China intelligence is getting better. Are the decisions?

The presentation is running late. There are slides on consumer confidence, city tiers, platform shifts, competitors, pricing and travel. By slide 40, someone has stopped taking notes. Six consumer segments have produced seven priorities. Then somebody asks the question those 40 slides were supposed to answer. Where, exactly, should the next investment go? Nobody in the room has one. I have seen versions of this meeting in Shanghai and Paris for years — different brands, different questions, the same stall at the end. What has changed is how much information is available. Dashboards update daily. Consumer studies, forecasts and platform signals accumulate faster than anyone can absorb, and AI will make the supply larger still. Yet the question on the table has hardly moved: what are we going to do? Before commissioning the next piece of China research, then, I would ask something more basic. What decision is this intelligence supposed to change? It sounds obvious. In my experience it rarely is. Positive sentiment, no clear answer In a recent China brand review for a global premium fashion company, 84% of the social conversation we analyzed was positive. At first glance, reassuring. The figure comes from an Other Logic Partners analysis of about 34,000 Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote) posts in the second quarter of 2026. We looked more closely at what that conversation was about. Much of it clustered around bags, discounts and styling — the same admiring comment that appears under any bag post on the platform. Was the brand building desire, or collecting it? Did it need broader awareness, or a sharper view of what it stands for? Should the next investment win new clients, or make the ones already carrying the bag want the next one? None of that was in the 84%. Good intelligence makes judgment possible. It cannot do the judging. Start with the decision Research rarely begins on neutral ground. The brief already contains a view of the problem. Ask how to improve awareness and the work will search for reach. Ask how to win younger consumers and it will slice the market by birth year and call the result a Gen Z strategy, as if a 22-year-old in Chengdu and one in Shanghai want the same thing. Sensible questions, none of them necessarily the right one. More useful is to name what you already believe. Perhaps the assumption is that awareness is the problem, or that younger clients are where growth will come from. Naming that belief makes the findings easier to judge afterward. Some will matter. Most will not. A team can do rigorous analysis and still answer the wrong question. If the brief assumes awareness is the problem, the work will focus on reach, and what gets measured tends to get funded. Abundance has a nasty side effect: almost any position can find support. A team that wants to expand will find reasons to expand. A team that wants to wait will find equally convincing reasons to wait. At that point, no amount of further research will settle it. The market moves faster than the plan Little of this is unique to China. What changes here is how quickly the assumptions move. China’s online luxury sales rose 25% to 35% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, Bain & Company said in the spring update to its global luxury study, with high-end ready-to-wear growing twice as fast as leather goods — evidence, the firm said, that domestic consumers are moving away from status-signaling purchases and toward products that carry a sense of belonging and personal expression. “China luxury is recovering” is therefore true and not especially useful. It is the sort of sentence everyone can agree with, which is part of the problem. Which clients are returning: the ones who backed away when prices kept climbing, or a newer group discovering the brand through a livestream? Are they paying full price in a boutique, or hunting duty-free prices in Hainan? Is this structural, or a flattering comparison against a miserable quarter last year? Teams in China can answer many of those questions quickly now. Whether they can act on the answers is another matter. The people watching the signals move may not have the authority to respond, and that authority often sits several time zones away, inside annual plans and budgets agreed months earlier. So I am not convinced global brands simply need to move faster in China. Speed gets plenty of attention. The more valuable capability is knowing when to change your mind, and having the authority to do it. That means agreeing something in advance which organizations often leave vague: what would we need to see to reconsider this plan, and who can act if we do? Without an answer, companies either chase every new signal or defend the existing strategy long after the assumptions under it have moved. Two companies, one market, opposite decisions Look past the headlines to the bet each company has made. Ralph Lauren reported China revenue up more than 40% YoY in its fiscal first quarter, with Asia revenue up 24% to $589 million, and has kept funding a full-price model in the market. Galeries Lafayette went the other way. It closed its Beijing flagship on May 27 after 13 years, citing falling sales, and said it would move toward more streamlined store formats with a sharper product selection, anchored by its Shanghai and Shenzhen locations. Both companies were reading the same market. One concluded its recovery was broad and durable enough to keep funding. The other concluded that the department store format — and the scale of a six-floor site that was the group’s second-largest store worldwide when it opened in 2013 — no longer matched what its customers wanted. Neither decision proves the other wrong. That is worth holding on to, because the temptation in China is to watch what is working for someone else and copy it. Plenty of brands have. What works for one house will not necessarily work for another in the same category, which is the whole reason judgment is required. Decide what you are prepared to change Uncomfortable findings rarely arrive labeled as the important ones. More often they look like an anomaly, or something the team would rather explain away. Awareness can be high while desire is weak. A hero product can succeed so completely that the house forgets how to be anything else. These are difficult because they rarely ask for more of the existing plan. They question something underneath it. Clarity is the aim: which assumptions does the strategy depend on, and what would cause leadership to question them? That also means accepting that some widely discussed China trends do not matter to your brand. There is always another platform or cultural moment asking for a slide. Some matter. Others can be ignored. Most strategy conversations are generous. There is usually room for one more initiative, another city, another pop-up, perhaps another KOL. Cutting one is harder. For the fashion brand, the questions eventually became narrower. What did consumers associate with the house beyond the one product everyone already owned? Did it still have a point of view, or had it become the brand people bought because a sales associate messaged them a private discount on WeChat? Evidence pointed somewhere the team had not expected. Rather than holding a high list price and discounting quietly, the brand moved to a lower, more credible full price and pulled back on private discounting. That ran against the premiumization logic of recent years, in which raising prices was treated as a growth strategy in itself. Here the judgment was that a price customers found believable mattered more than a higher one. It also produced an answer to the question most strategy conversations avoid: what will we stop funding as a result? Money came out of large campaign spend and discount-led promotion, and went into clienteling and in-store education. The total did not fall. It moved toward the client relationships that make full-price selling possible. This work is recent and the changes are still being implemented, so there is no proven result to claim. What the team can point to is a decision that is different from the one the original brief was heading toward. Next time the China deck reaches slide 40, I would worry less about what else the team knows, and ask which decision is now different because of it. China State of Play is a strategic intelligence program from Jing Daily and Other Logic Partners. Marc-Olivier Arnold is co-founder of Other Logic Partners, where he advises CEOs and founders of premium brands on China and Asia, and Chinese brands on expanding internationally. He has worked between Europe and Asia for more than 20 years.

China intelligence is getting better. Are the decisions?

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China intelligence is getting better. Are the decisions?

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag