What strategies are luxury brands using to enter the Chinese market?

I have found that brands that are entering the China market, for the first time, have had a lot of success with digital marketing. Using a combination of tactics, brands can have early success by creating a Chinese language microsite or landing page and then setting up online advertising campaigns that drive qualified traffic to these pages. In China, the most popular search engine is Baidu and they have a great advertising platform similar to Google AdWords and because Google is blocked in Mainland China, this is a particularly valuable and cost effective place to advertise. On the social media side of things Weibo also has great advertising options for promoted posts and promoted accounts. More advanced campaigns can leverage WeChat, QQ, as well as Tmall and programmatic media buying. If the brand is looking to target a localized Chinese market, such as the affluent Chinese population of New York City, then different strategies are employed such as Google and Facebook targeting to people with Chinese language account settings.

The big ones come in by themselves. The smaller brands try and find trustworthy partners. Now is the moment of small brands , as big-logo is frowned upon by the more sophisticated consumers. China is moving from bling to uniqueness, at least in the top 5% of the consumers.

From a different angle, some of them also use social media platforms like Weibo before actually penetrating the market. Read an article recently about Japanese brand Earth Music and Ecology and how they started using Weibo 3 months before they entered the Chinese market. Just a thought! Read the article here: http://fashionbi.com/magazine/china-as-the-front-rower-at-the-digital-fashion-arena

This is based on my observation:   Global luxury brands use a a strategy of ultra-exclusivity.  They will open a location in the most expensive, by property value, part of the shopping district.. usually in or attached to a high-end mall.  Many brands will all buy locations at the same top-end mall early in the project's planning and development phase, so they know they have other brands of the caliber to occupy the mall alongside them.   Its not uncommon to see dozens of people walking around one of these malls on a Friday or Saturday night, despit the fact they are far and away the nicest places to walk.  But given the starting price for luxury goods is high and the average citizen's wage is low, and there is a huge tax on luxury goods that make then 150% or 200% more expensive than they would be if I bought the same thing in the USA.  So few people even go there because they have no intention of purchasing anything at all.  But the stores huge, their locations cannot  be missed, so everyone knows what handbag costs 4 months of their salary.  This strategy has worked quite well, as those with lots of money will be eager to be one of a small few who actually go to those places to shop, and showing how expensive your <fill int he blank with any noun> is is normal.

Big players these days opt to localize their websites in Chinese because Chinese Market is such huge to take for granted. They believe that it will boost their business, and it’s feasible to invest on localizing their websites by acquiring services from translation companies like http://ybdtranslations.com/en.

I think quite a few brands have creative use of social networking services. Get a few high profile local celebrity to use their stuff and post pictures amongst their fans, and sit tight for the buying frenzy.