Shiyao Chen is a core leading member of Kearney’s Consumer Goods and Retail Practice in Greater China, with 10 years of consulting and industry experience with focus on Consumer Goods and Retail. He has served a variety of local companies and MNCs across Food & Beverage, FMCG, Fashion & Apparel, Durables, and Retail sectors.

Mr. Chen specializes in the areas of corporate strategy, growth strategy, operations improvement and digital transformation, and has supported enterprise clients driving business model innovation and capability uplifting along the entire value chain, covering product innovation, portfolio management, supply chain/operations, sales & distribution, branding & marketing, customer experience, etc. In addition, Mr. Chen is also actively engaged in topics of sustainability, organization & governance and M&A.

Mr. Chen holds Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University and Doctor degree from Cornell University, both in Engineering.

In the past decade, consumers’ attitudes towards alcoholic drinks changed significantly. From product perspective, the idea of “drink less but better” drives consumers to reduce drinking frequency, but drink higher-end alcohol. From channel perspective, online sales have skyrocketed, and online channels poses challenges to the traditional dealer channel in alcohol industry. From scenario perspective, more and more people choose to drink at home due to the pandemic. In addition, the demography of drinking is also changing, as more and more women started to savor alcohol. In the future, which way of drinking will be the most popular among the new generation of consumers?

In the past two years, low proof RTD has become very popular in western countries, with many traditional spirits companies and new start-ups rushing into the market with numerous innovative products. In China, low proof category is also showing great growth potential. However, the special Chinese culture, taste preferences, and many other facts are creating much unique needs.

We invite Mr. Kemble Han, who is the former APAC R&D Head at Bacardi with 10+ years Innovation/R&D experience in low proof category, to share with us his insights and innovations from a global perspective: How to capture global trends and accelerate innovation for low proof in China?

Out of health concern, a growing number of young people opt not to consume alcohol or to consume less alcohol. But young people do not "dislike drinking itself", they just hate the "side effects" of drinking. Young people who want to "have a cake and eat it" promoted the development of a new category-non-alcoholic liquor. What exactly is non-alcoholic liquor? How is its brewing process and taste different? Most importantly, who will pay for non-alcoholic liquor?

Lyre's team will bring non-alcoholic cocktail and we will have a chance to taste what is non-alcoholic liquor.

In recent years, Johnnie Walker has launched several limited-edition whiskies with Chinese characteristics, such as the annual Chinese Zodiac Whisky, the special whisky named "Century of China" in collaboration with the Forbidden City. Each of which is remarkable, and the most impressive part is all whiskies have been designed to be localized while retaining the brand's global style. In fact, as the world's best-selling Scotch whisky, Johnnie Walker's limited editions have been well received in many countries thanks to a deep understanding and integration of local culture. How does this two-hundred-year-old Scottish gentleman use design to impress consumers in every country, while staying true to his philosophy of "Keep Walking Forever"?

We will also taste the Johnnie Walker 15 Years Sherry Finish, and unlock the sweetness and smoothness of whisky in a creative way.

In contrast to the low-proof drinks, which are almost newborn in China, one of the most challenging problems for Chinese Baijiu is that: it is only by "learning from the past" that we can "open up the future". How can we make innovations to suit the times, while inheriting the essence of the craft and culture of Chinese Baijiu, and break the ice with new products and a new philosophy to impress consumers?

Craft beers seem to face various controversies these days: With the rapid development, are some breweries too big to make craft beers? Are those craft beers that make concessions to satisfy most consumers still considered craft beers?

The gradual popularity of craft beers can be regarded as an explosion of a new category, and it also implies an overall upgrade of the beer industry. How to treat craft beers rationally? How can craft beers seize the opportunity in the alcohol market which is constantly influx of young consumers?

Many new kinds of low-alcohol drinks appeared in 2020, such as hard seltzer, tea wine, rice wine, and etc. How can these low-alcohol drinks seek differentiated development from product innovation?

As General Manager, China for The Trade Desk, Calvin leads the company’s business in China, with a particular focus on localization of branding & strategies, client relations, and industry partnerships.

Calvin has 15 years of experience with digital and marketing data solutions, most recently as Chief Executive Officer for AdMaster, China’s leading digital measurement and data solution provider. As CEO, he oversaw the company’s P&L, operational performance, organizational development, product R&D, and strategic partnerships. Prior to AdMaster, Calvin held management positions in China and the United States for Nielsen.

Calvin is an innovative and widely respected digital industry expert in China. In 2020 and 2021 he was elected as co-chair of MMA China (Modern Marketing Association). He speaks regularly at major industry conferences such as I-COM, Advertising Week, ROI Festival, and GMIC, chairing GDMS, and also featured in Campaign magazine’s Asia Pacific region’s “40 Under 40” and China’s “Digital A-List.”

In addition to his digital marketing and advertising industry experience, Calvin often delivers guest lectures at leading universities, including Peking University, Fudan University, and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). He also served as a senior advisor (and former chairman of the Board of Advisors) for AIESEC in Mainland China, a non-profit organization that promotes youth leadership and global internship programs.

Calvin has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in humanities from HKUST. He enjoys reading, traveling with family, playing football with his sons, and is a die-hard Manchester United fan.

"History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes." There are many similarities between today's China and Japan in the 1980s, such as macroeconomic levels, disposable income, aging population, East Asian cultural attributes, savings, and consumption preferences.

Atsushi Miura, a Japanese sociologist, divided the Japanese consumer society into four stages in his book The Rise of Sharing: Fourth-stage Consumer Society in Japan: minority middle-class consumption, family-centered consumption, personalized consumption, and non-branded product consumption. To what extent will the Chinese consumer society follow this development path? What consumption era is China in and will China enter in the future?

In fact, no one will fall in love with a FMCG product because of marketing, "the only thing that leads to love is the product itself". If the product is not good, marketing can only create "fast disappearing products". The "Internet spirit" contribute to the rapid growth of Chinese internet industry, and its core lies in the idea of "user first, focus on products, respect for talent", and this also applies in the FMCG industry.

With the advent of a new digitalization cycle, both mature and emerging brands are busy deploying their self-operated tracks, driving a new round of commercial competition. Consumer-centric "social trade market" brings new consumption increments to brands, and the WeChat ecosystem that connects hundreds of millions of users has become a high-quality bridge between brands and consumers. When a 0-to-1 connection between brands and customers is established, how to continue to operate and enhance efficiency and realize repurchase through touchpoint contacts has become a major challenge for the brand in the next stage. Locking in this new incremental volume race track, Tencent’s sharing will focus on the model of subscription attraction, efficiency enhancement and repurchase under the WeChat ecosystem, and will tell a good marketing method that integrates both seeding and weeding, and comes up with creative business solutions that are highly adapted to the genes of food and beverage brands.

With the rapid rise of emerging markets, consumers' cognitive thinking has gradually upgraded. How to break away from the fast-food marketing model, let consumers hear the "brand story" with the original flavor, and sustain brand vitality? At Zhihu, committed creators and their hard-core content build a brand-new platform for dialogues on content between brands, consumers, and capital.

Visit Zhihu and try a spoonful of fresh ideas!

"The price of public domain traffic is climbing, and brands are paying more attention to ROI. These two factors have made private domain traffic occupy the C-suite of marketing for a long time, but the growth bottleneck and low activity of private domain traffic are also issues we have to face. In 2021:

-How should we look at private domains: why did they become hot-spot in the past? What role does it play?

- Rough growth or fine-tuned operation, how should food brands develop a private domain strategy?

-How to enhance user value through private domains? What should be done to co-create products and content, build digital user assets, and strengthen emotional links?"

"Taobao, Tmall, Jingdong, Pinduoduo, Weibo, WeChat, Tiktok, Kwai, Bilibili, Zhihu, RED...... Consumers are distributed like dust on every medium. For F&B brands:

-Which mediums are worth laying out? What are the attributes of different media, what kind of users are gathered, and what kind of content is more likely to be transferred?

-What is the underlying logic of the popularity of different symbols, from graphics and video to short videos?

-What are the media trends that brands should not miss in the coming year? How should brands develop their media strategy?"

Digitalization has become an essential part of everyone. Production and consumption are crucial thing which complements each other from a product and brand perspective.

For many brands, how can we develop in a rapidly evolving digital world which has become a serious issue? How can we reach every touch points thoroughly in a whole user journey?

Introducing "Bilibili 3i" marketing methodology which is the hinge to break through the boundary of brand marketing.

In the past year, many brands we have met are developing and marketing their products in the direction of wellness, but when it comes to wellness, most of brands only stay at "efficacy", lacking a more dimensional and direct feeling of consumers' health needs and psychology.

Therefore, how should a CMO find the right value point at the birth of a product concept? How to continuously influence the user's mind at all touch points between products and consumers, we see new possibilities in cases like "Eat a Rainbow" Cereal of Wugu Mofang, Less Salted Soy Sauce of LIU YUE XIAN and 0 Cal Sugar of LeSweet.

Remember how salted egg yolk swept through the F&B industry after matcha, cheese, and "dirty" brown sugar? After that, jicama, snail noodles immediately caught up. Popular flavors/ingredients are becoming faster and faster, who will consumers fall in love with next?
Based on 15 years of experience and practice in the industry, we combine multi-dimensional data and gather leading data, algorithms and knowledge graph technologies to achieve fast, complete and accurate mining of business insights, helping brands to gain insight into consumer taste preferences and explore high-potential product innovation ideas.

Marketers have heard the old saying that the marketing and branding department is the department that spends money. But I'm sure we all, more or less like me, feel that this paragraph is outdated. A large number of CMOs have become CGOs, and brands are pursuing a shorter path to purchase.

-Can we drive growth by digitalization only in marketing? With digital empowerment, how does marketing go deeper into user insights, product development, media strategy, and user experience?

-How should brands design the infrastructure of marketing digitalization, build the team, and collaborate across departments?

-Will first-party data become a key task in marketing digitalization as privacy-related data restrictions continue to expand and the price of public domain traffic rises?