Marketing on Fengyu WANG

Holding Is Buying

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Open any financial terminal and pull up the rating list for Hong Kong large caps, and you will see a spectacle: one company, Tencent, tracked by more than forty investment banks — forty-two of them rating it Buy or Strong Buy, two Hold, one Sell.

Forty-five analysts study the same company. Why can almost none of them bring themselves to say the two words: don’t buy?

Some say Hold is the neutral stance, refusing to pick a side. I find the idea of Hold strange — if you hold, aren’t you buying? A stock you bought yesterday now carries a Hold rating, meaning keep holding it; keeping holding it is staying long. The people who truly refuse to take sides sold long ago. So this list contains no neutral party: forty-four longs, and one person too frightened to speak.

Loud in the Mall, Silent on the Tag

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Walk into a shopping mall and the Zara logo sits where the foot traffic is thickest. Open a garment tag and not one designer’s name appears. Bright in the open, hidden at the bottom — the same company, the same people. Against its peers the contrast is sharper: H&M and Gap spend heavily on promotions, while Zara barely runs any. One company manages to be loud and silent at the same time, — not a split personality, but bookkeeping. Exposure is a budget: the bright parts go into the acquisition column, the hidden parts go into the risk column, and the two ledgers are kept apart. The customer positioning sits in plain view as well — middle class and above, relatively high income. Those shoppers trust location and storefront more than promotional flyers, so the budget belongs where they walk.

The Answer in Four SIM Slots

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The number-one mobile phone brand in Africa is a Chinese company. Transsion: shipments grew year after year for a decade, from 2006 to 2016, until it held first place across the continent — the king of mobile phones there. On what? Its handsets are neither the cheapest nor the most advanced. The answer is almost embarrassingly small: four SIM slots, a battery that lasts thirty days on one charge, a camera tuned for dark skin. None of it is a technical breakthrough. Every piece is the result of thinking through who the user actually is.

Treating Everyone Equally Punishes the Best Customers

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Call an airline for help, and how fast a human picks up depends on the membership tier. Diamond members reach a person right away; gold members wait; everyone else stays in the queue and finally hears that all lines are busy. Some find this outrageous: everyone paid for a ticket, so why the difference in treatment? The objection sounds principled, but it rests on a more basic fact it refuses to see.

Telling Time Is Free, What Gets Worn Is Not

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two taps on a phone return the time in any city on earth. By that logic, the wristwatch should have died as a category long ago. It did not. Does anyone truly need a watch? No. Yet watches still sell for twenty-five thousand dollars. In the same collection, a watch bought for five thousand decades ago now stands at twenty-five thousand; the alternative back then was a forty-dollar Swatch, still worth a few dozen dollars today. Both do the same job: showing the time. The function has been free for years, the business is still alive — where does the money come from?

The Compliment Was Scheduled

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lecturer tells the story of buying glasses twenty-one years ago. Ruth, the optician, first had him try on frames that were anything but the style he asked for. Then she lined up three options. Option 1, she announced, was somewhat boring, ordinary. Option 2 was a little nicer. Option 3 was the game changer. And then she added: most likely, he was going to want Option 1. She was absolutely right — he had already taken out his wallet to pay. She stopped him there. Today, she said, she was going to sell him Option 3, because it was the right option. The customer walks to the register on his own, and she stops him with her own hands — that order of operations is worth remembering; it comes back later.

Octopus Died in Australia, and Lived in Hong Kong

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One technology, two sales pitches delivered one after another — one buyer said no, the other said yes. The refusal came from Australia; the acceptance came from Hong Kong. Decades later, Hong Kong became the first place in the world to use the Octopus card. The most interesting part is not the technology itself — a technology’s fate is not decided in the laboratory, but in the soil it lands on. So why did it come alive in Hong Kong of all places?

One Point Of Retention, Five Points Of Profit

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Companies reward what they measure. On the report, the brightest number is new customers, so budgets rush toward acquisition. Growth keeps a company alive, and new customers keep growth alive — the instinct is not wrong; the mistake is giving it all the applause. Acquisition wins are reported every month; retention victories go unwritten. Yet bottom-line profit lives somewhere else. People who worked at AIG ran the numbers, and the numbers are cold and clear: the report and the bottom line answer two different questions — one decides how loud the story sounds, the other decides how much cash remains. There is a tidy definition for the ideal posture: customer centricity, putting the customer at the center of every decision. Fine word, different ledger — what a company actually pays for, row after row, is the report’s question.

Responsibility Has Layers; Donations Record Only One

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A company that donates nothing may be the most responsible company around — provided its responsibility has layers. Social responsibility has no single definition: employee welfare, governance transparency, environmental friendliness — everyone reads it differently. One borrowed model draws it as three circles. The inner circle is the basic economic function — growth, products, jobs. The second layer demands that the exercise of that economic function stay sensitive to changing social values. The outermost circle is actively participating in improving the social environment. Three circles, not three kinds of responsibility — one responsibility, on three floors.

The Organization That Wanted to Change, and Died Wanting

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How did Kodak die? The textbook has a standard answer: arrogance. Management failed to see digital coming, clung to film profits, and got run over. The story is complete, the causality smooth. It has exactly one flaw — it is wrong. Kodak was not a befuddled old company: in the film era it was practically mandatory travel gear. The moment digital cameras appeared, the senior managers saw the future and resolved to pursue it. What killed the company was something more common and more embarrassing: it wanted to change, and could not.

Repeat Buyers Are Not Loyal Buyers

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Customer loyalty has a four-quadrant matrix, sorted along two dimensions: repeat purchases and attitude. Most of the grid is easy to read. High repeat purchases with a good attitude is real loyalty. Low purchases with a bad attitude is no loyalty at all. A good attitude without many purchases is potential waiting to be cashed in. One quadrant, though, is deformed: they buy again and again, and their attitude is poor — sometimes extremely high-maintenance. This crowd keeps its wallet here and its opinion elsewhere. On one report the repeat-purchase curve looks beautiful; on another the complaint log looks terrible; both curves point at the same names, and managers tend to read only the first.

The Smallest Unit of Service Is a Name

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An American acne-skincare brand deployed a batch of vending machines with facial recognition in Japan. A member walks up, and the screen lights up with the name: welcome back, Gene. The machine names the product bought last time and asks whether to order it again; payment details are already stored, and with one yes, the product comes out. Japan has more vending machines per capita than anywhere else — the machines were placed in the market most used to unmanned retail, with recognition added to put the act of knowing a person back in.

Recognized, Not Watched

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Same mall, same recognition system, two kinds of message. A member walks into Langham Place and the phone buzzes at once: welcome back, Gene — followed by a list of offers only members can claim. The list arrives before any store has been entered. Passing an American Eagle store brings another: a members-only special, the store on the left, twenty percent off today. The welcome and the store advertisement come from the same system. Recognizing a person is service; shadowing a person is business. The dividing line is not the technology — so where is it?

Quality Got Localized Too

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reviewing the lessons of the China market, Uniqlo’s founder Tadashi Yanai once said: to adapt to China’s lower income levels, the company lowered both product prices and quality — in hindsight, that was a mistake, an over-localization. One sentence, two actions: cut the price, cut the quality. The error was not in the first one.

Cutting the Price Was Right; Cutting Quality Is Another Matter

Some say adapting to local customs is common sense — a market with lower incomes deserves somewhat lower-spec products, and holding everything at original price and original quality is arrogance. The price should indeed follow the local market; that half of the argument stands. But the same company proved that another road exists: fleece priced at 1,900 yen was itself a response to a low-budget market, with not one gram of quality removed. There are two roads for adaptation — change the cost structure, or change the quality floor. Choosing between them amounts to defining the local customer: short of money, or not deserving of good things. That definition was never put on the table at the time; it hid inside the purchase order.

Going First Means Paying Everyone's Tuition

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vodafone was a European mobile carrier and the first mover in European 3G technology and services. The price of going first began with an astronomical license fee. The 3G service launched in 2001; for the first three or four years almost nobody used it. Users said it sounded good but did not work well. Investors looked at that license and concluded the people who bought it had probably lost their minds. Only after the iPhone arrived did 3G take off. The cost of educating users was paid in full by the first mover; once the education was complete, the second company walked in without spending a cent on it.

Companies That Live a Century Keep Arriving as Outsiders

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Say Nokia, and mobile phones come to mind. Yet more than a hundred years ago, the company sold wood pulp: Finland had forests, and turning trees into pulp and selling the pulp was the whole business. Later the roads filled with cars, every wheel needed rubber, and the company moved from timber into rubber. Later still, judging that mobile technology would matter, it moved into handsets and became the world’s number one phone maker of the 2G era. Today it sells 5G equipment, and has even changed what it calls itself — no longer a telecom manufacturer, but a provider of business technology solutions. Three changes of trade in a century, and every entry was made as an outsider.

Nobody Gets Fired for Buying IBM

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the workplace dictionary, the three letters CYA stand for an unprintable mantra about covering one’s own back — its meaning is simple: protect the person who made the decision. Those three letters explain the most stable pattern in enterprise procurement. Given the same requirements, the option that costs half as much and does everything asked of it loses; the expensive one wins. This is not stupidity. It is rationality — with the beneficiary being the buyer’s career, not the company.

No One Left to Copy

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After Huawei became the world’s number one telecom equipment maker, Ren Zhengfei said the industry had entered an unpopulated zone. Past the top seat, there are no companies ahead. The era of following others is over, and the quota for copying homework has been used up. The tuition of leadership only starts being collected on the day the first chair is taken.

Humility Is Not a Posture, It Is Information

Some say being number one is glory, and humility is a posture staged for the press. Exactly backwards. After taking the top spot, Huawei became humbler than before, and began to genuinely respect former leaders of the market such as Motorola — because those who have walked that road know how hard leading is, and how many times each step nearly slipped. Humility is not a performance of virtue; it is information. Those who have not walked the road talk big. Those who have, talk less.

The Day the Martini Shrank

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lecturer spent fifteen years drinking at a Hong Kong bar — every Thursday, without fail. By his own account he was the fully committed regular, the kind every retention talk describes: fifteen years, more than seven hundred Thursdays. About three years ago, he noticed the martinis getting smaller: a different glass, less drink. He never paid attention to the price — he admits he did not care — until one night he finally looked. About 200 Hong Kong dollars for a martini already shrunk into a smaller glass. As he left, the manager gave the usual send-off: same time next Thursday, Mr. Ray. He stopped. Sorry, he said, there will be no next Thursday. Traveling? No. This is a breakup — it’s not me, it’s you.

A Million Jobs Won't Save a Casino

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Start with the flattering part: Macau’s GDP per capita has long ranked among the highest in the world. Fifteen years of free education, universal free healthcare, and an annual cash handout for every resident. The welfare is real, not a legend.

Then ask one question: where does the money come from?

It comes from what loses at the gambling table. More precisely, from a particular kind of loser — people whose loss is not bad luck but a designed outcome. The lighting, the sounds, the constant near-misses: the entire environment exists to bypass your rational mind and stimulate dopamine directly. Gambling addiction is a recognized behavioral disorder under the WHO’s classification framework. Which means the most profitable part of this machine earns its money from people who have already lost the ability to choose.

Loyalty Does Not Expire When the System Does

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netscape was once the catalyst of the internet. Before it appeared, going online was a specialist’s craft: to reach a website, a long string of internet addresses had to be memorized first. With its Navigator, a keyword was enough to connect. The internet thereby turned from a tool for a few professionals into a public commodity, and that credit belongs to the first one who built it right. In its day it held the position Google holds now — the first browser a person could genuinely get online with. Then Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer, and Netscape disappeared. One lecturer who had used Navigator throughout his doctoral years in Britain admitted years later that he still used it, out of loyalty, even though it was gone — all he could do was follow its followers — and that barely using Google was, by his own account, probably a mistake. When a familiar browser vanishes, where does the loyalty go? That is the first mover’s most valuable legacy — and the hardest product users ever try to return.

Lead Users Know Tomorrow's Demand First

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before a format travels from one country to the next, someone has already played it out. TikTok ran an anime drawing challenge in Japan; the challenge later spread to anime communities across Southeast Asia. The path looks like a platform decision made in a meeting room, but its starting point was a group of people who felt the itch earlier than the market — demand not yet formed, and they were already building their own fixes. In 2005, von Hippel turned this into a theory: Democratizing Innovation, published by MIT Press. The claim is direct. Lead users perceive demand pain points earlier than ordinary users, and the practical experience they hold is called sticky information. Sticky is the key word: what sticks is hard to move, and what is hard to move is valuable precisely because competitors cannot move it either.

The Data Executes the Hypotheses, and Apologizes to No One

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A study of 137 mobile-phone consumers executed, one by one, three of the industry’s favorite instincts. Instinct one: longer battery life, higher satisfaction. The data says the 18-hour battery option had a statistically significant negative effect on satisfaction — beta of minus 0.6154. Instinct two: the more AI, the better. The data says users without ChatGPT were more satisfied, coefficient 1.00677. Instinct three: the stronger the brand, the higher the satisfaction. The data says Apple scored lowest in brand perception, 1.88 against OPPO’s 2.74, yet the correlation between brand choice and satisfaction was 0.064 with p = 0.457 — effectively none. In the interviews, 10 of 12 participants also called recent iPhones lacking in innovation. Three instincts, all reversed.

Easy to Take a Booking, Hard to Keep It

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A scene from a sitcom, at a car rental counter. A customer walks in holding a reservation confirmation. The clerk says: yes, we received it. But unfortunately, all our cars are rented out. The customer asks back: isn’t a reservation exactly about keeping the car? That is the whole point of a reservation. The clerk has no answer. The audience laughs on the spot. The laugh has a reason: everyone has met the instant confirmation that evaporates at pickup. The dialogue is exaggerated; the structure is real. Comedy works by magnifying common sense, and the lecturer screened this clip in class as a specimen of customer service going wrong — not as a joke.

The Birthday Greeting That Sells Nothing

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago, no birthday greeting was innocent. Sending a message cost money, and money spent had to pay for itself, so every greeting carried a sales pitch — the birthday wish was the wrapper, the pitch was the filling. Then, about fifteen years ago, all of that changed. Today’s global best practice among CRM companies runs the other way: send a birthday greeting that simply says happy birthday, and sell nothing at all. What changed over those fifteen years was not the copywriting. It was the accounting. Every touchpoint posts an entry in an account: a greeting with a pitch is a withdrawal, a greeting without one is a deposit.

The System Was a Guess

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thirty years ago, a consultant newly arrived in Hong Kong spent the first week on the job being shown a system the company was proud of. Sit down, watch the demo. Afterwards came a single question: how did this get designed the way it did? The answer was not an explanation but the fact itself — it was completely wrong. Millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of work, and the thing was entirely wrong. The person brought in to fix it happened to be the one who would actually have to use it.

The Next Product Is Never in the Survey

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every product team owns the same tool: the survey. It is considered basic craft: interviews, questionnaires, user personas — the more solid the research, the closer the product sits to real demand, at least so it sounds. Ask users what they want, collect the answers, build them back into the roadmap. Hand someone a phone and ask what could be improved, and the answers come back in one voice — keys easier to press, a brighter screen, a battery that lasts longer. Every answer is reasonable. Every answer is an increment. The next product never lives in these answers. A classroom put it plainly: people don’t know what they want until it is placed in front of them.

No Proposal Under a Hundred Million

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A meeting room in a multinational company. The presenter gets to slide three or four before the CEO from New York stands up: heard enough — not doing it. Not because the proposal is weak. Quite the opposite. The presenter could build a demonstration that impresses everyone in the room and argue every line of logic. What killed it was a single sentence of house rule: at that time, the company entertained no changes unless a proposal produced at least one hundred million dollars in incremental revenue.

The Ones Who Complain Have Not Left

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Flip the problem over and it becomes an opportunity. Best-practice companies treat complaints exactly that way: a person who calls up furious, once handled properly, can end up among the most satisfied customers the company has. This is not customer-service rhetoric; it is arithmetic. A complaint is the cheapest diagnostic report a company will ever receive — and the person writing it has not left yet. Complaining is one of the last ways a customer still spends time on the relationship. Silence costs nothing, walking away costs nothing; only complaining means the outcome still matters to someone.

Clean Was Never the Point

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Soap can be produced anywhere in the world, bought everywhere, at a low price. So why pay a little more for one particular brand? Logic leaves only three roads: cleans better, best ingredients, best price. One company said none of the three. Its advertisement never showed a bar of soap from start to finish. Soap is the hardest product to sell, which is why the soap story is the one worth reading.

Churn Has Only Three Doors

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In class, a lecturer gave an insurance example. A customer believed she would have to pay 400 dollars a month. Six months in, she said even 100 was beyond her and she would let the policy lapse. She did not know a plan existed that would bring the cost down to 75 and keep the coverage intact. She held out those six months not because she could not afford it, but because nobody told her a third road existed. The insurer flagged her as at-risk of churn, reached out, and redesigned the plan around her budget. A nearly certain churn stopped at one phone call. Six months earlier, that call is a renewal; six months later, there is no one left to call. The numbers follow the lecturer’s classroom framing — take them as illustration, not statistics.

A Billion Dollars Buys a Head Start

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2017, the Wall Street Journal headline said it plainly: Musical.ly was acquired for as much as $1 billion. Counted by head, the price bought more than 60 million monthly active users — an overpay by any arithmetic. Counted by time, the picture changes. How many years does it take to cold-start from zero to 60 million monthly actives, with competitors watching from the sidelines the whole way? What TikTok bought, booked by head, is users; booked by time, it is a first move — a Western teenage user base, local operations experience, and the red-ocean years skipped. This is also the inward path of open innovation: a capability the company lacks is taken in from outside, then grown into its own.

I Wanted the Book, Not Your Tool

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I saw an open-source batch-rewriting project, and my first reaction wasn’t admiration — it was regret. Why did nobody publish the books it produced? What use is just the tool? The Count of Monte Cristo rewritten in the voice of Dream of the Red Chamber — that would be delightful. But he never showed me the book. I wanted to read the book, not look at his tool.

That’s the line between a content business and a coding business. Tools get stolen: this project will be copied within days — if Tencent wanted the feature, it ships tomorrow. Content doesn’t get stolen: Dream of the Red Chamber retold by a forum troll is genuinely appealing, like someone dubbing GTA in northeastern dialect. The code can be copied. The flavor can’t.