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This Company Boosts The New Economy In China With Agile Marketing Taeltech provides agile marketing tools for the new economy in China

By Dan Soviero

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In this digital age, technology is not the only thing that is moving fast. Consumer behavior and sentiment are also fast-changing. Taeltech is a marketing technology company based in Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney that helps companies embrace and implement agile marketing. The three main components of its business are massive-scale data collection from social media and e-commerce platforms, a machine learning and natural language processing tech stack, and a large user base of consumers in over 500 cities across China who use its scanning tool and marketplace.

Online shopping has already been on the rise for the past few years. However, COVID-19 accelerated the move to online shopping even more. In 2020, more than two billion people purchased goods or services online, with e-retail sales surpassing $4.2 trillion globally.

With this massive shift in consumer behavior, many fast-moving consumer goods companies and their marketing departments are struggling to keep up with the pace of changing consumer preferences. Consequently, those who find ways to innovate will be reaping big rewards.

For example, HeyTea, which is one of China's largest tea beverage chains, reached a valuation of over $2 billion in 2020 by leveraging social apps like WeChat to create a new tea culture in China. Further, Luckin Coffee, which is regarded as China's answer to Starbucks, saw immense growth thanks to its innovative approach. Not only does it provide a cashier-less environment and low prices to raise brand awareness, but it has also embraced digital commerce.

Many companies are now forced to embrace an agile approach to marketing. In the past, agile was just a buzzword used in corporate training. However, now, companies actually need to be agile.

Companies need much faster iteration speed and new measurement tools to keep up with the changes in consumer sentiment, which is exactly what Taeltech brings to the table.

Its integrated ecosystem offers full-scale agile marketing support. This includes market intelligence gathering, hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and measuring the campaign's feedback.

Analyzing consumer behavior to remodel e-commerce in China

By analyzing massive collections of consumer commentary to derive an in-depth understanding of consumers' brand choice preferences, Taeltech measures the efficacy of product and brand description. Further, it helps formulate marketing strategies with much higher conversion and retention probabilities than anything that is available on the market.

To make agile marketing work, data and analytics need to be used to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real-time. Further, tests and their results need to be deployed and evaluated quickly. Taeltech's clients can validate their hypotheses within its sandbox ecosystem before releasing them to the public, which enables faster and more frequent marketing hypothesis testing iterations.

Using the data it gathers, Taeltech creates comprehensive user consumption profiles composed of purchases on its native marketplace and items purchased elsewhere that were scanned with its scanning tool. These user profiles are further enriched with data from surveys, experiments, and behavioral metadata, with all data threads being brought together inside the company's recommendation engine.

The recommendation engine makes predictions about particular users' preferences and interests, and it also finds specific user groups that are most likely to share certain interests or preferences. What's more, using these profiles, the engine generates behavioral data-driven user seeds for look-a-like targeting on social media and e-commerce platforms.

Additionally, massive amounts of data from digital media, including video and live-streaming transcriptions of key opinion leaders, user comments, trends, brand mentions, and more, are constantly being collected and processed to facilitate a truly agile approach to marketing.

Further, by making specific user groups participate in surveys and experiments, gauging different messaging/product presentation effects with diverse demographics, and using ghost product listing and live A/B testing on its marketplace to target specific user groups, Taeltech can generate new data for very specific user groups on demand.

Keeping track of consumer sentiment

With a marketplace that offers several thousand different stock-keeping units of various foreign products that are shipped directly to consumers from the country of origin as well as a WeChat-based mini-app scanning tool that consumers can use to scan the barcodes of everyday consumer products to get information about the manufacturer's credibility, the safety of the ingredients, nutritional information as well as dietary recommendations, and more, the company is gathering a lot of unique data.

By scanning products with Taeltech's app, consumers accumulate loyalty points, called Wabi points, that they can use in the native marketplace to get discounts on orders. Consumers can also earn Wabi points on the marketplace by providing the firm with data on purchasing habits, product and category browsing, income level, and general demographic as well as geographic details.

Additionally, Taeltech users regularly test new products and participate in behavioral experiments as well as flash surveys on the company's platform in exchange for Wabi points. The loyalty points that consumers can earn are powered by blockchain technology, and they can not be sold.

That being said, there is a 1:1 correspondence in value between Wabi points and Wabi tokens, which are crypto tokens that are traded on the open market. This works because for every Wabi point that is issued to a consumer, one Wabi token is locked out of circulation.

Since Wabi tokens can be traded, the value of Wabi points fluctuates, which increases both consumer engagement and daily active viewership. There are also other advantages that blockchain brings to the table in regard to loyalty points management, such as interoperability and ease of bookkeeping.

Creating a mutually beneficial experience

This system is designed to create a mutually beneficial relationship between consumers and brands. Businesses spend a lot of money on marketing in the hopes of building consumer trust and engagement. This marketing spend results in an increased product price.

Further, brands collect data from consumers without giving them anything in return. However, with the Wabi ecosystem, consumers receive Wabi points for their participation. Additionally, brands get more data, which is also more relevant and leads to more effective marketing. More effective marketing can also result in lower prices, which further benefits consumers.

Because consumers also benefit from this system, this results in much higher engagement. Further, thanks to the increased transparency, consumer trust increases. This, in turn, benefits brands. All in all, every participating party benefits, and, with more brands and consumers participating, the benefits increase.

The Founder & CEO of Signature Athletics (parent company of Signature Lacrosse) and an Advisor to Florida Palms LC, Dan Soviero is a passionate entrepreneur, an influential leader and a sought-after mentor.  He is dedicated to building businesses and teams that have a positive impact on the world.
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