The failure is upstream of the marketing.
When a China launch underperforms, the first instinct is to blame the campaign. The creative didn't land, the influencer didn't convert, the storefront looked wrong. Sometimes that's true. But by the time a campaign is visibly failing, the real problem is usually further upstream: the business was set up to run the way it ran back home, and the market simply doesn't reward that setup. The org chart, the pricing, the channel plan, the assumption about how customers discover and decide — all of it was imported, and none of it was tested against how the market actually works.
That's why swapping agencies rarely fixes a stalled entry. You can buy a better campaign and still lose, because the thing that's broken isn't the message. It's the operating model underneath it.
What the documented exits had in common.
The public case studies make the pattern hard to miss. Home Depot closed its remaining big-box stores in China in 2012 and, per CNBC's account of the exit, took an after-tax charge of roughly 160 million US dollars; its core mistake was assuming Chinese homeowners shared the American appetite for do-it-yourself, when cheap local labour meant the middle class simply hired someone to do the work. The store model was right for one market and wrong for the other, and no amount of marketing was going to change that.
Marks & Spencer entered in 2008 and closed all ten of its mainland stores in 2016 amid continuing losses; according to the South China Morning Post, it later pulled its online store off Tmall too, citing the cost and complexity of a "highly promotional" online market it was never built to fight in. Amazon is the sharpest example: per CNBC, its China marketplace share slid from more than 15% in 2011–2012 to under 1% by the time it shut its domestic marketplace in July 2019, unable to out-operate home-grown rivals like Alibaba's Tmall and JD.com. Forever 21, as WWD and the retail press have documented, has entered and exited China more than once. Different categories, same shape of failure — a business run on home-market assumptions in a market that runs on its own logic.
China isn't one market, and it isn't your market.
The second failure mode is treating "China" as a single line in a plan. It isn't. Discovery, trust, payment, and fulfilment all work differently, and they work differently again by category. Customers often meet a brand on a content or discovery platform long before they see a storefront; a marketplace listing on Tmall or JD.com is where a purchase gets closed, not where demand gets created. Get the sequence backwards — open the storefront first and expect traffic to arrive — and you pay to stand in an empty shop.
The same is true below the storefront. Whether you sell cross-border from a bonded warehouse or set up a local entity is an operating decision with real consequences for margin, speed, and control — not a box to tick late in the plan. After-sales expectations, return windows, and how quickly a customer question gets answered are all judged against local incumbents, not against what passed at home. Fall short there and it quietly caps everything the marketing is trying to build, because the market has already decided what normal looks like and it isn't waiting for you to catch up.
None of this is exotic once you're on the ground in it. It's just different from what worked at home, and different in ways that don't show up in a deck written from head office. That gap between what a plan assumes and what the market actually does is the whole of cross-border operations: making decisions land the same way in a Shenzhen warehouse and a Western boardroom.
What we'd do differently.
The brands that succeed treat entry as an operating problem first and a marketing problem second. They fix how the business will actually run locally — pricing that survives local channel and logistics costs, a channel sequence that matches the category, someone senior who owns the market day to day — before they spend on scale. They also pilot before they commit, so they learn what's true while the cost of being wrong is still small.
That's how we work on Asia market entry. We start with a short, fixed-scope project that maps the market and the operating plan and gives an honest go, pause, or pivot read. If the read says go, a senior operator continues on a monthly retainer — embedded in the team, running the launch week to week, answering for the outcome rather than handing over a strategy and leaving. The point isn't to enter faster. Entering faster on the wrong model just spends the money faster, which is exactly what the exits above did.
If you're weighing a China launch, or trying to work out why one has stalled, a short call is the fastest way to find out whether the problem is the marketing or the model underneath it.