Growing Market Diversity
We have seen growing localisation and differences between countries as consumer driven social platforms have enabled users to transform the internet without barriers, infrastructure or investment. Global social platforms have enabled anyone to have localised internet experiences, connections and content. At the other end of the scale, e-commerce drives internet activity in most developed internet markets where benefit from more developed online and offline infrastructure.
To understand this global differentiation, we mapped e-commerce adoption versus an aggregate of social media adoption, incorporating social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, video uploads and forum participation.
This created four segments:
Social Commerce Stars: Brazil, China and Turkey are massively socially engaged and large enough to develop the infrastructure and mass demand for online retail. Much of this is direct social commerce platforms e.g Taobao in China or Mercado Libre in Brazil.
Socially Engaged: Many fast growing emerging internet markets have adopted global social media platforms, which are localised but generally US originated. There hasn’t yet been the investment in mass e-commerce infrastructure. This could be down to a lack of real world infrastructure, small economies of scale and cash-driven economies.
Laggards: Developed internet markets that lack the critical mass to implement e-commerce, either due to geographic size (Canada / Australia) or small population (Hong Kong) or dominance of traditional retail markets (Spain and Italy). While social media can still be significant in these markets, it tends to be one dimensional, i.e everyone is utilising social networks, but not blogs or uploading video etc.
Commerce Engaged: Developed internet markets such as Germany and the UK have the e-commerce investment and market push, plus the legacy consumer behaviour from the Web 1.0 boom. However, social media adoption is more passive and tends to be focused on social networking at a mass level.
Purchased a product onnline in the past month versus an aggregate score of ‘Manage a Social Network’, ‘Write a Blog’, ‘Comment in a Forum’, ‘Upload a Video’ and ‘Microblog’.
(% penetration by country, Wave 5 June 2011)