Alibaba.com takes aim at exhibitions

Alibaba.com's sales team recently sent out this attempt at email direct marketing which takes aim at B2B exhibitions. Trying to position a "Gold Supplier" membership on Alibaba.com as the more effective marketing channel, the email DM relies some rather random, unsupported trade show costs.

That aside, the more interesting conclusion here is that Alibaba.com must be feeling the competitive pinch from B2B exhibitions. Online platforms (such as Alibaba.com), print trade publications and B2B exhibitions all compete for the limited marketing spend of manufacturers and suppliers in Asia.

The fact that the Alibaba.com sales team took the time to put this together suggests that they sense they are losing some of that supplier spend to exhibition organisers.

It is also worth noting how entirely wrong this statement in the eDM is: "each year, the number of trade show visitors decrease dramatically." Visitor and exhibitor numbers increase year-on-year in Asia. Over the past five years, the B2B exhibition industry in Asia has been the fastest growing region worldwide. In Alibaba.com's core market, China, space sold at B2B exhibitions has increased 53% in the last five years according to BSG's own research.

In fact, over the past several years, there have been plenty of companies experimenting with organising events and exhibitions in Asia. One good example is Alibaba... "Alibaba experiments with events." Alibaba also has its own events team.