- Tencent’s total digital content subscription counts exceeded 100 million by the end of 2018, up 50% year-on-year and the fee-based VAS subscriptions were up by 1% year-on-year to 160.3 million, mainly attributable to growth in video and music subscriptions? click for more…
Insight & Implication: The desire of Chinese consumers for more digital content, especially the entertainment kind, has reached new heights. Their fragmented leisure time has become the main battlefield for all brands wanting to win a piece of it. However, only content the consumers perceive as valuable or highly entertaining can draw their attention and motivate them to actively and meaningfully engage.
- Kantar’s research has found that 60% of the brands that insisted on using celebrities in China in the past three years did not achieve continuous growth in Brand Power? click for more…
Insight & Implication: The excessive use of celebrity assets in China’s market has weakened the power of their influence, resulting in a significant marketing investment waste. Finding the right brand ambassador outweighs deployment of “liuliang stars” – celebrities deployed only because of their physical attributes and a large fanbase. This is why brands should conduct an evaluation to confirm whether their potential choice of brand ambassador truly matches the brand values and personality, and not utilize a celebrity asset only because of their large fanbase.
- The food delivery market was on course to reach RMB 240 billion in transactions in 2018, with an 18% year-over-year growth rate and total users would reach 355 million, which means a quarter of Chinese are now ordering food from their phones? click for more…
Insight & Implication: The food delivery industry is continuing its growth across China’s market and becoming an everyday life convenience. Face-to-face contact with consumers has led the industry leader Ele.com to establish a significant number of co-marketing activities with brands. Brands should consider what role O2O food delivery businesses can play in their communication strategy and how they can utilize these platforms at scale.
- China’s third-party mobile payment market reached RMB 47.2 trillion ($7.01 trillion) in trade volume in 2018 Q4, a 7.8% quarter-on-quarter increase and Alipay dominated 53.8% of market share while Tencent’s Tenpay with 38.9% market share? click for more…
Insight & Implication: The growth of mobile payments in China has slowed down due to the overall market nearing the saturation point. This is why payment service providers are shifting their focus to building their ecosystems to offer wealth management, insurance, credit and loans. Brands could utilize mobile payment gateways to help drive the digitization of supply chain at retail outlets and further exploit this important link bridging online and offline worlds.
- In 2018, Xiaomi’s revenue of the IoT (Internet of Things) and lifestyle products segment increased by 86.9% to RMB 43.8 billion (US$6.52bn), primarily due to the rapid growth in demand of smart TVs and other ecosystem products such as Mi Band, Mi Electric Scooter, and Mi Robot Vacuum Cleaner? click for more…
Insight & Implication: The demand on smart devices is growing rapidly in China. Xiaomi is riding the growth wave by bringing artificial intelligence to household electronics with the objective of further enhancing the user experience. Brands can consider what roles the AI-powered devices can play in their overall communications strategy and understand what they can do to further enhance consumer experience in this particular segment.
Have a great weekend!
