After 20 years working across European and Chinese markets, I have seen the same pattern more than once: a brand decides to enter China, translates its website, opens a Tmall store, hires a China marketing lead — and then waits for the market to respond.
Six to nine months later, the store is live, the team is in place, and a meaningful amount of money has been spent. But nobody is really talking about the brand.
The problem is usually not execution. It is the assumption that what worked at home can simply be transplanted to China.
I have come to see the first year less as a proof of entry and more as a validation year — less about proving that you can enter China, and more about finding out whether China has a reason to choose you.
European brands usually make the same first mistake: they read “localisation” as translation plus distribution. The real problem sits behind those two moves.
1. Distribution is not discovery. In much of Europe, getting into the right channels is a marketing move in itself. A department store, a specialist retailer, a concept store or a good independent shop puts the product in front of people. The shelf does part of the work. China's digital platforms work differently. Tmall, Douyin and Xiaohongshu are not simply digital shelves. They are discovery and content ecosystems. People often see something first, become interested, look it up, read what others say, and only then buy. So opening a flagship store is not the same as entering the market. A store is a place to buy. It is not necessarily a reason to visit. I have seen European brands spend months getting the storefront right, only to find almost nobody came — no content, no search demand, no conversation around the brand, so the platform had no reason to send traffic.
2. Heritage is not trust. European brands often arrive with a story they are rightly proud of — founded in 1928, family-owned for three generations, made in Italy, German engineering, traditional craftsmanship. At home, that history carries weight. In China, it may not — not because Chinese consumers don't value heritage, but because an unfamiliar brand has to earn credibility differently. When someone meets your brand for the first time, they rarely start at your corporate site and read your history. They are more likely to search: “Has anyone used this?” “Is this brand any good?” “What do people in China think about it?” Your history still matters. But increasingly, the question is not what you say about yourself. It is who is willing to say it for you.
3. Price is not a currency conversion. Take the European retail price, convert it into RMB, add logistics, tax and channel margin, and you get a number that looks rational on a spreadsheet. It may still be wrong. Chinese consumers don't compare your price with your competitor's in Berlin, Milan or Paris. They compare it with the alternatives they can actually buy in China. A European brand can easily end up in the worst position: too expensive to try, but not established enough to justify the premium. Adding more distributors or more advertising doesn't fix that. It just makes an unresolved pricing problem more expensive.
There is another reason I would be cautious about importing an old European market-entry playbook into China. The economics of Chinese digital commerce have changed. Traffic is more expensive. Competition for attention is harder. Livestreaming is no longer the easy growth shortcut it once appeared to be.
For smaller European brands in particular, the problem is not necessarily getting exposure. It is turning exposure into something that remains after the budget stops.
A brand can buy traffic. It is much harder to buy recognition, trust and repeat purchase.
That is why the old sequence — enter, build channels, build the brand later — has become increasingly difficult to justify. For me, this changes what year one should be for. I would treat the first year as a validation year, not a scale year. Not because growth does not matter, but because scaling before you know what actually works is an expensive way of learning.
These are not four tasks to complete. They are four assumptions to test — and, if necessary, disprove.
Does anyone come looking for you?
Don't start by building every channel. Start small. Take a controlled budget, pick one platform, create a handful of pieces around real use cases rather than corporate messaging. Then watch. Do people comment? Do they ask questions? Do they search for the brand? Do they come back? There is an important difference between traffic you bought and interest you created. Clicks are easy to purchase. Unprompted behaviour is far more interesting.
If nobody looks for you once the paid traffic stops, you have learned something important — and you can usually learn it in weeks, not months.
Does the price hold?
Don't start with “What price gives us the margin we need?” Start with “What price makes sense in the consumer's head?” Test it — different price points, different propositions, same product where possible. Look beyond the first transaction: watch conversion, objections, basket size and, eventually, repeat purchase. If the price doesn't hold, I wouldn't rush into more channels. More distribution doesn't fix weak price perception. It just spreads the problem.
Who is willing to speak for you?
In China, trust is often distributed — across creators, communities, reviewers, specialists, customers, and increasingly people with no formal tie to the brand. That is why I wouldn't make “find the biggest KOL” the first objective. I'd rather find two or three people who genuinely understand and use the category, and give them room to explain the product in their own language. The question is not who can reach the most people. It is who would make this brand more believable. That is a very different brief, and one of the clearest signals of whether a brand can become part of a conversation rather than remain an advertisement.
Is there one reason to choose you?
This is the hardest question. A European brand usually arrives with established positioning — design, materials, craftsmanship, technology, heritage, sustainability, innovation. All valid. But which of these actually makes a Chinese consumer choose you over the brand next door? The answer may be the same as in Germany. It may not. And that is fine. What matters is eventually finishing the sentence: “Chinese consumers choose us because…” in one clear sentence. If you still need a paragraph to explain it after a year, I would read that as a sign the positioning has not been properly validated yet.
This is probably the biggest shift I would make in how European brands approach China. Don't measure the first year only by revenue. Measure what you have learned.
Do you know who is interested? Do you know why they buy? Do you know what price they accept? Do you know where they discover you? Do you know who they trust? And most importantly: do you now know why someone in China should choose you? If the answer is yes, you have something valuable to build on. If all you have at the end of year one is a Tmall store, a local team, a few distributors and a large advertising bill, you may have entered China without understanding the Chinese market. The first year should not be about proving how much you can sell. It should be about proving why someone in China should buy you. Growth comes after that.
