Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
