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\"If you took the economic might of Amazon, and added the penetration of Facebook, the ubiquity of Google, and the cultural significance of YouTube, you might have something starting to resemble Alibaba. Commonly mischaracterized as a kind of Chinese eBay for businesses, Alibaba and its interlinked network of products and services have exploded into global markets, disrupting conventional businesses and creating previously unimaginable opportunities for millions of small businesses worldwide. This book reveals the Tao of Alibaba-the company's \"secret sauce\"-a consciously cultivated ethos and spirit that has enabled Alibaba to weather tough times (including its recent setbacks with the Chinese government) and persist toward a common mission. It is a blueprint of the company's management philosophy, crystalized into the most important elements that have driven its success, and it provides a road map for how to incorporate these principles into any organization's operations. Wong distills his 20 years of experience inside the company to show readers how to align their organization's capabilities with performance-maximizing tools in order to achieve success. But most importantly, the Tao of Alibaba teaches the pursuit of greater purpose and meaning, steering entrepreneurs to view their ventures as a vehicle for having profound and lasting impacts on their communities. Ultimately, the lessons shared in The Tao of Alibaba will serve as timeless tools for any entrepreneur seeking to configure their organization toward purpose and impact\"-- Provided by publisher.

Many businesses today have adopted tweeting as a new form of product marketing. However, whether and how tweeting affects product demand remains inconclusive. The authors explore this question using a randomized field experiment on Sina Weibo, the top tweeting website in China. The authors collaborate with a major global media company and examine how the viewing of its TV shows is affected by (1) the media company's tweets about its shows, and (2) recruited Weibo influential' retweets of the company tweets. The authors find that both company tweets and influential retweets increase show viewing, but in different ways. Company tweets directly boost viewing, whereas influential retweets increase viewing if the show tweet is informative. Meanwhile, influential retweets are more effective than company tweets in bringing new Weibo followers to the company, which indirectly increases viewing. The authors discuss recommendations on how to manage tweeting as a marketing tool.

Traces the founding of Alibaba, the world's second largest Internet company, by an English teacher from humble origins, drawing on interviews to explore how the company and Jack Ma have become icons and leading employers in China's booming private sector.

This paper investigates the economic value of online reviews for consumers and restaurants. We use a data set from Dianping.com , a leading Chinese website providing user-generated reviews, to study how consumers learn, from reading online reviews, the quality and cost of restaurant dining. We propose a learning model with three novel features: (1) different reviews offer different informational value to different types of consumers; (2) consumers learn their own preferences, and not the distribution of preferences among the entire population, for multiple product attributes; and (3) consumers update not only the expectation but also the variance of their preferences. Based on estimation results, we conduct a series of counterfactual experiments and find that the value from Dianping is about 7 CNY for each user, and about 8.6 CNY from each user for the reviewed restaurants in this study. The majority of the value comes from reviews on restaurant quality, and contextual comments are more valuable than numerical ratings in reviews.

Traces the founding of Alibaba, the world's second largest Internet company, by an English teacher from humble origins, drawing on interviews to explore how the company and Jack Ma have become icons and leading employers in China's booming private sector.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumers’ value evaluation and personality factors influence consumers’ intention to adopt mobile coupon (M-coupon) applications in China. The moderating effect of gender on the relationships between personality factors and consumers’ adoption intention is also tested. Design/methodology/approach – This study conducted a survey to collect data from M-coupon application users. In total, 271 valid responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) technology. Findings – The results indicate that perceived value, personal innovativeness, and coupon proneness positively affect consumers’ acceptance of M-coupon applications. Personal innovativeness has more positive impact on behavioral intention for males than for females. However, the differential effects of coupon proneness on behavioral intention are not significant between males and females. In addition, the findings show that perceived convenience, perceived enjoyment, and perceived money savings positively influence perceived value, whereas perceived fees and perceived privacy risk negatively influence it. Practical implications – This study helps M-coupon application providers to identify who is positive toward their services and how to improve consumers’ perceived value of the services, eventually expanding their user base. Originality/value – Prior studies mainly focussed on the usage behavior of M-coupons and overlooked the important role of M-coupon applications in promoting M-coupon use. This research fills this gap. The research findings offer insights into the factors influencing consumers’ behavioral intention to adopt M-coupon applications. Besides, the results of gender’s moderating effect advance the understanding of the differences in males’ coupon usage intentions between the contexts of M-coupon applications and paper-based coupon services, which enrich couponing research.

E-cigarettes have gained popularity among teenagers due to extensive marketing strategies on social media platforms. This widespread promotion is a risk factor, as it fosters more positive attitudes toward e-cigarette use among teenagers and increases the perception that using e-cigarettes is normal. Therefore, the marketing of e-cigarettes on social media is a serious global health concern, and its strategies and impact should be clearly identified. This study examined how e-cigarette companies popularize their products via Weibo and identified the specific strategies influencing the effectiveness of their marketing. In phase 1, we conducted a search on Qcc.com and identified 32 e-cigarette brands with active Weibo accounts between October 1 and December 31, 2020, along with 863 Weibo posts. The data were investigated through content analysis. The codebook was developed into four categories: (1) product and features, (2) sales and promotions, (3) social contact and interaction, and (4) restrictions and warnings. To further understand the factors influencing e-cigarette brand marketing, we conducted a multiple linear regression analysis. Marketing tactics by e-cigarette companies on Chinese social media were documented, including emphasizing attractive product features, using trendy characters, implicit promotions, downplaying health concerns, and engaging with Weibo users in various ways. Out of 863 posts, 449 (52%) mentioned product characteristics. In 313 (36.3%) posts, visible figures were used to attract attention. Product promotion was absent in 762 (88.3%) posts, and purchase channels were not mentioned in 790 (98.3%) posts. Social interaction-related posts received attention (n=548, 63.5%), particularly those featuring hashtag content (n=538, 62.3%). Most posts did not include claims for restrictions on teenagers' purchases or use (n=687, 79.6%) or information on health warnings (n=839, 97.2%). Multiple linear regression analysis identified marketing strategies that effectively increase the exposure of e-cigarette posts on Weibo. Posts including engagement via posts encouraging reposts, comments, and likes (P<.001) and engagement topics related to e-cigarette brands were positively correlated with the number of reposts (P=.009). Posts highlighting nonmonetary incentives (P=.004), posts with age restriction statements (P<.001), engaging via stories and idea collection (P<.001), and engagement topics related to products (P<.001) and current affairs (P=.002) had a positive effect on the number of comments. Engagement topics related to brands (P<.001) or interactive sweepstakes (P<.001) had a positive effect on the number of likes. E-cigarette posts on Weibo that focus on product features and social interaction attract public attention, especially from teenagers. Stricter regulations and monitoring should be adopted to restrict the social media marketing of e-cigarettes.

In the beginning, the World Wide Web was exciting and open to the point of anarchy, a vast and intimidating repository of unindexed confusion. Into this creative chaos came Google with its dazzling mission--\"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible\"--and its much-quoted motto, \"Don't be Evil.\" In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google--and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google's global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the \"evil\" it pledged to avoid.

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platforms have become a major engine of growth in Internet commerce. This is especially true in countries such as China, which are experiencing a big rush toward e-commerce. The emergence of such platforms gives researchers the unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of such platforms by focusing on the growth of both buyers and sellers. In this research, we build a utility-based model to quantify both cross and direct network effects on Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com, the world’s largest online C2C platform (based in China). Specifically, we investigate the relative contributions of different factors that affect the growth of buyers and sellers on the platform. Our results suggest that the direct network effects do not play a big role in the platform’s growth (we detect a small positive direct network effect on buyer growth and no direct network effect on seller growth). More importantly, we find a significant, large and positive cross-network effect on both sides of the platform. In other words, the installed base of either side of the platform has propelled the growth of the other side (and thus the overall growth). Interestingly, this cross-network effect is asymmetric with the installed base of sellers having a much larger effect on the growth of buyers than vice versa. The growth in the number of buyers is driven primarily by the seller’s installed base and product variety with increasing importance of product variety. The growth in the number of sellers is driven by buyer’s installed base, buyer quality, and product price with increasing importance of buyer quality. We also investigate the nature of these cross-network effects over time. We find that the cross-network effect of sellers on buyers increases and then decreases to reach a stable level. By contrast, the cross-network effect of buyers on sellers is relatively stable. We discuss the policy implications of these findings for C2C platforms in general and Taobao in particular. Data, as supplemental material, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.0976 .