Doris Ke on Marketing Across the US and China
GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Doris Ke, a marketer and writer who has had an interesting career across the US and China. Doris grew up in China and went to the US for college, where she attended Bard College in New York. She started her career at Unilever where she worked on brand development, and then joined Michael Kors in New York where she was the social communications manager for APAC. In 2015, she left Michael Kors to become the head of marketing operations at Alipay US, based in Silicon Valley. In 2017, she returned to China to become the CMO of the Chinese startup YCloset (衣二三), which is often referred to as “the Chinese version of Rent the Runway”. She recently left YCloset to start her own marketing startup.
Throughout all of this, she has also been running a WeChat official account with around 100K followers called “doriskeke”, where she blogs about the cultural differences between US and China.
During this lively episode, Doris discussed the cultural differences between working at Chinese vs. American companies, lessons from her viral yet controversial marketing campaign at YCloset, what it is like to live in Beijing as a Shanghainese, and how she used the “growth mindset” to find her boyfriend (now husband).