Amazon’s brand value has risen 42% to US$150.8 billion, retaining top billing as the world’s most valuable retail brand according to a Brand Finance report, while other e-commerce brands are in strong growth, such as Alibaba (up 58% to US$54.9 billion) and JD.com (up 47% to US$19.6 billion) as well as Germany’s Zalando (up 40% to US$3.8 billion).

Brand Value Change 2017-2018

Alibaba is this year’s fastest-growing retail brand, who plans to invest US$15.2 billion towards its global logistics chain expansion according to Brand Finance, an independent branded business valuation and strategy consultancy based in UK.

Jingdong (JD.com) got into the world’s top 10 most valuable retail brands for the first time, driven by its advancements in retail technology and plans to market its developments to third parties around the world, effectively creating a Retail-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering.

Top 10 Retail Brands in the World in 2018

The total value of the top retail brands from China, Alibaba (3), JD.com (7), and Suning (30), accounts for 12.7% of all 50 top brands, following that of the U.S. (66%).

Check out Carrefour’s retail transformation with WeChat Mini-Programs

On April 17, the Chinese government announced that it will scrap all foreign ownership limits for companies producing automobiles in China over the next five years. To be more precise, it will lift foreign ownership stake limit in manufacturers of special purpose vehicles and new energy vehicles in 2018; in makers of commercial vehicles in 2020 and in makers of passenger vehicles in 2022.

To summarize, all foreign ownership caps for China’s automobile industry will be completely removed within five years.

Initially, when foreign auto brands entered the Chinese market, they had to find a local Chinese auto company to set up a joint venture to build cars in China. They were not allowed to own more than 50% of these joint ventures.

They couldn’t form more than two joint-ventures with as many Chinese partners in the same automobile category either. (For example, Volkswagen, which formed passenger vehicle joint ventures with FAW (First Automotive Works) and SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp), was not allowed to partner with a third Chinese partner to produce passenger cars.

How will this gradual but thorough open-up policy affect the Chinese market, which is the world’s largest? To be more precise, where will Chinese brands be five years from now?

First of all, the better ones of private Chinese auto brands are already strong enough to compete against foreign auto brands. In the recent five years, Chinese auto brands have significantly increased their market share in China. As a result, South Korean and French auto brands have been yielding market shares to them.

Now that these private brands have established a solid foothold in the lower-end market sector, they’re foraying into middle or even high-end sectors. For example, Great Wall has launched its WEY premium SUV brand and Geely partnered with Volvo to set up a joint venture LYCO & Co. to pilot a new shared smart car business model.

Secondly, we have to admit that Chinese partners have made meaningful contributions to the successes of foreign brands in China. Not all globally successful brands are automatically success in China. For example, Toyota is a global leader, but in China, it is lagging behind Volkswagen.

Apart from the ups and downs in diplomatic relationships between China and Japan, VW owes much of its success in China to its excellent domestic partners – SAIC and FAW. It is a similar story for Nissan and GM in China. To win the Chinese market, you need more than technology and manufacturing. Chinese partners can help make a big difference, especially in sales network and marketing.

Thirdly, for state-owned Chinese auto companies, they have also made big progress on developing their self-owned brands, such as FAW, SAIC, Changan, and Dong Feng. Their brands have already moved up in the best-selling model ranking in recent years and laid a solid foundation for branding and manufacturing.

Last but not least, let’s fast-forward to five years in the future. What will the Chinese market of 2022 look like? Given the trajectory, it’s safe to say that the power of Chinese auto brands and the quality of their cars will continue to rise.

At the same time, new energy vehicles will become more mainstream in China, which is a totally different realm compared with the fossil-based auto market. The Chinese government supports Chinese auto brands can boost their strength through becoming leaders in the new energy sector. As a matter of fact, some Chinese brands have already accumulated sizable advantage in this area, such as CATL and BYD’s leading position in the auto battery.

The recent five to 10 years is the story of the growth of Chinese auto brands. They have narrowed gaps with foreign brands in many areas, from product quality to branding to sales channels. In some areas, they’re even doing a better job than foreign competitors now. This is one of the main reasons for slow-down of foreign auto brands’ growth in China. For French brands, they have even reported declines in sales.

In the near future, this trend will continue, but more important game-changers will come from new-energy cars, connectivity, and AI. Chinese auto brands have a good foundation to compete with foreign brands in these areas. For example, the leading Chinese Internet companies, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, are all entering this area with their mighty technology power and huge data resources. In theory, they should feel easier to work with Chinese auto brands.

To summarize, in the five-year transitional period, Chinese auto brands have a good chance to weather the challenges brought by full open-up of the industry. We can expect a smooth and gradual change of the market competitive landscape in China.

China mobile app user insights 2018

The article was originally published on Kantar.com

About 10 years ago, Chinese young people jokingly named each year’s November 11 as “Singles Day” because all digits for this day are the lonesome “1”. Alibaba Group saw a commercial opportunity and in 2009 launched an online sales festival to “celebrate” the Singles Day. Now it has become the world’s largest e-commerce as Alibaba’s platforms (B2C brand Tmall and C2C brand Taobao) alone sold goods worth of 168.2 billion yuan in 24 hours.

According to Lightspeed survey during November 3 and 6, Chinese netizens are most likely to shop at Tmall (76%), Taobao (63%) and JD.com (57%), in which Tencent owns a significant stake – the trio formed distant first tier platforms. Amazon.cn (16%), Suning (15%) and VIP.com (15%) formed the second tier.

Even though the competition for winning shoppers online has become more fierce, Kantar panelists showed the total spending during Singles Day will surely increase: 44% said “I will spend more than last year”, followed by 30% said, “more or less same as last year”. Only 14% said, “I will spend less”.

In terms of budget, the largest bracket is 1,001 – 2,000 yuan (22%), followed by 501 yuan – 1,000 yuan (18%) and 2,001 – 4,000 yuan (5%). About 2% said they have prepared more than 10,000 yuan for this annual occasion!

As e-commerce becomes more sophisticated in China, Chinese consumers are looking for things beyond physical goods: while 89% said they plan to buy physical goods, 19% said they would buy services online and 18% mentioned virtual goods.

The hottest physical goods categories are apparel (71%), shoes (51%) and food (48%), followed by three key important FMCG categories: household goods (39%), personal care goods (35%) and cosmetics (34%). On average each respondent plan to buy goods from 4.48 categories.

Paid membership of online video sites (49%), financial products (44%) and online services (such as cloud storage) (37%) are most mentioned virtual goods. Among services, people mentioned tour services (54%), hotel accommodations (47%) and plane tickets (31%) most.

The Kantar survey also asked brand attitudes during this Singles Day. Lots of respondents regard this as a rare chance to try out their preferred premium brands which they usually couldn’t afford: 60% said: “I will buy those brands that I have always liked but haven’t tried because of high price”. It clearly offered an opportunity for premium brands to launch smaller-volume packages to lure more consumers to try them out and grow penetration rate.

Brand loyalty will pay off on this day as well: 51% said they would continue to buy the brands they have always bought, only 14% said they would try unfamiliar brands simply because they’ll be cheaper on this day.

This article was originally published on Kantar.com

Two out of three Chinese consumers (aged 18 to 64) would like to tell their family and friends about the good experience; and, 60% consumers said they would share the experience on social media according to a survey by Epsilon.

65% of Chinese consumers surveyed, who had a good experience, would search for more information about the brand or company online or offline; 63% consumers would interact more with the brand or company; 63% consumers would follow them on WeChat; and, 62% consumers would install the brand’s app after having a good experience.

Epsilon also did a research about top factors that would influence a brand/company’s reputation; the instant interaction between customers and brands/companies ranked the first, followed by instant assistance (69%).

Also read: Chinese Consumers More Selective on Spending Habits

WeChat launched a new Moment Ad format, native promotional page ads, following the ceremony of Rio Olympics.

Related to Moment Ads: coupon ads on Moments, video ads, minimum budget

The native promotional page ad consists of outer and inner layers; the native promotional page will instantly be displayed when a user clicks on the outer layer:

Currently, native promotional page ads on WeChat Moments are by invitation only. It definitely provides advertisers more space for branding and creativity.

Also check out Nike and Samsung’s ads utilizing this new format:

Apple beat Samsung in 2014, who used to be the best brand according to China brand Power Index (C-BPI) since 2012, and become the best mobile phone brand in China, released by China Enterprise Brand Research Center (“CEBRC”) of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The research by CEBRC involving 13,500 respondents (between 15 and 60 years old) from 30 cities in China, was conducted from August 2013 to January 2014 to investigate people’s brand perception loyalty in China.

Also read: China Top 10 Industries by Online Ad Spend in Sep 2014

China retail market has been growing rapidly attributes to the booming economy and the increasing demand for consumption goods. China’s FMCG market is evolving quickly; the overall market continues to decelerate across all sectors and all city tiers; channel dynamics changed substantially with more challenges in offline channels facing the growing popularity of online shopping in China according to Kantar Worldpanel report.

Chinese shoppers demonstrate very low engagement with brands for most of the 26 categories Kantar studied. The average purchase frequency for the top brands among the categories is less than one purchase every four months—a very low purchase rate.

Low-frequency shoppers represent a significant percentage of each brand’s shopper base and contribute a significant share of its revenues. Kantar Worldpanel also found that the majority of shoppers left the brands they studied after two years. In order to compensate for losses, Kantar recommends brands continuously recruit shoppers.

Kantar Worldpanel reported 5.7% value growth for China’s FMCG market for the latest 52 weeks up to Sep 5th 2014 which remains low in comparison to historic levels. FMCG growth recovered to 6.9% in Q3 2014, higher than both Q2 (4.7%) and Q1 (4.6%).

Read more: Chinese Consumer Goods Companies Take Share from Foreign Companies

Do You still remember the “nickname bottle” that Coca Cola launched last summer? Such an impressive case was not so long ago, now Coca Cola has shifted its focus from bottle to cap, joining up with WeChat. 

Caps are beverage manufacturers’ favorite widget for doing promotion, other than bottles. Such as the most popular “one more bottle” printed on caps in previous years, used to be a common promotion way for many manufacturers. As consumers get used to marketing strategies like “free taste”, “special sale” and “different bottle packaging”, beverage manufacturers are forced to search for new strategies.

Coca Cola tried some creative marketing activities for many years in China. They set up ICOKE platform in 2005, combining traditional marketing with internet platform. By holding iCoke events and communicating with young consumers, Coca Cola successfully built an online community and strengthened their brand awareness.

In the past year, Coca Cola launched a brand new packaging specially for Chinese young consumers. They printed dozens of internet nicknames on the bottle packaging, including popular nicknames such as “Chi huo” (meaning foodie), “Xiao qing xin” (people like indie pop) and “Bai fu mei” (white rich beautiful woman). By carrying out various marketing tactics, the nickname bottle won much attention and became a distinguishing brand marketing case in 2013.

Coca Cola, in cooperation with WeChat, launched a promotion activity named “3PM drink and win Coca Cola” on March 3 in 2014. The activity was jointly organized by Coca Cola, WeChat and Yixun. For getting the chance of “seckilling”, consumers just need to join the Coca Cola Interactive Platform on WeChat, and input the Pincode on the cap. Coca Cola prepared 990 million Coca Cola, Sprite and Fanta with WeChat logo printed on the bottle for the activity. A special 15-second advertisement was on TV since March 3 and the creative information about the activity was also spread on social media.

It was the first time that Coca Cola tried to do exchange promotion on mobile; and WeChat created a new channel to interact and promote on mobile. The activity provided a true sense of retaining consumer relationship management, and an excellent marketing opportunity. Here are some noteworthy points of this cooperation:

• Traditional beverage giant initiated a cooperation with WeChat, trying new O2O interaction mode. WeChat is no doubt significant for branding, attributed to its high penetration rate on mobile. While Coca Cola has been testing water in mobile marketing, WeChat will positively help it improve consumer participation, get closer to the young and boost sale.
• For the first time, the manufacturer uses a combination of Pincode and mobile internet to pull offline consumers to online, then retains and interacts with them. When participating in this activity, consumers need to follow the official Coca Cola account on WeChat, so consumers are retained and might become die-hard fans of Coca Cola. It increases the consumer stickiness, as well as the feedback value of Pincode.
• The tripartite cooperation (Coca Cola, WeChat and Yixun) inspires other enterprises with innovation and creative ideas of WeChat marketing. WeChat is more than an information carrier; WeChat marketing is not only a single pattern of information push, fans interaction, customer service or online transaction, but a combination of sources for marketing. In this way conversion will be easier. Many FMCG enterprises are expecting a cooperation opportunity, however not all brands have the chance to cooperate with WeChat and Yixun.

How to do WeChat marketing? There have been many representative cases, but Coca Cola gave us an inspiration. The primary user group of WeChat is the young, coinciding with the younger brand image of Coca Cola. Online shopping, WeChat interaction and “seckill”, these tactics are all preferred by young consumers, helping Coca Cola get close to the young people. “3PM drink and win Coca Cola” integrate the online and offline advertising sources, and WeChat utilized its advantage on mobile to offer marketing and service scenario. It brings branding and promotion closer and provides other brands a reference for mobile marketing. “WeChat and Didi” and “WeChat and Red Envelope” both caught people’s eye, now “WeChat and Coca Cola” would very likely to be popular with consumers and becomes a typical crossover marketing case in 2014.

Ma Jiajia, who owns a sex shop named Powerful, caught the eye of the media in 2013. As a post-90 girl, she was quite successful in building a brand and marketing. Her creative marketing ideas were highly appraised by entrepreneurs. Many companies invited her to give them advice and suggestions on marketing.

As a post-90 college graduate, Ma Jiajia knows how to market with a maverick language style. Ms. Ma is trying to make herself a leader of post-90, like what Han Han (a Chinese best-selling author born in 1982) means to post-80s, and to develop the business with personal brand.

Although someone depreciated Ms. Ma, saying what she did was speculation rather than marketing. But she actually have the ability to build a successful brand and win a lot of fans. How did Ms. Ma achieve all this in a short period of time?

Break with Convention to Draw Attention

A female who chose to set up a sex shop near her university rather than to work in media after graduating from Communication University of China is not something you see everyday. Sex is still a sensitive topic in China, which could only be mentioned by man most of the time. In such a conventional culture, Ms. Ma dared to implement the unconventional ideas of female, by utilizing her professional knowledge in media. To promote an event of anti-tradition and create an internet meme is not a difficult thing nowadays. It not only drew public attention but also brought a good topic for media. This was the successful first step of Ms. Ma.

Hype Herself Continuously

“Your chatter distracts me from my business!” Ms. Ma complained to investors. Then why she spent time interacting with media and companies if she really wanted to focus on business? It can be viewed as personal influence improving and relationship building by hyping herself, in the progress of personal brand building.

In this phase, the strategy is product-centered marketing with the assist of personal image. For many Chinese, the name”Ma Jiajia” will remind them of the girl running a sex shop. Now Ms. Ma are cementing the relationship between personal brand and sex toy brand. This is a relative long progress which required regular exposure to public. If an influencing person try to criticize her, it would be a good chance for Powerful to take a leap.

In China, sex toy industry is still in the shadow. Ms. Ma and her brand, Powerful, can not break the barriers at present, but they can destabilize it. Just make Powerful an excellent, distinctive sex toy brand, and people who need it will purchase it, even not in a public way. Ms. Ma will have some achievement as their team keep running the shop despite gossip.

There is a consensus that Ms. Ma is a mature marketer who knows marketing and branding very well. The complete procedure of marketing and branding that Powerful has shown are worth learning from.

However, Powerful is mainly driven by personal brand of Ms. Ma, and lacks for the ability to run independently. How to breakthrough when Powerful reaches a bottleneck will be a question that Ms. Ma must consider.

Small is beautiful. Powerful can be a successful, boutique sex shop, but it seems difficult to become a large influencing company. But Ms. Ma is still young, her future will be limitless. The relationships Powerful brought Ms. Ma may help her become a legend of post-90 entrepreneurs.

Baidu, in cooperation with Millward Brown, announced 2013 brand equity list on November 18 2013. Brand digital equity, a new concept proposed by Baidu, which combined big data of consumer search results with Millward Brown consumer brand equity research, evaluates brand performance in digital area from multi-dimensions.

Baidu’s list is a little different from Millward Brown’s BrandZ. BrandZ list is based on finance data and consumer data, and its China list only covered Chinese brands. Baidu digital equity covers all domestic and foreign brands’ performance in China  online market.

Baidu analyzed brand equity in two dimensions: the number of pages, and the number of active links. With 90% netizen penetration rate and 1 billion search queries per day, Baid owns the most comprehensive and complete brand information and consumer behavior data.

Besides, Baidu cooperated with Millward Brown to demonstrate each other’s research results, and they found out that brand digital equity is highly correlated to brand loyalty. Baidu brand digital equity list includes 3C, travel, stock, retail,luxury, healthcare and other brands, about 20 categories.

In mobile brands, Chinese brands occupied 7 out of 10. Xiaomi ranked the third, surpassing traditional mobile brands Nokia. Nokia and Meizu ranked in the top 10, were not because of the sales of their mobile phones but for the topics about themselves.

Alibaba ranked the top in B2B brands in 2013, with dominant advantages.

In B2C brands, Taobao ranked the first, followed by Jingdong and Amazon.

Ctrip ranked the top in OTA (Online Travel Agency) brands, followed by Qunar and Elong.

One of the interesting list was China internet enterprise brands, Taobao ranked the top, followed by Tencent. Baidu was not included in the ranking. Although Tencent has the highest market value, Taobao is closely related to consumers. Consumers buy products on Taobao,  while they only use Tencent’s QQ or Wechat for communication. This is why Taobao ranked higher than Tencent on brand digital equity list.

When Baidu’s brand digital equity list came out, some enterprises were pleased with their ranking while some grudged about it. Unlike search ranking, brand digital equity list is non-commercial and enterprises could not pay their way up. This means if enterprises want to improve their brand digital equity ranking, they will need to do more promotion on internet to improve online media coverage.

Coca Cola has been cooperating with Sina Weibo to promote its customized bottles using Weibo Wallet. It costs about 20 yuan a bottle. So, how was the online sales?

• The first day, 300 bottles sold out in one hour
• The second day, 500 bottles sold out in half an hour
• The third day, 500 bottles sold out in five minutes
• The fourth day, 300 bottles sold out in one minute

What’s the secret behind this best-selling? As we all know, Coca Cola launched its “nickname bottle” incorporating internet buzzwords into its branding. In this new marketing campaign, Weibo played an essential role in it. Celebrities and opinion leaders showed off their customized bottles with their names. It soon became popular among consumers making their own bottles to satisfy their wish to be like a star, some said they would use the bottle to express their feelings.

When Coca Cola knew the need of the consumers, they immediately worked together with Sina Weibo to attract more  consumers to customize their bottles in the vast Chinese market. In order to test Weibo Wallet, Coca Cola only charged delivery fees. Consumers can choose the nicknames they like to be printed on the bottle, and their own names, then pay for delivery fees via Weibo Wallet. It is as simple as any online shopping procedures.

After the first day’s sale on Weibo, consumers shared their bottles with their friends on social media, which explained why Coca Cola’s customized bottle sell better and better day by day. This is the power of social media marketing.