Brand Databank’s Monetization: Turn Consumer Data into Powerful Assets

8

October

2020

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Brand Databank, designed by Alibaba Group, is a consumer asset data management center for brands, which allows brands to fully manage consumer data, make business decisions and apply uni strategies across Alibaba ecosystem. Brand databank treats brand consumer data as an asset, storing and adding value like currency. With Ali’s unique Uni-Identity-Match, it integrates CRM, e-commerce data, advertising data, media data, and social attribute data in the Alibaba ecosystem and connects “data islands”. It is the first try of Alibaba to make brands to accumulate consumer data assets and promote relationships with their consumers through big data.

Databank provides 3 fundamental functions for brands:
1. “Aggregation”: All online and offline data will be restored to the brand data bank to represent every real consumer’s interaction with the brand in Alibaba. The brand owner will be able to track the status of brand consumers throughout the awareness-interest-purchase-loyalty (so-called AIPL) process.
2. “Analysis”: Enable each brand to independently analyze its consumers of different characteristics by applying multiple tag conditions at the same time with set operations (intersection, union and difference). Databank identifies more than 5,000 tags from consumers which is still growing, covering predicted personal characteristics (such as age, gender, job, region), shopping behaviors (price-sensitive, reoccurring consumer, ), reactions to different marketing channels and content channels, and interconnected data between different subsidiary platforms.
3. “Activation”: Integrated with other Alibaba’s Uni Marketing applications and several cooperated major media platforms, Databank is able to get the feedback of ads from different channels (even outside Alibaba ecosystem) and help improve marketing capabilities. Databank is commonly used as an essential tool for brands to test various marketing strategies and improve marketing efficiency.

As indicated by Alibaba’s product experts, consumers’ time and marketing scenarios in the wireless era are constantly fragmented, making traditional marketing tools and data products unable to match this theory, so that many brand owners’ brand management planning and execution methods are often out of touch. Traditional marketing theories can not help brands to track and convert consumers, nor can they optimize communication methods based on changes in consumer preferences in a timely manner, resulting in brands unable to establish a sustained and stable relationship with consumers. Nonetheless, databank’s strong infrastructure enables brands to control end-to-end brand building. It is built on Alibaba’s ability to capture and analyze real-time data from the entire vast ecosystem and transmit it into the structure that enables brands to explore patterns of consumer behaviors. In turn, brand owners can use these data to promote new, more targeted and effective brand building activities based on real-time data.

References:
1. Alibaba Introduces Brand Databank: Data Can Appreciate and Be Deposited like Monetary Funds
https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-introduces-brand-databank-data-can-appreciate-and-be-deposited-like-monetary-funds_595587
2. New Marketing Tools Make It Easier Than Ever to Reach Consumers in China
https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/article?news=p170619
3. Alibaba’s data-driven “uni marketing” engine rewrites the rules of brand marketing
https://www.thegeniusworks.com/2017/06/alibabas-data-driven-uni-marketing-engine-rewrites-rules-brand-marketing/

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How Alibaba Interconnects Data of Consumers through Affiliates

7

October

2020

5/5 (3)

Alibaba, as the largest e-commerce platform in China, has huge data base of customer behavior patterns. In addition to providing e-platform service as its core business, Alibaba put its attention into becoming an advanced “data and insights provider”, not only via its Alibaba Cloud computing services, but also through data applications on Taobao, Tmall, AliPay and all other subsidiaries of Alibaba Group. To get there, an essential step is to collect as much valuable data as possible from each individual consumer.

Services from Alibaba and its affiliate companies cover almost every part of people’s lifestyles. Take a look at these subsidiary companies:
Core commerce: Taobao, Tmall, Alibaba, Alimama
Payment: AliPay
Media: Alibaba Music, Alisports, UC browser, Youku (video hosting service)
Local services: Ele.me (food delivery App), Fliggy (online travel platform) TaoPiaoPiao (ticketing App), Amap (map App), Koubei (Chinese-version Yelp), AliHealth (online healthcare service)
Logistics: CaiNiao
Others: DingTalk (office tool, Zoom+WhatsApp)

So how Alibaba actually plays around with data? It all starts with its 88 VIP membership program since 2018, which redefines customer loyalty by offering top-tier consumers a yearly membership with only 88 rmb (11 euro) annual fee. 88 VIP customers are able to enjoy discounts, monthly coupons, premium services across Alibaba’s ecosystem covering commerce, entertainment and local services. Obviously, the annual fee is definitely too little to cover the benefits offered to its consumers. However, the real secret behind 88 VIP membership is to interconnect the client data between platforms and be able to identify the same customer ID within different platforms.

For example, a consumer who purchased 88 VIP membership on Taobao, wants to enjoy his/her monthly 20 rmb coupon on Ele.me while ordering food deliveries, or view premium videos on Youku. Instead of purchasing memberships separately on each platform, a 88 VIP consumer can enjoy all equivalent benefits by simply connecting his/her account on Ele and Youku to the account on Taobao.

Alibaba makes great efforts to encourage consumers to do so, especially during its 11.11 Singles Day propaganda. By visiting up to 15 apps affiliated to Alibaba and completing different tasks daily during the half month before 11.11, consumers can earn around 3-10 rmb vouchers everyday, which can be counted up and used on any purchase on 11.11 Singles Day. Alibaba adds a lot of fun into these activities and makes sure the consumers who want to save money and bear time-consuming activities will spend the most of time in its ecosystem. In order to earn more vouchers, a number of consumers will download all these apps, and connect their accounts to the Taobao accounts.

Afterwards, Alibaba could easily distinguish the behavior patterns of a specific consumer across each subsidiary platform it owns, and additionally use the data to predict future behaviors. If you purchased a flight ticket from Shanghai to Amsterdam on Fliggy, an online travel platform launched by Alibaba, you would probably find advertisements recommending international call and wifi packages shown on your Taobao homepage or encouraging you to use AliPay for discounted Euro exchange rate shown on your AliPay App.

As a data analyst myself, I think it is an incredible innovation of Ailbaba to generate value with data, but as an online consumer, it also brings huge concerns for privacy and data security. When the choice between privacy and convenience is put on the table, what will be your choice?

Reference:
1. Here’s How Alibaba Is Leveraging Its Data
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/05/16/heres-how-alibaba-is-leveraging-its-data/#594ca5f33292
2. Alibaba’s data-driven “uni marketing” engine rewrites the rules of brand marketing
https://www.thegeniusworks.com/2017/06/alibabas-data-driven-uni-marketing-engine-rewrites-rules-brand-marketing/
3. Alibaba Launches Top-tier “88 VIP” Membership

Click to access p180809.pdf

4. How Alibaba uses big data to understand Chinas shoppers

Click to access How_Alibaba_uses_big_data_to_understand_Chinas_shoppers.pdf

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