Women to Watch 2020: Danielle Jin, Visa

Danielle Jin

Head of marketing, Greater China
Visa
China

Not many can boast about pioneering a product from scratch during their marketing career. Well, Danielle Jin falls into the rare category. When she was once director of marketing for Ghirardelli Chocolate in San Francisco, she helped open up the premium chocolate category in the US and was one of the very first marketers to establish the cacao percentage and chocolate bean origin concept. Interestingly, her work kickstarted a strong gourmet and health trend for dark chocolate.

These days, she spends her time at Visa based out of Shanghai where she leads the Greater China marketing team. In her four years at the company, she led the team to leverage data to generate insights of cardholders’ spending behaviours to turn them into data-led marketing activations which subsequently led to more personalisation for cardholders.

As Visa took a hit from COVID-19, Jin and her team veered away from travel-related activations into cross-border ecommerce campaigns. Using a B2B2C model, the team helped issuers—or member banks—to quickly shift their cardholder engagement strategy to provide tailored product offerings and privileges.

Jin is also a huge proponent of AI and data-powered creative technology. For instance, she pushed her team to make over 300 variation tests based on 40 basic creative formats from human design. The results provided the business deeper insights on consumers’ preferences based on their demographics and travel interests. It’s evident that she has nailed the tricky intersection of creativity, data and AI.

With Jin’s knack for turning around underperforming businesses and launching new innovations, her rise up the ranks in one of the biggest payment companies in the world is only but a swipe away.