Shopee's first cross-border brand summit concluded, upgrading the entire chain to empower brands to expand overseas

June 23, 2022, Shenzhen - Recently, the leading e-commerce platform Shopee successfully held its first cross-border brand summit. The theme of this summit is "Ride the wind and run 'Orange', brand growth". Shopee Chief Business Officer Zhou Junjie and many platform experts and official partners analyzed the growth points of brands from the perspectives of market strategy, brand positioning, marketing layout, etc., and officially announced the full-link measures to help brand development and the latest support policies. The summit attracted nearly a thousand brands to participate, and many benchmark brands going overseas discussed overseas growth opportunities with Shopee.

It’s the right time for brands to go global, and Shopee continues to build its leading influence

Shopee Chief Commercial Officer Zhou Junjie delivered an opening speech

At the opening of the conference, Shopee Chief Business Officer Zhou Junjie shared the latest trends of brand overseas expansion based on authoritative reports:

● From the demand side, the consumption power of the population in the two blue ocean markets where Shopee is located has gradually increased, and brand consumption demand has expanded accordingly: it is estimated that by 2030, the overall population consumption scale in Southeast Asia will exceed 4 trillion US dollars, and the middle class will account for 67% of the total population ; in the Latin American market, the wealthy/middle class with high consumption power has also begun to prefer digital consumption. Taking the Brazilian market as an example, among wealthy/middle-class Internet users, the proportion of digital consumers in 2020 increased by 20% and 27% year-on-year respectively .

● From the perspective of channels, e-commerce platforms are not only consumption channels, but also play an important role in the decision-making process before purchase: 26% of Southeast Asian consumers said they are most likely to discover new products on e-commerce platforms , and 43% of Latin American consumers prefer e-commerce platforms to conduct product research before purchase . In addition, consumers are also highly open to new brands, and the personalized experience and cost-effectiveness of brands are their focus.

● From the supply side, relying on the strong supply chain strength, Chinese manufacturing is participating in the global value chain at a higher level: under the trend of quality export, Chinese brands, backed by supply chain strength and e-commerce marketing experience, are in line with local market consumption preferences, and their overseas favorability continues to increase. This is particularly prominent in emerging markets - more than half of the respondents have a positive attitude towards Chinese brands . It is the best time for Chinese brands to leverage e-commerce platforms to go overseas and layout emerging markets.

“These trends have created huge market opportunities for brands,” said Zhou Junjie, Chief Commercial Officer of Shopee. “As a leading e-commerce platform, Shopee has seized the opportunity of brands going global and, relying on its continuously built regional influence, has helped many brands efficiently connect with local consumers and create brand experiences tailored to local conditions. It has become the preferred partner for many domestic brands going global to Southeast Asia and Latin America.”

As of now, Shopee Mall has more than 36,000 official brand stores , showing a strong growth momentum. During this year's 315 consumer promotion, the number of brand orders on Shopee Mall increased to 5 times that of normal days, and many well-known Chinese brands ranked at the top of the promotion category list. In addition, Xiaomi, OPPO, and realme became the first brands to join Shopee's 100 million US dollar club.

"Four stages" to dismantle brand layout and easily realize the dream of going global

Since the first batch of cross-border brands settled in 2016, with the help of Shopee, sales have increased hundreds of times in five years . In this process, Shopee observed that brands at different stages face different opportunities and challenges, and based on this, it summarized the brand overseas methodology, focusing on the four stages of incubation, start-up, growth and maturity , and breaking the brand pain points one by one :

● Incubation period ( 3 to 6 months): Confirm brand positioning and clarify brand development expectations. At the beginning of cross-border business, brands need to be familiar with and master the rules of the Shopee platform, determine brand positioning and main sites based on their own product characteristics, deeply understand market policies and user needs, and find the most suitable development direction for themselves;

● Start-up period ( 3-12 months): Tailor the brand’s products based on market feedback and accurately target the target customer group. Actively expanding the product pool is the primary task of the brand in the start-up period. The brand needs to increase product selection based on consumer feedback, appropriately increase the budget to focus on marketing, and find more “reserve troops” of explosive products;

● Growth stage ( 9-18 months): Expand the target audience and fully explore user needs. After the brand has established a firm foothold in the main site, it can continue to enrich its product line, try to open up new sites, and expand the second traffic pool. At the same time, the brand can also upgrade the consumer experience through overseas warehouses, Shopee Live, etc., and cultivate loyal fans;

● Mature stage ( more than 18 months): Develop personalized market customized products and build a brand matrix. Based on their own successful experience, mature brands can continue to dig deep into the market and platform consumer needs and replace store hot products. Brands can also further prepare sub-brands, build a brand matrix, and cooperate with Shopee to explore exclusive first launches, super brand days and other in-depth cooperation forms.

At the same time, in order to help brands discover more traffic entrances and better meet users' pursuit of consumption experience, Shopee continues to upgrade traffic conversion and brand marketing methods, and launches three special traffic resource packages for mall traffic, new product launches and product experience, to help efficiently attract traffic and quickly increase brand voice.

"Four Major Initiatives" to Build Brand Value, Brand "Top Student" Notes Fully Revealed

As brands go global, facing a blue ocean market worth hundreds of billions of yuan, how to accurately enter the market and convey brand value has become a difficult problem for domestic brands to go global. In this regard, Shopee summarizes the "four major levers" to go deep into each link of brand going global and help brands quickly build their own value:

● Find the right market to enter: The overseas market is extremely vast, and brands need to find a market that suits them from multiple dimensions, including market size, market demand, infrastructure, policies, and culture. Overall, brands can use mature online shopping sites as a cornerstone to consolidate growth and actively explore emerging markets to seize opportunities;

● Customized brand growth path: Although users in overseas markets vary greatly, Shopee will provide resources and support for brands’ differentiated positioning and growth paths from two perspectives: “product quality driven” and “brand story driven”, based on the characteristics of different brands, to help brands take the first step in building their core values;

● Create a pleasant consumer experience: For brands, high-quality services and excellent shopping experience are important ways to efficiently convey brand value. Therefore, cross-border brands should actively focus on improving consumer experience, consolidate brand positioning and image, and continue to convey brand value from multiple angles such as products, customer service, and logistics;

● Accurate marketing tools: To avoid homogeneous brand competition to the greatest extent, brands need to adopt a more sophisticated operation model based on their own positioning, integrate brand value throughout the consumption path, achieve full-link reach, and cooperate with Shopee's off-site marketing tools, Shopee's on-site advertising and Shopee's on-site marketing functions to achieve the dual goals of short-term sales growth and long-term value construction with three major traffic conversion tools;

At the same time, Shopee also invited outstanding overseas representatives to share and exchange ideas from the brand's perspective, focusing on topics such as the focus of different development stages and brand marketing goal setting.

Representatives of outstanding overseas brands share their secrets to overseas brand growth

● Talking about the focus of brands at different stages of development, the beauty brand Feiluer believes that "the slower the brand is in the testing stage, the better, and the faster the brand is in the mature stage, the better. Slow does not refer to speed, but to carefully grasp the data, clarify who your users are, which type of users has the highest conversion rate, and which type of delivery channel has the best effect, so as to find the best communication path, communication media and communication content. After accumulating successful experience, start to invest rapidly."

● In terms of setting staged goals for brand marketing, the electronic accessories brand UGREEN pointed out, "Our current goal is to improve both conversion rate and brand awareness. A high conversion rate for orders means we need more precise advertising and be very careful in choosing the right audience and keywords. In terms of increasing awareness, we will focus more on large-scale off-site exposure and spend more energy on social media."

In addition, representatives of outstanding overseas brands including Baseus, Puxi, Yunshu, Sacelady, Shikemei, Breylee and others also summarized the secrets of success in the overseas market. As long as the product is the core competitiveness of the brand, with a reasonable marketing layout and strong platform support, Chinese brands can show their strength in the blue ocean market with the help of Shopee.