I was in Hangzhou, China this past week and visited Taobao Makers Festival, an annual offline event hosted by Alibaba's social commerce arm Taobao to celebrate the maker spirit of China's entrepreneurs. Taobao Makers Festival (TMF) is a celebration of ideas, hobbies and a place for creators who typically gather and interact online to the physical space.
The festival is divided into themes--technology, food, culture, fashion. The technology portion of the festival showcased emerging technologies such as exoskeleton that help workers carry heavy loads, consumer tech gadget brands and mixed reality technologies. Consumers can try new combinations of flavors in the food section. Time-honored culinary brands reinvent and cross-collaborate with other brands--anyone cares for a hotpot flavored lollipop? A popular hotpot chain did create a lollipop with three levels of spiciness, and there was even a garlic crawfish flavored ice cream in another TMF store. Traditional culture and heritage institutions, for example, the Forbidden Palace, are creating new brand collaborations and incubating products from stationary to imperial pastries.
All of the brands at the festival have an online presence--they operate Taobao e-commerce stores, maybe also a Wechat platform page for content creation, a TikTok channel to stream short videos, or Red page to seed interest in products and build consumer engagement. The offline stores offer the opportunity to showcase, but beyond the two-week festival, the brand owners can continue to leverage the social and content tools embedded in Taobao and other platforms.
I often think about the difference between China and the U.S. in terms of marketing, social commerce, engagement & fans management and how important the role of content is in driving conversions. In my view, China's digital and the physical worlds collide and converge and will continue as larger segments of society becomes digitalized. In China, interactions between the consumers and brand owners are not unilateral and highly social, engagement is 24/7 and extremely sticky. The Taobao Makers did not come to the festival hoping to just gain a few hundred paying customers, they want their product ideas, however niche, known to a bigger audience and generate a higher brand likability score. No vendor I came across gave out coupons for a few RMB off, they requested visitors to follow their store on Taobao or Wechat. Cultivating interest and building a community is more important for brand building than ever before.
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