Click read the original text for details Former P&G employees are known as the P&G Alumni, and they have established a fraternal organization called the P&G Alumni Association. In 2017, the P&G Class of '97 "alumni" gathered in Shanghai. "If I could choose again, I might have left P&G a bit earlier." In July 2018, Xiong Qingyun, who had just joined electric vehicle startup XPeng Motors as CMO six months prior, said this to CBN Weekly in her office at the company's headquarters on the outskirts of Guangzhou. The office environment here is more like a factory, with flexible and casual employee access and visitor visits, giving it a distinct startup feel, in stark contrast to P&G's high-end office building in Zhujiang New Town. As a benchmark figure among Chinese professional managers, Xiong Qingyun was the highest-ranking Chinese executive in P&G Greater China's history. She served P&G for 23 years, starting as a management trainee, and left in 2015 as Vice President of the Beauty and Grooming Business Unit for Greater China. Xiong Qingyun, CMO of XPeng Motors, was once the highest-ranking Chinese executive at P&G Greater China. In Xiong Qingyun's WeChat, there is a special "Old Three Classes" group—referring to the first three cohorts of fresh graduates recruited by P&G starting in 1990—and Xiong Qingyun happens to be in the third cohort. From 1992 to 2015, over 23 years, she witnessed almost the entire rapid transformation of Chinese commercial society, as well as P&G's difficulty in keeping up with that speed in its later years, and the three relatively large-scale talent outflows from P&G China that resulted. In the early 1990s, as a foreign enterprise with over a century of history, P&G's mature corporate structure and systematic operational model attracted a large number of outstanding graduates from China's top universities when it first entered the Chinese market. After layers of interviews and scientific management training, they were written upon like blank sheets of paper with marketing concepts that had been tested countless times in Western markets, becoming China's first generation of professional managers. P&G was thus called the "Whampoa Military Academy" for domestic professional managers. This group had distinct professional characteristics: they communicated in English, addressed each other by English names with Chinese surnames like Laura Xiong and David Wang, and were adept at dealing with foreigners. More importantly, they were almost the first group in the early development of China's market economy to understand how concepts like brand positioning, marketing, channel strategy, and TV advertising affected the consumer market. Throughout the 1990s, foreign enterprises flourished in China. Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other foreign consumer goods companies that had entered the Chinese market earlier became key competitors to P&G, and it became common for people to leave P&G for these equally prestigious foreign companies. Xiong Qingyun told CBN Weekly that in the mid-to-late 1990s, P&G experienced its first significant talent outflow, peaking in 1997, 1998, and 1999. A group of early professional managers left P&G to pursue MBAs at top US business schools like Harvard Business School and Wharton, seeking more professionally advanced career development. Many of these individuals later held key management positions at top US companies like McKinsey. The situation of flowing from foreign companies to foreign companies soon changed around 2000. Chinese local consumer goods companies, which had endured over a decade of "suppression" by foreign companies, began to realize that "brands are not just about selling products; doing branding well actually creates a premium," Xiong Qingyun said. "These domestic brands' brand awareness was awakened by P&G." At the same time, under overwhelming competitive pressure, domestic consumer brands gradually improved product quality, thereby continuously narrowing the gap with foreign companies in terms of products. Just as the external environment was changing rapidly, P&G's global headquarters suddenly began to strengthen comprehensive management of its Chinese subsidiary around 2008, establishing various process systems to improve the subsidiary's institutional construction. According to Wang Bin, then a P&G brand manager, P&G headquarters changed P&G China from a relatively free "developing market" to a "developed market," meaning P&G China would no longer primarily pursue scale expansion but operate with a more standardized corporate management model. As a result, a group of P&G professional managers whose room for maneuver was limited began to flow to local consumer goods companies that were still in the pioneering stage. The latter could offer larger platforms and faster promotion, while the former exchanged their professional marketing skills learned from P&G. It was during this period that Wang Bin decided to leave P&G after six years and join Liby, a Chinese local daily chemical company, as General Manager of the Laundry Products Division. He saw that Chinese local consumer goods companies were still in the stage of relying on extensive channel expansion, where finding the right agency or making a good advertisement could significantly boost sales, but they fundamentally lacked effective internal operational models and had very weak institutional construction. When Wang Bin first arrived at Liby, the company's marketing department had almost no division of labor and rarely considered market research centered on consumer surveys; only large-scale media placement was a focus that company managers personally "grasped." "Many local enterprises initially treated marketing as a subsidiary department of sales," Wang Bin told CBN Weekly. He quickly began adjustments within Liby, establishing a business unit (BU) system similar to P&G's—where a major product category forms a business unit, bringing together personnel from marketing, product development, production supply, human resources, and finance, all serving the same product category. Under Wang Bin's institutional adjustments, Liby's sales department began to act more as an executor of the marketing department's new product strategies and promotions, clarifying product pricing power, clarifying brand positioning and brand connotation, and starting to truly value real feedback from consumer perceptions. As a result, during Wang Bin's eight years at Liby, the company indeed developed from a competitor in the daily chemical washing category to a leader in that category, and successfully established a dual-brand strategy for Liby and Good Daddy. "Local Chinese companies initially lacked P&G's experience with multiple brands in the same category; their understanding of multi-brand logic was simply to create two names," Wang Bin said. In the approximately ten years from the early 2000s onward, on the one hand, P&G China's increasingly large matrix internal structure made reporting relationships between levels complex, and new product launches in the Chinese market required approval from the US upstream team before execution, while the US team could not promptly understand and adapt to the rapid development of the Chinese market. According to multiple former P&G employees, P&G therefore spent too much time on internal communication, and its standardized but inefficient operations caused the giant company to encounter a long-term business growth bottleneck. On the other hand, besides the rise of local Chinese enterprises making market competition more intense, the entire internet industry and e-commerce channels grew at an obvious speed. "We ourselves could also perceive changes in the entire consumer goods industry and user purchasing behavior," Xiong Qingyun said, but P&G at that time was unable to keep up with these changes. The situation also changed accordingly, and P&G's role in the entire consumer market shifted from industry leader to chaser. Sun Lei joined the marketing department of P&G's skincare brand OLAY in 2010. At that time, department store channels still accounted for an absolute proportion of the business, but she felt it was very hard work. "Clearly everything we did was right, but foot traffic in shopping malls was continuously declining." Sun Lei proposed to Xiong Qingyun that they create an e-commerce channel for OLAY, which was already "late." Xiong Qingyun only agreed to give a "small amount of funds" of several million US dollars to try "internal entrepreneurship." "At this point, I began to realize that the bottleneck to doing e-commerce well actually came from within P&G," Sun Lei explained to CBN Weekly. "At that time, it was clear that the trend of e-commerce was certain, but the company's various resource investments in strategic architecture did not match this trend." The final result proved that when Sun Lei left P&G at the end of 2013, e-commerce channel sales already accounted for more than 10% of OLAY's sales. Starting in 2012, over three to four years, internet companies such as 58.com, Alibaba, JD.com, Jumei, and Vipshop successively listed on Nasdaq. A large amount of capital and talent flowed into the internet industry, and P&G China inevitably experienced another, and so far the largest, talent outflow. Many professional managers like Sun Lei joined the internet and e-commerce industries to seek more promising career futures with more growth space. If you study carefully, you will find that most well-known Chinese internet companies have had P&G alumni in marketing and related management positions. Well-known examples include Vipshop Vice President Feng Jialu, Tmall President Jing Jie, former eLong CEO Cui Guangfu, and Yuan Fuyu, former NetEase marketing general manager who just announced his appointment as Baidu Vice President. From this perspective, P&G's professional manager training system not only made P&G China successful but also promoted China's commercial development. Through these three obvious talent flows, this foreign enterprise continuously supplied high-quality talent to Chinese commercial society. P&G's famous PVP (Purpose, Values, Principles) talent development system emphasizes core values of employee leadership. According to Xiong Qingyun, this leadership requires P&G marketing personnel to bear the pressure of product sales and market share from the start, be results-oriented, closely link marketing and sales, take on significant responsibilities from the beginning, quickly adapt to department and position rotations, and build employees' confidence and competitiveness. This training model enables P&G-trained professional managers to quickly get into role when accepting a new position or task, pursuing goals and results. Even though the automotive industry operates differently from consumer goods, within six months of joining XPeng Motors, Xiong Qingyun quickly built the basic organizational structure, set brand positioning, created sales channels, and gradually established a basic market form for this startup. She personally went to offline locations to study which cities to prioritize and what successful offline store formats and emerging store formats with unclear market response existed. However, not all P&G people adapted well to the internet industry. In the consumer goods market, P&G's effective methodology is based on consumer-centered market research, multi-dimensionally deducing the possibility of a brand and product succeeding after launch, and only after confirming that all links reach a "satisfactory" state is the specific execution plan finally implemented. But in the wild-growth internet industry, the proven methodology is to quickly launch new concepts and products, then iterate at a higher frequency based on actual user feedback—the intersection of two different operational logics and concepts has confused some P&G people who joined the internet. Dai Kebin, CEO of Liepin, which just successfully listed in Hong Kong, fell into this misunderstanding in the early days of his entrepreneurship in 2008. When planning to start a business, Dai Kebin thought P&G was a product of the industrial age, while the information age should have a new playbook represented by Google and BAT. He therefore decided to forget what he had learned from P&G and fully learn internet practices. "But I gradually discovered that this industry was very immature in terms of organizational building, management models, and talent pipelines," Dai Kebin recalled to CBN Weekly. "Internet companies emphasize speed, but pursuing speed has many costs. You must lower your requirements for talent and organizational building, but when an organization expands from 100 people to 10,000, this unstable growth form quickly collapses." After leaving P&G, Dai Kebin chose internet recruitment as his entrepreneurial direction. Liepin, which he founded in 2011, just listed in Hong Kong. After leaving P&G, Dai Kebin chose internet recruitment as his entrepreneurial direction. Liepin, which he founded in 2011, just listed in Hong Kong. This detour lasted until 2013, when Dai Kebin finally realized that many people had used time and user dividends during China's internet explosion to create novel and interesting things, but they might not really be powerful. Rather, it was "a group of people suddenly attracting a large number of people with something others had never seen, generating traffic, and then traffic generated monetization, creating an illusion through continuous capital amplification." He decided to return to P&G's methodology and found that Google and Apple actually had many similarities with P&G in terms of scaling growth. So, Liepin began trying campus recruitment three or four years ago to cultivate management personnel internally. At P&G, 95% of management comes from internal development. Dai Kebin hopes Liepin can achieve a state of 60% internal development and 40% external recruitment. At the same time, he also tried to establish a set of Liepin values, gradually being able to identify whether a person is "very Liepin" during the recruitment process. The profound impact of P&G's experience on Dai Kebin also includes how to position and operate a brand from the perspective of a brand manager, internalize strong data analysis and strategic analysis capabilities, and the professional habit of writing a memo after meeting people and discussing matters. More importantly, P&G taught him to do things with skill, rhythm, and thought, and ultimately to form a closed loop. He believes that most professional managers in China's internet industry do not understand how to establish such a "closed loop." "They often don't know what the next step should be after completing something, or what it means for a task to be 'done,'" Dai Kebin told CBN Weekly. Wang Bin also believes that his P&G experience helped him save time and trial-and-error costs. "When you gradually confirm in practice that the concepts P&G 'instilled' in you are correct and effective, it's like what a child sees when they open their eyes—you can't forget it or change it." To this day, Wang Bin even feels that communication costs with fellow P&G alumni are lower, which makes him willing to maintain close contact with this group of people who left P&G. He now also serves as the head of the P&G Alumni Association's South China branch. "To some extent, P&G actually recruits 'the same type of people.' Everyone must pass a personality test before joining, and the results from nine dimensions must all reach the passing line to be eligible to join P&G," Wu Yipeng, head of the P&G Alumni Association's Shanghai branch, told CBN Weekly. "Then P&G cultivates these people with similar personalities in the same direction." This clear recruitment orientation and leadership training also led to an inevitable result: P&G professional managers have a strong desire for achievement. One reason many ultimately decide to leave P&G is that the "sense of achievement at P&G is not as strong as before." P&G is a market-driven consumer goods company, while the internet industry is driven by products and technology. This brings out another reason why many P&G-trained professional managers find it difficult to adapt to the internet industry: marketing here becomes a supporting role rather than the leader. So, after working for a period at US smart bracelet startup Misfit, Sun Lei decided to return to the daily chemical category. She eventually co-founded a domestic beauty brand based on e-commerce channels called "Perfect Diary" with another P&G alum. When Wang Bin wanted to enter the internet field, he evaluated internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba and chose the relatively traditional mobile phone manufacturing industry that relies more on internet marketing, becoming the global CMO of Honor, a brand under Huawei's terminal division. He helped the brand hire spokespersons, sponsor TV variety shows, and tried to combine internet marketing with FMCG tactics to market phones. Sun Lei's Perfect Diary launched its first product in March 2017. At that time, a popular loose powder's lid had issues with powder leaking during logistics, but now the gap between the lid and the box is just precise enough to fit an A4 paper, after more than 10 iterations. Xiao Guoxun, also from P&G sales, founded Haose Pai Salad, which focuses on healthy dining, and it also updates iteratively every month, with 30% of its 10 to 12 salad products updated monthly across online and offline channels. "The benefit is that people begin to reflect on what problems exist in P&G's operational system, such as 'everyone satisfied' after layers of decisions does not necessarily mean consumers are satisfied. P&G cares very much about brand building, and only when the product is excellent will it move forward. So you know where not to learn from P&G when building a small brand," Wu Yipeng said. It is undeniable that P&G's attractiveness to talent has significantly declined. New employees who joined after 2012 generally choose to jump to other companies or start their own businesses after two or three years. Although P&G has begun to recover growth after a downturn, its pace of change still cannot keep up with the speed at which the professional managers it trained are growing. When it entered China in 1988, P&G played the role of market enlightener with a huge halo, becoming the top choice for China's elite talent. Today, catching-up local consumer goods companies and internet private enterprises represented by BAT are causing this consumer goods giant's halo to gradually fade. The process of disenchantment is lamentable, but the result is not necessarily so pessimistic. "Just like in the US, P&G has finally returned to normal," Sun Lei said. P&G Alumni | P&G (China) Alumni Association Connecting· Sharing·Growing·Enjoying Source: CBN Weekly -END-