Kantar and Alibaba Group announced today, during Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the launch of their new partnership to redefine brand building in China by co-creating an integrated ‘insight to activation’ platform that will help CMOs to develop, measure and optimise their marketing activities at ‘China Speed'. Together, they will help brands realise the vision of ‘real time’ brand and campaign management. 

Today, marketers of Chinese and global brands alike see their marketing strategies outpaced by the scale, scope and speed of China’s consumer market and media transformation. To address these needs the first phase of the partnership focused on unifying fragmented brand metrics into a new integrated ‘insight-to-activation’ platform, enabling brands and businesses to make more agile decisions. 

Kantar mapped and validated Alibaba’s Marketing KPI ‘Consumer Asset’ framework (launched in 2017) to Kantar’s broader portfolio of marketing KPIs. With the validation of the Consumer Asset framework, the companies are integrating Kantar’s globally-renowned research intellectual property (IP) and marketing insights solutions with Alibaba’s in-depth consumer behaviour and brand insights derived from their rich understanding of around 600 million active mobile consumers across China. 

The first outcomes from the partnership is a new set of Kantar-branded solutions that link brand-building strategies with in-market activation, enabling marketers to respond to today’s market conditions today and enabling brands and businesses to drive long term brand growth and create short-term market impact.

Three new unified, integrated and real-time marketing insights and measurement solutions are:

 - Brand Measurement & Diagnosis will spot real-time brand trend/signals (using tools such as Alibaba’s behaviour-based KPIs and Kantar Millward Brown’s Digital Behaviour Analytics) and provide a seamless linkage between real-time brand status and the underlying drivers (utilising monthly/quarterly in-depth brand diagnosis tools such as Kantar Millward Brown’s Brand Health Tracking and Kantar Worldpanel’s penetration data).

 - Brand Activation Guidance & Planning enables marketers to instantly act upon new brand building insights using Kantar’s advanced analytics to target the right audiences with relevant content and media strategy.

 - Performance Measurement & Optimisation toolkits enable up-to real-time measurement for dynamic creative optimisation, campaign impact measurement, as well as campaign ROI so you know today’s campaign performance today. (using solutions such as LINK and ABCS (Audience, Brand lift, Consumer behavior and Sales) Insights from Kantar Millward Brown.

Commenting on the launch of the partnership with Alibaba, Eric Salama, CEO, Kantar observed: “The Chinese market is one of the most difficult and rewarding places in the world to do business. Our partnership with Alibaba is unique in the market place today. The combination of our proven IP and insights and capabilities with Alibaba’s deep understanding of their half-billion plus strong consumer base will be a ‘positive disrupter’ for the Chinese marketing landscape, making it up to four times quicker for brands to understand and respond to the fast moving and evolving Chinese consumer’s needs, and be up to 40% more cost effective.” 

Chris Tung, Chief Marketing Officer, Alibaba Group added: “Consumer retail and marketing are being redefined by technology, data and insights. The combination of Alibaba’s unparalleled understanding of over 500 million mobile Chinese consumers, created by leveraging Alibaba’s technology, data and rich consumer insights when combined with Kantar’s proven methodologies is transforming brand and product loyalty. Together we are creating the most powerful and advanced framework to differentiate brands and build growth.” 

Availability of the three new solutions through Kantar China is currently slated from Q3 2018.