Co-branding in China (lianming): how foreign brands pick partners that travel
Short version: in China a co-brand (联名, lianming) borrows the partner's meaning, not just their audience — so pick a partner whose meaning you actually want to inherit, whose fans overlap with yours in more than size, and whose trademark and IP rights are clean enough to survive a viral week. Most foreign brands pick for reach and end up wearing someone else's baggage. The good ones treat a collab as a borrowed identity and choose accordingly.
The lianming — the branded collaboration — is the closest thing China has to a growth cheat code, and that's exactly why it's dangerous. When Luckin Coffee put Kweichow Moutai's baijiu flavour into a latte in September 2023, the Jiangxiang Flavoured Latte moved 5.42 million cups on day one and cleared over RMB 100 million in a single day. Every marketer in the country saw that number and decided they needed a collab. In Q1 2025 the food-and-beverage category alone ran roughly 115 of them. That's not a channel any more; that's a stampede.
Foreign brands, arriving late, tend to draw the wrong lesson. They see the reach and go shopping for the biggest partner they can afford. But a co-brand in China isn't an ad buy — it's a temporary merger of meaning. For a limited window, your brand is what your partner is. Pick well and you borrow years of accumulated affection you could never buy directly. Pick badly and you inherit their politics, their price signal, and their last scandal. Here's how I think about choosing.
A collab borrows meaning, not just eyeballs
The reason Luckin × Moutai worked wasn't the audience arithmetic. It was the collision of meaning: a RMB-9.9 daily coffee wearing the aura of a bottle that costs a month's salary. Young consumers got to "taste" an untouchable status brand for the price of a latte; Moutai got to feel young. The story wrote itself, and stories are what spread on Red and Douyin — not media plans.
So the first question about any partner isn't "how big is their following." It's "what will people say my brand means the morning after." If the honest answer is "nothing, but it trended," you've bought reach and no memory. The collabs that build brand equity are the ones where the pairing itself is a small argument about who you are — premium meets accessible, heritage meets irreverent, local meets foreign in a way that flatters both sides.
The partner archetypes, and what each one actually costs you
Not all lianming partners are the same animal. The four you'll be pitched most often, and the real trade-off behind each:
| Partner type | What you borrow | The hidden cost |
|---|---|---|
| Heritage Chinese brand (a museum, a baijiu, a legacy snack) | Instant cultural credibility and "we belong here" signal | Slow, cautious partners; approvals take months; one tone-deaf visual reads as a foreigner cosplaying the culture |
| Character / designer-toy IP (Pop Mart's Molly, Labubu, Sanrio) | Collectibility, resale buzz, a built-in reason to buy multiples | Licensing fees and MOQs; you rent the fans, you don't keep them; hot IP is oversubscribed and fickle |
| Cross-industry brand (异业, a coffee × a car, a snack × a cosmetics line) | A genuinely new audience and a "1+1>2" novelty story | If the logic isn't obvious in one sentence, it reads as random and dies quietly |
| Domestic KOL or celebrity's own label | Speed, an activated fanbase, ready-made content | You inherit the person — their next controversy is now your problem |
The character-IP lane deserves a specific warning, because it's where foreign brands overspend most. Pop Mart's 2025 revenue rose about 185% to RMB 37 billion, almost entirely on the back of Labubu, and that gravity pulls every brand toward the same handful of properties. But renting the hottest IP at its peak is the co-branding equivalent of buying a stock at its all-time high. The fans are loyal to the character, not to you; when the hype plateaus — and IP hype always plateaus — you're left holding a licence fee and a warehouse of themed packaging. A rising mid-tier IP whose values match yours will almost always outperform a fading megastar you overpaid for.
The three fit tests I run before anything else
Before I look at follower counts, a candidate partner has to clear three gates:
- Values fit. Would your founder be comfortable in a photo next to theirs? A premium skincare brand co-branding with a bargain-basement snack doesn't get "accessible" — it gets "cheapened," and the price signal is very hard to un-ring.
- Audience overlap that isn't just demographic. Same age and city isn't fit. You want overlapping taste — people who would plausibly love both things. The clean test: can a fan of theirs explain, unprompted, why the pairing makes sense? If not, it's two logos on a box.
- Reputation you can live with for a year. The collab outlives the campaign in search results and resale listings. Do a real diligence pass on the partner's recent controversies, their nationalist exposure, their supply-chain record. In China a partner's problem becomes your problem overnight, and foreign brands get judged harder.
The unglamorous part: whose IP is it, actually
This is the step foreign brands skip and Chinese legal teams never do. A lianming puts two trademarks on one product, and if either side's rights aren't clean, the whole thing is a liability. Before you sign, confirm the partner actually owns — and has registered, in the relevant Chinese trademark classes — the marks and characters they're licensing you. Trademark squatting is rife; a surprising number of "iconic" logos are contested or registered by a third party in the exact class you need. Nail down, in writing: which classes are covered, who can approve the creative, how long the licence runs, what happens to unsold co-branded stock when it ends, and who is liable if a consumer complaint or a quality issue attaches to the joint product. A collab that goes viral on a shaky rights foundation doesn't just fail — it can drag your core mark into a dispute. (This is the same reason I keep telling brands to register their own China trademarks early: you can't co-brand from a position of weakness.)
Design for resale and re-share, not just sell-through
The best Chinese co-brands are engineered to be photographed, collected, and traded. Limited runs, numbered editions, packaging that looks good in a Red flatlay, a reason to buy two. The Luckin × Moutai run made the paper bag and cup sleeve part of the product — people posted the packaging as much as the drink. If your co-branded item looks like your normal item with a second logo slapped on, you've missed the point. Ask of every execution: would someone screenshot this to a group chat? If not, it won't travel, however famous the partner.
Bottom line
A China co-brand is a borrowed identity, not a media buy. Choose a partner whose meaning you'd be proud to wear, whose fans share your taste and not just your target age, whose reputation you can live with for a year, and whose IP is clean enough to survive success. Get those right and design the thing to be traded, not just sold, and a lianming can do in one campaign what a year of paid media can't. Chase the biggest name at its peak instead, and you'll pay top price to rent a crowd that forgets you the moment the hype moves on.
If you're weighing a China co-branding partner and want a second read before you sign, that's the kind of call I'm useful on — reach out. And for the trust that has to exist before any collab lands, read how foreign brands navigate China's home-brand pride.