Asia-Pacific Power List 2023: Yajuan Wang (Zhiheng), Red

Yajuan Wang (Zhiheng)

Chief marketing officer
Red
China
New member 

Little Red Book, also known as Red or Xiaohongshu, is a widely popular Chinese social shopping app that boasts over 300 million monthly active users. Since its inception in 2013, it has focused on female beauty products and gained immense popularity, leading Chinese netizens to refer to Tencent's WeChat as "Little Green Book" when it introduced a new picture-sharing feature.

At the helm of this remarkable success is Red's CMO, Yajuan Wang, also known as Zhiheng. Leading the charge with her commercial team, Zhiheng has devised a new process to upgrade brand awareness, product seed-planting (influencing), and transaction conversion. As Zhiheng stated at the 2023 Red Will Commercial Conference, "Influencing is about communicating the value of a product through word of mouth," and "Red's vision to support the growth of great products has never been changed."

While Red excels in community sharing, influencing, and even deinfluencing, conversion and monetization remain challenging areas. Thus, business marketing is Zhiheng's top priority, and she and her team have worked diligently to help brands overcome these pain points. For instance, during a keynote speech at the Red Will conference, she highlighted the success of Proya, a C-beauty brand that has been working with Red for over three years. Proya continues to influence through scenarios, promoting new products through top products, and expanding from a popular single product to a matrix of products, which, according to Zhiheng, lengthens the life cycle of super products and captures users' minds, leading to commercial success.

Zhiheng and her team have also worked with various brands and third-party platforms to analyze Red's closed-loop marketing. They found that with better influencing, the vast majority of brands marketing, whether online e-commerce or offline channels, could achieve full-funnel growth.

Although Red faces the pressure of lower conversion rates on its platform, brands marketing in China cannot ignore the app's power for conversion in other online and offline channels. Red is considered a guide for millions of consumers, particularly young ones, for buying and shopping in China.

Red, with 20 million daily active content creators online, is quickly becoming a favorite platform for brands and is opening the Chinese market to new domestic and international brands. For example, when Amika, a haircare brand from the US, entered the Chinese market, it first gained popularity on the Red app by tapping into Shanghai's underground voguing community.

Despite Red's already impressive success, Zhiheng and Red's commercialisation efforts hardly cease. Recently, Red launched online group buying to open up the closed loop of local dining, allowing users to purchase group packages and consume them directly in stores from the product notes in the app. This new feature poses a challenge to Meituan and Dianping.