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The IADS invited Xiaohongshu, internationally recognised as Red Note, to present at the 2025 General Assembly held in Hong Kong. Xiaohongshu, now a key platform for brands navigating access to Chinese consumers, originated as a response to the needs of outbound Chinese tourists. When visiting Hong Kong, the founder realised that Chinese tourists were unaware of local purchase limits at the Apple Store, which led to the creation of seven region-specific PDF guides. Xiaohongshu evolved to include shopping tips, beauty advice and lifestyle inspiration. Today, the platform is a defining touchpoint for Chinese consumers, especially those travelling abroad, and the overseas Chinese population.

This text is a synthesised version of Xiaohongshu’s presentation, which provided an overview of the platform’s strategy, distinctive characteristics, and key user insights. They also explored how international brands can build a presence on the platform and harness user data to reach Chinese consumers across demographics. Confidential information including the Q/A section, only available to IADS members in the meeting recap on the IADS website, has been omitted from this article.

Authenticity and user-generated content as strategy

Xiaohongshu operates on an open model in which all accounts are public and all content is shareable. This structure establishes the platform as fundamentally community-driven, characterised by high-level engagement, with approximately one-third of users creating content actively. Consequently, content creation is not limited to official brand accounts or influencers; rather, everyday stakeholders contribute to a continuous cycle of discovery, purchasing, reviewing, and peer-to-peer sharing. This participatory model sustains a high content volume of ongoing discussion and inspiration, thereby fostering authenticity and establishing the platform as a trusted source of consumer insight.

The platform’s strategy is grounded in authenticity and user-generated content, a focus reflected in the generation of over 6 million comments and in the fact that 90% of all content is produced by individual users. Central to this strategy is directing at least half of all platform traffic toward user-generated content. In this ecosystem, user feedback is transformed into an active asset; the opinions shared provide brands with unfiltered insights and serve as organic promotional tools when positive sentiment emerges. Thus, authentic consumer voices act as a barometer of brand health and a catalyst for further growth.

Xiaohongshu’s capability lies in surfacing everyday stories from ordinary users rather than relying solely on curated content. The platform thrives on narratives rooted in daily life, such as users sharing arts and crafts projects, discussing materials, or detailing coffee rituals and the tools utilised. This approach enables brands and retailers to position their products within the context of users’ personal routines and hobbies. While the focus is on the ordinary user, KOLs remain an important part of the ecosystem, offering guidance to followers and shaping trends.

A defining characteristic of Xiaohongshu is its search-centric user behaviour, with 70% of users actively performing searches on the platform. This distinguishes it from Instagram or Facebook, where content discovery is algorithm-driven and interest-based. Conversely, Xiaohongshu users arrive with specific questions and intent, seeking actionable answers comparable to a commercially driven version of Reddit’s public forums. This behaviour has led the platform’s search volume to surpass that of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine.

Xiaohongshu’s analyses reveal emerging trends through a strategy of segmenting its user base into personas to target content more effectively. For instance, the platform identifies ‘early creators’ as users who travel specifically for art exhibitions, concerts, and cultural events. Major occasions like Art Basel in Hong Kong, or concerts by artists such as Adele, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga, attract attention from Chinese travellers, who go abroad to attend performances not available in mainland China. Beyond the primary event, these users are interested in associated lifestyle elements, such as the handbags celebrities carry or the immersive shopping experiences they seek. To leverage these behaviours, the platform’s analytics enable brands to segment audiences by highly nuanced interests including determining whether travellers are motivated by coffee culture, art history, or family-oriented activities, to ensure that messaging resonates with the correct consumer segments at the right time.

Outbound Chinese travellers: User insights and travel trends

Xiaohongshu currently has 350 million monthly active users, seeing a surge during China’s three-year COVID-19 lockdown as consumers turned to the platform for answers to urgent questions, such as hotel recommendations and quarantine procedures. The user base is young and affluent, with 85% of users under 35 and half residing in China’s first- and second-tier cities, which command considerable purchasing power. While the platform initially attracted a female audience and remains skewed toward women (60% to 70%), it has broadened its scope across a range of industries and interests, with ongoing efforts to balance the gender mix.

For outbound Chinese travellers, the platform serves a search-driven function, replacing traditional web searches as the go-to source for inspiration and practical advice on destinations, airlines, accommodations, and tax-free shopping options. This behaviour relies heavily on specific peer recommendations, such as tips to visit Galeries Lafayette’s rooftop or utilise John Lewis’s after-sales service for electronics. which the platform’s data analytics allow brands to study to understand consumer values, decision-making, and loyalty. Travel patterns are concentrated around three major holidays: Chinese New Year in February, Labour Day in May, and National Day in October, all of which drive pronounced influxes of visitors to retail destinations. Additionally, search activity mirrors social and political developments, such as visa requirement relaxations in Southeast Asia, leading to observed growth in trends for countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

The consumer journey is mapped out over a 60-day timeline, providing a framework for retailer content and campaign planning. The process begins 60 days before departure with searches for broad travel inspiration and city guides. Between 40 and 60 days out, attention shifts to logistical elements like visas, hotels, and transportation, where practical information on airport transfers and local navigation becomes relevant. As the trip approaches (20 to 30 days prior), users focus on specifics such as attraction tickets, local train bookings, and guided tours. Finally, in the last 10 days, the emphasis moves to detailed planning for daily activities and shopping, making this the most effective time for targeted invitations to stores and exclusive experiences.

Currently, Xiaohongshu is observing rising interest regarding exclusive products or experiences available only in specific cities or regions, such as fragrances or character merchandise limited to Singapore or Thailand. These city exclusives are significant drivers of live searches, fuelling a sense of discovery and urgency among users. Simultaneously, there is a prominent trend for “must-buy” recommendations, where users seek straightforward advice on what to purchase or experience, preferring curated guidance over conducting exhaustive research. The platform reflects an integration with global social media culture through fashion trends like “OOTD” (Outfit of the Day) and “summer feed check,” highlighting the importance of visual storytelling. This visual emphasis extends to the physical world, where users are drawn to retail environments that offer opportunities for selfies and social sharing; features such as mirrors and photogenic spaces have become differentiators for department stores and malls.

Brand seeding on Xiaohongshu

The first step for international retailers to build a presence on Xiaohongshu is establishing an official account, which grants access to tools for content creation, influencer collaboration, and community partnership. This system is designed to surface positive brand narratives while providing mechanisms to address negative feedback, often utilising large-scale IP-driven events around major festivals like Chinese New Year to introduce trends, encourage exploration, and foster optimism through emotional storytelling. The platform’s campaign logic prioritises gradual, sustained brand building over short-term, high-spend bursts; a strategy exemplified by a showcase for Singapore’s Changi Airport where pre-exposure to iconic features led to the creation of dedicated mini-pages aggregating discussions and reviews. This structure ensures that high-quality, positive content dominates the results page when users search for a brand or destination. To facilitate conversion, the platform integrates with online travel agencies (OTAs), closing the loop between inspiration and transaction by allowing users to book hotels, restaurants, or experiences directly through promoted posts.

Because Xiaohongshu rejects the notion of one-off, high-budget campaigns for instant mass awareness, the effective time horizon is long-term, typically spanning six months to a full year and timed to coincide with key Chinese holidays. The platform advocates for a ‘seeding’ approach: cultivating a group of engaged users, nurturing their interest, and expanding reach as brand affinity deepens. This is relevant to shopping malls and retailers outside China that face indirect competition from other cultural attractions vying for tourists’ attention. Brands are encouraged to use a funnel-based approach to track awareness, engagement and post-campaign evolution, to direct marketing investments toward building a foundation of loyal consumers. While most content targets the mainland Chinese audience, the platform is a valuable testing ground with currently only a handful of active international entities, offering new brands the opportunity to learn from early adopters and develop best practices for engaging Chinese consumers at home and abroad.

Beyond building brand presence to directly engage potential customers on Xiaohongshu, brand content on the platform could have broader trickle-down effects as search behaviours shift from engines to generative AI chatbots. The high-quality, high-weight data of genuine human voices is evidenced by Reddit’s data being one of the most cited sources on ChatGPT and being licensed to train AI models. It is highly likely that Xiaohongshu’s authentic user opinions may be harnessed in a similar manner, adding a distinct cultural lens to AI shopping, given its Chinese user base.

As marketing spend transitions from SEO to enhancing LLM visibility, a positive presence in training data becomes key to remaining relevant. Establishing and controlling the brand’s narrative on Xiaohongshu can lead to better discovery and user engagement through genAI chatbots as customers ask for hyper-specific recommendations, thus future-proofing retailers’ presence by embedding themselves in training data. By actively participating in Xiaohongshu’s ecosystem, international brands ensure that AI models grasp not just products but also why they matter to this specific demographic.

Credits: IADS (Anchita Ranka)