There is an assumption that a product beloved in Western markets needs only to be shipped East and placed on a shelf to find its audience. The wrapping stays the same. The recipes stay the same. The price point stays the same. And then, slowly, the queues fail to materialise.
Carmen Chiu, director of branded products at Maxim’s Food Group, has spent the better part of two decades working against exactly this instinct, with a portfolio of experience spanning from Ferrero, Nestlé, the Belgian chocolate brand Diva, Fortnum & Mason and Shanghai Tang.
Speaking at the NRF’s Big Show Asia Pacific in Singapore, Chiu laid out the commercial and philosophical framework that has guided her career to KPMG’s Cath Jowett.
Starting with data, staying with people
Chiu spent two years building competency in pricing, promotional analysis and distribution modelling at data analytics firm Nielsen Group before entering the marketing sector.
“But something was missing,” she told the audience. “I wanted to go and work for a brand. I was very fortunate that I joined Ferrero.”
At Ferrero, she was handed responsibility for two brands that could hardly have been more different in their consumer logic: Ferrero Rocher and its sister brand Kinder Surprise.
“When you’re talking to customers who are three years old, it’s super fun. You get to really understand how they want to buy the products, and they are the customers, by the way, not their mums, because they keep nagging their parents to buy Kinder for them,” she said.
However, Ferrero Rocher was a completely different world to her.
“If you think about the Ferrero Rocher shape, it’s gold and round, and it’s perfect for Chinese culture when you talk about celebration,” Chiu said. “We just needed to draw out what’s relevant to those markets.”
The television creative, featuring a tuxedoed ambassador plucking chocolates at a reception, remained essentially unchanged across territories. What evolved was the occasion architecture. The brand was moved beyond Christmas and Valentine’s Day to occupy Chinese New Year, corporate gifting seasons, and other culturally distinct moments of exchange.
This is the intellectual foundation of Chiu’s entire approach. The product’s core identity is inviolable. But the occasions it inhabits, the channels through which it is sold, and the sensory details of the experience around it are all negotiable.
The ratio she returns to repeatedly is roughly 80/20: 80 per cent fidelity to the source brand, 20 per cent local adaptation. Get the ratio wrong in either direction, and you either lose relevance or lose the brand itself.
The ice cream problem: Seasonality as a business risk
At Nestlé, Chiu’s domain was the HoReCa channel (hotels, restaurants and catering), where her business partners and stakeholders were chefs and pastry chefs. The challenge was to turn a scoop of ice cream into a beautiful dessert at a much higher price point.
“It’s all about the experience: the plating, the service, the conversation happening at the table, the ambience where you’re being served,” she said.
She learned, in other words, that occasion elevation is a commercial strategy, not merely a marketing exercise.
“It’s always about reminding yourself to think as the customer,” she added.
It was at Diva, however, that these lessons were tested at a real financial scale. The Belgian chocolate brand, which Chiu oversaw across the Asia Pacific region, faced a problem familiar to any premium seasonal business: 85 per cent of annual revenue was concentrated in four consecutive months of the year, across three gifting occasions: Christmas, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day and in some markets, White Valentine’s Day.
The arithmetic of retail does not care about seasonality. Leases are paid monthly. Staff costs are fixed. A business that earns 85 per cent of its revenue in a third of the year is, by any measure, wasting two-thirds of its operational capacity.
The solution Chiu’s team landed on was disarmingly counterintuitive: soft serve ice cream at US$8 a cone. Soft serve occupies a category in most consumer minds associated with seaside kiosks and fast-food drive-throughs. Placing it in a premium Belgian chocolate boutique at a price point eight to ten times the market norm should, by conventional logic, have bewildered customers.
Instead, queues formed outside every store. The reasons, Chiu argues, were that the soft serve was a genuinely low barrier to entry for aspirational consumers who found the full Diva gifting proposition financially out of reach.
“I think the success behind the soft serve was actually not just because we did a great innovation, although I think we did, but it was all these advocates posting photos of the soft serve, taking photos with their families, showing it off. It gave the brand much more frequent exposure,” she said.
Fortnum & Mason: The weight of 315 years
If Diva tested Chiu’s ability to innovate under commercial pressure, Fortnum & Mason tested something more delicate: How to remain faithful to a brand whose identity is inseparable from its geography.
When Chiu was tasked with opening the brand’s first international flagship in Hong Kong in 2019, the directive from London was unambiguous: the store should feel exactly as it does in Piccadilly, with the wallpaper, the clocks, the sculptural details and the afternoon tea menu translated faithfully. Chiu understood the intention. She also knew it was commercially untenable.
“I knew that every market would have a different taste, and for us, we have less chocolate consumption,” she said. “It also depends on which markets associated with Asia would be a little sweeter, but Hong Kong and Mainland China are very much going towards that less sweetening.”
Fortnum & Mason’s Hong Kong flagship spans two floors, with the top floor being the restaurant, serving afternoon tea as well as lunch and dinner. After every visit, the store sent guests a questionnaire asking how they felt about the food, ambience, service, overall experience, and whether they’d recommend it to a friend.
“With around 200 customers every day, you collect a lot of data, and that gave me really strong factual support to go back to the group and say: customers are telling us your dishes are too sweet,” Chiu said. “You can’t just do a 100 per cent copy from the origin market. Of course, the intention was good as they wanted to protect the brand experience and ensure consistency, but consumers were telling us they won’t come back if it stays this sweet.”
“By the end of it, we actually reduced sweetness and saltiness by 37 per cent, while keeping the same menu and the same beautiful presentation. We just needed to cater to the local palate.”
At the same time, Chiu realised the brand needed to be locally relevant beyond just adapting recipes.
“We created mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival. We created Chinese New Year gift boxes featuring the Zodiac signs. We were never walking away from the brand’s DNA, but there’s still that 20 per cent that you need to adapt otherwise customers won’t come back,” she added.
Maxim’s: When a brand becomes a ritual
Four months into her tenure at Maxim’s Food Group, Chiu is operating in a different register entirely.
Maxim’s Group is an Asian institution, one whose products are woven into the fabric of cultural practice across 20 countries. The weight of that positioning, she suggests, is something the company takes seriously in a way that goes beyond commercial strategy.
The insight that struck her most in an early consumer focus group was the depth of the relationship across generations. Customers spoke of Maxim’s mooncakes not as a product preference but as a ritual continuity. The brand had been present at their grandparents’ table and their parents’ table, and now at their own. The act of cutting a mooncake, of extracting the salted egg yolk at the centre, of sharing with relatives is about the occasion, the memory, and the sense of belonging that the occasion encodes.
“We really feel a responsibility to nurture and preserve that legacy and that culture,” Chiu told the audience.
“And it’s not just about one city. Our business now spans 20 countries. Whether it’s Mainland China, the North, the East, the West, Singapore, or across Southeast Asia, it’s all different. You have to be relevant and know the culture well enough to adapt, while still keeping the brand consistent.”
On AI, digital, and the irreducible value of the physical
The conversation inevitably turned to technology, specifically the question of how premium heritage brands survive in an environment where algorithmic commerce and agentic purchasing tools increasingly mediate the relationship between brands and consumers.
“A few years ago, we said, ‘Oh, AI is going to take over everything.’ I think now it’s come to a point where it’s about how we use AI. For us, it’s about using it to identify future trends in food and how people celebrate, providing strong data and the confidence to make the right decisions. Digital is really about keeping the brand accessible and discoverable,” she argued.
“With all the brands within Maxim’s, we try to understand behaviour and translate it into experience. Last week, for example, we had a rice dumpling making class with our chefs, telling the story of handcrafted cultural heritage.”
According to Chiu, AI and digital are really about discovery and getting the right data, while offline is about creating real memories and experiences, and then you bring people back online.
A full circle
Jowett, closing the conversation, noted that Chiu had travelled a complete arc: from data analyst to brand builder, and now back to a role where data is once again at the centre, not as the end product, but as the instrument that makes human connection legible at scale.
The retail industry has spent much of the past decade in a false debate between data-driven commerce and experiential retail, as though the two were competing. What a career like Chiu’s demonstrates is that they were never separate disciplines. Data without the appetite to understand what it means in human terms is just arithmetic. Experience without the discipline to measure what it produces is just sentiment. By all accounts, Carmen Chiu has spent 20 years learning exactly where the line falls.
