Assisting brand marketers—retailers, in some cases—in their initiatives to grow their omnichannel business will be a major part of Alibaba Group’s growth strategy, according to a letter to shareholders from CEO Daniel Zhang.

“From our perspective, the most important opportunity on the horizon is not growing online sales in isolation but rather helping traditional retailers upgrade into a brand new retail model,” Zhang said. He added that Alibaba will enable this growth through the creation of a new marketing model, integrating a digital marketing matrix with a consumer media platform, “thereby delivering a digital environment that empowers brands and marketers with game-changing, data-driven capability to manage the entire consumer life cycle.”

Zhang zeroed in specifically on the Chinese market—which accounts for an estimated $4.5 trillion in annual retail sales, and whose consumers have embraced online shopping to a greater extent than U.S. consumers, according to an analysis of the letter on the Retail Dive website.

“The consumer retail industry as a whole is experiencing a radical disruption driven by digital transformation,” Zhang said. “The biggest trend is the integration of offline and online retail for a re-imagined omnichannel experience.”

The CEO also said cloud computing (specifically, Alibaba’s own Alibaba Cloud) and data will also become pieces in Alibaba’s strategy. “Alibaba Cloud will serve businesses of all shapes and sizes across a variety of industries, and eventually become a diversified ecosystem,” Zhang said. “When the era of IoT arrives, Alibaba will be there to provide comprehensive infrastructure services to businesses through cloud computing and big data.”

“The transformation of commerce will be increasingly dependent on innovations in new technology,” Zhang added. “A principal question in our future development is how to leverage our expansive commercial ecosystem to provide an environment for large scale application of new technologies—such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, Internet of Things—and ultimately help drive the birth of new business models as new technologies mature.”

(Source: hfndigital.com  Author: David Gill)