Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 73
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
🤖2025: AI gradually, then suddenly
I follow
for a regular dose of Austrian economics and realism. This time Peter had a video on AI and that topic fits in this newsletter. It’s important in my opinion to think of the impact of AI and how to get the most out of it. This video (“will AI cause mass deflation?”) helps in that tought process.🧐Details in the substack post—>: https://substack.com/@profstonge/p-153534793
🌪️Storm from Standford University: Revolutionizing research with AI-generated articles
STORM, developed by Stanford University, is an AI-powered writing system designed to generate comprehensive, Wikipedia-like articles on a wide range of topics. Its purpose is to assist users, particularly in academic and research settings, by producing detailed reports complete with citations, streamlining the research and writing process. I gave it a try and I think it can be very useful for use cases where you want to have articles based at experts opinions and scientific background. So different from ChatGPT where the output usually is a conversation the output here is an article (although there is a conversation button as well). They have a nice survey at the bottom also to improve the tool.
Try it yourself: https://storm.genie.stanford.edu/
🇨🇳 Wholesale visit in China: Freshippo X and Sam’s club
While traveling in China, I visited two wholesale stores. Sam’s club in Shenzhen and Freshippo X in Shanghai (Pudong). A couple of pictures and observations -compared to (local) wholesalers here in Netherlands-
Both Sams Club and FreshHippo X have an enourmous amonts of "sample stands" everywhere in the store. Mostly with staff but not all. It is possible to try many things (food mainly) before buying. See pictures. Most have promotions also.
Both sams club and FreshHippo X have everywhere the "Why" displayed explaining their proposition.
App promotion is everywhere (but makes sense also in China that is much more app or miniprogram focused): Sams Club for example via a showcase area where it says : details via app.
FreshHippo had also survey signposting. Survey works via app.
What stood out was also the checkout at FreshHippo. So we bought a few things, they scan the membership card but then you do not pay via the POS terminal but you get the payment request in the APP. So you pay directly with and on your phone even when standing next to the cashier.
SamsClub had shelves that tilted forward some non food items like tents, making better showcasing also they had huge ESL’s (electronic shelf labeling).
FresHippo X is in fierce competition so they have lowest price guarantee. It also works via the app.
With FreshHippo X we could even before entry chat with someone to get guidance how to get there. We also did not want to pay the full membership for a year but just check the store for a few pictures. Via chat we could get an entry card for one day for about 1 euro. Worked very smooth have to say. So really direct and fast chat access. It worked so well that within 15 minutes we had fixed everything directions and access all via chat.
Sams Club has a big crossborder e-commerce stand -which I liked a lot- It allows customers to explore a curated selection of international brands and products that they can order online, connecting the physical shopping experience with a broader range of global goods available through the Sam's Club app or website. This setup caters to customers seeking imported or exclusive items not stocked in the store itself.
At Freshippo X (just like the Chinese Hema supermarkets) you can buy food and someone prepares it for you and you can sit and eat it (in this case after the cashier).
It was very nice to visit the stores and see the interaction. Freshippo X was not busy when I visited, Sam’s club was pretty busy.
🇹🇷 Swinging Istanbul restaurant
A coffee restaurant has brought the viral trend of getting free coffee if you enter the shop, while dancing and laughing, to Istanbul. Great idea to get your coffee restaurant known on social media and to boost in store traffic.
🇨🇳 AI/productivity boost in China to be expected
I think we can see an AI boost/innovation boost coming from China as Alibaba Cloud lowers prices significantly. This aggressive pricing strategy is part of an effort by Chinese tech companies to make AI technology more accessible and affordable, resulting in widespread adoption across various industries. There are price cuts op to 85%. This means AI is accessible for a great lot of people and SME’s. This will boost innovation and productivity, I think. Imagine that small and medium companies via cheap AI soon can get McKinsey level advice. Imagine the new uses that these companies can find that otherwise were out of reach for them!👏
I see it a bit as the affordable cheap, fast, safe and innovative transport in China (high speed rail, safe and extensive and fast subway, the incredible transportation hubs etc.). It helps productivity, the barrier to do things, to mingle, to trade, to consume, to build, to innovate. Cheap and accessible AI access will even have a larger impact.
“China’s strength is to make really affordable inference engines and then to let applications proliferate,” Lee told the Financial Times.
Rather than training one “dense model” at once on a vast database that has scraped data from the internet and other sources, the approach combines many neural networks trained on industry-specific data.
I will be keep on watching what happens in China in this field. Very interesting!
Original: https://www.ft.com/content/0a6da1bb-2bda-40f3-9645-97877eb0947c
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/8OqXq
🗞️2025 predictions from Dara Denney
Well, it’s still january so we can still publish some predictions. Below Dara Denney gives her predictions on performance marketing. Next week 2025 AI predictions so subscribe if you haven’t already.
Dara’s list:
Creative volume: a big success factor on Meta will be creative volume
Video and graphic design for ads will be impacted heavily by AI
The year of the B2B creator
Influencer becomes a performance channel
Black Friday, Cyber Monday will be shorter
And also Google is confirming huge AI changes in it’s performance marketing business:
So stay tuned, keep on reading, testing tools, so you can be in the front seat of all coming changes, I know I will!
🏭B2B marketing vs B2C Marketing
Just a table that can be useful when you create plans for B2B (or B2C) digital marketing. Although there are always other ways to achieve goals and it is industry dependend, and not 100% complete, it gives some guidance and I like these kind of overview tables 😆
Via: https://www.selfmoneycare.com/post/b2b-vs-b2c-digital-marketing
✨Watch this AI optimism talk
Now it’s time for some AI optimism. It’s a must watch video in my opinion (28 min. only) on what is going to happen soon (including date predictions) and including some little funny jokes from Musk😂.
"Neuralink enhances human capabilities, allowing us to keep up with AI by increasing our cognitive output by a thousand or even a million times."
"Within three months, Tesla's self-driving will have a probability of accidents better than the average experienced driver."
"We're aiming to have several thousand Optimus robots built this year, scaling up to 500,000 in three years."
That’s it for this edition.
Thank you for reading, liking and subscribing,