Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Stephane Coruble, CEO of RTL AdAlliance, on the sidelines of their executive evening at Villa Basset, the residence of the French Consul General in Shanghai. What began as a conversation about European media strategy quickly opened into something more fundamental: a question neither side fully anticipated sitting with ... not just how Chinese brands should approach Europe, but how both sides are still working with incomplete pictures of each other. That mutual blind spot is costing real opportunity, in both directions.
What Chinese brands keep getting wrong
The default playbook for Chinese brands entering Europe goes something like this: aggressive digital spend, influencer seeding, price positioning. It works in China. It fails in Europe — and most teams don't understand why until it's too late.
The first mistake is misreading how trust actually works in Europe. European consumers don't discover brands the way Chinese consumers do. Trust isn't built through volume of impressions. It's built through institutional legitimacy — the kind that comes from being seen in the right context, on the right platforms. Linear TV, premium radio, established streaming ecosystems: these aren't legacy channels that brands should graduate away from. In Europe, they're still the credibility infrastructure.
According to RTL AdAlliance's Living Room Study, over 60% of European audiences trust mainstream TV advertising, compared to around 30% for social media. Without that foundation, performance marketing is simply spending money to reach people who don't yet believe you exist in a serious way.
The second mistake is underestimating how purchase decisions actually get made. European consumers (particularly for high-consideration categories like EVs, smart home appliances, or premium consumer goods), operate on longer decision cycles than their Chinese counterparts. These are not impulse purchases driven by a flash sale or a KOL unboxing. They involve research, comparison, and a genuine threshold of brand credibility that must be crossed before a consumer even adds you to their consideration set.
Brands that skip the trust-building phase and go straight to conversion are, in effect, trying to harvest a crop they never planted.
The third mistake is treating Europe as a single market. It isn't. France and Italy share a border and a currency. Their media ecosystems, consumer psychology, and data regulations might as well be different planets. GDPR doesn't just affect legal compliance — it structurally prevents the kind of cross-border data optimization that Chinese brands consider table stakes. Germany's consumers are analytical and certification-driven; Southern Europe is more emotionally engaged and entertainment-oriented; Northern Europe is highly digitized but deeply privacy-conscious. Every market needs its own architecture. That's not inefficiency. That's the reality.
The result is a pattern that plays out repeatedly: a Chinese brand arrives in Europe with world-class products, a substantial budget, and a playbook that worked brilliantly at home, and spends the first two years wondering why conversion is so low. The product was never the problem. The market entry framework was.
What Europe is missing about China
And yet, the other side of this conversation is one that rarely gets told in European boardrooms.
There's a number that most European business leaders haven't encountered: 60/70/80/90. In China, private enterprises account for over 60% of GDP, 70% of technology innovation, 80% of urban employment, and 90% of new jobs created. By the end of 2024, there were 55 million registered private companies in China -- making up over 92% of all businesses in the country.
The brands that have reached Europe so far represent a fraction of this ecosystem. A highly visible, often scrutinized fraction, but a fraction nonetheless. The deeper story is what's still coming.
The EV sector is the most visible example of how fast this shift has moved. Chinese manufacturers have gone from "affordable alternative" to genuine innovation leaders. Battery technology, software integration, user experience design: the gap with European incumbents has closed, and in several areas reversed. European automakers aren't managing perception anymore. They're managing a real competitive threat.
But this dynamic extends well beyond EVs. Across industries, from luggage to smart hardware to apparel: former contract manufacturers who spent years building products for the world's leading brands have quietly developed proprietary technology, independent supply chains, and now, their own brand ambitions. The supplier relationships Europe relied on for a decade are becoming the brand partnerships ... and in some cases, the direct competitors ... of the next one.
The 55 million private enterprises in China are not standing still. A significant wave of them, across smart hardware, lifestyle, apparel, and consumer tech, are at precisely the stage where they have the product quality to compete globally but haven't yet found the right European entry framework. That gap is a strategic opportunity, for the right partners on both sides.
What this means strategically
Chinese brands that want to win in Europe need to stop asking "how do we buy our way in" and start asking "how do we earn legitimacy here." That requires a fundamentally different budget philosophy: less performance, more brand infrastructure. It requires genuine localization -- not translated copy, but market-specific strategy built from the ground up.
For anyone operating at this intersection, whether as a media partner, a distribution ally, a potential joint venture counterpart, or simply trying to understand where a Chinese competitor, supplier, or customer is headed, the landscape has shifted more than most realize. The Chinese enterprises arriving now bring manufacturing depth, proprietary technology, and genuine brand ambition. Understanding that combination, rather than mapping it onto outdated assumptions, is what separates the partnerships that will hold from the ones that won't.
A sincere thank you to Stephane Coruble for the openness and depth of our exchange, conversations like this one are exactly how the gap gets closed.