The story of Hilary’s career progression has been interwoven with the growth of WPIC as a company—as well as with the development of China’s online landscape.
As China’s ecosystem has evolved, Hilary has constantly upped her skillset to keep abreast of market changes. She engineered many of the solutions that have allowed WPIC to adapt to these changes and consistently deliver strong results for clients.
“When I started my internship, WPIC’s marketing services were primarily related to search engine optimization,” Hilary explains.
In 2010, visibility on Baidu was at the core of a brand’s digital strategy in China. With Google pulling out of China earlier that year, Baidu was by far the largest search engine in the market—and one of the most important channels through which Chinese consumers learned about brands.
Tmall, JD, and Weibo were already online by 2010—with WeChat to follow a year later—but they hadn’t perfected the features which today make them such engaging platforms for highly personalized discovery of brands.
“Back then, traditional browser search was an important part of the pre-purchase phase of the customer journey, both in terms of discovery and research,” Hilary explains. “It was similar to the Western customer journey of today, with people relying on Google to learn about or find brands.”
“So as an intern, my main tasks involved search engine optimization of the content on our clients’ websites, as well as creating and placing paid advertisements on Baidu,” she adds.
For Hilary, the scrappy nature of start-up life meant that even as an intern, she had direct exposure to every aspect of the growing firm, from business development to client relationship management to the execution of a wide range of tailor-made services. She ended up interning part-time with WPIC for two years while she was completing her master’s degree. During that time, the firm’s client list and solution set began to grow.
“I learned so much during the internship,” Hilary says. “We had a collaborative team ethos and I got to work on engaging projects from the get-go. As a new company, we had to be able to quickly pick up new skills and work together to overcome challenges.”
That flexibility would prove crucial as Hilary and WPIC adapted to changes in the digital landscape.
After finishing her master’s program, Hilary was hired to be a full-time account manager in the marketing division. She was pivotal in securing some of the company’s first big clients, including major multinationals in the manufacturing, entertainment, and apparel industries. She subsequently managed those accounts and quickly won clients’ trust for designing and executing successful marketing campaigns.
“Hilary’s creativity and marketing prowess not only helped land some major business wins early on, but allowed us to deliver great results to those big-name clients, which really put WPIC on the map,” says Jacob.
Around that time, China’s e-commerce revolution began to pick up steam—and with Hilary’s shrewd reading of the market, WPIC re-oriented its service offerings to meet the changing market conditions.
“We realized a trend that Chinese consumers weren’t going to be relying on web search so heavily in the pre-purchase phase—customers were going to be making purchases inside the marketplaces, which couldn’t be reached through a web search,” Jacob says.
“That had major implications for the marketing strategies we developed for our clients,” Hilary says. “Instead of web search, the customer journey would involve going to e-commerce marketplaces directly and being exposed to new brands and products through personalized recommendations, ads, and interactive features.”
At the same time, Weibo was also taking off as a platform where brands could promote themselves through paid advertisements and partnerships with key opinion leaders (KOLs).
“In response to these trends, on the marketing team we developed integrated offerings for search, e-commerce platforms, and social media. This allowed our clients to work with a single vendor to cover all touchpoints with Chinese consumers,” Hilary says.
As the digital ecosystem continued to change, Hilary spearheaded new solutions to better connect brands with consumers.
“Consumers now discover brands and products through a wide range of digital channels, such as Little Red Book, Douyin, and Kuaishou,” Hilary adds. “An omni-channel approach is so important for success in China, so we created solutions to work with our brand partners across all those platforms.”
As the company grew around Hilary—expanding to additional offices in Nanjing and Hangzhou, adding a logistics division based around a cutting-edge warehouse facility in Jiangsu province, and growing to over 300 employees across China—she has been a rock on the marketing team, gradually taking on more responsibility and eventually leading the team.
In 2017 she was named Director, then became a shareholder and in 2020 Vice President, overseeing nearly 20 direct reports. She is also a member of the firm’s senior leadership team that oversees WPIC’s strategic direction.
