E-commerce giants lack brand strategy_美文

E-commerce giants lack brand strategy

A recent myth, after Uber selling its stake to a Chinese competitor, is that foreigners always lose in the Chinese internet market. Must it always be the case? Perhaps not.

It may sound convenient to say those who lost all did so because of poor strategy. But strategy does occupy an important place in any business in a large country. So, if Amazon, seemingly the lone foreign warrior fighting in a market dominated by Alibaba and JD.com, can have a China strategy and manage it well, it may not have to beat a Uber-ish retreat.

Think about it. Which woman in this country (and you don’t have to know any Chinese language to tell) would like to wear an Alibaba summer dress or hold a JD handbag?

It is not easy to develop either Chinese e-commerce company’s name into a brand of consumer goods. In fact, neither company has done that. Nor have they developed their own lines of products.

They are both, for all their differentiations, what people call platform companies, offering themselves as online marketplace for other offline businesses. Alibaba is trying to offer an ever-increasing variety of goods and services while JD is spending huge money building its own logistic and delivery services.

By comparison, Amazon is obviously playing a different game in its home base.

Bloomberg recently reported that Amazon is already the biggest online seller of clothes in the US, whose apparel sales totaling $16.3 billion in 2017.