Success and the price of going for the CHINESE TOUCH

Li has noticed that over the past year a Taobao clothing store she often visited has started selling many clothing items with Chinese elements, and prices have tripled.

"The original price of a trench coat was a little more than 100 yuan, but just with the addition of two embroidered pockets, it now costs more than 300 yuan," she says.

It is not just clothes that are becoming more expensive. Guochao milk tea and snacks have sprung up like mushrooms. With more guochao elements in the packaging design and store decoration, prices can double.

"Some brands regard guochao as a status symbol," Li says. "The price of ordinary coffee, milk tea and lipstick with the elements of the Forbidden City have doubled in a flash. Ordinary restaurants put up Peking Opera masks or affix Chinese style totems to pull in customers."

Guo Xin, a marketing professor at Beijing Technology and Business University, says: "People are becoming more savvy, and even if brands gain customer traffic by cashing in on the guochao fad, it's unsustainable to just cobble together a collection of meaningless oriental cultural elements such as cranes, auspicious cloud patterns and Chinese characters, and then slam a guochao label on it thinking you have a sales winner."

In particular, many products are not all that different from one another if you strip them of the guochao hype. If you search for the term "Chinese-style lipstick" on Taobao, you are likely to be confronted with 10,000 products. However, Heimao Tousu, a third-party customer service platform under Sina, says one lipstick brand alone attracted more than 300 complaints last year. Grounds for complaints included "Quality problems have not been resolved", "Failed to receive refund for subpar products" and "Poor attitude of sales staff".

"Since the reform and opening-up, consumption has become diversified, and now is the time to seek personalization in diversification," Guo says. "Young people need a tool with which they can advertise themselves, and guochao is exactly that. But the rise in popularity largely comes down to one thing, and that's product quality."