性”: a sense of uniqueness that can nevertheless be produced at scale.
The same principle can be seen in Pop Mart, although in a different form.
Its products possess a distinct aesthetic appeal and are often sold out or fiercely sought after, giving them the aura of scarce collectibles.
Yet behind this perceived scarcity is a highly capable supply chain that allows Pop Mart to launch products, test concepts, and iterate at remarkable speed. It may not be able to match SHEIN in terms of production speed, but it is almost certainly the fastest producer in the designer-toy sector. This enables Pop Mart to identify the most promising products at exceptional speed—one of the reasons its success rate in developing IPs is so high. Over time, the more data it accumulates, the stronger its moat becomes.
This allows the company to achieve scale without sacrificing a sense of uniqueness.
I’m not entirely sure whether Pop Mart’s production processes are simpler than Songmont’s, but the underlying principle is the same: using supply-chain capabilities to make distinctiveness scalable.
That, in essence, is the quality advantage I want to emphasize—not simply the ability to manufacture products efficiently, but the ability to massive consistently produce products with aesthetic, emotional, and cultural value.
Cultural Assets & Translation: Deconstruct culture and reshape its aesthetics across products, spaces, and every brand message, unifying them through a shared visionary language.
Beyond maximizing their supply-chain advantages, many Chinese brands are beginning to adopt best practices from European, Japanese, and Korean brands—many of which have likewise built their brands on a strong product foundation.
More specifically, the greatest inspiration has come from neighboring predecessors—Japan and South Korea.
Cause - they are also late‑developing nations with similar cultural roots, comparable social challenges, and more advanced thinking on paths as a non-west brand. In short, these two countries have been teachers to China in branding in many ways —especially in cultural translation: not forcing national symbols onto products or slogans, but selectively infusing globally resonant cultural languages.
Japan has sold its products and lifestyle to the world through “restraint, order, craftsmanship, and long‑termism.” Korea has sold its understanding of “trend, emotion, visual identity, and self‑expression” to the world. This aesthetic translation extends beyond the product itself into the space and even across all brand content, with all visual languages that global audiences resonated.
This is where this generation of Chinese brands woke up: they can’t run “patriotic campaigns”—that’s too cheap and annoying — nor can they treat Chinese culture as decorative stickers, plastering it onto Western product forms in the old “Guochao” (national wave) mindset — that’s ugly.
What they need is not a translation but transcreation: not diluting their cultural identity, but transforming cultural DNA into a sense of “premiumness”, “chill”, ”cool” and “ease” that global consumers can perceive without complex context. 👇
Founder’s Will - Dare to Challenge the Impossible and willing to prioritize the branding work
One thing that might be understated— if supply chain is hard power and cultural translation is soft power, then the “local / even wild” backgrounds of these rising founders are another critical invisible variable that fuses the two.
Look closely, many of today’s leading Chinese consumer-brand founders do not have extensive international backgrounds. Few have been trained within Western brand systems, and many did not even attend the university - extremely wild.
The reason is perhaps just that simple: local talent has richer on‑the‑ground experience, making it easier to read China’s existing strengths and potential, more willing to explore the country’s yet‑unformed advantages, and willing to growth the brand embedded with national roots or strengths.
At the same time, this less glamorous background has, to some degree, freed them from being intimidated by long‑ingrained frameworks—pushing them toward bolder execution.
As Jack Ma put it, “Because you believe, you see.” But for many, it’s the other way around: they need to see China prove itself first, before they’ll believe.
One more thing — after several years of painful experimentation with brand building, the founders who survived have generally learned one fundamental lesson from the failures around them: the founder must take primary responsibility for the brand and make it the company’s highest strategic priority. This is not something that can simply be delegated to others; the founder must do it by themselves.
Cause — In theory, the tactical problems involved in brand building seems not particularly complex and can be delegated. In practice, however, everyone is doing this for the first time. Without prior experience, how can you know which issues matter and which do not—or which are strategic and which are merely tactical?
As a result, such important work still has to be done and supervised personally especially when the brand is not matured. Many theoretical frameworks are simply summaries written after the fact. But how many ready-made models are there in China for companies to copy? In most cases, founders have to work through the process themselves and learning by doing along side the way around.
That is why you may see Pop Mart’s founder spending a long time in a meeting discussing something as seemingly minor as a shopping bag. This is simply the stage Chinese brands are currently at.
Don’t misunderstand me—this doesn’t mean all these cool Chinese brands were founded after 2020. Many have a decade of history but for the majority, ideological evolution in branding sector has been gradual. Take Songmont and Pidan, both born around 201X —look up their first brand message posts on Rednone / INS — they were all published around 2021–2022.
A Delayed-Breakout is Not a Destination
If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that brand is not a binary “done/not done” outcome—it’s an ongoing process of growth. A breakout can be late, but growth happens every single day—as long as you keep going
I’ve been thinking about this a lot—we still need a simple frame of reference to see where we stand.
Let’s roughly break Chinese brands down into few stages, for the sake of discussion 👇
1. Rookie Brand – survival and profitability is the top priority; product is core, branding is nice to have.
2. Matured Brand – stable product, aesthetics, and core audience; the brand begins to develop a recognizable “personality.”
3. Scaled Brand – big impact across regions, categories, and cultures; systematic delivery capabilities.
4. Leading Brand – not just No.1 or 2 in the category, but defining the category, setting standards, even shaping aesthetic trends.
5. Timeless Brand – transcending multiple cycles, generations, and cultures—becoming a critical part of human civilization.
By this measure, virtually all of today’s Chinese consumer brands—including those that are repeatedly written about and widely praised—are still somewhere between stages 1 and 2. In reality, however, most brands are still at the 0-to-1 stage, or even moving from -1 to 0. Only a very few have reached the threshold of stage 3. Almost none have firmly established themselves at stage 4, let alone stage 5.
That’s why I wrote earlier that I think Chinese brands are still remarkably humble—and highly conservative. As a major global power, our systemic capacity to produce world-class brands at scale remains remarkably weak. There is plenty of visible activity, but very few brands have truly broken through — most remain content to sell quietly, and many struggle even to make themselves truly marketable.
I’m glad more and more brands have brought such incredible color to the world in recent years—but my expectations for them extend far beyond that.
They still have a long, long way to go.
Climbing the Smile Curve – The Hard Way
As discussed, Chinese companies didn’t suddenly become good at branding.
The “Big Big Big” phase before 2015 was a weak player’s crude worship of scale.
The “well-considered but merely tactical” phase from 2015 to 2020 was largely a rigid imitation of Western theories.
The post-2020 phase, when branding became a strategic core, marked a cognitive leap—one forced by mounting headwinds in international markets.
I’m not even taking into account the period before 2010. I have no firsthand experience of that era, only what I’ve learned from books.
Clearly, none of these steps were easy or smooth. They were battle‑scarred, only to eventually present the audience with their most beautiful work and most romantic stories. OFC - I hope you enjoy them.
The bigger picture — True brand‑building capability is never found in university textbooks, other people’s “words.” or even the experience as a top-employee. That’s just “技术.” — Good to know but not enough at all.
In truth, a true brand begins with a deep desire to change something — with painful decisions, self-discovery, brutal battles, and standing on the front lines of uncertainty. It is forged through an obsession with every detail, the unglamorous grind, and countless sleepless nights. Over time, these experiences give rise to an unreplicable business model, a defensible product moat, and a distinctive philosophy of life. That philosophy is then embedded in every detail of the brand and product.
This virtuous flywheel is the true “天道” of brand building: not a superficial exercise in image-making, but the inevitable result of what the founder’s believes, builds, and endures in everything single day.
In the end, as per talked, beyond the founder’s thinking and expression, the brand flourish is also the best evidence of a civilization’s competitiveness, creativity and energy. At both ends of the smile curve, China will secure not only the left side but also the right—that is China’s resolve, and the collective mission of its brands.