Digital collaboration in China
US consumer brand
Building customer loyalty via apps
A leading US consumer brand has joined forces with Tencent and Alibaba in one of most ambitious collaborations of its kind in China.
The partnerships allow the brand’s customers to use Tencent and Alibaba’s payment services in its stores and ‘social gift’ its products on the WeChat messaging platform. E-commerce and other digital services have been added to the company’s loyalty programme while augmented and virtual reality features, powered by Alibaba, have been introduced in its flagship Shanghai store.
In order to link the brand’s own loyalty apps and e-commerce channels with the ubiquitous WeChat and TaoBao platforms, we had to answer the fundamental question of whose ‘customer’ any one user is – and, crucially, who should ‘own’ their data.
We also worked closely with technical teams on all sides to analyse the customer journey and identify precisely what data is generated at each stage. From there we developed precise legal structures that isolated the individual datasets from one another and allocated specific ownership, access and use rights.
Our work included creating contracts that protect the company from cyber risk and ensure its partners’ data collection policies are consistent with the scope of the agreement provide robust protection for its customer’s data - no easy change to implement with such a huge number of users.