Alibaba’s 6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival breaks sales records with innovative marketing tools

Alibaba Group’s Taobao and Tmall shattered multiple records during this year’s “6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival”. Brands and merchants leveraged a suite of Alibaba technologies to enhance engagement with consumers across the country.According to the company, over 200,000 brands took part in this year’s festival. With more than 110 brands leveraging the innovative marketing campaigns and tools provided by Alibaba’s core platforms during the 18-day campaign, each brand generated gross merchandise volume in excess of RMB100 million.Merchants used Taobao live-streaming as a channel for consumer engagement. Compared with 2018, the number of live-streaming sessions hosted by brands increased by more than 120%. Some of the brands debuting with live-streams included Puma, Decathlon, Crocs, and Casio. Taobao live-streaming generated gross merchandise volumes (GMV) of more than RMB13 billion.Alibaba’s dedicated market research arm, Tmall Innovation Centre, also used data intelligence to enable brands to curate and develop new products that best appealed to Chinese consumers. During the shopping event, Nestlé introduced a new fruit-flavoured coffee, which sold 44,000 packs in two hours.Flash sales channel Juhuasuan, which allows brands to attract new customers via discounts, added over 300 million new consumers. More than 180 products topped RMB10 million in sales, and 4,700 products achieved sales of over RMB1 million. It was a record-breaking number for brands’ participation in Juhuasuan.“We are very pleased to see that our strategy to help brands penetrate the less-developed markets has paid off. Customers in the emerging cities are very receptive to innovative products and promotion campaigns such as programmes on the Juhuasuan platform,” said Jiang Fan, president of Taobao and Tmall.“The number of customers and GMV from third to fifth-tier cities both hit 100% growth. We believe this group of customers will continue to grow into a strong and sustainable force for brands who are looking at further developing the Chinese market.”The company also sees there is a rising demand from consumers in less-developed cities for quality products. With an increase in discretionary income, consumers in China’s less-developed areas are quickly becoming a crucial driver of China’s solid consumption.These consumers were the main engine powering this year’s 6.18 Shopping Festival. According to Tmall, 48% of the newly launched products on the platform during the event were purchased by customers outside first and second-tier cities.“The results of the ‘6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival’ were encouraging. It has proven to be a celebration that can match the enthusiasm and scale of the ‘11.11 Global Shopping Festival’. More than 100 brands achieved a new sales record that surpassed the result from last year’s 11.11,” Jiang said.