Turning a global pharma brand into a D2C business in China

The situation

Virbac built its China business the way most foreign animal-health companies did: selling through veterinary clinics and distributors. Pure B2B. Then COVID hit the clinic channel, exactly as the company was preparing to launch two parasiticide brands into the market. That distribution model stopped delivering, and the gap had to be closed by reaching pet owners directly.

The problem was that Virbac China had almost nothing to reach them with. No consumer brand presence, no first-party customer data, no membership infrastructure, and a product portfolio governed by strict pharmaceutical and e-commerce advertising rules. "Go direct-to-consumer" was the ambition global and APAC leadership had set: grow D2C to a major share of the business over a ten-year horizon. On the ground it meant rebuilding the commercial model from the consumer backwards while staying inside both global brand guardrails and Chinese platform regulation.

I held the client seat for that rebuild. In the program org charts I was the China D2C Project & Community Lead, the single point of accountability sitting between Virbac's French and APAC stakeholders on one side and a roster of agencies and platform partners on the other. The consulting partner was Artefact; alongside them the working set included the social/content agency, the e-commerce TP (Tmall Partner) operators, and the media and KOL vendors. That was four-plus agencies and vendors whose work I had to brief, sequence, and hold to a standard.

The decision

The pivotal call was structural, and I made it early: treat this as a transformation to be governed from the client side, not a campaign to be bought from an agency.

That sounds obvious. In practice it is the decision most client-side marketers get wrong: they hand the agency a budget and a deadline and accept whatever comes back. I did the opposite. Before anything was signed, I put the agency's roadmap through a reverse-brief process and marked it up in writing. Where a deliverable read "communication plan design" with no defined output, I pushed it back. Outcome is not clear. Propose a quantifiable outcome; what are the references and benchmarks to quantify it. Where a section was thin, I wrote this is simply too vague. Those annotations set the terms of the relationship: every line of scope had to answer what gets delivered, against what benchmark, measured how, before a yuan moved.

The second decision followed from the first. I would not let a global playbook run on autopilot in a market where it could not legally run at all.

The strategy

Three architectural choices shaped the program.

1. Build the owned data engine before spending on the campaign. Parasiticides are bought a few times a year. Pour money into paid reach for an audience you can't recapture and most of the spend evaporates. So I prioritized the WeChat mini-program and a membership system as the owned data asset: the thing that turns a one-off campaign into a compounding customer base. The architecture I backed put a smart-protection tool and reminder engine inside the mini-program, feeding a first-party database that every future campaign could target against. The sequencing was deliberate. Data foundation first, then activation on top of it.

2. Buy reach as coverage scenarios, not as a tactics list. I had the agency present the media budget as audience-coverage choices, roughly 11% versus roughly 20% of the category audience, rather than a menu of line items. That reframes the budget conversation from clerical to strategic: leadership is choosing how much of the market to reach, not approving a spreadsheet. We took the focused option, and in later rounds I drove a descope, cutting two softer phases so the money stayed on the conversion path. The funnel logic came from Artefact's 3D/2D/1D framework (create demand, capture demand, convert), with each layer assigned its own channels and KPIs.

3. Let regulation set the creative, early, before production. Reviewing the brief, I caught the catch that would have sunk the campaign in market. The global targeting strategy for the worming brand leaned on a vulnerable-population health angle and zoonosis-risk claims. China's e-commerce platforms prohibit exactly that kind of claim for exactly that kind of audience. I flagged it in writing: the EC platform has very strict regulation against such claims for those target audiences; given this legal sensitivity, who then is our focus target audience and what are the appropriate claims? Then I forced the rework before any creative was produced. The campaign moved from fear-and-claim messaging to scenario-led reassurance, with compliance rails built into every key visual rather than bolted on after a rejection.

Around these three calls sat the operating-model work. A D2C transformation is an organizational problem before it is a technology problem, so I also drove the "new ways of working" thread: naming the seats the model needed (consumer insight, CRM, media, integrated content management) and the process to run them. That is the part that makes a transformation survive after the launch deck is closed.

Execution

The program ran across roughly eleven months, from a December 2021 strategy-and-roadmap working session to a signed, costed pilot ready to go live in Q4 2022.

Through it I governed the work end to end rather than receiving it. I chaired the reverse-brief rounds and made the agency re-write scope until every deliverable had an owner, an output, and a benchmark. I directed the agency roster across strategy, creative, media, and e-commerce, keeping planning and reporting consolidated under one lead agency so the program stayed coherent. I authored the corporate annual digital plan that absorbed the agency's draft into a Virbac plan-of-record: a roughly RMB 5–6M annual digital roadmap with budget split across owned WeChat/mini-program content, social seeding, search, a new short-video line, and pet-fair activation. The owned-channel engine that ran alongside the pilot was already at meaningful scale, a KOL/KOC network of 280+ influencers reaching roughly 11.2M, with engagement up about 25% under the content discipline I set.

And I reported up. The stakeholders were not in the room day to day. They were in France and across APAC, so a large part of the job was translating between what global wanted to say and what the Chinese platforms would allow, and keeping the GM, the commercial lead, and the regional digital/data lead aligned on scope, budget, and trade-offs as the plan tightened.

Result

The honest outcome is a leadership outcome, and I state it as exactly that.

• Strategy converted into a signed, costed pilot, a contract of approximately ¥1.07M. The roadmap I owned and pressure-tested line by line became a real, fixed-scope service agreement: agency fee plus media and third-party fees, covering Douyin KOL activation, livestreaming, and Baidu search, with a payment schedule written around the 11.11 shopping festival. That is the proof the strategy was credible enough to fund.
• A regulatory catch I raised pre-production redirected the campaign's targeting and creative before any production money was spent. That is the difference between a launch that runs and a launch that gets pulled from the platforms.
• Virbac's first consumer data engine, mini-program plus membership, was stood up, shifting the brand from renting attention to owning a customer relationship it could build on.

What I do not claim: this pilot has no post-campaign performance deck. Its documented outcome is the roadmap-to-signed-contract, not a results number. The leadership value is in getting a regulated, B2B-native foreign brand from "go D2C" to a funded, compliant, launch-ready program with the data foundation to compound.