Xiaohongshu Pugongying Explained: A Complete Guide for International Brands Entering China’s Social Commerce Market
- Aug 4
- 7 min read
Why International Brands Need to Understand the Pugongying Platform
In the past, international brands entering China often focused on traditional advertising, offline events, and major e-commerce campaigns to build awareness. But the way Chinese consumers discover and choose products has changed dramatically. Today, people are more likely to trust authentic recommendations and real user experiences than brand advertisements alone.
With more than 300 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu (Red Note) has become China’s go-to platform for lifestyle inspiration and product discovery. Its user base is largely made up of young, urban consumers, with around 70% born after 1990 and more than 70% female. This highly engaged consumer base has made Xiaohongshu a key platform for brands looking to build awareness, influence purchasing decisions, and connect with China’s next generation of consumers.
To help brands effectively engage with this audience, Xiaohongshu introduced Pugongying (means Dandelion), its official creator collaboration platform. By connecting brands with verified KOLs and KOCs, Xiaohongshu Pugongying enables businesses to create authentic, user-driven content that resonates with target consumers while improving brand visibility and credibility within Xiaohongshu’s social commerce ecosystem.
If Xiaohongshu reflects the direction of China’s evolving consumer landscape, Pugongying provides brands with a practical way to engage with it. By helping brands identify the right creators, develop authentic content strategies, and deliver messages that resonate with Chinese consumers, Pugongying turns social influence into meaningful brand growth.
Introduction of Xiaohongshu Pugongying Platform
Xiaohongshu launched the Pugongying (Pugongying) platform in 2021 to create a more structured connection between brands and creators. The name reflects the platform’s underlying concept: a creator shares a brand story, the content spreads organically through user interactions, and the message gradually builds influence within the community.
Within the Xiaohongshu ecosystem, Pugongying creates value for three key groups: brands, creators, and the platform itself.
For brands, Pugongying provides an official and transparent way to collaborate with creators. Rather than reaching out to creators individually and negotiating rates separately, brands can discover suitable creators, review collaboration costs, analyze audience profiles, and evaluate past content performance in one place. Xiaohongshu also facilitates the collaboration process, helping brands reduce uncertainty around payments, data transparency, and campaign management.
For creators, Pugongying serves as an official gateway to access paid brand collaborations. They can accept campaigns, submit sponsored content, and receive payment through the platform. By managing the collaboration process within Xiaohongshu’s ecosystem, Pugongying also helps creators better align with the platform’s guidelines for commercial content.
For Xiaohongshu, Pugongying establishes a more structured and scalable framework for sponsored content. By combining stringent content review with robust performance tracking, it allows the platform to manage commercial collaborations effectively while safeguarding the authenticity and trust that underpin user engagement.
In essence, Pugongying transforms creator outreach from a fragmented, ad hoc process into a systematic, data-driven approach—enabling brands to measure impact, optimize performance, and scale with confidence.
How Brands Can Effectively Leverage Xiaohongshu Pugongying
For international brands entering China’s social commerce ecosystem for the first time, the process is relatively straightforward and highly scalable.
Step 1: Registration and Account Setup
Brands must first establish and verify a professional business account on Xiaohongshu. Once approved, they gain access to Pugongying (Dandelion). For international brands without a legal entity in China, partnering with an authorized local Xiaohongshu marketing agency is a practical solution, as agencies can manage multiple brand accounts within a unified system.
Before contacting influencers (creators), brands should localize their campaign materials for the Chinese market. A simple translation of product information is rarely sufficient. Instead, the campaign brief should clearly define the product’s core use case, pricing range, target audience, and any compliance-sensitive claims to avoid.
Providing well-structured, locally relevant guidance not only streamlines the content review process but also empowers creators to produce authentic, high-quality content in their own voice. At the same time, it ensures consistency across collaborations, giving brands a reliable baseline for evaluating performance and insights across different creators and campaigns.
Step 2: Intelligent Creator Matching
Pugongying’s creator marketplace includes more than 100,000 creators, enabling brands to identify the right partners with precision. Advanced filtering options allow brands to refine their selection based on content category, follower size, creator ratings, historical cost per engagement (CPE), audience overlap, and other performance-driven metrics.
In late 2025, Pugongying further enhanced this process with the launch of the Intelligent KOL Finder. By inputting key campaign parameters: objectives, product details, budget, and target audience. Brands can generate a tailored shortlist of suitable creators within 5–10 seconds. The tool also provides clear rationale for each recommendation, significantly improving decision-making efficiency.
What once took days of manual research and coordination can now be executed in minutes, enabling brands to scale creator selection with speed, precision, and greater strategic confidence.
Step 3: Selecting a Partnership Model
Pugongying currently supports three core partnership models:
Customized Campaigns: Brands collaborate directly with selected influencers to develop tailored content aligned with specific campaign objectives. This format is particularly effective for product launches, brand-building initiatives, and storytelling that requires greater depth and nuance. The creator service fee is typically structured as a fixed fee.
Open Recruitment Campaigns (Batch Campaigns): Brands publish a campaign brief and invite creators to apply. From the applicant pool, brands can select multiple creators to collaborate with, enabling broader reach across diverse audience segments. This model often results in more cost-efficient collaborations, as creators may offer more competitive rates when submitting proposals.
Livestream Partnerships: Creators showcase and sell products in real time through livestream sessions, combining product demonstration with interactive engagement. This format is particularly effective during major shopping festivals, promotional pushes, and campaigns focused on driving immediate conversions. Creator service fee is typically structured on a cost-per-sale (CPS) basis, aligning creator incentives directly with performance.
Brands are not limited to a single collaboration model. In practice, many adopt a phased approach, using customized campaigns to build awareness and credibility, then introducing livestream partnerships as the focus shifts toward driving sales and conversion.
Influencer selection should go beyond follower count. Niche creators with a highly targeted audience often generate more meaningful engagement, such as quality comments, active searches and product inquiries, than celebrity accounts with broader but less focused reach. For brands entering a new market, a sensible first round is to collaborate with a mix of creators across different tiers. This allows for performance benchmarking and insight gathering before scaling investment with greater confidence.
Step 4: Performance Tracking
After a campaign ends, Pugongying provides a dashboard covering the main performance indicators:
Exposure performance: Impressions, views, cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and cost per view (CPV)
Engagement performance: Total engagements, engagement rate, and cost per engagement (CPE)
Traffic-source analysis: The percentage of traffic coming from the discovery feed, search results, following feed, and creator profile
The dashboard delivers value well beyond a single campaign. It provides clear visbility into what performed well, what underperformed, and what should be refined moving forward. This continuous feedback loop is one of Pugongying’s most significant advantages over traditional advertising models.
Brands should also look beyond headline view counts. On Xiaohongshu, content often continues to generate traffic through search long after publication. Metrics such as saves, comments, product inquiries, and branded search volume offer deeper insight into user intent, indicating whether audiences are merely viewing content or actively considering a purchase. These signals are particularly valuable for brands still identifying which product features and messaging resonate most with Chinese consumers.
Case Study: Swedish Outdoor Brand Klättermusen and Its Pugongying Strategy Brand Background
Klättermusen, a premium Swedish outdoor brand, is known for its technical performance and environmentally conscious design. In the second half of 2023, the brand increased its investment in China and began operating the market with greater independence. Its core challenge was to quickly reach serious outdoor enthusiasts while building brand recognition in a highly competitive landscape.
Strategic Approach
Klättermusen was among the first brands to launch an official corporate account on Xiaohongshu. It subsequently forged extensive partnerships with buyer-style creators via the Pugongying platform. These collaborations revealed an important difference between markets: Chinese shoppers paid far more attention to the color of outdoor products than many European and North American consumers did. The brand might have missed this preference without direct feedback from creators and users.
The brand responded by making three changes:
Color Localization: Introduced softer, nature inspired palettes that better align with local aesthetic preferences.
Fit Optimization: Refined product cuts to better suit Chinese consumers’ body profiles and outdoor usage needs.
Content Strategy: Collaborated with influencers to develop content centered on mountain landscapes and outdoor lifestyles, strengthening relevance and resonance with the target audience.
In 2024, sales from Klättermusen’s Xiaohongshu store increased sixfold year over year. This growth was not driven by heavy advertising spend but by strategic collaboration with relevant influencers and the ability to convert credible product recommendations into actual purchases.
Klättermusen’s experience highlights three key advantages of Pugongying for international brands. First, it provides early insight into local consumer preferences, allowing brands to refine products and messaging before a full-scale rollout. Second, it enables precise audience targeting through creators who already engage with the right communities. Third, it establishes a rapid feedback loop. In a fast-moving market like China, brands cannot afford delayed insights. Pugongying allows them to test ideas, gather user feedback, and iterate in real time while campaigns are still evolving.
The impact extends beyond content optimization. Creator and user feedback can inform decisions on packaging, colorways, sizing, product bundles, and even launch priorities. This makes Pugongying a valuable tool not only during execution, but also in the pre-launch phase. For international brands, validating these elements through targeted campaigns is far more cost-effective than correcting misalignment after products have already entered the market.
As noted by Maggie, Chief Marketing Officer of Adidas Greater China, Xiaohongshu enables brands to identify opportunities and validate demand with significantly greater speed.
Conclusion: Pugongying as a Gateway to the Chinese Market
In today’s China, a polished slogan alone is rarely enough to earn consumer trust. Audiences increasingly rely on creators and peer voices they already value. Pugongying enables brands to build these relationships at scale, while keeping the entire conversation within Xiaohongshu’s trusted ecosystem.
For international brands, Pugongying serves as both a marketing engine and a source of actionable market insight. It enables brands to:
Reach highly relevant segments within Xiaohongshu’s audience of over 300 million monthly active users.
Track content performance in detail and apply those learnings to optimize future campaigns.
Test the Chinese market at a controlled cost while identifying which messages resonate most with local consumers.
For brands entering China, the greatest risk is often not a lack of demand, but a gap in local understanding. Pugongying helps bridge this gap by integrating market feedback, creator collaboration, and campaign performance into a single, unified system. As China’s social commerce landscape continues to evolve, this integrated approach will only grow in in strategic importance.
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