What a biscuit aisle taught me about discounts

In the spring of 2007 I stood in a Xiamen supermarket and watched shoppers walk past our cream biscuits at full price because they had learnt that the promotion would return within a month. I was an assistant brand manager at Huaxinpu Foods, and I had helped plan that cycle. Every promotion had met its volume plan. Together they had taught customers that the regular price was for people who were not paying attention. I have thought about that aisle in nearly every pricing discussion since.

I studied advertising at Xuanbei Arts and Commerce College, graduating in June 2001, and joined Jinmolan Advertising in Shanghai as an account executive the following month. Agency life taught me to write quickly and to accept that the client's legal reviewer was usually right. A line I liked for a dairy drink was removed because it compared the product with every competitor in a way nobody could substantiate. China's advertising law already prohibited superlatives such as 'best', and I learnt to treat claim review as part of the craft rather than an obstacle to it.

In July 2005 I moved client-side to Huaxinpu, a family-owned biscuit and snack maker selling through supermarkets across southern China. I planned promotions for two biscuit lines and then managed the cream-biscuit brand from 2008. The work was mostly trade marketing: display fees, promotion depth and the timing of price cuts that buyers requested. I began measuring what a promotion cost after the event, including the full-price sales it had simply pulled forward, and used that evidence to reduce our deepest discounts.

Ruiqinglu Tea in Hangzhou hired me in April 2010 to build its online marketing. Tea gifts were moving to online stores, and the November shopping festival had become a contest of discounts. I ran our stores through four of those festivals. Online sales grew from RMB11 million to RMB64 million, but too much of that growth was bought with our coupons stacked on platform subsidies. I came to see an online price as a public statement against which every other channel would be measured.

I joined Hemeiqiao in September 2014 as head of marketing. The company then had 76 shops in Jiangxi, revenue of about RMB430 million and a strong local reputation for walnut cakes and flaky pastries. Its marketing was a calendar of festival posters. I built a team, opened online stores in 2015 and started a free membership programme in 2016. When interest in domestic brands and traditional design grew sharply, some colleagues proposed presenting us as an old house. We were founded in 1992 and hold no official time-honoured brand recognition, so we implied neither. Our redesigned packaging used Jiangxi blue-and-white porcelain motifs and told the founder's story as it actually happened.

From 2019 I led marketing and franchise development together, bringing our shops into county towns through local partners. That role taught me that a franchisee experiences every marketing decision as a cost or a margin, usually funded from family savings. When the founding family welcomed a minority investor in 2020 and formed an executive committee, I was asked to lead a single marketing function, and I became chief marketing officer in January 2022. I report to the chief executive, Jingrou Pan, and present to the board as an invitee. I have not held a directorship.

I lead through five heads: brand and design, membership, content and live selling, shop and trade marketing, and consumer insight. I ask each of them to bring the cost of a proposal as well as its upside. I expect our quality and regulatory manager to see a claim before a product name is chosen, not after packaging is printed. I care more about evidence than about how polished a presentation looks, and colleagues who disagree with me know that a written objection will be read and answered.

The three cases on this site show that method under pressure. A volume-rich livestream offer would have undercut members and franchise partners. A reduced-sugar recipe was not yet entitled to the claim the team wanted. A member coupon had become the reason people visited. In each, I chose the slower option and paid for it in measurable ways, and in each I can name something I would now do differently.

I am interested in one external board role. I would bring a practical understanding of consumer pricing, advertising claims and franchise relationships in Chinese consumer businesses. I would also need to learn how a board weighs those questions against capital, risk and succession, matters on which I have contributed as an executive but never decided as a director.

Open to Board appointments

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