The lazy “Chinese consumers only buy local out of nationalism” narrative is back, and it deserves retiring.
In the last half-decade, China has seen the emergence of strong homegrown consumer brands across several categories—beauty, F&B, fashion (especially in athletic apparel), toys, etc.
Repeatedly, commentators explained this phenomenon as the result of nationalism: that consumers, “caught up in a wave of nationalism”, decided to buy local all of a sudden. Apparently, according to this recent Bloomberg article, this “patriotic fervor has cooled”, and Western brands are back.
This framing is flat out wrong for a variety of reasons.
First, Chinese consumers are not really motivated by nationalism in their purchasing decisions. This comes up again and again in our data. Chinese consumers care about quality, price, and brand value. Look at the US-China Trade War 1.0, or the Canada-China and Australia-China spats of recent years. American, Canadian, and Australian brands remained highly popular.
There was never a widespread boycott of Western brands, as this article suggests. There has been a handful of targeted boycotts of specific brands in response to specific PR crises (e.g. of Gucci). Generally speaking, these boycotts were not widely embraced, nor were they sustained for long periods of time. Western brands still lead or hold massive market share across most consumer product categories.
So what explains the rise of Chinese brands? Innovation and business savvy. Chinese brands have become successful by embracing new sales and marketing tactics. They use market data to rapidly iterate products that match consumer preferences. In some cases, they’ve leaned into Chinese aesthetics (guochao), but very few of the successful Chinese brands leverage their Chinese origin as a primary selling point.
So to the extent that the relative reputational advantage of Western brands has slipped, that’s not because of nationalism—it’s because Chinese brands have caught up or surpassed their Western counterparts in product quality or value. And in many product categories—like health, pet, or baby—overseas brands still have a reputational advantage.
Hope to see the nationalism narrative retired for more nuanced analyses.
