---
title: "Dialogue with Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China: To Live Great, Brands Must First Believe in Greatness | Brand Narrative Questions"
description: "Can creativity solve business problems? The management classic \"Built to Last,\" first published in 1994, clearly states that most brands that survive across eras share a commitment to corporate culture and values while continuously driving innovation. Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China, offers a similar answer: \"Believe in the power of the brand, persist, and you will win.\" This confidence is also what has driven Sharlene's deep engagement in the advertising industry for over 20 years."
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published: "2024-11-21"
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# Dialogue with Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China: To Live Great, Brands Must First Believe in Greatness | Brand Narrative Questions

> Can creativity solve business problems? The management classic "Built to Last," first published in 1994, clearly states that most brands that survive across eras share a commitment to corporate culture and values while continuously driving innovation. Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China, offers a similar answer: "Believe in the power of the brand, persist, and you will win." This confidence is also what has driven Sharlene's deep engagement in the advertising industry for over 20 years.

**Creativity**
**Can it solve business problems?**
The management classic "Built to Last," first published in 1994, clearly states that most brands that survive across eras share a commitment to corporate culture and values while continuously driving innovation.
Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China, offers a similar answer: **"Believe in the power of the brand, persist, and you will win."**
This confidence is also what has driven Sharlene's deep engagement in the advertising industry for over 20 years. She has provided outstanding services to global top brands such as Unilever, NetEase, Gillette, Alibaba, PUMA, Bayer, adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, CK, and Bentley, and has won numerous awards. In 2021, she joined Grey, a top marketing communications company with a century-old brand heritage, and in 2024, she took on the management of AKQA, a world-renowned digital advertising agency. Both companies have creativity as their core competitiveness and fully demonstrate the concept of "creativity driving business effectiveness." This year, the two companies completed their merger, jointly serving well-known brands such as Volvo, Master Kong, Haleon, HSBC, and Nike. In Sharlene's view, the core task of modern marketing in China is to create maximum value for clients. "The market is developing rapidly, and consumer concepts are constantly updating, but the construction and accumulation of brand culture takes time. Some of the chaos in this process is actually an inevitable path in the industry's development. The biggest challenge at present is that brands often lack patience under pressure. Therefore, I believe one of the important tasks for practitioners is to help brands calm down and think—what should change, and what must be adhered to?" Sharlene said.
As an innovative pioneer in the advertising industry and a promoter of digital transformation, Sharlene Wu, CEO of Grey & AKQA China, has helped many well-known brands achieve business growth and transformation with her outstanding entrepreneurial spirit, leadership, and execution, and has been listed on the "2024 Heroes Executive Role Model List," demonstrating her extraordinary influence in the industry.
Grey was founded in 1917, headquartered in New York, with a century-long history, and is a traditional advertising agency with creativity at its core. AKQA, established in 1994, is headquartered in London and focuses on digital marketing, providing services and products in the web, mobile, and social fields. This year, Grey & AKQA completed a formal merger.
What should **change**?
What must **persist**?
Whale Whale:
**This year, we have seen many leading brands encounter growth bottlenecks. In such a situation, should brands increase marketing investment or first stabilize the current sales base?**
**Sharlene Wu**
**Brands must keep pace with the times,
or even lead the era and create the future.
First, they need to conduct a
"health check" on themselves.**
Through a "health check," brands can identify challenges, better understand the target consumer profile, and make corresponding adjustments. I do not think brand concepts need to change every year, but as lifestyles change, brands need to think about how to deeply integrate with market culture and, on that basis, continuously iterate and update to form new interpretations. Therefore, I often say, **the advertising industry is essentially a cultural industry.**
For example, Nike's "Just Do It" slogan, since its launch in 1988, has evolved with the times and lifestyle changes, expanding from encouraging sportsmanship and self-challenge to diversity, individuality, and even integrating into internet and pop culture, continuously inspiring people to bravely pursue dreams and overcome difficulties in innovative and resonant ways, becoming a positive and optimistic attitude and spiritual symbol. Although Nike has experienced one trough after another in its lifecycle, after the previous "Find Your Greatness" Olympic campaign, this year's "Winners are not always who you think" Olympic ads show us Nike's powerful influence in innovative culture.
Swipe left to see more
Nike's "Winners are not always who you think" Olympic ads
Nike's "Find Your Greatness" Olympic ads
Whale Whale:
**This year, we have also seen many local brands that do not position themselves as white-label brands and are very good at building connections with consumers on new media. If these brands want to move up a notch, what suggestions do you have?**
**Sharlene Wu**
Local brands should think more about how to practice and adhere to long-termism. The key to upgrading lies in clarifying the brand's starting point—whether it is demand-oriented or value-driven.
If a brand starts with functional needs, the next step is to think about how to replicate that need to a broader market or achieve upgrading by discovering new needs.
For brands that start from values, they need to continuously pay attention to the motivations behind consumer behavior and keenly capture future trends. For example, when we see young people on Xiaohongshu enthusiastically sharing photos of sunbathing their backs, we can think about whether this cultural phenomenon reflects their increasing attention to physical health. Brands can start from this insight and seek entry points for upgrading.
Whale Whale:
**We have noticed that some brands that grew up in niche markets have not been smooth when trying to enter larger markets. These brands also struggle with whether going mainstream will lose their original consumers. What do you think about this situation?**
**Sharlene Wu**
The domestic market has already passed the stage of using external items to show identity and status. If a brand cannot make its proposition clearly perceived by consumers and its pricing is not friendly, it will be difficult to achieve upgrading.
In the final analysis, the core of brand building lies in shaping culture. Creative ideas that enrich human life can not only win consumer affection but also drive rapid brand growth.
Whale Whale:
**In today's media environment, are there any suggestions to help brands better understand and evaluate the correctness of their strategies?**
**Sharlene Wu**
**Innovation is the core competitiveness of Chinese brands,
but the real challenge lies in
whether companies can maintain sufficient sincerity and patience
to continuously invest and build the brand.**
In the era of booming e-commerce and social media, brand organizational structures also need new thinking and methods. Today, a brand is more like a professional manager, shouldering the heavy responsibility of integrating resources and efficiently allocating them. Poor market performance is often not a single brand issue; channels, products, and other links are equally crucial. Therefore, I often emphasize that people are key.
In addition to continuous investment in talent, brands also need to actively embrace digital transformation. A slowdown in sales is usually intuitively reflected in a decline in advertising efficiency, not simply a market demand issue. However, relying solely on manpower makes it difficult to quickly verify the return on new strategies. At this time, platform data resources or internally and externally built data systems can provide brands with more precise consumer insights, thereby optimizing strategies and improving efficiency.
It is based on this concept that we have assembled a diverse team and built an internal data system to fully support AI and generative content (AIGC), e-commerce and social media insights, and overseas marketing analysis. These initiatives help us integrate the concept of "Famous Effective" into more project practices.
Whale Whale:
**This year, which brand narratives do you think were particularly well done?**
**Sharlene Wu**
First is the Nike ad I just mentioned during this year's Olympics.
In addition, I would like to share the promotional campaign launched by Volvo for its first MPV, the EM90. This ultra-luxury pure electric model, priced at around RMB 1 million, cleverly used the culturally significant symbol of the "door" during the special time of the Spring Festival to convey the concept of "Room for Life." The campaign not only successfully resonated with the values of China's wealthy elite, but the related films also garnered over 67 million views, precisely reaching the target audience and triggering strong emotional resonance.
Brand collaboration case:
Volvo MPV EM90's campaign using the "door" as a cultural symbol
I would also like to mention Alibaba's Olympic slogan "Believe in Small and Great" proposed in 2018, which used warm stories to convey support for ordinary people, small forces, and small and medium-sized enterprises. This not only fit the social sentiment at the time, but even today, it still has strong resonance and contemporary value.
Alibaba's Olympic slogan "Believe in Small and Great"
Whale Whale:
**How do you view the current "cooperatism" between brands and marketing agencies?**
**Sharlene Wu**
In the current era, cooperation is particularly important. How to create maximum value for brands is gradually becoming a market consensus.
In the past two or three years, brands have increasingly cooperated with KOLs/KOCs to create content. However, this year, brands have become more cautious in this area, preferring to cooperate with us to integrate resources and formulate strategies together, ensuring that content aligns with the brand's long-term development goals. This is also the unique value that marketing agencies demonstrate in an environment where "everyone can create."
In addition, in terms of brand going global, more and more companies realize that relying solely on price advantages is no longer enough to gain a foothold in the international market. They hope we can provide insights with local perspectives to help formulate more precise overseas strategies.
Taking our cooperation with Ctrip as an example, we assisted it in launching the Trip.Best travel ranking in the Asia-Pacific region (covering South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Based on deep insights into modern travelers, especially those in the four major markets, we found that they are more eager for trustworthy and data-driven travel recommendations. To position Trip.Best as the go-to resource for travel planning, we focused on its unique advantages—advanced data insights, scientific evaluation, and curated compilation based on millions of real traveler reviews—and launched a series of campaigns. This not only successfully shaped Trip.Best's fair, comprehensive, professional, and trustworthy brand image but also further promoted Ctrip's globalization strategy.
Swipe left to see more
Brand collaboration case:
Trip.Best rankings: including Top 100 Luxury Hotels, Top 100 Popular Attractions, Top 100 Night Tours, Top 100 Food and Dining
**Column Introduction**
In the rapidly changing consumer environment, seeing brands face unprecedented challenges and opportunities, we constantly ask ourselves what we can do. The Brand Narrative Award might be one answer, hoping to help brands strengthen their brand narratives and make brands more vividly perceived by the public.
Along the way, more and more peers have joined us. Adhering to the common belief of "letting more good products and good brands stand out, and conveying truly excellent brand narratives to more people," Whale Whale has decided to throw some of our questions about brand narratives to industry experts. This series of content will be updated in the **Whale Whale Headline** column **"Brand Narrative Questions"**.


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