My Career Narrative

Beginning with data

In 2019, I had summer school at UC Berkeley and took a course called Intro to Principles of Data Science, where i learnt about how to manipulate and analyze data through Pandas and implement basic regression analysis in Python. Walking through numerous interesting hands-on projects such as sentiment analysis of Trump’s Twitter and a spam filter, I was fascinated by the power of data and would like to know the principles behind those models.

Therefore, I chose Statistics as my major during my undergraduate study. In the following 3 years, I acquired different statistical modeling skills such as time series, machine learning and stochastic process. I love to solve problems using data and always seeking opportunity to apply what I learn to real life. The initial motivation for me to pursue a career in analytics came from a favor I did when I was a sophomore. My father’s friend, who worked in the Shanghai Fire Department, asked me to provide some ideas about the digital transformation project. I performed some analysis on historical conflagration data and built a random forest model to classify those cases into three levels. It was the first time that I had applied what I learnt in class to solve real-life problems and started thinking of applying analytic skills in work.

Integrate Into Business

Among my internship experiences, two of them made a huge impact on me, where I found my passion and gained insights.

At Danone as an advanced-analytics intern, I got the chance to solve business problems with data. The team was developing a machine learning model to predict future offtakes. It was not only a technical problem, but also a business problem. Despite of tuning parameters and designing algorithms, we also tried to improve the model from the business prospective. We identified and verified factors which affected sales and put them in the model. Through this experience, I not only learnt how to integrate data with business, but more importantly, immersed in the business context and gained business acumen.

At the beginning of 2022, I joined GrothBox, a start-up company which focused on studying and solving business growth related problems.

My first research project started with the digital transformation implemented within L’Oreal. We conclude 2 main reasons why L’Oreal transformed to digital. First is the main comsumer group switched from people born in 1960-70s to 80s and 90s, second is the growing time people spent online or on mobile phones. Therefore, in 2014 the company put forward its digital transformation strategy. The strategy was constructed with 3 parts: E-commerce, Data Technology and Consumer. They also set up their own data department CDMO and since then the growth rate speed up. A through analysis report can be seen from here. (In Chinese)

The second project was to study the power of social media in leveraging marketing campaigns. A typical case we studied was ANTA’s great win during the Winter Olympics. As the sponsor of the Chinese Delegation and Olympic Committee, ANTA conducted huge amounts of campaigns on Weibo and gained huge exposure to the audience, and also a significant boost in the sale. By utilizing NLP to conduct sentiment analysis and topic extraction, we summarized 2 strategies ANTA took, bound with trending topic and elicit people’s emotion.

My third study was about Membership System or in other words, brands’ loyalty programme. We selected several representative brands such as Starbucks and McDonald and studied how they approach customer and retain those customers. They all applied same structure in their loyalty programme, accumulating points; membership discount and selling monthly plans. But customers are loyal to the subsidy rather than to the brand. To transform from programme loyalty to brand loyalty, interaction is important. Those brand frequently approach their member through app notifications, SMS and even phone calls. And brands tend to use automated interaction powered by AI to provide customers customized experience.