Government officials, economists and retailers have long worked to get thrifty Chinese consumers to spend. China’s online retailers this weekend tried appealing to their loneliness.
Chinese media on Monday was filled with articles about a surge in online shopping on Sunday, Nov. 11, for Singles Day 1,1,1,1, the loneliest number, as some say a day in which single people are supposed to buy stuff for each other and for themselves in a culture with a obsessive fixation on marriage. The apparent rush wasn’t the byproduct of some inexplicable phenomenon, such as the instantaneous global preoccupation with the Korean pop-video Gangnam Style.
Instead, it appears to be been pushed by China’s online retailers in an effort to nurture an annual consumer event.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which runs e-commerce sites Taobao.com and Tmall.com, launched a marketing blitz aiming to create the “single” largest online shopping day of the year in China. Many of the merchants who sold their goods on Alibaba’s sites offered 50% discounts. Some promoted singles steamers to help the unwed iron out their wrinkled clothes and freshen up their appearances. Others offered deals on “singles” closets.
Full numbers for the event won’t be available from third parties for several days. But Alibaba said 213 million loners in China flooded the Internet yesterday to buy $3.1 billion worth of stuff.
Alibaba said it wasn’t trying to focus on China’s dateless and desperate. “The reason why it falls on 11/11 is because it is an easy date to remember, and the association was quite accidental,” said an Alibaba spokeswoman.
The push as Chinese companies discover the potential sales to be made in corporate commemorations, otherwise known to Western greeting-card buyers as “Hallmark holidays” after the card maker.
Qunar.com, a Beijing-based travel site, launched a Valentines’ Day promotion earlier this year, giving 10% to 50% discounts on low-end rooms and the chance to spend merely 100 yuan (about $16.50) to stay in a five-star hotel room for one night. Suning Appliance Co., China’s largest retailer by outlets, rolled out a “zero-yuan purchase” campaign for Singles’ Day, doling out gift vouchers equaling the amount each customer spent on its site.
In countries such as the U.S., holidays such as Valentine’s Day or Father’s Day have often been promoted as key occasions to splurge on a gift for a loved one. And holidays like these have helped propel consumer spending beyond Christmas, the biggest shopping season of the year in the U.S.
In China, where the government is keen to create willful spenders out of scrimping savers, holidays have been welcomed with open arms. Even the adoption of the shopping mall Santa and chocolate Easter-bunnies have been easy sells to the agnostic country looking to rev up cash register rings.
The more holidays the better, said Tom Doctoroff, North Asia area director and Greater China CEO of ad agency JWT, adding, “China is a country fixated on transactions: social, financial and commercial.”
There has been some backlash to marketer’s latching onto holidays. An opinion piece in the state-run paper the Global Times criticized Singles Day, saying, “with its commercialization, our focus has shifted from concern with single people to crass consumerism.”
And not all consumers are buying into holidays like Singles Day either. One user of China’s social networking site Sina Weibo wrote on his microblog that those who were actually single on Singles Day were lucky because they could opt out of these kinds of marketing gimmicks. “How about having a girlfriend who wakes you up to snap up deals on Taobao at midnight for Singles Day sales,” he said.
When asked if Alibaba would ever consider adding to its Singles’ Day promotion an offer for a matchmaking service, a spokeswoman said, “That would be a little incongruous with our mission and e-commerce background, but who knows if a Taobao shopkeeper has ever plucked up the courage to ask out a regular customer or if two shopkeepers have met and hit it off at one of our offline training sessions?”