Chemist Warehouse has extended its lucrative partnership with Alibaba’s Tmall platform in an exclusive deal that will see the Chinese ecommerce giant weigh in on marketing.
In a deal signed by Alibaba’s local head Maggie Zhou at the company’s Melbourne HQ on Friday, Chemist Warehouse, and by extension its suppliers, will benefit from the digital advertising weight of Alibaba’s database.
Alibaba’s news portal Alizilla reports that the marketing support will coincide with the singles day shopping festival, which will take place on 11 November.
According to Alizilla, the e-commerce giant will be supporting Chemist Warehouse’s major marketing campaigns which coincides with the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.
Under the deal Chemist Warehouse will utilise Chinese-based bloggers as social media influencers advocating Aussie products, air a video on Alibaba’s Youku platform and have two live-stream shows run on Taobo’s marketplace.
Influencers will begin broadcasting from October, with vitamins, baby foods and other Australian supplements on the promotional agenda.
“The motivation to continue the relationship is so we can use Alibaba’s ecosystem to build our brand awareness in China,” said Nancy Jian, COO of Chemist Warehouse China.
“The influencers are very significant,” Jian said. “Alibaba itself has a platform for KOLs as well that we can utilise. If we’ve had very significant impact, this will prove that,” Jian said.
Its not the only customer-connection play Chemist Warehouse is making in China, the pharmacy is also working with Ant Financial to enable Chinese consumers to use Alipay to shop at Chemist Warehouse — both online and offline.
According to Alizilla, consumers will be able to purchase with Alipay at bricks-and-mortar Australian shops and digital promotions will then besent to them so they can also do more shopping on Tmall Global when they go home to China.
“We want to create a seamless global experience for our customers,” Chemist Warehouse COO added. “We want to continue growing in China because there is a lot of potential in the market. Demand will only grow because people’s concern about health is getting stronger, it’s getting more widespread and that’s what we want to see.”
