Page 8 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Alibaba succeeds

by taking

the consumer

center stage

With a spectacular IPO last month, the Chinese compa- Will there be a breakthrough of Weibo or WeChat
ny Alibaba has been slingshot into the public eye. The as well?
surprise was great and brought up the discussion how it
could be possible for a Chinese company to compete in The fact is that mobile messengers are enjoying grow-
markets that have been firmly in the hands of ebay and ing popularity worldwide as well as social media appli-
Amazon for so long?
cations, especially among the younger generation. Ac-
cording to a Pew Research study, mobile users, for
In view of the enormous size of the Chinese domestic instance, send and receive an average of 50 text mes-
market, the answer seemed to be found quickly, but it is sages (SMS and mobile messages) per day, and in the
more than naive to be satisfied with this explanation, age group of 18 to 24 years of age even more than
100.
as the alleged "obscurity" of Alibaba is primarily attribut-
able to the western disinterest. If today’s population is increasingly using new commu-
nication channels, successful companies must be pre-
As the Chinese government had decided to shut their sent there as well. Consequently, mobile messaging
doors for major American technology companies, the services will in particular become an important touch
need to develop their own platforms simply arose. This point for digital marketing communications. It is there-
happened literally out of nowhere and completely inde- fore important to identify the relevant services for the
pendent of traditional forms of communication. It now company and to integrate them into the marketing mix.
turns out to be China’s great advantage, because the
new stand-alone solutions will lead to more competition Just take a look at WhatsApp, which is the clear num-
worldwide and an improved digital offer. ber one mobile messaging service with its 500 million
users worldwide. In China, however, a market with 250
What Alibaba is doing better? million mobile Internet users, WhatsApp is virtually
meaningless because the local leader is WeChat.
Alibaba is much more than just another e-commerce
platform. While Amazon and ebay focus on the product, About 400 million people use the Chinese messaging
at Alibaba the consumer is at the center. This view is service WeChat (in China: Weixin), of which 100 mil-
expressed, for example, in a comprehensive range of lion are outside of China. Regarding its functionality,
functionalities that go from dispatch to delivery to the WeChat is more extensive than WhatsApp and particu-
highly advanced mobile payment. larly interesting for marketing. It enables the sending of
advertising messages, which means that companies
Analog to Alibaba’s “consumer first approach”, it's al- can not only send service and transactional messages,
ways about giving the customer as much information but also (individualized) product offerings, advertising
and choice as possible. That way, Alibaba exploits the texts, or discount codes, etc.
possibilities of digital communications technology to the
fullest and enables the customers instead of patronizing It should be considered, however, that WeChat users
them. have similar expectations of mobile messaging com-
munications, as WhatsApp users. Although WeChat
In Asia, the hype surrounding Alibaba is of course any- allows advertising messages, this does not mean that
thing but surprising, since we have been observing the you should send users blunt, offensive advertising, as
happenings in the field of Chinese technology compa- authentic and personal communication is crucial as
nies for a long time already and are only waiting for the usual.
international breakthrough of other Chinese technology
companies, such as Weibo or WeChat. WeChat plans to have a stronger integration of e-
commerce offerings in the future. How this will look like
is unknown yet, though. It is for example conceivable
that there will be shops directly on the company pro-
files, as it is possible on Facebook, too.
8 Asian eMarketing October 2014 - Marketing Automation