Culture Export Works by Pull, Not Push

Ten-plus years in this business, and the obsession I’ve seen most often goes like this. A brand with a genuinely strong product sits down to figure out why it’s lukewarm in Western markets, and the postmortem lands on the same conclusion every time: “we haven’t told China’s story well enough.” So the budget moves. Brand films, heritage decks, “5,000 years of craftsmanship,” the founder’s journey. All aimed at people who never asked.

It rarely works. Not because the product is weak; most of the time the product is fine. It’s because nobody picks up a story they didn’t ask for.

An INSEAD strategist recently put it in one line: culture export works by pull, not push. I’d been watching this mistake for years. That was the first time it had a name this precise.

America never pushed the American Dream

If you grew up in North America, the next part may sound obvious in hindsight. It isn’t obvious from the other side of the Pacific, where the standard reading of America is: the world’s best cultural exporter, therefore the world’s best cultural promoter. The order is actually reversed.

In the postwar decades, America solved real, newly created needs first: material scarcity, industrial expansion, women entering the workforce at scale. Fast food, cars, consumer credit all grew out of a mass market that had just been cracked open. The products delivered value first; the “American Dream” attached itself to Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Hollywood afterward, and spread by word of mouth. Product first, story second. Culture followed value delivery. It never marched out front with a megaphone.

Once you see that order, the awkward position of Chinese brands today starts to make sense. Reverse the sequence, story first and market second, and you don’t just fail. You invite backlash.

The clearest evidence is the brands whose stories are being told for them. SHEIN has been pinned in Western discourse as fast fashion plus environmental controversy. TikTok has been written into American politics as a national-security threat. What these two share: the narrative slot where their story should live has long been occupied by someone else: media, competitors, regulators. And when you don’t hold the pen, standing up at that exact moment to proclaim a national narrative about “the rise of Chinese brands” only welds the “foreign threat” label on tighter. Turn up the volume and you’re just playing the villain more energetically, in a script someone else already wrote.

This is not an argument against telling your story. It’s an argument for winning back the position to tell it from, so the story has somewhere to land.

Korea ran the smarter play

Korea’s last two decades of culture export used the same underlying logic as postwar America, but the sequencing is the part Chinese brands should steal.

Korea didn’t open by asserting how valuable Korean culture was. It imitated first, blended second, elevated last. It learned the production machinery of Hollywood, HBO, and Netflix. It borrowed the packaging and marketing grammar of Western pop acts. The international shell came from outside; the core stayed Korean. BTS and Samsung are playing the same hand: local soul, global shell. Samsung presents its ads, channels, and trade-show presence at Western standards. It stopped binding itself narrowly to one national culture a long time ago, and instead uses the platform of a world-class brand to carry a national one. The influence of Squid Game and BTS wasn’t bought in any single year. It was pulled into place over many.

There’s a balance point inside this that deserves its own name: optimal distinctiveness. Be different enough to be remembered, and familiar enough to be let in. Both ends are traps. Assimilate completely and you lose the core; you live permanently in someone else’s shadow, with no pricing power. Over-index on how Chinese you are and you push the audience away, especially in a moment when both national sentiment and the economy are touchy. Most Chinese brands get this exactly backward: they lead with how Chinese they are, then wonder why the trust gap never closes.

Some have walked the smarter path. Anker, the charging brand you’ve probably bought on Amazon without thinking about where it’s from, is the example I keep coming back to. It didn’t shout. It spent close to a decade building its own ground in the English-speaking internet: owned content, a real user community on Reddit, a founder who speaks in English, directly. What it built isn’t a louder story. It’s a presence that gets found, mentioned, and trusted naturally. That’s what trust being pulled looks like.

Japanese brands ran this play a generation earlier. When Toyota pushed into the American market in the seventies and eighties, it didn’t transplant Japan. It studied how Americans actually used cars, from body styling and marketing down to the size of the cup holders and the dimensions of the seats, and rebuilt around American habits. When American buyers compared it against domestic cars, they saw only upside, no trade-offs required. That wasn’t better storytelling about Japan. That was a better understanding of America.

Listen before you speak

If you want to turn all this into something you can act on tomorrow, start with three questions, not a brand film.

What does this market already want? Which version of you have they already heard? And if you let them come to you on their own, which direction would they move?

The first question forces you back to real demand, instead of what you feel like expressing. The second shows you your current narrative position — neutral ground, or territory your critics have already defined. The third swaps the push impulse for pull patience: you’re not looking for a way to force your message in, you’re looking for the direction the market is already drifting, so you can put the product on that path.

Answer those three clearly, and then decide what narrative the product should carry. The order doesn’t reverse.

The story is the last thing you earn, not the first thing you say.

Adam Yang | 10+ years in China-to-global expansion · Independent consultant 中文版: 文化输出靠拉动，不靠推动