A 15-minute readiness benchmark for overseas brands — see exactly where you'll stumble in China, before you spend a dollar entering. Marco Polo scores you against the China-entry standard so you enter with eyes open, not a guess.
Free self-benchmark · No sign-up · You keep the result.
Built on 20+ years of China-entry experience and real market data — since 2003.
Four questions most failed China entries couldn't answer. Be honest — you'll see your gaps instantly.
Your readiness score, a seven-dimension radar, and a clear read of where you stand — benchmarked against the China-entry standard, instantly, before you commit a dollar to China.
A clear 0–100 number benchmarked against the China-entry standard, with a traffic-light per dimension.
See your strengths and weak spots at a glance — and where you sit vs the benchmark.
See exactly which dimensions you're short on, how wide each gap is, and which way to steer.
Built from a proven China-entry methodology for overseas brands and products.
Four steps. No sign-up. You keep the result.
45 short questions across seven dimensions of China-market readiness.
A 0–100 readiness score with a radar across all seven dimensions.
A clear diagnosis of your weakest dimensions — your gap map, not a ready-made plan.
Take your gap map and your navigated route into the market — or talk to us first.
Our benchmark framework is built on two decades of China business entries and the data behind them — since 2003. Most brands don't fail for lack of product; they fail for lack of a navigator. Marco Polo shows you the gaps, the order to fix them, and the way in — whether you go solo, with local partners or agencies, or a combination.
See the exact cracks across seven dimensions in 15 minutes — before any budget is on the table.
Your gap map benchmarks where you stand vs the standard, and ranks what to fix first, dimension by dimension.
The framework sets you up whether you go solo, with local partners or agencies, or a mix. We can guide the whole route or just your weak spots.
Most China entries don't fail because the product is bad — they fail because the gaps weren't found until money was already on the table. A 15-minute honest self-check today is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy against a painful, public, expensive launch. Find the cracks now, on a screen — not later, in the market.
For an overseas brand, China is the ultimate prize — hundreds of millions of digitally-native, trend-hungry consumers; a culture that rewards novelty and shares fast; platforms like RED, Douyin and Tmall that can mint a foreign brand overnight. A successful China entry isn't just new revenue. It's global proof, scale, and the kind of momentum that compounds. The dream is real — and it's worth chasing.
The brands that fail rarely have a bad product. They skip the readiness filter — and pay for it after launch.
A 1.4B population means nothing if you can't name your first 2.5%.
Curiosity never turns into a first order without a reason to try.
Reads "foreign and irrelevant" instead of "made for me."
Without KOL, certification or a flagship, you're invisible in a high-trust market.
The global bestseller flops when spec, story or packaging don't fit locally.
You learn the hard way, in public, in hours — with no crisis plan.
Most failed China entries aren't mysteries — they repeat the same gaps. A 15-minute filter surfaces them before you pay to find out.
Case 01 · Pricing & channel coherenceThe brand already had offline presence through a few local shops, but no social media footprint at all. Those shops were selling at inflated prices, so when the official site launched, its own prices looked out of place next to them.
The filter would catch: a broken price-and-channel architecture (Q6 · Purchase Decision) and a missing social base (Q4 · Feedback) — before any agency budget was spent on a launch that looked disjointed on day one.
Case 02 · Stakeholder buy-inFor small and medium businesses the key stakeholder is usually the owner. If the owner isn't interested or isn't fully involved in the China entry, the project will most likely fail — no matter how good the product or the agency is.
The filter would catch: a missing internal commitment signal. Readiness isn't only external — if the person who actually decides isn't bought in, don't burn budget yet. Surface the go / no-go early.
A free feasibility tool that estimates customer-acquisition cost from your media plan — and shows how weak brand signals quietly inflate it.
CAC = (CPM ÷ 1000) ÷ (CTR × CVR) ÷ brand coefficient — media cost divided by funnel efficiency, then adjusted for brand strength.
A 0.1–1.0 multiplier. A weak overseas presence (0.1) can 10× your cost; a strong "boomerang" brand (1.0) earns cheap reach.
Feasible if CAC ≤ profit per item (first order pays back); moderate if 1–3 items; hard if CAC dwarfs unit profit — fix brand signals first.
Most overseas brands only discover their real CAC after they've paid for it. The calculator flips that: enter your target market size (TAM), core reach, channel CPM, click-through and conversion rates, and it returns an estimated cost-per-acquisition plus the cost to reach your core audience once. The catch is the brand coefficient — it captures how much "education cost" China entry carries. If your cross-border penetration, social position and category share are thin, the model surfaces a steep CAC you'd otherwise learn the hard way. It feeds directly into the CAC feasibility read of your assessment.
Two decades of China management consulting, distilled into a tool you can use yourself — before you spend a dollar on bespoke help.
We've been doing management consulting in China since 2003. Across industries and brand sizes, we kept seeing the same mistakes: brands burning budget before they understood their own readiness, then paying again to fix what a simple check would have caught. So we built Marco Polo — tools you can run yourself, first. Instead of selling a bespoke solution at the get-go, we'd rather you benchmark, go through a learning phase, and find out exactly where you want to spend. It saves cost, and it means that when you do engage us, the money goes where it actually moves the needle.
Across brands and categories, the failures follow the same pattern — we'd seen them all before building this.
Run the benchmark yourself first. No bespoke engagement is pushed at the get-go.
A learning phase shows you exactly where the money should go — so when you invest, it counts.
Benchmark your readiness for free — then go deeper with a real market benchmark. When you're ready, we research your actual position against the China market.
If you're weighing China entry and want a frank, no-fluff read on your readiness, send a note — I'll get back to you directly.