Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Juliana Chu

One of our esteemed finalists is Juliana Chu (pictured), VP of digital and eCommerce for Shiseido APAC.

Chu joined Shiseido in mid-2021, and before that she was at Kimberly-Clark for more than a decade from 2010 to 2021. Some of the roles she has helmed include associate director of strategy, and director of digital and analytics for the APAC region.

With so many years of experience, she is an expert at what she does. Her current focus is on Shiseido’s growth in the region – with particular attention on omni-channel revenue via aggressive transformation in digital and eCommerce – covering five main areas. These areas are eCommerce acceleration; customer acquisition and relationship management; 360 data-driven media planning; consumer and market intelligence; and digital organisation and capability building.

Under the eCommerce acceleration, she covers the growth of the eCommerce business via establishing a strategic win-win partnership with leading retailers, alongside delivering data-driven shopping experiences that incorporate personalised offerings, and activities leveraging live-streaming, beauty technology, gamification, and online to offline innovation.

This is then branched out to customer acquisition and relationship management wherein she builds and executes an APAC CRM strategy and tech infrastructure to deliver personalised consumer acquisition and engagement experiences across all channels, both online and offline.

Chu also executes 360-degree data-driven media planning across paid, earned and owned media and gathers consumer and market intelligence by conducting various external consumer understanding studies as well as subscribed marketing panel data and social listening surveys.

Last, but definitely not least, she also handles digital organisation and capability building to ensure the continual upgrading of the team’s capabilities to “drive the digital engine”. This includes implementing the right organisational structure and capabilities for each country and region, and digital education curriculum building.

She credits much of her achievements to her team being able to push boundaries to achieve double-digital growth for three consecutive years. In the past few years she has been able to achieve growth in eCommerce, despite a return to brick-and-mortar stores after social distancing restrictions were relaxed across APAC.

When asked how the team found success in such a competitive space, Chu said setting the right eCommerce channel strategy was key.

After setting the right strategy, the next focus is delivering the ultimate data-driven customer experience which is undeniably difficult in a highly competitive online beauty market as differentiating oneself can be a hard task. Last, focusing on execution, based on market analytics, is an important criterion for the team.

“Whether it’s product offerings, consumer targeting strategies, a media channel mix, pricing and promotion tactics, all of it can be A/B tested and optimised in the most agile manner,” she said.

“Agile decision making and execution is a big key success factor for eCommerce.”