Working with Bloggers, Influencers and KOLs - Ashley Dudarenok

Ashley Dudarenok

Marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok co-authored with Lauren Hallanan her latest book, Digital China: Working with Bloggers, Influencers and KOLs, a hands-on introduction into the tricky e-commerce market in China for foreign companies, for one week available at Amazon for only US$0.99.

From Amazon:

Want to know more about influencer marketing in the world’s largest and fastest growing online market? This is the second book in our series guiding you through China’s digital space. China is one of the most attractive markets in the world and collaborating with bloggers, KOLs and influencers is essential if you want to find a place in the consumer’s heart. Don’t know where to start? This book will help newcomers and experienced marketers alike gain insight and take action. You’ll learn about:

• The Most Influential KOL Platforms and How They Work

• How to Find and Select the Right Influencer for You

• The Ins and Outs of Effective KOL Campaigns

• KOLs in action: Revealing Case Studies

 Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on e-commerce at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Why size matters in China's e-commerce - Tom Doctoroff

Tom DoctoroffAfter a slow and hesitant start, e-commerce is booming in China, with very Chinese characteristics, marketing guru Tom Doctoroff explains in The Huffington Post. Chinese want to bargain, and the size of the seller matters.
Tom Doctoroff:

The growth of China's consumer e-commerce sector is breathtaking, doubling year on year. On-line shopping is more than a trend; it is a phenomenon. But it took a while for things to take off. It was not until two fundamentally Chinese business essentials were addressed -- the benefits and reassurance of scale, low price as the ultimate competitive weapon -- that an inflection point was crossed... In the Middle Kingdom, bigger is better. Broad scale forges trust and order from chaos. China's largest appliance manufacturer, Haier, is not a particularly innovative company but consumers are drawn to its size. This suggests reliability. Its expansive retail and distribution network deployed as a one-of-a-kind national 24-hour service operation. Over the past ten years, brands such as Yili and Mengniu have morphed from local dairy brands to national titans. Transformation was driven by both top-down government support and bottom-up consumer food safety concerns. Even luxury goods must project "authority" before "craftsmanship." Louis Vuitton, Mercedes and BWM succeeded, first and foremost, because of their global clout. In the People's Republic, no one "invests" in status brands unless everyone recognizes them.

More in The Huffington Post.

Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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How Ebay failed in China - Helen Wang

Jack Ma of Alibaba

In the slipstream of the most recent Yahoo-Alibaba brawl Helen Wang recalls the long-standing tradition of failure Yahoo's ecommerce site Ebay had in China. From an excerpt of her upcoming book "The Chinese Dream" in Forbes.
The struggle started in 2004:

In 2004, I visited Alibaba at its headquarters in Hangzhou. It is located on a campus of three ten-story buildings in the northeastern part of Hangzhou, about a ten-minute taxi drive from West Lake. In the lobby, a flat panel TV was streaming video clips of Jack Ma speaking at various public events where his admirers, most of them in their twenties, were cheering him like a rock star. While visiting Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, I felt the same “insanely great” energy of entrepreneurship as I felt in Silicon Valley. When I asked a senior manager at Alibaba whether the company was worried that it would be bought by eBay, I was blown away by the answer: “We will buy eBay!”

As we know now, Ebay failed that epic struggle, that is still going on. Helen Wang:

First, eBay failed to recognize that the Chinese market and the business environment are very different from that of the West. EBay sent a German manager to lead the China operation and brought in a chief technology officer from the United States. Neither one spoke Chinese or understood the local market. It was eBay’s biggest mistake. Second, because the top management team didn’t understand the local market, they spent a lot of money doing the wrong things, such as advertising on the Internet in a country where small businesses didn’t use the Internet. The fact that eBay had a strong brand in the United States didn’t mean it would be a strong brand in China. Third, rather than adapt products and services to local customers, eBay stuck to its “global platform,” which again did not fit local customers’ tastes and preferences.

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Image by Fantake via Flickr

Helen Wang

Helen Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need her insights at your meeting of conference, do get in touch.

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Why Yahoo cannot ignore China - Paul Denlinger

Paul Denlinger by Fantake via Flickr

China's leading eCommerce site Alibaba.com is in another spat with its largest shareholder Yahoo (neatly summarized here in the Wall Street Journal) because it started to recruit advertisers on the mainland. Business analyst Paul Denlinger explains in the Business Insider why Yahoo has to reclaim lost ground in China.

Things were fine as long as the two companies didn't enter each other's territory: For Alibaba, this was the China market and for Yahoo , this was everywhere else. (Yahoo has a significant presence in Hong Kong, and commands more than 95% of all traffic in Taiwan through Yahoo 's acquisition of Kimo in 2000, and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang's Taiwan roots.)

Alibaba is entering the global market, taking on Yahoo outside China. So, Yahoo entering China, led by its current headquarters in Singapore, is unavoidable, writes Paul Denlinger.

That's a mighty big hole. With China's economic dynamo, it's impossible to sell a real ad package if China is not included. This is why Yahoo needs to move into ad sales in China. 

But the problem, from the Chinese government's perspective, is that the ad sales center is based in Singapore, which is not a part of China. When Google skedaddled out of Beijing to Hong Kong in March, it could at least claim that Hong Kong was a part of China, and that it had not in fact left China, even though Hong Kong is not covered by the Great Firewall of China which censors content in the PRC.

But that is not the case with Singapore, which China recognizes as a sovereign nation, even though more than 70% of its population are ethnic Chinese. And diplomatically, China and Singapore, along with the other countries of Southeast Asia, have been going through some rough patches lately.

In short:: Yahoo is not only taking on Alibaba, but also the Chinese government, warns Paul Denlinger.
More at the Business Insider.

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Paul Denlinger is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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