🏠 The gap between seeing and searching
An overseas brand runs a seeding campaign on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. The posts land. The comments fill with people asking where to buy. Traffic to the brand's own site barely moves, and the sales team asks why.
Most brands conclude the content failed. The content usually did not fail. What failed is the assumption that seeing and buying happen in the same place.
In late September 2026, iiMedia Research released a 201-page study, built on its CMDAS data system, on how Chinese consumers in their twenties and thirties decide what to buy. For advertisers planning a China budget, three of its findings matter more than the rest.
Paid influencer endorsement barely registers as persuasion. Asked what content drove their purchase decisions, 53.57% pointed to emotional storytelling, 47.98% to genuine reviews from ordinary users, and 40.68% to immersive unboxing and experience video. KOL and influencer recommendation came in at 8.85%, which the report describes as marginal.
The channels this cohort researches on are social, not search. Among 16 to 26 year olds, Douyin and Kuaishou lead at 63.89%, followed by Xiaohongshu at 45.14% and Bilibili at 43.06%. Among 27 to 36 year olds, the top named source is friends and family at 39.40%.
The message that lands is a demonstrated scene. Asked what brand communication moves them, 59.16% chose scenario-based experience demonstration, 48.29% chose community KOL or group real reviews, and 39.75% chose emotional value and lifestyle messaging. What they want is the product shown inside a life they recognise.
No search engine appears in either list. That is not a case for skipping search. It is a case for treating search as a separate phase of the decision, and for noticing that almost nobody budgets for it as one.
🔎 What this report measures, and what it does not
The direction of this data holds up. But the figures need handling carefully, and the limits are worth stating before they get quoted back at you in a pitch.
The public release does not disclose a sample size. Several experience categories are published as ranges rather than point values: theme parks and study tours at "over 26%", escape rooms and concerts at "over 21%". The 8.82% figure for short trips counts respondents who have never taken one, and the report uses it as a coverage marker rather than as a participation rate to be inverted into 91.18%. Collectibles at 8.39% appear as a contrast case, not as the bottom of a ranking.
What is solid is the scale of the shift. China's experience economy grew from RMB 3.22 trillion in 2020 to RMB 19.67 trillion in 2025, and is projected to reach RMB 59.66 trillion by 2035. That is more than a 17-fold increase in roughly fifteen years.
The public release does not disclose a sample size. Theme parks and study tours are published as "over 26%" and escape rooms and concerts as "over 21%". The 8.82% short-trip figure counts respondents who have never taken one — it is a coverage marker, not a participation rate to be inverted. Collectibles at 8.39% are a contrast case, not the bottom of a ranking.
💰 Three budget pools, not one
The most useful number for media planning is not the size of the experience economy. It is the split between categories this cohort spends heavily in and categories where it does not.
Pool one, high search intent. Digital products lead at 58.70%, followed by fitness equipment and classes at 35.09%, and skincare, cosmetics, and medical aesthetics at 33.54%. What these three share matters more than their size. They have specifications, model numbers, and a price range. A buyer who wants them compares before buying, and comparison happens in a search box. Within the 27 to 36 band, digital products reach 60.40%. In the 16 to 26 band they sit at 52.78%, behind skincare at 38.19% and travel at 37.50%.
Pool two, strong demand inside a closed loop. Collectibles register at only 8.39% for large spending, yet 52.74% of this cohort pays for emotional value through blind boxes, designer toys, and anime merchandise, and 43.23% through snacks, tea, and coffee. Spending intention is high. The decision happens inside a community, at a convention, or on a resale platform. A search campaign here competes for queries that barely exist, and cannot reach the moment of decision at all.
Pool three, demand that arrives on a calendar. Concerts and music festivals draw over 21% monthly consumption, and theme parks and study tours over 26%. Twenty-one percent sounds modest until you see where this cohort's spending actually moved. Over the past year, the largest increases were education and self-improvement at 20.28%, short trips at 19.97%, and branded apparel at 19.81%. Arts exhibitions fell by 13.00% and outbound travel by 10.37%. The money shifted toward things that repeat and that can be booked, and booked things produce search bursts tied to dates.
This pattern has already hardened into routine. 28.64% of this cohort buy light exercise at least once a quarter — cycling, frisbee, hiking, mountaineering — which is the highest rate of any offline experience category. Short trips and urban micro-trips register only 8.82% as never tried, which means they have become the default rather than the exception. Light, repeatable experiences turned into an everyday necessity, while heavy and narrative ones split by age tier. That is why the right budget shape is not a fixed monthly line but a search budget tied to dates.
📍 The keyword problem
This is where most overseas campaigns lose the budget they just spent on seeding.
A British sportswear brand runs a running campaign in China. The creator video works. The brand then bids on English keywords and its own English product names. It gets impressions and almost no conversions.
Chinese consumers do not search for the English product name. They search the local term for the product type, the local term for the feature, and the local phrase describing the problem they want solved. A fitness brand is not found through a search for strength training equipment. It is found through a local term for the equipment, then a local term for the training method, then a local phrase for the symptom. The same structure holds across all three top categories: digital products by local model terminology, skincare by local ingredient and skin-type terms, medical aesthetics by local procedure names.
Underneath that sits a vocabulary problem. About 33.44% of this cohort already uses a smartwatch or band, and 45.50% plan to buy noise-cancelling headphones within the year. The words Chinese consumers use for these products are not the words on the box. A translated campaign reaches people and then cannot answer them.
There is a second, quieter version of the same failure. Once a user searches, they search the comparison: this model or that one, this brand against a competitor, is it worth the price, where to buy it authentically. Those queries carry the highest commercial intent in the entire market, and they are almost never part of an overseas brand's keyword plan, because planning them requires reading Chinese search behaviour rather than translating a keyword list.
🛡 The review wall
Two of the three top-spending categories sit in the most heavily reviewed advertising categories in China.
Skincare, cosmetics, and medical aesthetics touch medical advertising rules. Fitness equipment and classes sit alongside education and training in review practice. Advertising in China is filed and reviewed per industry, and claims are checked against permitted phrasing. A creative that performs well in another market, a before-and-after claim, a health-outcome claim, a testimonial with a named result, can be rejected on submission in China with no prior warning. Rejection is usually only visible after the creative has been filed.
There is a second review surface that is easy to miss: how you describe your own store. Terms implying a guarantee of authenticity, parallel-import pricing, or overseas direct fulfilment are restricted phrasing in several categories. Brands that have run the same messaging for years in other markets tend to discover this at submission time, inside a launch window, when there is no time to rewrite.
The report's own data argues for the compliant route. When asked what makes a brand ready for the young market, 50.00% said a deep binding of product function to scenario, 45.65% said integration of AI decision chains, and 38.82% said delivered sustainability, while only 8.54% named second-hand circular models. And 59.16% said a demonstrated scenario is what moves them. Scenario-led claims survive review better than outcome-led claims, because a scenario is a description and an outcome is a promise.
📅 Budget and timing
Two patterns in the spending structure set a practical floor for any plan.
On monthly allocation, 35.71% of respondents put between 31% and 50% of monthly income into daily necessities, and 31.67% put 11% to 30% into savings and investments. Experience services and digital goods sit close together in distribution, and neither is a routine large monthly line. Both are phased spending, which means the buying moment is a trigger rather than a month: a trip being planned, a course starting, a device being released.
Self-care categories are steadier. 34.15% cap them at 10% of income, 29.04% allocate 11% to 30%, and 17.86% allocate 31% to 50%.
Read together, this says search demand for this cohort appears at the trigger, not before it. The plan that matches is not a large always-on budget. It is a smaller, well-built search position held through the trigger windows, with seeding doing the work of making the trigger arrive at all.
🏢 Where Baidu PPC Pro comes in
The keyword problem and the review problem are one problem seen from two sides, and neither is solved by a translation layer. Both are solved by a team that reads Chinese search behaviour every day.
Baidu PPC Pro opens and manages Baidu advertising accounts for overseas companies without requiring a Chinese business licence, then runs the campaign logic behind them. In practice that comes down to four parts.
An account without a Chinese entity. No Chinese business licence, no local company, no incorporation delay. This is the step that decides whether a brand can respond to a trigger window at all, or whether it watches the window close.
A keyword map built from local terms. Category terms, feature terms, problem terms, brand terms, and the comparison queries that carry the highest intent, plus negative keywords that stop budget leaking on terms that cannot convert. Built from observed Chinese search behaviour, not from a translated list.
Creative that clears review the first time. Industry-specific claim phrasing, review-safe wording for health and efficacy, and correct handling of the restricted store-description terms before submission rather than after rejection.
Landing pages that answer the search. Chinese-language pages that resolve the comparison the user just typed. Traffic to a page that reads as translated is traffic that has already been paid for and then lost.
The most useful finding in this report is not a media cost. It is that the formats driving China's consumer market are the formats a brand cannot buy, and the formats it can buy are the ones that persuade least. The budget moves to the phase in between, the moment someone types a product into a search box.
That phase is winnable. It is not won by seeding well.
📎 Notes on the source
- Report: Paying for Experience and Identity — 2026 Survey of New-Generation Consumer Demand, iiMedia Research, published 2026-09-30, 201 pages, drawn from the CMDAS data system.
- Data points quoted here come from the report page and from iiMedia's 2026-10-05 breakdown of monthly spending allocation.
- Ranges are quoted as ranges. The report does not disclose a sample size in its public release.
Key Takeaways
- Seeding channels and search channels are different phases. Among the surveyed cohort, no search engine appears in the top purchase-decision drivers or in the top research channels.
- Emotional storytelling drives 53.57% of purchase decisions and real user reviews 47.98%. Paid KOL recommendation registers only 8.85%.
- Three budget pools behave differently: high search intent, closed-loop community demand, and calendar-driven demand. Only the first and third produce search volume worth bidding on.
- The binding constraints for overseas brands are a Chinese business licence for the account, plus the ability to read local search behaviour and clear industry ad review. Neither is solved by translation.