Global Marketing News – 17th June 2016
Jack Ma Claims China’s Fakes Are As Good As Originals
Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, has defended the company’s counterfeit problems, by claiming that fake goods in the country are now better than the real thing.
China has long suffered with the issue of counterfeit goods making their way into the market, but Ma said that “The problem is that the fake products today have better quality and better prices” than the real products and brands they are based on.
He did add that Alibaba was one of the best at fighting the issue of counterfeits, but even so the comments have not gone down well with others trying to tackle the problem.
Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Center, responded to the comments by declaring Jack Ma’s comments as “inappropriate”.
He added that “for some individual cases what he’s saying might be true, but it’s wrong to generalize the phenomenon.”
Ma’s company, Alibaba was recently suspended from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, after it was judged they were not doing enough to stop fakes being sold on its sites.
Facebook Is Argentina’s Favourite Social Network
Facebook is Argentina’s most popular social network after it was revealed that nearly 100% of internet users had used the site.
The report carried out by Carrier y Asociados, showed that 97% of those on the internet in Argentina had used Facebook in past, putting it a long way ahead of WhatsApp in second place, on 70%.
However, the survey also estimates that just 72.7% of those online will use social media at all this month, whilst just 71 will use Facebook.
Surprisingly the results showed a high 60% usage rate for Google Plus, whilst the site is a lowly 9th in usage rate across the whole of Latin America with only 8 million users to Facebook’s 140 million.
Messenger App Use On The Rise In Indonesia
Messenger app penetration is growing steadily across Indonesia, rising to nearly 50% of the population using the services.
Currently at 48%, a survey by TNS also show that the level of users on social networks is now just 6% higher, at 54%.
The digital director of TNS Asia Pacific, Zoë Lawrence said the finding opened up new opportunities for marketers, especially as figures from the whole of Eastern Asia show messenger services as having higher usage than social media.
For example, Facebook, Line and WeChat have all seen increased users and have now introduced bots to its messenger services in order to directly communicate with their users.
Lawrence said that companies can now “carry out customer service activities through the messenger and the process is interactive”.
Dutch Shoppers Stay At Home
New data has revealed that the majority of Dutch shoppers are more likely to shop domestically online.
Whilst 71% of the country shop on the internet now, there are now more than double the amount Dutch online shoppers than there was ten years ago.
This increase in shoppers has led to a larger market which has encouraged an increase in online retailers.
By giving Dutch shoppers more choice online, up from 15 thousand to 32 thousand in six years, they are increasingly likely to buy from shops in their own country, and less likely to buy cross-border.
This trend can also be seen across the EU, where a survey by The European Commission found that users were usually put off online shopping in foreign countries due to delivery issues or not trusting the retailers themselves.
Alibaba Looking To Deliver To The Moon
And finally, Jack Ma has announced that he intends to develop technology that will allow him to deliver people and parcels to the moon.
Ma indicated that his company, Alibaba, was looking into a high-speed delivery service to remote places, that customers would be able to hail through an app.
The ecommerce tycoon said that the logistics industry had no limit of growth and that when it became a reality, it would be ready to send goods to the moon.
Whilst he would first need Chinese government permission for the app to be launched in the country, he said that they aim to be able to deliver within 24 hours of an online order, and 72 hours internationally.
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