It wasn’t long ago when Chinese brands were seen as imitators and fast followers rather than pioneers. Factories copied Western products, start-ups mimicked Silicon Valley’s playbook. But that era is over. Today, China is a global engine of fearless innovation. Its brands aren’t just keeping pace; they’re setting new standards by blending deep user-centricity with a willingness to launch, learn, and iterate faster than anyone else.
But even now, when people in the West talk about China’s rise as a tech powerhouse, they focus on scale, the sheer size of its market, the opportunities that lie within, and the economic momentum. But the real story of China’s fastest-growing brands isn’t about strength and power. It’s about how they innovate: by putting the user at the centre of everything and by iterating at breakneck speed.
This is what we’ve seen firsthand in more than a decade of working in China, with brands like NIO, Trip.com Group, Huawei, IHG, Haier, and Fabrique.
The lesson to us is clear: in China, “user-first” is not a slogan. It’s a strategy. And combined with a cultural willingness to launch, learn and improve in real time, it’s an approach that Western brands should be paying very close attention to.
User-Centricity: Designing for Real Human Experience
In Western boardrooms, “customer centricity” is a well-worn phrase. But in China, the commitment goes deeper. It’s embedded into how products are conceived, designed, and developed from the very start.
Take NIO, for example. When developing its new family-focused brand ONVO, the team spoke to more than 600 families across China, not just in Tier 1 cities, but also in Tier 2, 3, and 4. This created a deep understanding of what families truly wanted from a car. By focusing on insights beyond Tier 1 cities, NIO saw in stark reality the realities and needs of modern family life: comfort for long drives, easy access for grandparents, and moments of calm for parents in busy urban environments.
At NIO, those learnings aren’t just captured in briefs; they’re visualised. The company documents the entire intended experience – from discovery to ownership – in a storybook format that acts as a north star for everyone in the business, from engineers to executives. It’s a way of keeping the desired human experience at the heart of every decision.
In Western boardrooms, ‘customer centricity’ is a well-worn phrase. But in China, the commitment goes deeper. It’s embedded into how products are conceived, designed, and developed from the very start.
This approach – designing from lived experience – transforms NIO’s vehicles into what it calls Experience Defined Vehicles: cars shaped by empathy as much as engineering.
User Co-Creation: Building with the Community
The second layer of China’s “user-first” mindset can be seen in the development and implementation of co-creation, that genuinely invites people to actively shape the brand itself.
Take the community around the media platform Bilibili, which, I think, illustrates this point vividly. Rather than treating the community as a passive audience, users are empowered and encouraged to help author the content and platform itself. It does this through live bullet-chat overlays that create real-time dialogue.
There are participatory festivals and co-created animations, and communities also police norms, uphold the platform’s creative standards, and champion authenticity. The result is a platform that functions less as a media channel and more as a cultural engine. It’s a level of participatory architecture that Western platforms still struggle to emulate.
The result is both the creation of a fiercely loyal customer base but also an increased sense of agility. When your feedback loops remain constantly open, and, importantly, acted upon, innovation becomes a living process: adaptive, iterative, and human-led.
Speed over polish
A defining trait of China’s innovation culture, that we’ve seen, is its comfort with imperfection. “Perfect is the enemy of good” could easily be the unofficial motto of the start-up scene. That’s not to say quality isn’t ever paramount, it is, but there’s an acceptance that an iterative, building approach, with real feedback in the real world, is a sensible way to innovate.
Chinese internet firms don’t often spend years refining a product behind closed doors. They release it quickly into the real world, where users stress-test it, and then they adapt. ByteDance, parent of TikTok, is one of the most famous examples of this. At one point, it was launching a dozen apps in six months, analysing user data, and doubling down on the winners while quietly shelving the losers. That’s agility in action.
Chinese internet firms don’t often spend years refining a product behind closed doors. They release it quickly into the real world, where users stress-test it.
It’s also a brand having faith in the market that the market will tell you what it likes and what it doesn’t. Trip.com Group, the travel agency, is another good example. Product teams launch features into the market at speed and then measure user behaviour in the wild. The company then iterates based on live data rather than traditional static assumptions.
This is a rapid-fire, feedback-driven model, and one that whole-heartedly supported from the top down. Leaders empower and product teams act. And not just act, they experiment and adjust without many bureaucratic bottlenecks. The result? A culture where speed is not sloppy, it’s strategic. For a creative studio, that creates a culture living with imperfection, iterating and testing fast to catch up.
Business Model Innovation
One of the most overlooked aspects of China’s innovation culture is, I believe, how boldly brands rethink their models of what a business is and how it operates.
NIO’s Battery as a Service (BaaS) allows users to buy the car without the battery. On the face of it for an EV company that may seem a strange move, however, what it does is lower upfront costs while creating subscriptions for flexible access and upgrades through its swap network.
One of the most overlooked aspects of China’s innovation culture is, I believe, how boldly brands rethink their models of what a business is and how it operates.
This kind of systemic innovation is now appearing across China’s tech sector. Take DeepSeek, the open-model AI company that’s quietly outpacing Western competitors by opening its models for adaptation and community-led improvement.
Rather than locking its AI models behind proprietary fences, DeepSeek has truly embraced openness. It releases models for adaptation, optimisation, and community-led improvement. The beauty of this approach is that it decentralises innovation – a key point when looking at Chinese innovation. DeepSeek allows developers, enterprises, and research communities to extend the capabilities of the model rather than, as we tend to in the west, simply consume it. The result is a fast-moving ecosystem where improvements compound, not only within the company but across its contributor base.
In both cases, innovation isn’t just what you build, it’s how you deliver and evolve the product and brand, and by doing so it blurs the lines between product, service, and ecosystem.
Lessons for the rest of us
Not every country can be like China, and nor should it strive to be, but there are some tangible takeaways that brands can learn from this. For us, there are three things that stand out.
- Treat users as collaborators, not just consumers.
The days of the passive customer are over. Chinese brands succeed because they let their users play an active role in shaping products and services. Western firms often pay lip service to “listening”, but the real step-change is designing systems where feedback loops are constant, open, and acted upon. Not as a nice to have, or a box to tick, it is a strategic imperative.
- Embrace a beta mindset.
If you wait for perfection, your moment might never arrive. The pace of change and the creation of new ideas is simply too fast to wait for that perfect moment. Take a lesson from Chinese brands, and quickly pilot innovations in the market, collect real-world data from real-world people, and iterate quickly. Yes, you will make mistakes, but make that a barometer of success. Often we only learn from mistakes. But you’ll also learn faster than competitors still stuck in research decks and planning cycles.
- Innovate beyond the product.
Don’t just create new things, create new ways of owning, sharing, and improving them.
Why this matters globally
It’s easy to see China’s approach as unique to its scale or culture. But in reality, the methods behind its innovation success are relevant everywhere. In reality, there’s very little difference in consumer wants from those that reside in London or Los Angeles to those in Shanghai. We all want faster service and greater personalisation. We all want to feel that our voice is heard and matters.
For companies outside China, the challenge, and, of course, the opportunity, is to adopt this to their own user-first, fast-iterate model. I believe we may be moving to a time where “successful” innovation by brands is defined by those who learn the fastest and who listen the hardest, and who have the courage to let their users in, in a real and authentic manner.
George Watson is Creative Director at forpeople.
Featured image by Peng Liu.
