A brand built for China, at every touchpoint. Designed in China, for the Chinese consumer.

Translation moves words across. Localisation moves the brand. Chinese shoppers carry their own references, their own visual cues and their own platforms. A brand that lands without those signals reads as foreign in the bad sense, polite but irrelevant. The work is to keep what makes you you, and rebuild what is needed for a Chinese shopper to recognise it as theirs.

Different enough that you should plan for it from day one. Social proof carries more weight than brand-led claims. Reviews, KOL endorsements and what a friend bought last week often beat anything you say about yourself. Heritage matters, innovation matters, and being seen to understand local culture matters a lot.

Neither, cleanly. Foreign brands carry a quality and prestige signal. Local brands carry cultural fluency and value. The winners borrow from both. Keep the heritage and quality story, then build the cultural fluency on top so the brand feels local even when the badge is not.

It is the gap between a literal translation and a story a Chinese shopper would tell about you. Same brand truth, rewritten in a register that fits the audience. New metaphors. New examples. Sometimes a different hero benefit, because the one that works in Paris is not the one that wins in Shanghai. Done well, it does not look adapted at all.

Easy to say. Easy to remember. A meaning that flatters the product or at least does not embarrass it. If a shopper can read the name out loud after seeing it once, you have a fighting chance. If they cannot, you will spend forever explaining yourself.

That is the normal starting point, not the exception. Most foreign names sound awkward or carry the wrong meaning when forced into Mandarin. The fix is to create a new Chinese name that sits next to the Latin one, with its own logic, sound and story. Apple has 苹果. BMW has 宝马. You can too.

Both, almost always. The Latin name protects the global brand. The Chinese name does the daily work in market. On packaging, signage and search, the Chinese name leads. On global communications and premium positioning cues, the Latin name does the lifting.

Read it out loud in three cities. Get reactions from young, mid and older shoppers in your target tier. Test it on a poorly-lit phone screen, not just a slide. Run a trademark check across the categories you actually sell in, plus the obvious adjacent ones. If anything trips, we redo the round rather than patch it.

It has to read at thumbnail size, on a 1.5cm WeChat avatar, on packaging stacked on a tier-3 shelf, and on a Douyin sticker. It has to survive being printed badly. It has to carry meaning when stripped of color. Most foreign logos pass the first test and fail the next three.

They ship the global guidelines untouched. The color palette designed for European retail looks washed out under Chinese supermarket lighting. The typography that breathes in print suffocates on a phone. The hero asset built for billboards does not crop for vertical video. Adapting the system is not optional.

Use them on purpose, not as a default. Red works when there is a reason for it. Gold works when it earns its place. The lazy version is everything red and gold for New Year. The strong version is a brand that uses one cultural cue with intent and lets the rest of the identity do its own work.

Sometimes the bottle, yes. The artwork rarely. Chinese packaging has its own conventions: front-of-pack claims, ingredient cues, regulatory icons, language hierarchy, retail formats that differ from yours. Adapt the artwork for China before launch. It is the most visible piece of brand a Chinese shopper will ever hold.

A China brand book, not a global one. It maps the brand into the formats Chinese platforms actually use, with templates, do-not-do examples and tone notes. Then you give it to every partner who touches your brand: TP, KOL agency, retail designer, PR firm. Consistency is a logistics problem dressed up as a creative one.

Some of it, with editing. Mood and lifestyle shots travel poorly because the cast, the homes, the gestures all read as foreign. Product photography travels well if the lighting and surfaces match the platform standards. Plan for a Shanghai or Shenzhen shoot for at least the hero campaign per year.

Strategy and naming, four to six weeks. Visual identity, six to eight. Brand assets including packaging and key creative, eight to twelve. Allow another month of buffer for trademark checks, consumer testing and revisions. Three to five months end to end is honest. Anyone promising six weeks is selling a template.

Big rebuilds every four to six years, light refreshes every two. The Chinese market moves fast. Visual trends, platform UI and consumer references all shift on shorter cycles than in Europe or the US. Plan a yearly check-in, not just a major reset every five years.

You. Always you. The agency builds it, your team owns it. Put that in the contract on day one along with file ownership, working files and font licenses. We have seen brands locked out of their own assets because the contract was vague. Do not be that brand.

A range, not a number. A focused build (strategy, Chinese name, refreshed identity, packaging for one SKU range) typically lands between 30 and 80 thousand USD. A full multi-SKU programme with original photography and video usually doubles that. Anything under 20 thousand is template work in disguise.

Roughly 25 percent strategy and naming, 30 percent identity, 45 percent assets. Most foreign brands underweight assets and end up with a beautiful logo and nothing to put it on. Plan for the assets first, then the identity falls into place around what you will actually produce.

Yes, the day you settle on it. China is first-to-file. Trademark squatters watch press releases and register names the same week. Buying back your own name costs more than the build itself. Register in Mandarin, in Latin script, in pinyin, across the categories you sell and the obvious adjacent ones.