China: The Most Advanced Market for Recommendations

There are markets you observe to understand the present, and others to see what comes next. China belongs to the second category, and not for the reasons you might think.

I have been there twice. First as a tourist, and second with a delegation, spending ten days in the Greater Bay Area: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou.

Both trips led to the same conclusion, from two different angles.

What you see walking down the street

First trip, through curious eyes. Two phenomena struck me.

Live shopping, everywhere. Not just online: in shopping malls, car dealerships, fashion, beauty, and sportswear boutiques. Recommendations are embodied as much as possible, bringing products to life and humanizing brands.

Guides at tourist sites. At every location visited, dozens of people film themselves, bringing the tour to life with their explanations, opinions, and advice.

The common thread between these two trends: embodiment, authenticity, and recommending a product, a brand, or a place. True advocacy, on a national scale and in everyday life.

What struck me was not the technology. It was that recommending is a normal social act, carried out by ordinary people without wondering if it is marketing.

What you see with a delegation

Second trip, through a professional lens, as part of the Digital InPulse award celebrating the excellence of French startups. A demonstration of technological power: humanoid robots, drones, AI, automotive industry. Cutting-edge manufacturing capacity. A powerful drive to push further, always ahead, a true production binge.

I will be honest: between fascination and defiance, modernity and tradition, energy and exploitation, speed and hyper-competitiveness. At what human and environmental cost, one can legitimately wonder.

But one thing is certain: everything is firmly focused on the future. And it moves fast. Very, very fast.

The structural detail that explains everything

This is the point I find most instructive for a European brand.

Digital in China relies on powerful communities, particularly through WeChat. Google and Meta are banned there.

In other words: this market was built without the channels that structure Western acquisition. No Google Ads, no Meta Ads, no advertising duopoly to fit into. Something else had to be invented.

And what emerged is an ecosystem where product discovery happens through groups, mini-programs, peer recommendations, and native social commerce. The default channel is not media buying: it is conversation.

Far from being a barrier, it proves that alternatives always exist. And it makes China a market particularly ahead when it comes to recommendation habits, with an ultra-connected, creative population.

What this says about our own market

Here is why this comparison is more than just a travel anecdote.

In Europe, Google, Meta, and Amazon capture 75 % of digital ad spend [1]. So we built our acquisition strategies around an available, effective infrastructure. It was rational.

The problem is what this convenience created: a generation of marketers for whom “acquiring a customer” automatically means “buying an impression”. Recommendations remained an unmeasured bonus, because there was no need for them to be.

The Chinese market shows what the same activity looks like when developed without that crutch. And it shows that the result is no less effective. It is simply built on the other available resource: people.

It is not a model to copy: cultural, regulatory, and political contexts are not comparable, and I would not wish the Chinese ecosystem on Europe. It is a textbook case: proof that recommendations can drive product discovery on the scale of an entire country.

Three transferable takeaways

1. Recommendations can scale. The argument that “word-of-mouth does not scale” does not hold up to observation. It does not scale without infrastructure. That is not the same claim.

2. Embodiment matters more than production. Chinese live shopping is not polished. It is embodied, direct, immediate. Production value is secondary to the presence of a real person talking.

3. Immediacy is a standard, not an option. Instant payout, instant response, instant reward. It has been woven into daily habits for a long time, and it is exactly what European consumers demand today.

What this changes for us

Our visions, cultures, and processes are very far apart. Yet deeply complementary. It is up to us to find the right common ground to move forward together.

What makes this market interesting for Frak is straightforward: it is a territory where the culture of digital word-of-mouth is already deeply rooted. We do not arrive with a concept to explain, but with an infrastructure for a behavior that already exists.

And that is perhaps the main takeaway, true everywhere: recommendations do not need to be invented. They need to be given the right tools.

Finally, a word on what these ten days were above all: a deeply enriching human journey, alongside brilliant fellow award-winning startups. Because even if robots are impressive, humans remain, by far, the best there is.

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I am Virginie Maire, co-founder of Frak Labs, which turns your customers into a scalable, profitable, and authentic acquisition channel. A committed entrepreneur and mother of two, I have spent 20 years navigating media, social networks, influence, and e-commerce… and I am still having just as much fun!