Wal-Mart looks to China for new US marketing chief

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart is turning to its marketing chief in China to shape how it relays its message to shoppers in the U.S.

The world’s largest retailer named Tony Rogers as chief marketing officer for the U.S. on Friday. He will report to Greg Foran, president and CEO of Wal-Mart’s U.S. division starting in mid-January. Tony, a 10-year veteran at the company, has been the head of marketing and social media in China for two years.

Rogers succeeds longtime marketing chief Stephen Quinn, who retires next month.

Wal-Mart has also hired former Target marketing executive Michael Francis as consultant. Francis is best known for his nearly 30-year career at Target, where he helped create the discounter’s cheap-chic image through whimsical advertising.

Before moving to China,Rogers worked for eight years in the Wal-Mart’s marketing division. Before joining Wal-Mart, Rogers spent several years with Pepsi-Co’s Frito-Lay division.

*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated Tony Rogers’ last name. The error has been corrected.

Wal-Mart looks to China for new US marketing chief

Tencent blocks Uber on WeChat, so what 'fair play' can we expect in China?

Global car-hailing app Uber and its local rival in China, Didi Kuaidi, are de facto in a business war, after Tencent, a key investor of Didi, decided to remove Uber from one of the most powerful online marketing platforms in the world’s No 1 internet market.

What’s the key takeaway of the story here for other foreign businesses if they are considering doing or expanding business in China? It’s getting more difficult to make money in China, especially when you have to compete with local monopoly players.

The news that all Uber’s WeChat accounts had been removed by Tencent, the parent and owner of WeChat, China’s most popular real-time messaging app, where many businesses have set up accounts to promote products and services and engage with customers, shocked the technology world over the weekend. Tencent said it blocked Uber on WeChat, affecting Uber’s online services in at least 16 Chinese cities, because of “malicious marketing”, something Uber denied.

It’s getting more difficult to make money in China, especially when you have to compete with local monopoly players

Tencent’s move came just days after Didi announced a global alliance with Lyft in the United States, GrabTaxi in Singapore and Ola in India, with the partnership widely dubbed an “anti-Uber alliance” by tech industry players.

It’s been no secret for the past few months that there’s no friendship between Uber, the US-based car-hailing app that has changed the way people travel every day, and Didi, its top rival. Uber co-founder and chief executive Travis Kalanick accused Tencent publicly at an industry forum in late October of using WeChat to censor positive news about Uber and play up negative stories. Tencent didn’t respond to those complaints. If Kalanick’s allegation were true, Tencent would be the one playing dirty tricks through “malicious marketing”.

Tencent is one of the three most powerful internet firms in China – collectively known as “BAT” – along with Baidu, China’s top search engine, and Alibaba, the No1 e-commerce firm in the world’s second-biggest economy.

But my bigger concern is whether everyone can expect fair play when doing business in China, at a time when top leaders are calling on foreign investors to continue to support Chinese economy and have pledged to strengthen the rule of law to protect the business interests of all parties.

Domestically, even between the members of the BAT triumvirate, we’ve seen more and more negative – and totally unnecessary – marketing tricks attacking each other. A new online poster distributed by Alibaba to promote the use of Alipay, the popular online payment tool that makes it stand out in tough competition, suggested Alipay users should not shop at many Alibaba rivals, including some backed by Baidu, because doing so risked “misfortune”.

Businesses compete with each other all the time and all around the world, especially when they grow bigger and expand beyond their home markets. In the good, old days we had a “gentlemen’s rule” to show respect to your rivals, but in China nowadays winning business is all about winning market share, by any means.

George Chen is the managing editor of SCMP International Edition. For more Mr. Shangkong columns: facebook.com/mrshangkong or follow @george_chen on Twitter

Tencent blocks Uber on WeChat, so what "fair play" can we expect in China?

Air China Likes Facebook for Marketing, Despite Ban

An Air China jet on the tarmac at Beijing Capital International Airport.

Facebook in December honored Air China for best use of the social network for international marketing by a company in Greater China. That’s not surprising, since the state-owned carrier has aggressively used the service to offer everything from links to its booking engine, to giveaways of models of the new Boeing 747-8 it flies between Beijing and New York, to a recipe for Rolling Donkey, a popular red bean-and-rice snack. The surprise is that the airline has embraced Facebook even though it’s been banned on the mainland since 2009.

Air China isn’t alone in using the service beyond China’s borders; state-owned rivals China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines, along with privately owned Hainan Airlines, also use Facebook to connect with international passengers. Chinese airlines, says Thomas Crampton, global managing director of Ogilvy & Mather’s Social@Ogilvy team, “are clearly looking to build their connections with people outside of China.”

Despite having its service blocked by China’s government, Facebook is finding ways to profit from Chinese businesses. “We’ve got 1.3 billion people on Facebook, and it turns out that marketing to those people from China works really well,” Facebook Vice President Vaughan Smith told a mobile Internet conference in Beijing last year.

More such collaboration may be ahead. Facebook, which until now has worked with Chinese companies mostly through its Hong Kong office, in 2014 signed a three-year lease for office space in Beijing’s central business district. And last fall, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who’s learning Mandarin, joined the board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, a prominent business school in Beijing.

Air China didn’t respond to multiple e-mails and calls seeking comment for this story. Facebook said it had nothing to add to previous statements.

Social media has become a key tool for Chinese airlines to woo international travelers. About 60 percent of fliers used foreign carriers for their trips to and from China in 2013, Ron Kent, Boeing’s managing director for marketing in Northeast Asia, said at a conference last year. China’s carriers want social sites to help boost their share of that prized group. Air China has more than 153,000 Facebook followers and has had more than 200,000 interactions with users since it opened its page in June 2013, it said in a Dec. 15 statement. The airline has customized Facebook pages for key markets such as North America and Germany. “Using social media is very cost-effective, and airlines can easily reach customers,” Jefferies analyst Boyong Liu said in an e-mail.

Air China also is using Facebook for targeted advertising. In 2012 guests at popular Asian restaurants in Sweden were encouraged to “check in” with the carrier on Facebook as they sat down to eat, making them eligible to win plane tickets to Asia. For the Lunar New Year holiday in February it’s mounting a campaign on the service aimed at Hong Kong-based consumers who want to spend the holiday on the mainland.

Chinese carriers already are big users of social media domestically. China Southern says it has 2.3 million followers on the local Twitter-like Weibo service and 3.5 million fans on Tencent Holdings’s WeChat service. Passengers on the mainland can book air tickets via WeChat, where carriers sometimes offer discounts for transactions made online. Says Ogilvy’s Crampton: “In China, you never have a conversation whether a company needs to be involved in social media; it’s always how they need to be involved.”

The bottom line: Air China has logged more than 200,000 customer contacts on its Facebook pages, boosting marketing efforts.

Air China Likes Facebook for Marketing, Despite Ban