Profile... Unconventional Lee enjoys shaking things up

She may be softly spoken, but DHL China marketing director Joy Lee is not afraid to ruffle a few feathers. She even describes herself as “the mean client”. The comment is meant as a joke, but agencies working on DHL’s pitch will recognise the grain of truth within it. Lee has deliberately banned them from including television spend in their proposals.

Such thinking flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which regards TV as China’s most influential medium. But Lee’s decision is based on a strong understanding of the market as well as of how easily agencies can become complacent in their media planning. It also reflects how the rising cost of airtime at CCTV is forcing advertisers to consider alternative media as budgets come under pressure.

“Currently, 80 per cent of our adspend goes to TV, and CCTV’s fees have been going up by around 20 per cent a year,” she says, noting that marketing budgets generally do not increase at comparable rates. Nevertheless, there are already indications that CCTV is reviewing its pricing policies in light of the global economic slowdown and the end of the Olympics, which helped bring TV ad rates to unprecedented levels. Tellingly, even though Lee is prepared to defend her arguments about, for instance, the over dependence on TV (“It’s a simple story - lower costs and get bigger returns”), she also seems to savour shaking things up for the sake of it. “I’ve been trying new things for years - online, search, billboards, LCD displays,” she says with a slightly impish grin.

Lee’s playfulness, however, co-exists with a keen understanding of the weaknesses of the current agency model. With a track record littered with big client-side names such as Nike and PepsiCo, she has the confidence and experience to criticise the way the industry works. “Agencies are just not proactive enough,” she argues, both regarding innovation and being clear about differentiating themselves. This is part of her rationale for calling for a media review in the first place. “I want to keep them working hard - I don’t want them to stay in their comfort zone,” she says.

If she can get what she’s looking for, Lee is prepared to challenge global alignments to support an agency that responds to the pitch with a “brilliant proposal”.
She adds: “We’re aligned with Carat globally and with MEC in Asia-Pacific, and they have been invited to pitch - but we’ve tried to invite proposals from different groups, like Dentsu, to get different perspectives.”

Marketing what is primarily a business-to-business brand comes with a particular set of challenges. The China market is home to four international courier services; DHL, FedEx, UPS and TNT. Of these, DHL has the longest history in the country, having been in China for 23 years and claims a market share of 40 per cent. “To a certain extent, we’re still enjoying a first-mover advantage,” says Lee.

“Much of our marketing and communications is based on forecasting of economic trends,” she notes. “Of our team of 40 in China, half of them are analysts engaged in working out where deliveries will be from and to.”

Given the emphasis on directly approaching potential and current customers, what role does advertising play in DHL’s overall marketing strategy in China?
“Well, my CFO often asks me the same thing,” Lee chuckles. Having worked for consumer goods firms, she admits that she found an enormous difference when she stared advertising for B2B products. “Working at companies like McDonald’s was all about seduction - in my current job, we can’t actually create demand,” she argues.

What DHL can do, though, is make sure it stays top-of-mind for clients. For Lee, the most successful example of this came during the snowstorm that hit southern China at Chinese New Year.

“We stayed away from emotional responses to the crisis, and instead focused on our core business,” she says. “What we did was post advertising online to say that we were still in business, working 24/7, regardless of the weather.”

Within three days, the online ads had registered an impressive 800 million clicks. “Even when the whole region was shut down, we could deliver with only two days delay, which put us way ahead of our competitors.”

Building on that message is now the challenge for Lee - with or without TV.

Joy Lee's CV

2005 Marketing director, DHL China
2004 Managing director, SmartClub Loyalty Management
2000 Marketing director, China, McDonald's
1998 Marketing manager, China, PepsiCo
1997 Marcom manager, China, Nike