The partnership with Alibaba covers online sales, brand building, cross-border ecommerce retail, and rural market development of Nestlé products.
A spokesperson for Nestlé China told BeverageDaily.com that while online sales are growing rapidly, the importance of ecommerce goes further than this.
Offline sales are also influenced by what consumers see online, meaning brand building now goes beyond good TV advertising or nice packaging.
A strong presence online also gives Nestlé scope to reach China’s huge population, including targeted consumers or those in rural areas.
“Online brand exposure is critical for brand building,” a spokesperson for Nestlé China told this publication. “Firstly it can reach massive number of consumers because the daily traffic of major Ecommerce platforms can be over 100m. Secondly it is very targeted because big data can help Ecommerce platform to screen out the targeted consumers.”
As part of the partnership, Nestlé and Alibaba will collaborate on chaoshi.tmall.com, tmall.com, tmall.hk, cun.taobao.com and ju.taobao.com.
Nestlé will use the site tmall.com to introduce some of its overseas products to Chinese consumers. Meanwhile, cun.taobao.com will help distribute nutrition, coffee, confectionary, cereal, dairy and culinary products to rural areas.
In the first phase of the partnership, Nestlé is introducing select products from around the world to the Chinese market. These are Nescafé Dolce Gusto BMW Mini limited edition coffee machines from Italy, Nestlé Damak chocolate from Turkey, Nido full cream milk powder from The Netherlands, Nestlé and Wyeth infant nutrition products from Switzerland, the UK and Germany and Nestlé ProPlan cat food from Australia.