Kevin Guo, General Manager Strategic Cooperation & Marketing Innovation at Ctrip, decodes the company’s innovations in marketing.
Q: What do you think of the future of mobile marketing?
A: The use of mobile phones has surpassed the one of PC/tablets and is now the core of e-commerce, and the entire user’s behavior is around mobile phones, at least in China. Over 70% of Ctrip bookings are done by mobile. Convenience is what consumers are always pursuing. Mobile phones are so convenient and we haven’t yet seen a tool that will replace them in the near future.
Q: What do you think of WeChat Mini Programs, or sub-applications, within the WeChat ecosystem?
A: It’s a very useful tool and we’re also developing some products around this channel. However, it’s not in our hands and is controlled by Tencent, so we would like to first observe and wait for this tool to reach a larger audience. If the whole mini program market gets bigger, we’ll for sure follow the trend closely and invest to develop more adapted products.
Q: What are the priorities of Ctrip for 2018?
A: Our foremost priority is internationalization. We aim to achieve this objective via different approachs: acquiring local brands, like Skyscanner in Europe and MakeMyTrip in India that we acquired in 2016, and we are studying some mature tourism companies as targets in Australia and the US; as well as building our own brand. In November 2017, in an important step in our globalization strategy, we acquired the US travel research website Trip.com and rebranded it as our global brand website. Today if you open any of our overseas websites, you’ll be redirected to this website.
In terms of geographical zones, we’re already quite well established in the Asia Pacific region, but we wish to extend our reach beyond to the US and Europe and to further explore the high consumption markets in tourism.
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