Commercial
Can the idea create measurable business value?
Creative marketing / Business thinking / Experience design
Creativity that moves people—and business.
I work between strategy, marketing, design and commercial teams—finding a different way to solve the business problem in front of us.
Shan Lai · Marketing Leader / Creative Marketer
Selected work2024—25
Point of viewHow I work
Creative philosophy
Creativity begins with the change we want to make.
Experience
Will people actually want to engage with it?
Human
Will people remember how the experience made them feel?
Business → Creativity → Experience → People
Case 01Commercial creativity
01
Shanghai Expo
Turning unused marketing budget into a new business platform.
A major exhibition became a coordinated business-development platform—starting with a challenge to where the marketing budget could work harder.
See the album ↘RMB 200Kredirected from long-term spend
3×six-month ROI challenge
2×+ROI delivered within six months
01 / Find the opening
Start with the business, not the booth.
In 2024, after taking responsibility for Greater China marketing, I met department heads in Shanghai to understand where marketing could create more business value.
One opportunity kept surfacing: a major import expo with direct access to target corporate clients—an opportunity PERSOL had historically been unable to fund.
02 / Reframe the budget
Make room for a more commercial bet.
I reviewed the full plan and reduced around RMB 200,000 from areas including SEO and parts of website maintenance.
Headquarters backed the opportunity with one condition: strong exposure, meaningful engagement and 3× marketing ROI within six months, excluding existing clients.
03 / Join marketing to BD
Turn attendance into a four-day plan.
With limited passes, the team researched target companies, prioritised prospects and aligned every invitation with BD objectives.
The exhibition stopped being a standalone marketing event. It became a focused platform for commercial conversations.
Activation 01
Workplace Happiness Capsule
Visitors selected their current workplace happiness level and received corresponding advice from a playful capsule machine. QR participation also created a useful feedback layer.
Activation 02
Thank Someone at Work
Visitors wrote to someone who had improved their working life, turning a corporate HR message into something emotional, human and naturally shareable.
Commercial result
The target was not fully reached. The value was still real.
Several potential client projects were placed on hold because of client budget issues. Within six months, the campaign delivered slightly above 2× marketing ROI rather than the original 3× goal.
It also generated significant exposure, strengthened client relationships, created commercial opportunities and became an important internal reference case for headquarters.
Case 01 takeaway
“Creativity is not only the booth design. It can start with how you challenge the budget, structure the business case and connect marketing directly to commercial opportunity.”
Case 01 / The album
Shanghai Expo
13 photographsClick any image to explore
Case 02Experience design
02
Survey Celebration
Turning a boring survey reminder into something people wanted to join.
If a company says every voice matters, the invitation to participate should make that value tangible—not disappear into another inbox reminder.
See the album ↘01 / The contradiction
A meaningful question wrapped in forgettable communication.
Employee surveys usually arrive as an email, a QR code, a deadline and several reminders.
The challenge was not simply how to get attention. It was how to make people feel that their participation genuinely mattered.
02 / The opportunity
Use the Mid-Autumn moment as an experience.
The survey period coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival. Instead of treating the seasonal gift and survey as separate communications, the team combined them.
Alongside the mooncake, every employee received one physical piece of a collaborative puzzle.
03 / The behaviour
Make every contribution visibly necessary.
Employees came together to complete the picture, then kept their own puzzle piece as a desk souvenir.
The object quietly carried the message forward: without each voice, the picture is incomplete.
The object
One piece of the puzzle
A small physical object made an abstract idea—employee voice—visible, personal and easy to remember.
The connection
Work and Smile
The campaign did more than ask whether people were happy at work. It tried to make the act of listening collaborative, positive and human.
The reframing
Feeling before format
The process began with the feeling and behaviour to create, not with a channel or a reminder schedule.
Case 02 takeaway
“I don't start with the communication format. I start with the feeling or behaviour we want to create.”
Case 02 / The album
Survey Celebration
06 photographsClick any image to explore
Case 03Creative under constraints
03
HR Mixer
When the budget is small, the idea has to work harder.
A deliberately provocative question gave a modest Hong Kong client event the relevance, tension and memorability that production budget could not buy.
See the album ↘01 / The constraint
Compete through an idea, not production scale.
The event could not rely on a large venue, expensive production or headline entertainment.
The strategy was to find one strong thought that could carry the invitation, conversation and experience.
02 / The hook
Should humans still hire humans?
AI was becoming one of HR's biggest topics, but much of the discussion remained broad and generic.
The question created immediate curiosity and placed PERSOL inside a more consequential conversation about recruitment's future.
03 / The format
Make it an after-work mixer.
Busy HR professionals did not need another formal seminar. They needed a relaxed space to reconnect, exchange views and hear credible perspectives.
Drinks, food, trivia, lucky draws and networking made the thought leadership feel social rather than staged.
The hook
A provocative question
One line created tension before the event began and gave the whole experience a memorable point of view.
The credibility
Relevant industry voices
Human Resources Online, industry speakers and PERSOL leadership grounded the conversation in real judgement and experience.
The experience
A mixer, not a seminar
The format gave people room to listen, challenge ideas and reconnect with peers in a more natural environment.
Case 03 takeaway
“A limited budget doesn't necessarily limit creativity. Sometimes it forces you to find a stronger idea.”
Case 03 / The album
HR Mixer
06 photographsClick any image to explore
The through-line03 cases / 01 approach
What connects the three
Three different problems.
One way of thinking.
Case 01Business constraint
Problem
No dedicated budget for the opportunity.
Response
Reallocate budget, sell the business case internally and turn the exhibition into a BD platform.
Case 02Engagement constraint
Problem
People ignore survey reminders.
Response
Turn participation into a physical, collaborative and emotional experience.
Case 03Production constraint
Problem
The event could not compete through production budget.
Response
Build the event around one strong idea people want to discuss.
The method
“My creative process usually starts with the constraint. Once I understand what we cannot change, I look for what we can rethink.”
04
The real me at work
The work tells one side of the story.
The other side is how people experienced working with me.
Campaign results, brand work and commercial outcomes can show what I delivered. But when I left PERSOL, my colleagues gave me something more personal—a commemorative book containing their messages and memories.
Rather than rewriting those words into testimonials, I would rather let them speak for themselves.
See the book ↓PERSOL commemorative book
Their words, in their own words.
12 original pages
When I left PERSOL, colleagues gave me a book filled with messages and memories. I have kept it intact rather than turning selected lines into polished testimonials.
Turn the pages and let their words speak for themselves.
From all of usClick a page or use the arrow keys
Personal notes
from a remarkable team.
from a remarkable team.
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