From Amazon's beauty products event to rising e-Commerce in Italy, find out all of the latest international marketing news. Read more.
In this week's international marketing news round-up, you'll find information about Amazon's beauty event, Italian e-Commerce growth, instant messaging privacy concerns and Google's investment in a $2.1B office in New York City.
According to documents reviewed by CNBC, Amazon plans to host a beauty products event in October to attract early holiday customers and enhance the company's position in a booming industry.
According to a Presentations deck emailed to select cosmetic firms, Amazon is currently planning the event for Oct. 4-25. The same information was shared with a few consulting firms that assist in the management of Amazon businesses.
Consumers have flocked to the internet to buy makeup and personal care items throughout the pandemic; thus, the beauty market is of special relevance now. According to market research firm 1010data, online makeup sales increased by 40% in 2020 compared to the previous year, while sales of “self-care” items including shampoo, face wash products, and lotions increased by 59%.
Beauty is one of Amazon's fastest-growing categories, according to Kroon, and it's "ripe for innovation" in terms of product discovery and presentation. According to her, Amazon is “uniquely positioned to reinvent” the experience of purchasing beauty items online.
Elaine Kwon, who previously worked as a vendor manager in Amazon's apparel sector and now owns Kwontified, e-commerce management and software start-up, believes the October event would help Amazon better compete with retailers like Ulta Beauty and LVMH-owned Sephora. Department stores are losing ground to Ulta, Sephora, and direct-to-consumer firms like Glossier and ColorPop in the beauty sector.
In Europe, cross-border e-commerce is common, and online business owners can take advantage of new opportunities that occur when they expand into a growth market. According to data conducted by Shopping Tomorrow Cross Border E-commerce and Salesupply, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Sweden are among the markets with the strongest e-commerce growth.
Italy, in particular, is predicted to quickly become one of Europe's largest e-commerce markets. This is a result of the country's rapid digitization. The rise in popularity of online marketplaces has led to an increase in cross-border purchases by young Italians.
While many older Italians prefer to shop online, they are sceptical about carriers. The most difficult obstacle for e-commerce companies looking to sell in Italy is delivering quickly to the country's less accessible south. In Italy, a large number of new pickup points are being installed across the country. Cross-border vendors can deliver faster within Italy by using local carriers and warehouses.
Cross-border merchants must be aware of consumer preferences in each area in order to succeed worldwide. The first impression is particularly essential to Italian customers, Norwegian consumers are devoted to brands and products, and Swedish consumers value sustainability.
Influencers are becoming increasingly prominent in Sweden and Norway. Nonetheless, the newspaper is still a popular place to promote in Norway, while television advertising in Italy still has a large reach.
“In private messages, you expose more about yourself, not only in the substance but also in the manner you use language,” says Timo Koch, a psychologist at Munich University.
Koch and his colleagues evaluated over 300,000 WhatsApp messages and trained an algorithm to determine the authors' age and gender - an experiment, he claims, that demonstrates the significance of protecting privacy in these environments. “End-to-end encryption is a critical first step,” Koch explains. “But, more importantly, we need to be informed - platforms must be clear and include flags when data is not encrypted.”
After the algorithm had been trained, a sample of roughly 1,000 words was adequate to get a reasonably accurate age and gender classification. The researchers calculated this figure by counting the number of words in a moderately busy conversation between two people: three days of dialogue contains just over 1,000 words on average. Nonetheless, the team notes that the analysis' potential would be much bigger with a larger database.
According to the contents of What's up, Deutschland? younger users use more emojis and express themselves in the first person more frequently, a trend that has previously been observed in studies of content posted on other platforms and appears to confirm that we become less individualistic as we get older.
Should we be regulating what we say on private messaging applications now that we know what we know? According to Koch, it all relies on how much value we place on privacy vs convenience. “There are some good alternatives, such as instant messaging service Signal, which is also encrypted and is not backed by a corporation with a strong interest in profiting from the data,” he argues.
Google announced on Tuesday that it would spend $2.1 billion to purchase a massive Manhattan office building on the Hudson River waterfront, paying one of the highest prices for an office building in recent years and sending a ray of hope to a real estate industry hit by the pandemic.
According to Mayor Bill de Blasio, this represents "a historic investment in New York City." The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the deal.
While Manhattan has a glut of office space for lease, setting record vacancy levels during the pandemic, the four companies that make up so-called Big Tech — Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook — have put a big bet on the city's future.
Google has 12,000 corporate employees in New York City, making it the company's largest satellite office outside of California, and the company announced on Tuesday that it plans to hire another 2,000 people in the city in the coming years.
However, their employees are unlikely to return to the office five days a week anytime soon. Even when the epidemic is over, many tech businesses have stated that they will allow staff to work remotely in a hybrid model. Because of the extremely contagious Delta variety, Google recently postponed its return-to-office plans until early 2022.
If you have any questions surrounding the news in this week's round-up, please do not hesitate to get in touch.