When BMW launched the 1 Series in China, it ran the campaign very differently to how it would have done in Munich or London, where the tried and tested approach is a press embargo, a motor show reveal and getting motoring journalists into the driving seat. Instead it partnered with a Chinese pop star on Douyin (China’s answer to TikTok, actually sharing the same parent company, but running as a separate app with its own audience and rules) and built the campaign around a Valentine’s Day theme. The point is that BMW understood that a car launch in China is a piece of culture, not just another fly by night marketing activity.
After providing remote counsel for a number of years to both Chinese brands entering Europe and European brands entering China, we decided to form a partnership with an agency in Shanghai, Tang Cultural Media, to get closer to a stronger, more workable solution. We have seen far too many European and American brands designing their China strategy in London and New York boardrooms and simply handing it over to a translation team, rather than to people who actually understand Chinese consumer behaviour and trends.
None of this works without proper market research. Too many brands treat China as one audience when it is closer to several, split by city tier, by age, by platform habits, and by what people are actually trying to achieve when they open an app. Understanding the end user inside out, what they search for, what they distrust, what convinces them, has to come before a single word of creative is written, and it is exactly the kind of groundwork a local partner does better than a strategy team working from a brief.
Why PR works differently in China
European PR is still led predominantly by media relations, on the assumption that national coverage confers credibility. That assumption does not disappear in China, media coverage still shapes how regulators, business partners and institutions see a brand, and a badly handled crisis can still make front pages. For building consumer trust, the emphasis shifts, because Chinese consumers strongly weigh personal recommendation and peer discussion, often taking place in private channels a brand cannot see or moderate, more heavily than any media endorsement, however prestigious the title behind it.
Douyin sits right at the centre of that shift, and it deserves more explanation than most European boardrooms give it. It is not simply a video app, it is a closed ecosystem with its own algorithm, its own commerce tools and its own content rules, entirely separate from TikTok despite sharing an owner, and it rewards brands that post consistently and understand what the algorithm is looking for on any given week, rather than brands that arrive for a single campaign and leave. Getting this right from outside China is close to impossible, because the platform changes constantly, moderation and compliance require native fluency, and the creators worth working with are known through relationships, not a media kit. It is precisely the kind of terrain where a brand needs people on the ground rather than people reading about it from London.
Prada’s augmented reality try-on feature on Douyin, which let users try on hats and sunglasses through the app and post the results as short videos, worked for the same reason the BMW campaign worked, because it gave the audience something to do rather than something to read, and in China that distinction decides whether a launch is noticed at all.
Where European brands have made fools of themselves
Dolce & Gabbana ran an advertisement showing a Chinese model attempting to eat spaghetti with chopsticks, and then made it immeasurably worse when the brand’s own co-founder responded to the backlash with insults rather than an apology, turning a clumsy campaign into a full boycott that cost the brand its Chinese market for years. Marriott listed Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan as separate countries in a customer survey, a mistake that one phone call to a competent local adviser would have caught, and it triggered a formal rebuke from Chinese regulators instead. Mercedes-Benz entered the market under a transliterated name that, spoken aloud, sounded uncomfortably close to “rush to die,” which a five-minute conversation with a native speaker would have flagged long before it reached a billboard. What links all three is not malice but arrogance dressed up as efficiency, the assumption that a campaign built for one market will survive a light translation and a change of font when it lands in another.
Travel leads the way
Tourism boards have generally understood something European corporate brands still resist, which is that Chinese travellers now do almost all of their research before they book, reading Xiaohongshu posts and watching Douyin videos the way a previous generation might have read a guidebook, and destinations that invest in that research phase see it convert into bookings months later.
Qatar’s tourism board built a sustained Douyin presence around the country rather than a single seeded campaign and saw sharp growth in Chinese search interest in the destination as a direct result, while smaller European destinations, Portugal among them, have found real traction by working with local creators to surface lesser known towns rather than repeating the same handful of postcard images every European campaign defaults to. The pattern holds across every sector we have looked at here, that the brands still visible a year after launch are the ones that treated China as a long relationship rather than a single push.
Authenticity is a track record, not a tone
European brands love to claim authenticity, and in China the claim means nothing until it is backed by consistency, by what a brand does when nobody is watching and, more tellingly, by how it responds when it gets something wrong. We believe Chinese consumers have watched enough foreign brands arrive with confidence and leave with a hastily worded apology that they have developed a fairly reliable instinct for the difference between a company that means it and one that is performing meaning it.
What works in China, what doesn’t, and what brands still need to work on
Before any campaign is built, it is worth being plain about the fundamentals, because a strategy that ignores one of these three rarely survives contact with the market.
What works
Genuine engineering, craft and heritage still carry real weight, provided they are explained with specificity rather than mood, and platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu and WeChat reward brands that turn up consistently and let audiences participate rather than simply observe.
What doesn’t
Treating China as a single campaign rather than a market that demands sustained, dedicated investment, and arriving with a global strategy lightly translated rather than one built with local understanding from the outset.
What brands need to work on
Speed and honesty when things go wrong, since Chinese audiences spot inauthenticity within days and remember it for years, and the discipline to keep investing in research and platform presence long after the launch has passed.
Clearly, the European brands that do well in China over the coming decade will be the ones willing to look faintly ridiculous by Western standards, livestreaming the launch instead of embargoing it, answering the comments instead of issuing the release, sending someone to sit in the room rather than dialling in. The ones still hoping a good translation will do the job have already had their answer, several times over, and it has not been kind.
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