In recent years Black Friday has become the Holy Grail of shopping holidays, beating out Boxing Day in many markets. But in Asian circles it’s Singles Day where the best deals are made and where brands can reap some of their biggest profits.
In recent years Black Friday has become the Holy Grail of shopping holidays, beating out Boxing Day in many markets. But in Asian circles it’s Singles Day where the best deals are made and where brands can reap some of their biggest profits.
After months of lockdowns across Australia’s two biggest cities, retailers are eyeing off Black Friday as an opportunity to reduce overstocked inventory and make up for lost time.
To really impact the bottom line, those same retailers should be considering a Singles Day strategy.
What is Singles Day?
Singles Day was started in 2009 by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba as an anti-Valentine’s Day shopping festival. Since then it has become the world’s biggest online and offline shopping day, generating USD$74 billion in sales for Alibaba in 2020.
Retailers in China and abroad offer a myriad of discounts, incentives and offers to capture the Chinese audience, with Oliver Wyman research suggesting 86% of Chinese customers will spend the same or more than they spent last year, this year.
Why it's a smart festival to leverage?
The local Chinese community in Australia is sizeable yet under-catered to by local brands who truly understand them.
Brands that seek to understand and cater to this audience do so by embracing the channels on which they communicate – WeChat and RED being key – and celebrating what’s important to them. That includes the shopping holidays like Singles Day that have become traditions and which friends and family, as well as their much-loved Chinese brands, embrace. Many local Chinese follow mainland China’s market trends, including Double 11.
Singles Day is a fantastic opportunity for Australian brands considering building a presence among Chinese consumers to start to build a following and experiment with marketing to this audience.
It is a particularly great time to experiment with RED, which is the go-to platform where many Chinese undertake research before buying products and actively seek reviews.
How you can harness the power of Singles Day:
- WeChat banner ads promoting your brand and Singles Day sales
- Chinese media amplification
- Advertorial placement on WeChat and RED
- KOL and KOC endorsement and promotion, as well as live streaming
At Bastion Asia we can help you build a strategy that gets you noticed and gives you a taste of the potential of Asian marketing.
