Alex Baar | International Digital Marketing | E-commerce

Hello!! It is almost 2018 and as the new year approaches, many websites publish trends for 2018. I have collected a couple of links to the most valuable consumer and marketing trends in 2018, so once you are done reading this blog post you are completely up to date and you can continue your party preparations for new year's eve! The first one I would like to share is a trendwatching video from trendwatching.com. Trendwatching describes consumer trends as " a new manifestation among people in behavior, attitude, or expectation of a fundamental human need, want or desire ." meaning that this video goes beyond short term (product) trends. To work with trends it is important to uderstand what trends are and how they are created. This video explains this as well. Besides this explanation, 5 trends are described and altough the words below might seem familiar I still encourage you to watch the video as the trends themselves are explained differently then you might think, w...

What motivates me in work are a lot of things, but currently especially the following aspects are very motivating for me: Using user feedback into digital media (websites/devices), to really get this interaction with users. To find out what is working but also what to improve, and to understand why users do not buy! (and to change that of course). Optimizing the user experience (user engagement, touchpoints, data collection) Constantly innovating to improve the user experience Crossborder e-commerce Startup mentality, doing things together in a great team with the same focus. I really think that ecommerce (and marketing) has evolved from a functional model (direct selling) to a brand model and is now moving to an experience model. Things might overlap a little bit between these models, but this is the greater picture.  It is not only me who thinks so of course, more  and more  is written about this subject recently and it fits perfectly in line with another ...

I am currently on holiday and then I take time to read a few books. One of them is the book “Alibaba’s world” written by Porter Erisman. Funny now I write this down, I realise “Porter” is his first name. While reading the book, I constantly thought that everybody called him Porter just by his last name..:) Reading the book together with my friend, the seagull I decided to buy this book because I am interested in international e-commerce especially the Chinese and eastern e-commerce developments as this is where innovation is coming from. The book starts off with an introduction about Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. When China opened up and foreigners visited China, Jack was curious and started to talk with them. This is how he learned English and how the world beyond China look liked. For another job, Jack was sent to Seattle and one of his friends introduced him to the internet. Jack searched for the word “China” but there were no results. Jack said “This i...

Usually I publish the "cross border e-commerce" reports, I run into at the internet at either my  twitter  account or my  slideshare  account. But sometimes it is convenient to have a summary of direct downloads. So, some direct downloads, just because it is almost Christmas :) Forrester released a report (paid by metapack) about the relation between delivery options and e-commerce success in France, UK and Germany. A download via my dropbox here . I discovered that Pitney Bowes often has interesting reports and white papers. This one is a document that helps US retailers to reach consumers around the globe. But it is not only interesting for US retailers. For everybody who wants to understand customer and e-commerce differences around the world this is a useful document. It gives differences per country in purchase behavior and other localisation considerations. A direct download via my dropbox here Shop the world from DHL is a great ...

It is almost 2014. So, one of my last posts this year about 2013 figures.. But an interesting post! ATKearney  released an interesting report a few weeks ago. The so called "Global retail e-commerce index 2013".For everybody who is interested in cross border marketing and e-commerce, this is a must read report. Very useful for those who are busy with a global e-commerce strategy. The report ranks the top 30 countries for their online market attractiveness and it explains differences in e-commerce approach for a few major e-commerce countries. China tops the report, as ATKearny expect China e-commerce to explode in the next few years, thanks to improvements in infrastructure, urbanisation and the increase in consumption inside China. This article for example explains a path to a consumer led grow in China and explains about improving consumer protection (and thus more trust in online sales) China tops list of top 30 e-commerce countries AtKearney describes three g...

I am reading some international digital marketing information this saturday afternoon and I summarize some interesting links below. Europe is still busy thinking about the new European Cookie law . A law that will have a big impact at the online industry this and next year. A big test case will be the United Kingdom, where the law will get into force at the 26th of may. Other countries will follow later. A lot of things are still very unclear  and most likely we will see a big increase of the use of pop up screens or lightboxes asking for certain cookies consent. Mr Dave Evans from the ICO gave a little more explanation and the good news is, that if you use first party analytic cookies you might be left alone, if you inform your users well. Europe is still not a single e-commerce market, so differences between countries are common. A new e-commerce lobby group called " ecommerce-europe " has started and one of their goals is to optimize Europe's e-commerce. I hop...

Weibo, many people in western Europe or the USA, don't know what Weibo is, but in China, Sina Weibo is really big. Sina Weibo receives 1 in every 100 visits in China! If I say: "weibo is a Twitter +", probably you will get an idea. I started to do some desk research to learn about Weibo. Interesting for myself,  to learn about what Weibo is, why Weibo got so big and what can be learned from the services and features they offer and of course it is always interesting to look at cultural differences in (online) marketing. This article is based on desk research and I will add many links in the article. Sina.com is an online media company in China. Sina owns Weibo. Weibo is often described as a hybrid form between twitter and facebook. Details about Sina can be found at Wikipedia . Why did Sina Weibo became so big? Sam Flemming and Eugene Chew explain why Sina became so big in this  interesting video. An important reason is that they are very good at ...

Some short headlines on digital marketing news from Asia that got my attention the past few days. Online video is increasingly popular in China. With more mobile phones and computers then TV's and skyrocketing tv advertising prices, the attention is shifting to online video. Chinese online video market This video from Pepsi had 100 million views in 2 weeks time! Order and pay your mcdonalds menu in Japan via your car navigation system Meanwhile in Japan it is now possible to order your mcdonalds menu via your car navigation system, before you arrive. You can pay via creditcard also through your navigation system. Next step is targeted ads via your car navigation system. Also in Japan, it is no longer necessary to remember all these Japanese emoticons , just scan your face and it will be automatically be translated in the correct emoticon. In Japan TV sets can be operated by the use of twitter hashtags. South Korean e-commerce has reached an all time high  in...

Sometimes people say that Europe is fragmented. I know it is. But  Asia is truly amazing. More then 2000 spoken languages, from extreme wealth to poverty, from democracies to authoritarian governments. That's fragmentation . From a communication/marketing perspective, this is really interesting. Each market has it's own characteristics, demographics, infrastructure and social context. But above that, almost all markets will continue to grow rapidly.  This combined makes it really interesting for me to learn and investigate about the online possibilities in the Asia-Pacific region and to learn about campaigns that are developed or changed to local legislation, habits, communication etc. Ecommerce in South Korea South Korea! A country that is really high on my "visit" list. Hopefully this summer. But it is also the country that has the fastest internet connections in the world. Up to 200 times faster then connections in the USA, and that also cheaper. South...

Hoi An, Vietnam I visited Vietnam a few times and I really like the country. It is amazing how this country is developing. You can feel the vibes when you are walking in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam's internet usage grows very rapidly especially compared to the region. Vietnam has experienced the fastest growth in internet penetration in the region. Vietnam has or will very soon catch up with China and Thailand in terms of internet use. Vietnam has a population of 90,549,390 and has 28,625,393 internet users (may 2011). This is 31.6 % penetration. Facebook access is still sometimes difficult in Vietnam, when I was in Vietnam late june this year, I could still not have access to Facebook everywhere. But the amount of users, using Facebook is increasing extremely rapidly. So I guess the limitations are getting less and less.The last three months there was a 50%!! increase of Vietnamese Facebook users! This ranks Vietnam at number 4 of the incre...

Asia-Pacific Social Media Study 2011: http://techylib.com/view/mira/asia-pacific_corporate_social_media_study_2011 Understanding latent interactions in Online Social Networks. The University of California, Santa Barbara has released a paper about latent vs active social media users. They iinvestigated this at the social network RenRen in China. The paper gives also some interesting information about the differences between facebook and RenRen. As I expected, latent user interactions make up the most of traffic. Download the report summary here. We Are Social's Guide to Social, Digital & Mobile in Asia (Overview, Nov 2011) View more presentations from We Are Social Singapore