Global Marketing News – 29th January 2016
Is AI the future of search?
The leading Chinese tech company Baidu has announced that it will be investing more money in supercomputing technologies.
Baidu’s President announced the news in a Bloomberg TV interview, saying: “Voice recognition, picture recognition, machine translation, deep learning and neural networks and all those things will make us competitive in the long term.”
The company intends to embark on a merger and acquisition spree of such technology companies in order to get ahead of its main competitors Tencent and Alibaba.
In the last year, Baidu, which is most famous for its search engine, has been diversifying its products.
In 2015, Baidu said that it would invest over 3 billion US dollars in online-to-offline services in the next 3 years, and according to CEO Robin Li, the company’s future lies in services, rather than searching.
Online-to-offline services are those which allow users to do a real-world activity online, such as taxi-hailing and ticket-booking apps.
Baidu’s focus on online-to-offline services has been put down to the increasing penetration of smartphones in the Chinese market.
Luxury brands are missing out by not embracing digital marketing
Research by ContactLab suggests that many luxury brands are missing out on opportunities by not embracing the digital age.
Many luxury brands have little or no digital presence, and are particularly shying away from mobile marketing.
ContactLab recommends that luxury brands should engage in mobile commerce and mobile advertising if they want to succeed in an increasingly mobile world.
The benefits of engaging in online marketing is clear to see – customers who have seen or received some kind of digital marketing spend 25% more money in luxury shops compared to those who have not received any kind of digital marketing.
The global luxury ecommerce market is expected to surpass 20 billion US dollars by 2020.
Apple has over 1 billion active devices
Apple has revealed that it now has over 1 billion active devices.
The figure counts all iPhones, iPads, Macs, iPod touches, Apple TVs and Apple Watches that have been used in the last 90 days.
The news comes as it was also revealed that iPhone sales are facing a dramatic decline, however.
The number of iPhones sold last quarter was 74.8 million, just 0.3 million more than it sold the year previously.
This is the smallest ever increase in iPhone sales in Apple’s history, promoting concern that sales will actually fall this year.
The apparent fall in popularity may be explained partially by the rise of cheaper alternatives in China, made by rival firms such as Xiaomi.
Over 1 in 3 global online purchases take place on mobile
A report by Adyen has found that over one third of global online purchases now take place on mobile.
The report, which was based on an analysis of millions of global transactions, found that in the fourth quarter of 2015 34% of all online transactions took place on mobile, up 4% on the previous quarter.
Out of these mobile transactions, 68% were made on smartphones, compared to 32% on tablets.
For the first time ever, retail goods were more likely to be bought by smartphone, rather than by tablet.
The report also identified the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden as the top 3 markets in terms of mobile payment adoption.
Online shoppers can now collect items from Indian Metro stations
And finally, online shoppers in India may soon be able to collect their items from underground train stations.
From February, 10 Delhi Metro underground stations will have kiosks from which customers can pick up items they’d ordered online. The kiosks will be fitted with credit and debit card payment machines to allow users to pay then and there.
It has not yet been revealed which ecommerce sites will be distributing their items from the kiosks, although there is speculation that it may involve the country’s three biggest ecommerce sites: Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart.
The Indian ecommerce market is currently worth 11 billion US dollars and is growing rapidly, with online sales expected to reach 220 billion US dollars by 2025 according to estimates by Merrill Lynch.
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Cal O'Connell
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