Business Integration of Offline and Online Retailing

Offline and online retailing will soon become completely integrated into one. This will mean that one will not be able to do without the other. In the fast-moving world, Alibaba Group has been able to emerge as the biggest e-commerce company in the world. They made the shift to data company due to the integration of online and offline retailing. Data is a powerful tool used to help businesses understand their consumer preferences and to alter their products to make better ones while improving the customers’ experience. This is what the Alibaba Group strives on. Uni-Marketing During the Cannes Lions Innovation festival, Alibaba unveiled some marketing tools that allowed the use of real-time data to target Chinese customers and their preferences. One that I fond interesting was Uni Marketing. It analyses real-time data from the Alibaba Group ecosystem to be able to provide brands with accurate insight into the customers’ preferences and behaviors. This is helpful to the brands to be able to segment the customers while creating ample room for communication among them and their customers. It is able to target more clearly than other similar tools because it uses the whole Alibaba’s ecosystem data to be able to provide references of customers all across China. Publicis Groupe has been the first to adopt this strategy, which it targets to use and understand its luxury customers better. Uni Marketing is based on four strategies. The first one is exhausting the ‘Brand Databank’, which is an online dashboard providing data from customers and suggesting actionable steps.

The second is Uni Strategy with help in efficiently categorizing its customers; learn its behaviors, which eventually provides a complete picture of how different customers behave. The third is Uni Communication. It is an ad-serving tool, which gathers information from all leading Chinese media and feeds it to the Databank. This way allowing agencies to improve market capabilities and support brands. The fourth is the Uni Operation, which finally enables brands to personalize and create content for customers building relationships effectively across the board. Potential Business Value of Using Data It has been predicted that by the year 2020, the Chinese cloud market could reach $20billion. Consider that two years ago it was only $1.5billion (Clark, 2018).

Alibaba is tapping into the offline market in China and eventually worldwide by integrating its immense online retail with the offline one. This means tapping into new ventures in the group. It has consistently shown improvement in its revenues. Its computer networks and massive data it contains gives it advantages in the technological innovations. It still continues to come up with technological advances that co-integrate the customers to the sellers. This friendly environment creates trust which turns into increased value on the business side of things of the group. Alibaba is the most diverse and complex Internet-based company in the world.

Through personalizing their data and making it more secure, more customers will prefer a friendly interface while shopping which is a source of value addition to the Alibaba Group. The Relationship Between the Use of Data and the Analytic Value Escalator Gartner’s Analytic Value Escalator is a framework used in business to integrate platforms, people and processes to align them to give or be able to strategically approach business in a smooth approach. The company has been able to do this through its immense collection of data helping them learn and understand the preferences of their customers. Through online and offline integration, the company has been able to effectively use the framework. This clearly indicates that Alibaba fits in the Analytic Value Escalator and keeps using it to provide better services to its customers.