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Jingdong Xu Lei and Ali Zhang Yong: Beijingers and Shanghainese, marketing and financial background, love fashion brands and suits, open personality and introverted temperament. With such a contrasting image, they are very similar in doing things.

Text / Guo Chaofei

Jd.com and Alibaba are two very different companies. Xu Lei, the new CEO of jd.com group, and Zhang Yong, the chairman and CEO of Alibaba, are also two people with different styles.

Xu Lei, who grew up in Beijing and didn’t like to wear a pair of football shoes and slippers, even wore a pair of shoes in Beijing.

“My favorite music is very diverse and has a wide range of types. I like all pop and rock music except classical music.” Xu Lei said in an interview with Tencent technology that I usually like sports. Playing football can release pressure and exercise.

Zhang Yong is from Shanghai. He comes from finance. Most of the time, he is in suits. Ma Yun has a famous saying, “if you are not afraid of heaven and earth, you are afraid of CFO as CEO.” But later, he chose Zhang Yong from CFO to take over.

Zhang Yong is introverted, and his happiness and anger are not expressed in words. Ma Yun once asked Zhang Yong, “it seems I’ve never seen you get angry?” The latter replied that he was angry sometimes, but admitted that he was rarely angry. Compared with Xu Lei’s football, Zhang Yong is more static and likes watching football and basketball.

After careful observation, the two people with such obvious differences also have many similarities. For example, they launched double 11 and 618 in Alibaba and JD respectively; Undertake the important task of transforming from PC to wireless; Carry out organizational reform and build a middle platform; In the face of the strong rise of pinduoduo, organize a counter attack in the sinking market.

The contrast will be similar to a certain extent.

Draw a similar arc

In 2007, Cai Chongxin, vice chairman of Alibaba’s board of directors, poached Zhang Yong from Shanda to Alibaba. Previously, Zhang Yong was vice president and CFO of Shanda.

After entering Alibaba, Zhang Yong was appointed CFO of Taobao. More than a year later, Zhang Yong began to take charge of a business line, which was also called Taobao Mall at that time, and later became tmall.

Zhang Yong took over a hot potato. At that time, the development of Taobao Mall was not good, and the team was scattered. Another challenge for Zhang Yong is that he comes from finance and doesn’t have much experience in specific business. In 1991, he entered Shanghai University of Finance and economics to study finance. After graduation, he worked hard in Andersen and PricewaterhouseCoopers for ten years and entered Shanda or finance line.

In order to keep Taobao Mall alive, in 2009, Zhang Yong created “double eleven” compared with “Black Friday” in the United States. Zhang Yong once recalled that the fourth quarter was the golden period of retail. In China, there was the shopping peak of the National Day holiday in early October and the Christmas shopping season in December. November was the time of drastic changes in the season. People needed to store a lot of things from late autumn to early winter, so “we have a window in November”.

Compared with the future, the first double 11 can be said to be quite bleak. At that time, only 27 brands participated, with sales of 52 million yuan, and the figure reached 936 million only after the second year. In this regard, Ma Yun was very pleased. In 2011, Taobao Mall was separated from Taobao and developed independently. Zhang Yong was appointed general manager of Taobao Mall. In 2021, the total transaction volume of Alibaba’s double 11 was 540.3 billion.

One year before Zhang Yong joined Alibaba, Liu qiangdong met his noble man, Xu Xin, founder of today capital. Later, Xu Xin invested US $10 million in Jingdong and recommended Xu Lei to Liu qiangdong.

At the beginning, Xu Lei didn’t join JD immediately. He only served as the marketing consultant of JD. He didn’t serve as the vice president of marketing of JD mall until 2009. Even so cautious, Xu Lei once left and entered belle to be responsible for e-commerce business. Two years later, Xu Lei returned to Jingdong to take charge of marketing and soon became the head of Jingdong wireless business department.

Xu Lei mainly did two things when he entered jd.com. First, in 2014, unlike Alibaba, which created jd.com’s own shopping festival, he changed the original “red June” to “618”. Xu Lei’s logic is to highlight the theme of 618 and make sure that consumers remember a symbol.

Today, double 11 and 618 have become major marketing promotion activities in the e-commerce industry.

The second thing Xu Lei does is wireless. After the double 11 in 2014, Xu Lei officially took over the wireless business department. According to his memory, it took about a year and a half to strengthen the transformation of mobile. In 2015, the orders of 618 JD mobile terminals had exceeded 60%. On the one hand, users have accepted and enjoyed the experience of mobile shopping; On the other hand, jd.com has made many upgrades, such as making efforts in marketing and operation, optimizing traffic flow and increasing users’ shopping needs.

“At that time, we firmly believed that in the era of mobile Internet, we had to speed up again.” Xu Lei said.

In April 2017, Xu Lei became the CMO of JD group and reported to Liu qiangdong. Jingdong newly established the group’s CMO system, which is fully responsible for the integrated marketing of Jingdong group, including mall, finance, insurance, logistics, JD cloud and other businesses, as well as the overall domestic market public relations strategy planning of the group. JD evaluated Xu Lei and made outstanding contributions to the construction and shaping of JD brand and the strategy of transformation to mobile terminal.

Zhang Yong started Ali’s transformation and mobile earlier than Xu Lei.

In September 2013, Zhang Yong became the COO of Alibaba group and reported to Lu Zhaoxi, who took over as CEO of the group soon. At that time, Ali was in an anxious period of transition to mobile. In October 2013, Zhang Yong proposed at the Group Organization Department conference that “the whole group takes wireless as the most important strategy” and “all in wireless”. However, Lu Zhaoxi’s idea is to transform wireless through social networking, so we should expand “communication”.

After taking over Alibaba wireless business department, Zhang Yong changed his thinking, invested the group’s efforts to expand mobile Taobao, and finally let Alibaba complete the mobile transformation. In May 2015, Zhang Yong succeeded Lu Zhaoxi as CEO of Alibaba.

Zhang Yong and Xu Lei, two people with completely different starting points and experiences, drew such a similar arc in Ali and JD.

Zhongtai campaign

Both Zhang Yong and Xu Lei believe that the realization strategy should be realized through organization and personnel adjustment