---
title: "Mondelez Greater China VP Zhu Yijing: Thoughts and Responses on Omnichannel Business Development"
description: "At the recent China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference, New Distribution invited Ms. Zhu Yijing, Vice President of Mondelez Greater China, to share her insights. As a century-old global leader in biscuits, chocolate, gum, candy, and powdered beverages, Mondelez has consistently navigated industry cycles. Zhu, responsible for sales, shared her strategic thinking and responses to the rapidly changing retail environment, which New Distribution has compiled and excerpted."
author: "朱忆菁"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-04-19"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/KnREmfPI5VgOzR80d4z2WQ"
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# Mondelez Greater China VP Zhu Yijing: Thoughts and Responses on Omnichannel Business Development

> At the recent China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference, New Distribution invited Ms. Zhu Yijing, Vice President of Mondelez Greater China, to share her insights. As a century-old global leader in biscuits, chocolate, gum, candy, and powdered beverages, Mondelez has consistently navigated industry cycles. Zhu, responsible for sales, shared her strategic thinking and responses to the rapidly changing retail environment, which New Distribution has compiled and excerpted.

At the recent China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference, New Distribution was honored to invite Ms. Zhu Yijing, Vice President of Mondelez Greater China, to deliver a keynote speech.
Mondelez, a global leader in biscuits, chocolate, gum, candy, and powdered beverages, has evolved over a century, continuously crossing industry cycles and staying at the forefront.
As Vice President of Greater China, Zhu is responsible for sales. Facing the current volatile retail market environment, she has her own strategies. How does she think, and how does she respond? New Distribution has compiled and excerpted the highlights of Zhu's speech at the conference, now published for our readers.
******-01-****Suddenly Like a Spring Breeze Overnight—The Omnichannel New Retail Landscape** **Frankly, in today's retail environment, there is no longer pure online or offline shopping; nearly two-thirds of consumers shop across channels. You might think offline retail is struggling, but in fact, online e-commerce is also facing traffic exhaustion.** In the past, consumers went to the supermarket once a week, but now it might be once a month, and in the future, once a quarter. According to our observations, consumers visit 4-5 channels within a week, and the frequency of shopping in a single channel is declining. Therefore, whether online or offline, the number of people per channel is decreasing. **Consumers are still the same, but for brand owners, they need to consider how to reach and influence decisions when consumers shop across more channels; for retailers, with fewer people in a single area, the key is efficiency—can fewer people generate more sales?**
**-02-****Different Heights and Distances—Diverse Shopping Mindsets** Although channels are diverse, shopping mindsets vary by channel. You'll find that offline hypermarkets still hold the strongest stock-up mindset. Even though online offers unlimited shelves with tens of thousands of SKUs, when consumers pull out their phones, if they want to view 100 items, their hands might get tired; a single screen can only show 4-5 items at a time, but a hypermarket shelf can display 20-25. Consumers can view about 60-70 items per minute. While it's convenient to pull out a phone, viewing 100 items online is still quite laborious. Therefore, much of the stock-up mindset remains in hypermarkets. Online/offline supermarkets are more for replenishment—buying what you need. Offline supermarkets have the advantage of proximity compared to hypermarkets; online supermarkets are within easy reach. The replenishment mindset relies more on active search. At this point, every brand owner needs to ask: why would your product or brand come to mind? If consumers don't think of you, they likely won't search for you. The currently bustling social e-commerce, whether Douyin, Kuaishou, or Xiaohongshu, is more about a browsing mindset. Behind browsing, being interesting and useful is crucial; cheapness alone cannot sustain long-term brand interest. If a brand or product cannot produce good content, social e-commerce is unlikely to go far. Meanwhile, social e-commerce traffic is also rising. Finally, community e-commerce: many might think consumers shop there for cheapness, but ultimately, consumers don't want cheapness with no choice; they want good products at low prices. A typical example is Pinduoduo, which is different from its earlier version. In fact, the earlier Pinduoduo was like JD.com long ago—80% of platform traffic was promotional, but now JD.com's traffic mostly comes from search, and Pinduoduo is also increasing the weight of search.
**-03-****When the Mountains and Rivers End, a Path Appears—The Transformation of Offline Formats** The above describes different shopping mindsets across formats. Returning to the theme, how should brand owners respond to different formats combined with these mindsets? First, let's discuss offline formats. In the past, offline was a goods venue; consumers just went to the store to buy things. But now, is simply buying enough? Not necessarily. If you've been to Japan, you might recall that one important task in our travels is visiting Japanese convenience stores. **Why is Japan's offline retail so successful? The core is experience. In the past two years, our offline format upgrades have been mediocre because we don't care about consumers.** When consumers' living standards rise, they naturally need product variety. This variety doesn't mean seeing 100 products at once, but rather seeing 10 familiar products and 5 unfamiliar ones this week. A month later, seeing the 10 frequently bought products and 5 new ones. That's what Japanese convenience stores do—their product selection and management are highly developed. Conversely, why has e-commerce grown so fast? I don't know the logic for other categories, but for snacks, the logic is: on Tmall, it calculates shopper behavior over the past 7 days—whether it's favorites, add-to-cart, browsing, or purchasing—and decides what consumers should see based on that. Japanese convenience stores use a one-month calculation logic, adjusting product assortment and placement based on sales of each product in each trade area over the past four weeks. So shelves change monthly. Offline hypermarkets do well, but even Walmart, with rigorous category management, adjusts only twice a year—typically a major adjustment in March-April and a minor one in July-August. Of course, because stores are large, each adjustment is costly. Therefore, if you can respond more quickly to consumer changes, your growth rate will be faster. A simple formula: if you sold 100 units last week and 101 this week, if you persist, you'll likely grow 50% in a year. That was also the compound growth rate for Alibaba and JD.com in their early days. If you use a month as the counting unit and adjust monthly, the compound growth rate is likely 10%-15%. If you can only adjust 2-3 times a year, the compound growth rate is only 2%-4%. Now, technology allows the same format to serve different functions. For example, with O2O platforms like JD Daojia, a hypermarket can also function as a convenience store with 1-hour delivery, or as community e-commerce with in-store promoters as group leaders. Therefore, when we do channel distribution, we used to think only about the consumer's in-store behavior—what to sell and how to market—but now we need to consider whether this format can serve other purposes.
**-04-****The Flowers Are Dazzling—Online Supermarket Shopping Path** Many might think e-commerce is easy, but the reality is different. Based on our practice, **on Tmall and JD Super, consumers have an average of 11 touchpoints from the first click to the final purchase.** That means if you want to fully win over a consumer, you need to work hard on all 11 touchpoints. From another angle, your competitors have great opportunities to intercept consumers. But does this mean we should put equal effort into every touchpoint? Of course not. Usually, the first and last points are crucial—when consumers start caring about you and the final click to purchase. Therefore, for food and beverages, especially in online supermarkets, "search" is critical. About two-thirds of consumers rely on search when buying. Here, I want to share two key points: **the seller's show and the buyer's show.** The seller's show is the product detail page. Each product detail page should be treated as seriously as the product packaging. You need to understand who will buy your product and what information they care about. You can use images, videos, or text, but regardless of the form, think clearly about who the most important consumer is and what to say to them. The buyer's show is the reviews from purchased consumers. Reviews from buyers are the most persuasive. You'll notice that some emerging brands pay close attention to the first 100 reviews on e-commerce platforms. Why? Because consumers likely won't read 1,000 reviews; a dozen or two is enough. Of course, pay attention to negative reviews. After reading three or five positive reviews, consumers often check the negative ones, especially for new products. Negative reviews can determine whether they choose the product.
**-05-****Where Is the Restaurant?—O2O Opportunities from "Foot Movement" to "Hand Movement"** The emergence of O2O has shortened our physical distance. Previously, you had to go to the store; now it's easier—just a hand movement. Because it's easy and at hand, consumers typically don't schedule a specific time like a weekend trip to the supermarket. **Consumers become spontaneous, so we must create scenarios to attract them.** Let me share a case from our own experience. In December 2020, Oreo ran a themed campaign with Tmall Super, RT-Mart, Taoxianda, and Ele.me. We chose a life scenario theme: "Life is bitter, but smile sweet." Because last year, due to the pandemic, many people had a tough time. The difference between a good brand and a good product is that **a good brand has emotion and resonates with consumers.** Why December? Because after 11.11, platform traffic dries up. We wanted to do something right and meaningful to see if we could drive traffic rather than relying solely on platform traffic. Of course, the results were evident. The campaign was mainly in Shanghai. We did media placements, in-store displays at RT-Mart, and live streams on Tmall Super and Ele.me. The campaign achieved over 100 million exposures, reached over 10 million consumers, and gained hundreds of thousands of omnichannel users. Not only Tmall Super and RT-Mart, but all our channels saw over 100% growth, and we acquired many new customers. Looking back at the purpose: why do it after 11.11 and before the New Year's goods festival? Because our core goal was customer acquisition. Many loyal customers had already bought and stocked up during 11.11. We wanted to test whether we could acquire new customers through multi-channel online-offline collaboration. Sharing this case, I want to emphasize: purpose is crucial. Once the purpose is clear, it must be very precise. Don't always think about 100-city collaboration; frankly, doing well in one city is already impressive. **For omnichannel business, it's not just about doing well in retail; you also need to integrate various forms of media. Our experience is that using a good product in a short time, with omnichannel reach within a same-city retail network, is highly efficient.** Of course, from a supply chain and delivery coordination perspective, it's relatively easier—one warehouse is enough.
**-06-****Searching for Him in the Crowd—Social E-commerce PDD, Self-Directed** Now, Pinduoduo's daily active users have surpassed Alibaba's. Indeed, consumers go to Pinduoduo mainly for discounts, but we've found that in the snack category, due to safety and quality requirements, over 80% of snack purchases are still completed through search. Mondelez is also doing this, but frankly, it's not our core business unit. Our biggest challenge is fulfillment costs. Many products on Pinduoduo have average order values of 9.9 or 19.9 yuan. Most snacks and beverages can't achieve the high gross margins of cosmetics or clothing, so they can't sustain 20%-30% logistics costs in the long run. Of course, we're exploring. Oreo already covers over 2 million stores nationwide with hundreds of distributor partners, each with local warehousing. We're considering whether we can use digital methods to leverage the distributor matrix to deliver good products to consumers.
**-07****-****The Duck Feels the Warmth of Spring First—The New Journey of Community E-commerce** Now, internet giants are entering community e-commerce, and many ask if we'll do it too. The answer is obvious—we participate. But how exactly, we're still researching. In fact, current community e-commerce shares many common features with e-commerce platforms: consumers need low prices and time savings. But we believe the most critical factor is trust, especially the trustworthiness of group leaders. If they're only in it for money, they can't maintain trust long-term. We've been thinking: who are the group leaders? Small and medium supermarkets, convenience stores, and mom-and-pop shops have coexisted with community ecosystems for a long time. Perhaps their owners could be good group leaders, or in-store promoters in hypermarkets could be good group leaders—anything is possible. Currently, supermarkets and hypermarkets are also considering community e-commerce; they have many front warehouses and stores. Community e-commerce hasn't reached its final form. As I just mentioned, **our approach is to participate, but not just by setting up a community e-commerce department at headquarters; we involve the key account management team, regional teams, O2O team, and e-commerce team.** Each department has different approaches and understandings. Only by truly practicing can we know what suits us best. Facing new things, our consistent style is to test with different teams. Although this is very uncontrolled, we have two major principles to ensure efficiency and time costs. First, transparency—no matter who does it, they share how they do it. Second, maintenance—maintain the value chain, meaning terminal prices. If a brand owner has no profit, it's unlikely to sustain investment in R&D, and thus can't continuously produce better products. Finally, I want to share that facing the development of omnichannel new retail, there are both challenges and opportunities. But at the core, our thinking is simple: **Wherever consumers are, we are there!**

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