In its next leg of growth, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba wants to shift from plain vanilla advertising and commission revenues to using its massive trove of buyer data to target ads more efficiently, giving third-party foreign sellers access to middle-class Chinese consumers. In an interview with BusinessLine , Chris Tung, Chief Marketing Officer, Alibaba Group, discusses the scope for replicating this model in other countries and Alibaba’s concept of data-based new retail. Edited excerpts:

For Chinese shoppers, Alibaba’s consumer-to-consumer website Taobao is the website of choice, with 500 million active users and 10 million merchants. Do you think the scale of Taobao can be replicated in other countries?

Taobao is getting very big in countries with large Chinese populations. It’s already popular in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong, targeting 100 million Chinese people around the world. Fundamentally, this is already a winning concept for Chinese communities. But I think it’s a winning concept for all developing countries, including India. It’s like a pass for the future, for India, Russia, South-East Asia, Brazil... It’ll be different with local insights, but the idea of browsing for fun is strong. We’re already number one with our B2C websites in Russia, South-East Asia and some European countries such as Spain and France. In India, we’re looking at how to evolve the consumer from e-wallet to e-commerce. (Alibaba is an investor in Indian online wallet and e-commerce company Paytm.)

Alibaba has shown its proof-of-concept on new retail with Tao Cafe, a futuristic shopping experience which involves tech such ad facial and voice recognition and which lets small businesses open their own intelligent stores. Why did you see this as necessary?

Tao Cafe is an idea that makes the offline shopping experience cashless. This is going to be Alibaba’s statement to the market this year. We have been promoting our idea of new retail, where Alibaba as a super data company will leverage its data to support offline retail brands to run their operation with the data capability they have. We want to enable brick-and-mortar business with Alibaba’s data assets. Tao Cafe is about not just buying coffee, but also digitising the footprint of a consumer at an offline store. In the online world, we can personalise the web page; Tao Cafe is about making the offline in-store experience more exciting. The demonstration is about how to make offline retail better if you work with Alibaba’s technology.

At Cannes film festival this year, you spoke about Alibaba’s new concept of ‘Uni Marketing’ and signed a partnership with advertising major Publicis. Can you explain what Uni Marketing is about?

Alibaba is intending to provide a game-changing marketing solution to the whole industry, but also looking at the interest of all stakeholders, including brand marketers and agencies. We’re looking at how we can unlock the potential of our data and have a data-driven marketing system. The deal with Publicis is about programmed advertising — how do you match ads and their targets. We have robust data pools and want to open up our data to agencies when they serve the ads. Our data is like having a combination of Amazon, Google and Facebook. It’s three-dimensional and very complete about what a consumer would like to see. We have strong media metrics and we’re implementing this with major agency networks, so they can use their data and target clients better.

But is this exclusively for Chinese consumers at the moment?

Uni Marketing is the first such concept in the world. To start with, China is strategic for most brands because China is still their main market for growth. After this, we can look at other markets where we can get good data. We have a partnership for e-commerce with Lazada in South-East Asia and Paytm in India. One day, we can replicate the Chinese model here. It’ll work in parallel — market development and product development. We definitely have a global view on marketing, but now we want to get the China market right.

With the vast troves of data Alibaba has of its consumers, how do you ensure data privacy for everybody in your ecosystem?

We have defined 500 segments. We would never release individual data and we never do grouping that’s less than 100,000 people, so you can never figure out which individual we’re talking about. It’s always group tagging. We want to elevate the game in marketing but with zero compromise on data privacy and security.

(The writer is in Hangzhou at the invitation of Alibaba Group.)

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