DIGITAL
Lower Tier Cities Biggest Driver of China Ecommerce Growth
This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit
SCMP’s annual report highlights the significant opportunity for brands outside China’s most populous centres, and highlights KOLs as an essential marketing tool. China’s lower tier cities are the biggest growth…
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
SCMP’s annual report highlights the significant opportunity for brands outside China’s most populous centres, and highlights KOLs as an essential marketing tool.
China’s lower tier cities are the biggest growth opportunities for its plethora of emerging ecommerce technology brands, according to SCMP’s latest China Internet Report.
Launched at RISE today, the extensive study into China’s latest digital, technology and innovation trends highlights the untapped potential of these cities, finding that there are 128 million internet users in third tier cities or below that have not bought anything online.
Consumption is very much on the rise in these cities compared to the more saturated tier two cities and above, according to the report, which was compiled by SCMP, Abacus News and Edith Yeung, partner at 500 Startups.
Dividing the research into sectors, the China Internet Report also illustrated that KOLs are a must-have for Chinese marketing strategies. For the first time in August 2018, Taobao’s recommendation feed traffic surpassed its search traffic, pointing to how much Chinese consumers rely on peer recommendations rather than search-based shopping.
Regarding influencers specifically, the study found KOLs to be the social marketing format of choice, ahead of both short-form videos or official WeChat or Weibo accounts.
That said, the rise of short-form video is one of the key trends the report highlights, taking particular note of TikTok’s meteoric rise – the company is valued at around US$75 billion. However, the overall growth rate of short-form video consumption is decreasing as the market matures.
In tandem with the growth in content consumption is a growing trend for Chinese consumers being willing to pay for their content, such as long-form video and music.
The report also assessed China’s social media landscape, and concluded that Tencent is virtually unassailable in the space—its two platforms, WeChat and QQ, have a staggering 1.1 billion and 700 million daily active users respectively.
SCMP also highlighted how Chinese technological advancements are now in demand globally, an ironic twist for the nation once known for its copycat tendencies.
Article originally published on Campaign Asia-Pacific. Republished with permission.
Cover image: Campaign Asia-Pacific
Providing insights and intelligence into the ideas, work and personalities shaping the region’s marketing-communications industry, Campaign Asia-Pacific dives deeper into important subjects and presents the most compelling information that matters to businesses in the fastest-growing and most exciting communications market in the world. Campaign Asia-Pacific serves the marketing elite, those that are pushing creative advertising and communications to new boundaries, redefining brand experiences through multiple touch-points, both on and offline.
