What's keeping me up: Decathlon HK's Matthew Li

Most of us have heard of the terms branding and performance marketing. Yet, industry players have long been talking about how to strike a balance between the two to forge emotional bonds with their consumers, and at the same time drive long term sales for their businesses.

Leading a team size of nine, Matthew Li, head of brand and marketing, Decathlon Hong Kong, who is responsible for the brand’s communications content, digital marketing, CRM and loyalty, and creative, said that with the outlook remaining uncertain, brands will continue to drive more functional and less emotional connections with consumers.  

As such, he believed that brands need to stay agile, which may mean breaking traditional ideologies as a marketer. The second thing is to understand the playground marketers are playing in and accept what can and cannot be controlled around the business priorities. 

In this episode, Li shares with us his biggest worry during his time as a marketing leader and what keeps him going.    

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What is the biggest thing you worry about? 

With the economic downturn and change in consumer habits, the pressure on the retail sector is high, which forces brands to look more into short-term commercial-driven solutions and less into long-term branding investments.   

With the outlook remaining uncertain, brands will continue to face this pressure and drive more functional and less emotional connections, building more short-term and less long-term relationships with our customers. This is a vicious cycle that hinders growth in the industry. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: How do you deal with this worry?

The first thing is to stay agile, which may mean breaking traditional ideologies as a marketer. The second thing is to understand the playground I am playing in and accept what can and cannot be controlled around the business priorities.  

Once these are clear to myself and the team, it's time to unleash our creativity to find the best solutions and sometimes workarounds, which I believe exist most of the time but they are often not obvious and require us to think outside the box.  

Lastly, reinforcing and developing connections with more and different people, be it internally or externally, also helped expand my mind to cope with different situations. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: As a leader, how do you deal with it when your staff tells you the work is creating mental pressure and wellbeing issues? 

During these times, the most important thing is not to offer solutions, but to listen and understand the root cause of these issues. It is also important for me as a leader to remember everyone is different and there is no best practice or one-size-fits-all solution to these topics.  

Luckily, Decathlon has a fantastic culture of putting people first and investing time regularly not only to debrief teammates' professional performances and development but also to understand their pleasures and displeasures. A regular session like this could last up to a couple of hours and occur every few weeks.  

Still, we all believe this is a good investment because people are our biggest asset. We take this very seriously by being honest and transparent, so these issues are often quickly detected for me to take timely and concrete actions.

With a fantastic culture like this, it's my job as a leader to stay available and be proactive in anticipating potential issues and not just be reactive.  

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What keeps you going? 

As a marketer and a leader, one of my biggest motivations is of course seeing the impact of the work done by the team, but I also equally enjoy the process because each experience is a chance to grow.

On a personal level, it motivates me greatly to know what I do impacts not only the business but also the society and its citizens.

In Decathlon, our purpose is to "move people through the wonders of sport" and that means making sports accessible to bring the benefit of sports to as many people as possible, including fighting sedentarism which negatively influences our society on many levels. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: How do you boost employee morale when facing obstacles/challenges? 

On a team level, we only win and lose together and there's no individuality. This is very important for the team to understand because things are not always going to be positive and when times get tough, each teammate needs to believe the whole team including myself is there to support him/her. On an individual level, I would reinstate that everyone is different and is motivated by different things, so it is important for me as a leader to understand that and create a positive environment for the team to excel in. 

Join us this coming 26 June for Content360 Hong Kong, a one-day-two-streams extravaganza under the theme of "Content that captivates". Get together with our fellow marketers to learn about AI in content creation, integration of content with commerce and cross-border targeting, and find the recipe for success within the content marketing world!

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