---
title: "Ten Dilemmas Facing Marketing in China, According to DeepSeek"
description: "Using DeepSeek to re-examine ten structural dilemmas facing marketing in China."
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# Ten Dilemmas Facing Marketing in China, According to DeepSeek

> Using DeepSeek to re-examine ten structural dilemmas facing marketing in China.

**Authors** | Zhao Bo, DeepSeek

**Proofreader** | Zhang Yuwei **Layout** | Ge Chang

China’s fast-moving consumer goods market is experiencing an unprecedented “**Song of Ice and Fire**.” **On one side is the frenzied expansion of supply**—production lines roaring, new brands crowding in, and livestream hosts shouting “the lowest price online” from every direction. **On the other is the chilling reality of demand**—consumers are tightening their purse strings, unmoved by “50% off the second item,” and even beginning to ask, “Do I actually need this product?” According to Kantar Worldpanel, growth in China’s FMCG market slowed to 3.2% in 2023, its lowest level in a decade, while the number of new consumer brands surged by 15% annually over the same period. This rupture between “supply racing ahead” and “demand hitting the brakes” exposes a brutal truth: when the number of products on shelves exceeds consumers’ cognitive capacity, when algorithmic recommendations replace active choice, and when labels such as “China chic,” “healthy,” and “zero sugar” become standard across every brand, the FMCG industry has shifted from conquering new territory in an era of incremental growth to hand-to-hand combat in an era of stagnant demand.

The deeper conflict lies in the fact that **technology is rewriting the rules of this battlefield.** Douyin e-commerce, with 600 million daily active users, has transformed the logic of “people searching for products.” Community group buying has fragmented distribution through its “order today, pick up tomorrow” model. Millions of AI-generated advertising messages have left consumers aesthetically exhausted. **Yet even more insidious than technological disruption are the undercurrents of social sentiment:** Gen Z consumers snap up near-expiry food for RMB 9.9 on Pinduoduo, then queue for two hours to buy a RMB 30 cup of “emotionally rewarding milk tea.” Housewives in smaller cities stockpile a year’s supply of laundry detergent in livestream rooms, yet scoff at family-pack advertising slogans promising “less worry, less effort,” and so on. These contradictory behaviors confirm the collapse of the consumerist myth: when material goods are no longer scarce, functionality is no longer scarce, and even “value for money” is no longer scarce, consumers begin voting with their feet and demand that brands answer a sharper question—“**What else can you give me besides products?**” In a market saturated with surplus goods, information overload, and excessive promises, FMCG brands have collectively fallen into a “**crisis of meaning**.” The following analysis of ten major dilemmas will draw back the curtain and reveal the suffocating details of survival within this crisis. **Oversupply:**

**When “innovation” becomes a fig leaf for homogenization**

The capacity boom in China’s FMCG industry is staging an absurd “**innovation arms race**.” In a convenience-store refrigerator, you might encounter a scene like this: ten brands of oolong tea lined up in a row, their packaging bearing nearly identical claims such as “zero sugar, zero calories,” “cold-brewed,” and “double the tea polyphenols.” Search for “nut snacks” on an e-commerce platform, and the results range from “daily nuts” to “probiotic nuts” and “hyaluronic acid nuts”—with differences between their ingredient lists so slight that a microscope is almost required to detect them. Behind this superficial prosperity lies the collective exhaustion of supply-side innovation. According to data from the China National Food Industry Association, fewer than 5% of new FMCG products launched in 2022 survived, and more than 70% were essentially minor adjustments to the size, flavor, or packaging of existing products. Ultimately, **the cost of oversupply is passed directly on to consumers.** For example, when a housewife tries to choose a bottle of shampoo in a supermarket, she must select from 48 SKUs spanning six major functions—including dandruff control, repair, and oil control—12 fragrances, and three sizes. Yet neuroscience research shows that the human brain can effectively process no more than seven options within a single category; beyond that threshold, a decision-avoidance mechanism is triggered. This explains why consumers who linger in front of the shelves often end up grabbing the promotional bottle marked “50% off the second item” and hurrying away. **An even more dangerous signal is the collapse of the pricing system.** In 2023, a leading dairy company, seeking to clear inventory, offered near-expiry milk on a community group-buying platform for “RMB 29.9 per case (original price RMB 68),” directly provoking collective protests from its offline distributors. A beverage company, competing for refrigerator placement, paid listing fees to convenience stores that had risen by 300% compared with three years earlier, even as its retail sell-through rate continued to decline. These phenomena reveal a counterintuitive logic: **in an era of oversupply, increasing supply actually reduces brand value—once consumers realize that a product could be discounted at any time, their willingness to pay full price collapses accordingly.** **Perhaps the greatest irony of this crisis of excess is the disappearance of “differentiation” itself.** When every brand emphasizes its “exclusive formula,” “niche use case,” and “emotional resonance,” those terms merely become part of the market noise. As one investor joked, “In today’s new-consumer sector, the only genuine differentiation left is the color scheme of the founder’s PowerPoint deck.” **Information Overload:** **Brands “Shouting” in a Desert of Attention** Today, when 300 comments scroll past every second in a livestream room and Moments ads refresh every five minutes, Chinese consumers are experiencing an unprecedented “**sensory siege**.” In 2023, Chinese internet users were exposed to advertising more than 600 times per day on average—the equivalent of being “ambushed” by a commercial message every 90 seconds. Ironically, however, this seemingly precise saturation assault is backfiring: CTR data show that the average time users spend on in-feed ads fell from 1.2 seconds in 2020 to 0.7 seconds—the consumer brain has evolved a biological instinct to become “blind to advertising.” One international beverage giant once conducted a brutal experiment: it spent RMB 100 million simultaneously on WeChat Moments, Douyin splash-screen ads, and elevator advertising. The result was only a 3% increase in searches for brand-related keywords, while the Baidu Index for “how to block ads” soared by 200%. **The “precision” of algorithms is creating a new form of information hegemony.** For example, by the time a white-collar woman sees the eighth sunscreen advertisement in her Douyin feed, the algorithm has already analyzed her viewing duration, interactions, and even changes in facial expression, then bombarded her with combinations of keywords such as “value for money,” “quick film formation,” and “no white cast.” But the cost of this apparent ability to “understand you” is cognitive narrowing: **users become trapped in an information prison built from their historical behavioral data, growing increasingly insensitive to innovative products that break through their existing cognitive boundaries.** In 2022, a rising skincare brand launched a “waterless formula” technology. Because it did not fit the platform algorithm’s predefined pool of labels such as “whitening” and “anti-aging,” it received less than one-tenth the exposure of competing products during its first month. **The deeper contradiction, meanwhile, lies in the erosion of brand equity by traffic-driven logic.** To boost sales during the 618 shopping festival, one domestic cosmetics brand repeated the lines “Only 100 orders left! Buy one and get ten!” in its livestream room for 30 consecutive days. Its GMV exceeded RMB 50 million that day, but its brand search index fell by 15%. This confirms a brutal reality: when sales pitches drown out the brand story, the anchor in consumers’ memories shifts from “who I am” to “how cheap I am.” **In the information deluge, brands are being forced to exchange short-term noise for the right to survive.** The real winners in this war may be the platforms. The advertising auction system of one leading e-commerce platform has pushed the CPM for FMCG keywords to 4.2 times its 2019 level, while conversion rates have been cut in half. As brands battle for algorithmic placement in “You May Also Like,” they may not realize that **they are building an information prison for consumers from which escape is becoming increasingly costly.** **A Scarcity of Meaning:** **Spiritual Famine in an Age of Material Abundance** When consumers begin describing viral snacks as “digital pickles”—something to consume alongside online entertainment—and labeling clothing choices as “dopamine dressing,” China’s FMCG market reveals a paradox: **the richer the abundance of goods, the poorer their meaning.** Tmall’s 2023 ranking of the top 100 new products showed that 72% of FMCG products claimed to provide “emotional value,” yet consumer research exposed a brutal truth: only 9% of users could clearly identify the point of emotional resonance offered by any particular product. For example, a new-style tea brand launched an “autism-healing milk tea” covered in inspirational platitudes. It sold more than one million cups in its first week, but social-media monitoring found that “cloyingly sweet” and “cringeworthy copy” became the most frequently used descriptions. The inflation of cultural symbols is accelerating the hollowing-out of value. **A deeper crisis stems from the structural contradiction in the supply of meaning.** When young people in smaller cities buy Zen-inspired tea bags marketed as “essential for laid-back youth” while snapping up RMB 9.9 stress-relief squishy toys on Pinduoduo, their consumption behavior is essentially an absurd drama of self-redemption. Accenture research shows that 68% of Gen Z consumers are willing to pay a premium for “alignment with their values,” yet only 23% of the same group believe brands’ claims about social responsibility. This rupture has created the black humor of “meaningful consumption”: **consumers know they are buying illusory symbols, yet still need those symbols to resist the emptiness of reality.** As industrialized marketing proves incapable of producing authenticity, consumers are voting with their feet and migrating toward “imperfect reality”—**just as young people have grown tired of filtered livestreams and turned toward bare-faced authenticity, the FMCG market may be entering an era of “disenchantment.”** **The Surrender of Choice:**

**“Consumer Puppets” under Algorithmic Rule**

In a Douyin livestream room, a user has barely said, “I’d like some juice,” when, five seconds later, a purchase link for NFC orange juice appears in the shopping cart. This is not magic, but **the silent dispossession of consumer sovereignty by algorithms.** China’s FMCG industry is witnessing a transfer of power: **consumers’ shopping carts increasingly no longer belong to them.** According to iResearch, algorithmic recommendations on e-commerce platforms accounted for 47% of GMV in 2023, meaning that nearly half of all consumer decisions had been reduced to “the system thinks you need this.” **The “tyranny” of algorithms is not only reshaping purchase journeys; it is also rewriting product lifelines.** For example, when an oatmeal brand selected the “fitness audience” label while buying traffic on Douyin, the algorithm repeatedly pushed its products to people trying to lose weight. The company was ultimately forced to reduce the product’s calorie content by 30%, causing it to lose its original customer base. More absurdly, a time-honored local condiment brand received preferential traffic only after replacing the packaging that emphasized the value of its “traditional brewing method” with an “Instagrammable influencer aesthetic” the algorithm could recognize. These cases reveal a truth: **when algorithms become the arbiters of the market, the core value of a product must yield to data performance.** Consumers, of course, have not been entirely passive. In 2023, “anti-algorithm shopping” received 230 million views on Xiaohongshu, as young people began sharing ways to “take back the right to choose” by clearing their search histories and disabling personalized recommendations. But platforms responded with even greater cunning. On one e-commerce platform, for example, when users disable recommendations, the “You May Also Like” module continues to infiltrate their choices through social labels such as “your friends are buying this” and “popular within three kilometers.” **The essence of this contest is that platforms use code made of zeros and ones to deconstruct the freedom of consumption cultivated over centuries of human history into “what you believe to be free choice.”** Perhaps most disturbing of all is the “prepackaging of demand.” After a user orders coffee on Ele.me for three consecutive days, the algorithm begins showing them coffee beans, grinders, and even a “caffeine-dependence treatment device” while they watch short videos. This is not clairvoyance; it is the use of a data cocoon to confine people to predetermined tracks of demand. Just as “golden eye-level positions” on supermarket shelves once shaped consumer choices, algorithms now declare in a more concealed fashion that **in the world of FMCG, the true right to choose has long carried a clearly marked price tag, becoming a commodity sold through platform and brand bidding rankings.** **Information Cocoons:**

**Cognitive Prisoners behind Algorithmic Walls**

When a Beijing office worker’s Douyin feed is filled with specialty-coffee reviews while a young person in a county-level city sees an endless stream of RMB 9.9 instant coffee, algorithms are pouring invisible walls of cognitive segregation across China’s FMCG market. This segregation has moved beyond simple differences in interests and evolved into **systematic cognitive deprivation.** According to QuestMobile, users spent more than 150 minutes per day on short-video platforms in 2023, with 72% of their content recommended by algorithms—**equivalent to consumers spending 109 minutes every day trapped in an “information greenhouse” built from their historical click data.** When one imported oat platform attempted to expand from first- and second-tier cities into third- and fourth-tier markets, for example, it discovered that its target users’ feeds had already been saturated by low-priced domestic brands. Even after investing tens of millions of yuan in advertising, its penetration rate remained below 5%. **At the same time, the “precision” of algorithms is creating fractures in the market.** A beverage brand, for example, used algorithms to deliver its “zero sugar” concept precisely to fitness enthusiasts, yet encountered a cognitive barrier among older consumers whom the algorithm did not reach: seniors equated “zero sugar” with “specially made for diabetics,” accelerating the brand’s collapse in distribution channels serving aging communities. This cognitive rupture has spawned absurd parallel universes across social platforms. Search for “soy sauce” on Xiaohongshu, and the first page offers refined-lifestyle guides featuring “organic brewing” and “50% less salt.” Run the same search on Kuaishou, and the results are factory-direct stores selling “economical ten-jin family packs.” **The more profound effect is the gradual suffocation of innovation.** The founder of a new consumer snack brand shared that the company’s “regional-flavor spicy strips” did not fit the algorithm’s predefined “viral snack” labels, such as “cheese” and “cherry blossom.” Even though the product achieved a 40% repurchase rate during testing in Sichuan, the platform’s traffic mechanism classified it as a “nonstandard product” and restricted its reach. The brand was forced to transform it into “hot-pot-flavored cheese spicy strips” before it received exposure. **Through data hegemony, algorithms are compressing the diversity of Chinese food culture into standardized industrial components.** In this slowly unfolding crisis, the real loser may be the evolutionary potential of the entire industry. When brands devote their budgets to “matching trending Douyin keywords,” they may not realize that algorithmic recommendations create blockbusters while also killing serendipity. Just as supermarket shelves once defined success through “prime display positions,” algorithms now castrate possibility through “traffic pools.” **Products unable to scale the algorithmic wall will eventually become silent sacrifices on digital shelves.** **Extremism (Emotional Mobs):**

**The “Gallows of Public Opinion” in the Social-Media Era**

**On the battlefield of social media,** **consumers’ emotional bullets are more lethal than the products themselves, and this trend toward extremism is spreading at viral speed.** According to the Zhiweidata platform, 72% of trending FMCG-related topics in 2023 carried an obvious emotional slant, with negative sentiment accounting for 58%. Emotional leverage is rewriting the rules of marketing. A time-honored traditional food brand, for example, attempted to harness “patriotic sentiment” by turning its packaging red and printing “the pride of domestic products” on it, only to be mocked by young consumers for “emotional blackmail.” **In a public-opinion arena dominated by extreme emotions, a brand’s goodwill can become the knife it hands to its own attacker.** **The deeper crisis is the collapse of space for rational dialogue.** One infant complementary-food brand, for example, faced a flood of accusations on Douyin warning, “Don’t let toxic milk powder 2.0 happen,” after its contract manufacturer was exposed for environmental violations unrelated to the brand’s production line. Although third-party testing showed that its products were entirely compliant, the brand permanently lost 23% of its core customers. Platform algorithms quietly added fuel to the fire. A crisis-propagation model from one social-media platform showed that anger-laden posts about FMCG products spread 6.8 times faster than posts featuring rational discussion. This has spawned a new business model: one professional anti-counterfeiting organization edited clips from brand livestreams, added emotionally charged titles such as “unscrupulous corporation,” and extorted more than RMB 1 million in a single month. Brands, meanwhile, have been forced to add “statements against malicious interpretation” to every product-detail page, as though fitting their products with body armor. **Perhaps the most absurd feature of this asymmetric war is the “perfect victim” trap.** A yogurt brand, for example, was accused by a wellness blogger of “implying that consumers are unhealthy” merely because it used the conventional claim “supports intestinal health.” It was ultimately forced to change the copy to “make your tummy happy.” The spread of such self-censorship is dragging FMCG marketing into an era of “literary inquisition”: “natural” may be distorted into “implying that artificial products are poisonous,” while “fresh” may be interpreted as “mocking competitors for being expired.” The language available to brands is being dismembered into fragments of “safe words.” Companies that attempt to ride the wild horse of emotion often plunge over an even steeper cliff. One snack brand planned a campaign around a “stress-relief pack for overworked employees,” encouraging consumers to film themselves crushing the packaging underfoot. It hoped to inspire emotional resonance, but after one user uploaded an extreme rendition showing them “crushing the boss’s phone,” the brand was drawn into a public-opinion storm accusing it of “inciting workplace violence.” The conclusion of this farce was that **in the revelry of emotional mobs, there are no winners, only survivors—like victors in a Roman arena who have merely escaped the next thrusting sword for the moment.** **Island-Chain Communities:** **“Morse Code” in an Age of Social Islands** When a brand tries to flatter Gen Z on Xiaohongshu with slang such as “juejuezi” and falls flat, or imitates Kuaishou’s “laotie” style only to be mocked as a clumsy copycat, China’s FMCG market is enacting a brutal “Tower of Babel dilemma”—**every community is an island, and brands need a different language system to land on each one.** This fragmentation has penetrated the market’s smallest capillaries. QuestMobile data show that the overlap between users of major social platforms was below 12% in 2023, meaning that 88% of users were active within only one content ecosystem. Community jargon is erecting high cognitive walls. A dairy company, for example, printed bullet-chat expressions such as “awsl” (“ah, I’m dead”) on its packaging in an attempt to break into the anime, comics, and gaming community, only to discover that its target users had already moved on to newer codes such as “zqsg” (“genuine feelings”) and “ssmy” (“peerless beauty”). A snack brand that used the basic meme “666” while sponsoring an esports team was collectively ridiculed by players as “an antique chasing clout.” **This generational information gap exposes** **brands’ “tourist-level understanding” of community culture—like learning a dialect from a travel guide, they can never keep pace with the evolution of native speakers.** Fragmented channels create even deeper operational fissures, dismembering brands according to channel logic until they become indistinct, unclassifiable hybrids. One rising coffee brand discovered that the same cold-brew product had to emphasize the convenience of “dissolves in one second” on Douyin, be packaged as an “Instagrammable photo prop” on Xiaohongshu, and carry the label “RMB 2 cheaper than Nescafé” on Pinduoduo. More absurdly, one pet-food brand developed three entirely different slogan systems—“scientifically balanced,” “your fur baby’s favorite,” and “only RMB 50 per month”—to suit different platforms. **Yet perhaps the most fatal development is the disappearance of mobility between communities.** One beverage brand attempted to bridge the Hanfu and street-fashion communities through a “Chinese-style music festival,” only to find that the two groups remained sharply divided at the venue: Hanfu enthusiasts gathered around the guzheng performance area to take photographs, while young street-culture fans crowded in front of the electronic-music stage and danced. Their intersection in physical space failed to produce any chemical reaction. **As algorithms continue feeding users homogeneous content, the cognitive gulf between communities has transformed from “a stream that can be crossed” into “a national border that requires a visa.” And the rare cases that manage to “break out of their circles” often pay a devastating price.** A beer brand went viral on Hupu with a “straight-man test” meme, for example, only to trigger a collective boycott among female Xiaohongshu users. A premium water brand sponsored an art exhibition to elevate its image, but Douyin users labeled it “pretentious,” causing sales to decline. **Within an island-chain community structure, every attempt by a brand to cross into another circle may trigger a “cultural rejection response”—as with an organ transplant, a failed match results in mutual destruction.** **Atomized Individuals:**

**The Ultimate Confrontation between the Loneliness Economy and Economies of Scale**

When a convenience store launches a microwave meal for “one-person dining” but labels the ingredient packet “recommended for sharing,” we should begin to recognize a problem: **the more consumers pursue personalization, the harder it becomes for brands to find common ground on which to survive.** Yet this wave of individualization has already become a trend. Tmall’s 2023 Singles’ Day data showed that sales of miniature food packages rose by 210% year on year, while family-size products recorded negative growth for the first time. At the same time, the average transaction value for pet food reached 1.8 times that of human food—Chinese consumers are taking the pursuit of “living exquisitely on one’s own” to its extreme. One imported mineral-water brand, for example, launched “mood mystery bottles” printed with different emotional labels. They sold briskly in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen but languished in third- and fourth-tier cities, where consumers considered them “flashy and impractical.” The company was ultimately forced to implement a city-tiered supply-chain system. **The industrial-scale paradox of personalized demand is becoming visible.** When a snack brand streamlined its SKU count from 80 to 20, sales actually rose by 18%, exposing the “pseudo-personalization” at the heart of atomized consumers. As economist Herbert Simon predicted: “**People claim to want freedom of choice, but what they really desire is to make quick decisions from a limited set of options.**” **The emergence of data-privacy concerns has intensified the contradiction further.** A new-style tea brand, for example, used its membership system to record consumers’ sweetness preferences. But when one user discovered that an order for “no ice, 30% sugar” had prompted an advertisement for a hair transplant, it triggered panic over “big-data surveillance.” More seriously, Accenture research shows that 63% of consumers abandon an order when an app requests location access, yet 81% of the same group complain that “product recommendations are not accurate enough.” People are simultaneously afraid that algorithms will see through them and annoyed that algorithms fail to understand their desires. **The true disruptor in this revolution of individualization is the unchecked growth of “solitary consumption.”** One home-appliance brand launched a 1.2-liter miniature washing machine built around the concept of “one person, one drum,” selling more than one million units in its first year. An instant-food brand divided hot-pot ingredients into 199-gram single-serving portions, raising its average transaction value by 40%. As the household unit contracts to an atomic state, FMCG companies must reconstruct the entire value chain, from packaging design to channel distribution. The “economical family packs” disappearing from supermarket shelves are being replaced by miniature “one-month-use” sizes. In an atomized society, any collectivist narrative may trigger individual defense mechanisms—like hedgehogs longing for warmth in the depths of winter while fearing the pain of one another’s spines as they draw near. The atomization of China’s 1.4 billion people is, in essence, a complete betrayal of the logic of industrial production. **Brands that still rely on a “hero-product strategy” to conquer the market are like fishermen trying to catch mercury with a net—the harder they try, the more they lose.** **Pluralistic Values:**

**Brands “Walking a Tightrope” after the Collapse of Consensus**

An international beverage giant once ran an advertisement showing urban office workers drinking its sugar-free version while construction workers enjoyed the classic one. It was accused of “reinforcing class differences” and ultimately forced to withdraw the ad. This farce reflects a fatal challenge in China’s FMCG market: **in a minefield of values, every step a brand takes may trigger a hidden detonator.** This fragmentation of values has penetrated the smallest capillaries of consumer behavior.

Kantar’s *2024 China Consumer Trends Report* reveals striking generational differences in the definition of “health”: those born in the 1970s see “no additives” as its core; those born in the 1990s pursue “calorie and sugar control”; and Gen Z places “emotional health” first. The experience of one nut brand is highly representative: its “low-salt version” sold well among older consumers but was criticized by young people for “sacrificing flavor for performative posturing,” ultimately leaving it in the awkward position of pleasing neither group. At the same time, geographical fractures in values leave brands walking on eggshells. A dairy company’s “high calcium for strong bones” message achieved great success in northwestern China but was accused of “creating body anxiety” along the southeastern coast. An instant-noodle brand emphasized “filling and economical” in northeastern China but was labeled “crude and greasy” in Guangdong. **A deeper crisis arises from the fluidity of values.** One beverage brand centered on “environmental protection,” for example, discovered that 68% of its core users also bought fast-fashion clothing—the world’s second-largest source of pollution. Research by one “women-friendly” brand found that men unexpectedly accounted for 42% of its consumers, most of whom bought its products to please their girlfriends. This rupture between values and practice has given rise to what sociology defines as “cognitive-dissonance consumption”: **consumers need to purchase symbols to prove who they are, even when their behavior moves in the opposite direction.** Brands that attempt to please everyone often tumble into an even deeper abyss. One grain-and-oil company simultaneously launched two product lines—“the traditional taste of home” and “a new vision for light eating.” Existing customers believed it had “betrayed its original purpose,” while new customers thought it “had not gone far enough,” ultimately blurring the brand’s identity. This confirms philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s assertion: “The true conflict in contemporary society is not the confrontation between different values, but everyone’s obsessive pursuit of being ‘correct.’” **Perhaps the greatest danger in this mapless labyrinth is the weaponization of values.** When a marketing director laments, “We’re not selling products; we’re defusing ideological bombs,” the battle over values has already moved beyond marketing and evolved into a microcosm of social fragmentation. **Brands still attempting to find the “greatest common denominator” are like builders erecting the Tower of Babel on quicksand—the broader the foundation, the faster the collapse.** **The Conflict between Traditional Cultural Customs and Modern Society:**

**Brands Dancing on a Fault Line**

A century-old traditional Chinese medicine brand launches an “all-nighter drink” to attract young people, only to be condemned by longtime customers for “betraying the fundamental nature of medicine.” A liquor giant creates a co-branded ice cream that explodes across trending searches, only to have traditional drinkers accuse it of “desecrating drinking culture.” **China’s FMCG market is witnessing a conflict between traditional cultural customs and modern society.** At the root of this conflict is **modernity’s dimensional assault on traditional culture.** According to Ipsos’s *2024 Generational Consumption Research Report*, the penetration rate for purchasing traditional seasonal foods reaches 89% among those born in the 1970s but only 37% among Gen Z. Yet Gen Z’s willingness to pay a premium for “limited editions tied to the traditional solar terms” is 2.3 times that of the older group. The experience of one time-honored pastry brand is particularly ironic: young consumers snapped up all of its molten custard mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival to “take photos and check in,” but scooped out and discarded the fillings, keeping only the empty shells as photography props—**traditional culture is being reduced to scenery for modern consumerism.** **As modernity deconstructs traditional culture into detachable symbols, the solemnity of cultural inheritance is being replaced by the entertainment logic of consumerism.** Brands that try to bridge the fracture often become casualties of the conflict. One established vinegar-drink company invested in building a “Vinegar Culture Museum,” only to be jokingly described by young consumers as a “middle-aged wellness education center.” A rising brand incorporated the 24 solar terms into a snack gift box, only to be collectively mocked by Douban users for “cultural inflation.” **Along the fault line between tradition and modernity, any attempt at reconciliation may be regarded by both sides as betrayal—like mountain-building under the pressure of two tectonic plates, a brand will either be uplifted into a cultural landmark or crushed into the dust of its age.** **Conclusion:** **Finding Resilience amid Dynamic Imbalance**

**The “New Survivalism” of the FMCG Market**

The ten dilemmas facing China’s FMCG industry are by no means isolated risk factors. Together, they form a vast web woven from technology, culture, and social psychology. When oversupply collides with a scarcity of meaning and algorithmic hegemony confronts the atomized individual, **the crisis is fundamentally a systemic implosion of modernity—it signals the end of the industrial era’s linear logic of “production-communication-consumption” and tears open a bloody wound in the relationship among “people, products, and places” in digital society.** The methodologies that once created industry legends are losing their effectiveness: positioning theory cannot explain the encrypted logic of community jargon; the 4Ps framework cannot contain the destructive force of emotional mobs; and the slogan of integrating brand-building with sales performance appears feeble in a traffic wasteland ruled by algorithms. As sociologist Xiang Biao has observed: “**We are moving from a ‘market society’ into a ‘platform society’—the former is a collection of exchanges, while the latter is a dictatorship of algorithms.**” The vitality of future brands will lie not in resisting these dilemmas, but in transforming them into nourishment for symbiotic evolution. When philosopher Byung-Chul Han declared that “**we are transitioning from a disciplinary society to an achievement society,**” he may have omitted the crucial second half—**the ultimate form of the achievement society is systemic dynamic imbalance.** Brands still attempting to find stable formulas are like sculptors carving statues in quicksand. Companies that learn to dance with fluidity may instead find new points of equilibrium within imbalance. **The endgame of China’s FMCG market will be neither the coronation of a unified ruler nor a fragmented vision of apocalypse, but will more likely evolve into a “moving labyrinth.”** Here, oversupply and the hunger for meaning mirror each other; algorithmic hegemony and individual awakening tear at one another; and the constraints of tradition repeatedly collide with modern anxiety. The only certainty is this: those that survive will be neither the strongest nor the most intelligent, but the species best able to adapt to “the absence of certainty.” During the Cambrian explosion, transitional species that were neither fish nor amphibians ultimately opened the epic path by which vertebrates came onto land—**today’s FMCG brands may be standing at the same starting line in the history of commercial evolution.** This time, however, the stakes of evolution are not bones and scales, but the courage to confront the fault lines and a reverence for the deepest waters of human nature. ********

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