The Spanish postal service, Correos, launched its Tmall global shop
Recently, Spanish post office Correo launched its oversea flag shop on Tmall global(an online B2C platform under China Alibaba Group) and started the trial operation. All the products sold in this flag shop come from major local brands in Spain and will be directly sent from the Spanish local brands’ warehouse to China.
Last year, Alibaba’s Cainiao network announced the strategic collaboration with the Spanish post office Correos which significantly push forward the cross-border business and logistics services. After the flag shop is established, the delivery will be very convenient and fast. A staff working in Correos said “All the brands shown up in our flag shop are selected through deliberate consideration.” Since Correos has major advantage of its domestic logistics service in Spain, it only takes 7 to 14 days for Correos to deliver the products from the warehouse, transfer them to EMS and finally arrive at buyers’ designated address. Buyers can track the information on both Correos and EMS websites.
The brands in the Correos flag shop include:
- Oleocampo: a high-end olive oil made in Spain
- Colnatur: a protein powder brand with protein powder products suitable for both sports fitness people and middle aged people.
- ART: a Spanish fast fashion shoe brand
- Neosens: one of the high-end shoe brand from La Rioja, Spain
- Marques de Grinon: one of the high end Spanish wine brand
- Correos: main products are stamps and commemorative coin collection
However, Correos is not the first foreign country’s postal service company that launches Tmall global shop. UK’s Royal Mail, Australia Post and Northern Europe’s Post Nord have already had their Tmall global shop online.
Big Data and Precise Marketing – Tips from Baidu
Nowadays everyone is talking about big data, but what exactly is big data? How can we use it to benefit our business in China?
As we all know, Baidu is the biggest, and most popular, Chinese search engine with coverage of approximately 95% of China’s population. It receives around 6 billion search queries per day. With their countless backstage data, Baidu decided to move forward into the big data area and try to convert it into a high-value business service.
Last week 2Open attended a seminar about Baidu’s big data and precision marketing. Here are some point that were discussed during the event.
What is big data?
Big data is all about predictions, math applied to large quantities of data in order to infer probabilities. The big data will provide us with the new ability to crunch a vast collection of information, analyze it instantly, and draw conclusions from it.
Big data can be used in a variety of business field: cross marketing, precision marketing, reference location, credit investigation, quantity investigation, disease prediction and travel prediction etc.
For instance, by using Baidu’s big data, we can find out the crowdedness of certain touristic attractions and the popularity of the travel itinerary in China. With the help of this data we would be able to improve our travel plans since we would be avoiding crowded destinations.
Big data for marketing?
In the past Baidu cooperated with a motor company (to protect the advertiser’s rights we will refer to this company as Company A).
First of all, Company A wanted to launch a new A0 level car to the market, but they had no idea what the new car’s selling point was, more importantly, how to handle the pre-marketing and publication campaign. They decided to work with Baidu and used their big data service.
Secondly, Baidu identified consumer’s emotional needs by mining social data, and exploring differentiation opportunities by scanning the perception of other competitors. With all of this data they decided to use “happiness” as the communication concept/selling point of the new car.
Finally, by studying consumer’s profiles, identifying target audiences, and understanding different age groups by analysing their lifestyle and engagement occasions. The new car’s main target audience resulted to be 23-45 males, in tier3, tier4 and tier5 instead of tier1 and tier2 cities. This turned out to be the most important consumption market.
For lifestyle occasions, Baidu chose readings, videos, movies, TV series and gaming as the main five labels for determining their target audience. Company A even designed a LOL (League Of Legends, one of the most famous online games) poster ads.
For engagement occasions, there are five stages before the final purchase. Baidu defines them as; category research, comparative study, trial, finding 4S stores, and financial plan. Then they give related suggestion to company A for every stage of the marketing strategy.
Baidu named its big data & marketing decision platform “Sinan”(http://sinan.Baidu.com/). This platform mainly provides nine functions: audience definition, brand recognition, interest insight, search behaviour, demographics, geographic, media preferences, multiple data merge, and media buying suggestion. With the help of a big data platform like this any marketing strategy will be much easier for a company.
Still wondering about how to improve your business in China? Try embracing big data now! Or… get in touch with us. Here at 2Open we are passionate about every project. Our team of specialists have the expertise and knowledge that your company needs to thrive in the Chinese market. If you have any questions or require any information about our services, please do not hesitate in contacting us, we will be more than happy to assist you.
This article was edited by Andres Arroyo Olson from 2Open.