MAM
Alibaba – Building a new model for marketing
MUMBAI: As we approach a new decade, what were once predictions are today a reality. Some of these are – India enjoys a demographic dividend, smartphone and internet penetration is constantly growing, consumer appetite is expanding beyond established markets and coming from emerging India as well. Additionally, India is now the fastest growing economy in the world. This bodes well when you weigh the potential of the market. What comes next is attracting audiences and making it easier for brands to reach consumers.
This was the subject of a talk at the 44th International Advertising Association’s World Congress in Kochi by Chris Tung, Chief Marketing Officer, Alibaba Group. For any brand to enter a consumer’s discovery cycle that straddles Awareness, Interest, Purchase, and then Loyalty; brands need to do much more in the digital age. The need is for a cohesive, evolving, data-led ecosystem that involves content marketing, understanding consumption patterns, lifestyle preferences, and more. Through this data-led engagement, brands have the opportunity to become far more relevant to their target audiences. The data-led model allows for brands to experiment with campaigns readily and sometimes even optimise entire marketing strategies for customer acquisition.
Alibaba has been instrumental in achieving a data-led model that it terms as uni-marketing that allows brands access to insights based on data that are anonymised and aggregated down segments that number one million in size. This allows for a test-bed that at the very least has a million users. And the results have been promising for Alibaba and the brands that leverage its platforms. Alibaba reports 50% year on year revenue growth. For brands that leverage a data-led approach championed through uni-marketing at Alibaba – in some cases, time to launch has come down to nine months from 18 months. There are more top-sellers per brand today across categories. The real power of uni-marketing shone through with an insight provided to Mars Inc., wherein Alibaba suggested a chilli-infused chocolate treat to the global confectioner. The result? Between August of 2017 and March of 2018, sales of Snickers Spicy surpassed USD 1.43 million dollars with a 92% satisfaction rating among consumers.
That’s just the success of one product and one brand. When you scale this data-led engine out to engage with millions of users – what you arrive at is an e-commerce platform that brings brands and consumers closer to each other and a record sitting USD 30.8 billion Singles’ Day in 2018. To break that down further – that’s the ability to drive 300,000 transactions per second.
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
