Is Brand Rating by Mega-Influencer A Great Opportunity for New Brand to Acquire Customers?

On March 2nd, Tmall introduced “Scoring Qi” where Jiaqi Li, a famous mega-influencer in live-stream e-commerce, scores each product of each brand. Meanwhile, Jiaqi was also named as Chief Discovery Officer of Tmall Treasure’s new brand.

This reminds me of the Michelin restaurant scoring system, which further brings prestige and wealth to these restaurants. Like many influencers, they test and recommend popular products in their channels, further helping these products attract more customers. As live-stream e-commerce became popular and mature, influencers, like Jiaqi Li, can test and recommend a lot of products from all over the world in a few hours of live broadcast under the lower production cost. After acquiring trust by recommending popular products, Jiaqi started reviewing products of new brands.

He knows a lot about customer preference and product advantages and will make use of the methods, like lowering key competitors’ brand images, emphasizing the importance of certain criteria this new brand performs well and introducing new decision criteria, to persuade customers and set off a trend. Therefore, many new brands invited Jiaqi Li to be Chief Recommendation Officer. Huaxizi is the most famous example. In cooperation with Jiaqi Li, it chose to focus on Chinese culture that was scarce on the market and concentrated on polishing high-quality products based on Jiaqi’s recommendation and finally became the top-selling category on Tmall.

In order to expand the current market and attract the customers who have no time to see live video, Tmall introduced “Scoring Qi” so that these customers can take Jiaqi Li’s recommendations without joining live video.

This sounds like a great idea for new brand to acquire customers, but it relies much on the prestige and taste of Jiaqi and his team. Although Jiaqi knows a lot about women’s preferences, different women still have slightly different preferences. It is difficult to rely on Jiaqi alone to develop a mature scoring system endorsed by everyone. Therefore, it would be better to see that more different influencers in different areas are also included into brand rating system and gradually improve the scoring system.

WeChat: A Complete Social Media Ecosystem

Over the course of my summer internship in Loyalty Program Marketing, we heard the same complaint over and over again from our counterparty in the APAC region - our team's marketing strategy was NOT working in mainland China, where our largest customer base is outside of the United States.  

Our regular promotion consisted mainly of Email deployments and Banner Ads in our internal websites, but they were not effective at reaching our Chinese audiences - "nobody in China reads Email these days, and our internal websites take 45 seconds to load," we were told.

So what does work?  One word - WeChat.

What is WeChat exactly?  Out of all of the English-language articles I've read that attempt to capture the essence of this Chinese"Social Media" app, the below article by Connie Chan is by far the most effective in conveying what is so different about WeChat compared to WhatsApp / Facebook / Messenger / Twitter / Instagram / etc.

When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China

In short, WeChat has the seamlessly integrated mobile payment functionality that allows transactions to take place within the "App-within-App" environment, without ever leaving the WeChat Ecosystem.  Whereas Western Social Media tools stops at broadcasting promotional messages, WeChat actually provides the tools to convert that "like / share / retweet" into monetary transactions.

While most companies are still figuring out what to do with Facebook / Instagram / Twitter, these brands have successfully gained traction within the mainland Chinese audience with WeChat campaigns that are creative and interactive.

Top 10 Advertising Campaigns on WeChat

The “Umbrella revolution”: when social media empower democracy

Given the recent events in Hong Kong, I would like to dedicate this post to the role that social media have been increasingly playing in protests and in politics in general.

Only four years ago, I had the chance to watch from close the power of social media when in Tunisia and Egypt protests started online ignited what later became known as the “Arab Spring”: a series of mass protests in North Africa and the Middle East that shook the political systems of several countries in the region. Today, the same is happening in Hong Kong.

From September 26 to 30, more than 1.3 million tweets were posted about the protests. The government, of course, understands this power and filters communications from Hong Kong to the mainland. It cannot do much, however, to stop the protesters communicating within the special region. In one day, 100,000 people downloaded the app Firechat, which does not require cell connection to send messages.

In 1989, the image of a lone man standing in front of tanks in Tienanmen square was broadcasted on hundreds of World televisions during the following day. Today, the image of a protester shielding from tear gas with an umbrella was shared on Twitter thousands of times in the next hour.

Social networks have become more and more prominent as a digital marketing tool, in business as well as to politics, and the current events are just a new evidence of this trends, Events that I encourage everybody to follow with interest.

To know more, see http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/09/29/hong-kong-protests-social-media/16444213/ 

E-Commerce In China Will Pass America By Around 2015

THis article points to what we've been speaking about in class. We've put a lot of energy around how mobile/ecommerce will take off in the US, but paid little attention to how the demand in china is actually going to eclipse the US. I think while we may be thinking about amazon.com , there may be opportunities partner with the alibaba and the china 'ebay' in ways that may look to the future.



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“E-Commerce in China may surpass America by 2015,” scream the headlines based on BCG’s
new e-commerce report (below). 2014, 2015, 2016, or 2017–the exact year doesn’t matter. The point is it will happen, and soon. Here’s why.
The Demographic Tidal Wave
Sheer size is a large part of story. It’s also been covered to death–every foreign executive’s eyes glaze over with dollar signs when they think of selling widgets to China’s 1.3 billion.
Still, BCG does a skillful job of presenting it: by the numbers, China has added the entire population of France in Internet users each of the last four years, and will add the entire population of Canada as e-shoppers in each of the next four. All told, China will rise from 145 million e-shoppers today, to 329 million (!) by 2015.


“E-Commerce in China may surpass America by 2015,” scream the headlines based on BCG’s new e-commerce report (below). 2014, 2015, 2016, or 2017–the exact year doesn’t matter. The point is it will happen, and soon. Here’s why.
The Demographic Tidal Wave
Sheer size is a large part of story. It’s also been covered to death–every foreign executive’s eyes glaze over with dollar signs when they think of selling widgets to China’s 1.3 billion.
Still, BCG does a skillful job of presenting it: by the numbers, China has added the entire population of France in Internet users each of the last four years, and will add the entire population of Canada as e-shoppers in each of the next four. All told, China will rise from 145 million e-shoppers today, to 329 million (!) by 2015.
But size is not everything. E-commerce will also become bigger in China than America because of the unique environment.
1) The Limited Reach of Break and Mortar
“China is the first major nation in history to develop e-commerce before establishing a robust physical retail network,” said Jeff Walters, principal at BCG. “More products were purchased on Taobao in 2010 than at China’s top 5 brick-and-mortar retailers combined.”
In the rest of the world, the situation is dramatically reversed. Amazon had $34 billion in revenue in 2010. Wal-Mart? $405 billion. That’s why venture capitalist Hurst Lin of DCM says e-commerce is the Wal-Mart of China.
Many Chinese consumers are ‘leapfrogging’ retail stores for the web:
“Many consumers, especially in lower-tier cities and rural areas, began using mobile phones before landlines, thereby building up the habit of turning to their phones not just for communication but a also for entertainment and other activities that previously would have required a dial-up connection on a personal computer. Consumerism in China could develop similarly, skipping the usual stages of retail development and arriving directly at a heavy reliance on e-commerce–a pattern completely different from the experience of other developed countries.” [BCG report]
2) Better Selection, Better Bargains
These two factors are not unique to e-commerce in China, but they are amplified. Shoppers in top-tier cities often buy online because retailers don’t have the international products they want. Shoppers in lower-tier cities turn to e-commerce because, well, retailers don’t exist or don’t have the domestic products they want either. This is up to one-quarter of total demand.
And China takes bargains to the max. For all the crying I hear about how inefficient logistics is in China, it is certainly fast and cheap. “It costs $1 on average to ship a 1-kilogram parcel, versus $6 in the US,” writes BCG. I just paid 20 RMB for an overnight parcel from Beijing to Shanghai via Shunfeng Express. I think the same service San Francisco to Los Angeles would be more like $20 via USPS, so 6x sounds right.
Moreover, China does not have a ‘brand outlet’ channel, so many brands–especially apparel retailers–use Taobao as a channel for excess inventory. And that’s on top of what’s smuggled out of the Chinese factories through the back door.
Over half of Chinese shoppers would price comparison shop on their mobile phone, far higher than the other developed nations BCG sampled. Maybe I’ve become Chinese, because I share the constant feeling that I’m being ripped off when I’m in a retail store. And, compared to online prices, I usually am.
In the US, the joke is that Best Buy is the showroom for Amazon.com. In China, Best Buy is already dead and I think 360buy will also eat the lunch of Gome and Suning going forward, despite their attempts to also move online.
I sometimes wonder if Chinese e-shoppers aren’t being spoiled by price wars, delivery services, and an e-commerce bubble that is bound to pop. But then I move on and enjoy another order on 360buy.
3) Greater Consumer Trust
The single best sign of consumer trust, which BCG doesn’t mention in this section of its report, is that true brands are being built online. See VANCL (youth apparel) and La Miu (lingerie).
Even Taobao, traditionally the place you go to buy cheap shit, is making strides at boosting its image. It’s getting more and more brands to sign up its TMall B2C platform through a mixture of charm and coercion (if you don’t join, consumers will search and find ‘your brand products’ on Taobao anyway…).
And, there are entrepreneurs building brands on Taobao too. If you counted branded shops like OSA, Hstyle, and Yi Yi independently from Taobao, they would probably rank among China’s top e-commerce sites in their verticals. Such online-only brands in fashion are virtually unheard of in America.
So yes, China’s e-commerce market will surpass America’s soon. But don’t envision America with quadruple the population and a funny language, and think you understand what’s happening here.

Bing Goes To China

It seems Microsoft's Bing is teaming up with Baidu, China's largest search engine. Baidu is largely a Chinese language search engine and Bing will help them improve their English based searches. This comes after Google pulled out of China over concerns of censorship. The article says that the new Bing searches will be also censored and this made me think of the display ads and marketing. It's probably going to be even harder to introduce customized advertising content when you have to be careful of who you are targeting and what material you are providing them with.

The full article is available here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/technology/05microsoft.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Iran Goverment Bans Gmail

Google just cannot seem to keep its technologies out of the international spotlight (which I imagine is amazing for its PR business). First, China, now Iran. The Times is now reporting what Mashable did over an hour ago: the Iranian government has said it will permanently ban the use of Google's Gmail in the country.

How this will affect the ability of the Iranian citizenry to communicate via the internet is unclear, but it is my guess that the information coming out of the country will escape despite this roadblock.

The political and ideological implications of banning Gmail notwithstanding, it seems to me that any government trying to hold back the flow of information in this age of connectedness is a bit like trying to hold back raging floodwaters with your hand.

CHINA: Alibaba.com: Green Commerce Continues

In class,Prof Jeremy guided us pretty well on thinking more broader and deeper about online dynamic applications like E-commence, online auction,real estate broker,dating,social networking etc. Triggered with the comprehensive "picture" addressed by him, I think, besides personal social and entertainment needs, how should we come up with the indivudial social responsibility of protecting environment by using internet tools toward "Green" products. For you enrichment, I hope the article could give you a sense of what's going on in China about the green commerce and trigger you thinking about how to embrace the new energy ecological system global trend.

June 5, 2009, 7:31 am

"Despite the downturn, online trade in environmentally friendly products is holding up well", said CEO of Alibaba.com, the Chinese e-commerce and business-to-business giant. Over the past two years, the company reports that its Web site has seen a steady growth of searches for alternative energy resources like solar and wind power, electric cars, fuels and organic products. Solar-powered energy and organic products are the fastest-growing green sectors, increasing 71 percent and 68 percent year-on-year, respectively, in the first quarter of 2009, according to the company. Solar lights are among the most popular green items sold online, as countries in Europe, and parts of the United States begin to replace traditional streetlights with sun-powered alternatives. “Despite the downturn, online trade in environmentally friendly products is holding up well,” said David Wei, the chief executive of Alibaba.com. “This is because going green not only saves money, but it also creates money, especially as more entrepreneurs develop innovative products to support growing global demand.” Some members of Alibaba.com’s trading community agree.

“Climate change is having a positive impact on our business. Our sales have been growing by 30 to 40 percent over the past three years thanks to strong demand for green products from customers in the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia,” said Xiao Benpeng, the international trade manager for a company based in Hubei that specializes in high-tech solar energy products, and a member of Alibaba.com. China itself has set goals of generating 16 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and it has set aside about $30 billion of its economic stimulus package ofr the energy conversation and ecological engineering. Alibaba.com executives say they believe that these large-scale green projects will translate into multiple e-commerce opportunities.