Alibaba: online shopping winning the luxury brands

120.7 billion RMB ($18.1 billion) revenue in one day. 
This amount of sales revenue is generated in one day. Is it possible? It did happen on 11th Nov 2016. The daily sales revenue of Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba’s flagship C2C and B2C online shopping platforms, hit 120.7 million RMB. 
 
Alibaba and its Empire
Alibaba is debatably the biggest retailer in the world. Its quarterly profit exceeds the annual profit of Amazon. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and chairman, is the most well-recognized and influential Chinese entrepreneur in the western world. 440 million people are active on Alibaba’s platforms. What’s the magic behind?
Alibaba has been touting the power of the data thrown off by the consumers shopping, engaging with brands and consuming content on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. The growth and evolution of Tmall mirrors the unique online ecosystem with the support of big data and integrated marketing.
Let’s go back to the beginning. To distinguish with C2C platform Taobao and better serve brand client, Alibaba established Tmall, to host established brands. Tmall had reputation as an “online low-end-brand market” at the beginning. It has been through a long way to become a strategic retail channel to target younger audience.

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Tmall: from a cheap market-place to a brand collaborator
It publishes the purchase trends and brand impact rankings. In 2013, Tmall announced the plan to upgrade the branding services for flagship stores. It signalled that Tmall changed from a display marketplace, to a marketer. It aimed to increase brand engagement, improve CRM system, utilize user behaviour statistics, and raise the brand awareness. It means Tmall actively participates in the brand campaign, provides data-oriented insights, designs and executes the campaign.
Traditionally, luxury brands tend to stay away from online shopping, to maintain the brand proposition. However, luxury industry faces the growth bottleneck majority of them have realized that online shopping can cut advertisement cost and reach out to broader audience more effectively. They change the strategy, embrace Tmall and customize campaign accordingly.  The trend starts from cosmetic brands. For example, when launching its online store, Guerlain did a live broadcasting on Tmall, and gained 50,000 new members and 4 million engagement within one hour. Then come fashion and jewellery brands. In Feb 2017, TAG Heuer joined Tmall and opened its first online platform.

Big Data & Uni Marketing
Alibaba is good at analysing big data and understanding its user behaviour. It has launcheda new concept – Uni Marketing. “By combining its massive data assets, businesses can identify, segment and build tailored content for the best results.” said Alibaba Chief Marketing Officer in a statement.
It reveals Alibaba’s ambition of aggressively increasing conversion rate and becoming a big winner in the marketing and advertising, the same philosophy as Google search algorithm. Alfa Romeo collaborating with Tmall, to first launch its brand in China is a great example. Alibaba analysed the existing search stats related to Alfa Romeo and luxurious cars to find the target audience, then customized the campaign and message. APASS, Alibaba Passport, is the loyalty program, the member of which spends in average 300,000RMBD on the platforms. APASS members are crucial to the luxury brand marketing. The precise targeting proved to be successful. In the first 30 minutes of launch, over 300 Alfa Romeo cars are sold out.
 
Alibaba has other products that are less known but contribute lots to the brand, such as Alipay (a great war with Wechat Pay, Alicloud, and Gaode Map (the main competitor of Baidu Map). Stay tune with Seeniun Media for more China insights.