We have been doing a lot of work with DTC brands globally and in China. Most of these digital native brands have been built from the bottom-up, via Facebook and Google ads.
Facebook and Google have made it possible to buy audiences in small, affordable increments …and scale those efforts very reliably. Global DTC brands have mastered performance marketing - at bottom-of-the-funnel - with rock-solid CAC measures.
These same, global DTC brands run into trouble in China. Incremental acquisition tactics - using the same mix of social/search/ecommerce - cannot be replicated in the same way.
In the global ecosystem, it’s possible to track links, ‘pixel’ images and pull data from APIs. In China, the big platforms don’t play nice with each other, as barriers between social/ search/ecommerce sites making tracking very tough.
If you can do everything within an Alibaba (Tmall) or Tencent (WeChat) ecosystem, then tracking becomes more feasible BUT full visibility is the reserve of large brands spending big $$.
Without a familiar bottom-up formula… that leaves global DTCs the option of either; (A)dropping into the trenches with crowds of local, Chinese DTC brands (and getting killed), or (B)following a top-down, brand-driven approach.
