Chapter 16-- Integrated Marketing Communications

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.

By Unknown