What brands can learn from China: the experience accelerator

27 June 2019

Our Head of Connected Experiences, Christophe Castagnéra and Sam McMorran Group Creative Director, China discuss - What brands can learn from China: the world’s leading experience accelerator.

Strategically designed experiences

When it comes to connecting offline with online, the ecosystem in China is the most advanced in the world. As a result, brands are increasing their business growth through strategically designed experiences, making China the world’s leading accelerator when it comes to experience.

The connected data ‘ecosystems’ that have been created by companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu in China have a higher user base and a wider range of features than their US counterparts.

Take Tencent’s platform WeChat for example. Its true, success lies in the integration of offline to online behaviour that’s achieved through driving the full adoption of QR codes. With a low barrier to entry, QR codes are used by almost everyone in China in the offline (or physical) world to connect to new users and collect information in physical spaces. The other key feature is WeChat pay, which enables the brand to collect data on who the person is, what purchases they made and where they made them. This gives them the opportunity to link the data to the other behaviours including QR scanning in physical spaces, online social sharing, online browsing and content views.

A culture of data sharing

Seen from a Western perspective, there are some contextual factors to understand this culture of data sharing. In China the technology platforms started out by flooding the market with incentives, to encourage wide customer adoption. This rapidly created a large user base, used to provide personal data and location data in exchange for rewards.

Chinese customers have shared their data to enjoy the benefits of incentives alongside integrated and convenient services, leading to near-universal adoption rates. But how does the ecosystem in China allow the true power of experience to be realised and accelerate business and brand growth?

Read the full report on The Drum where we discuss the following trends: