Online mob power
p2p news / p2pnet: P2p Power – Net Power – is increasingly demonstrating its immense potential, slowly forcing the likes of the entertainment and software industries to revise decades-old business practices under which the customer is always wrong.
Thanks to their ability to almost instantly communicate with each other via blogs, emails, IM and personal sites, in the 21st digital century, ‘consumers’ are making traditional marketing obsolete as they again become ‘customers,’ buyers with free choice and the weight to exercise it.
Now, "Tuangou, or team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob," says The Economist, continuing:
"It is spreading through China like wildfire. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has quickly inspired several specialist websites, such as 51tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn. Zhang Wei, who helped to set up teambuy less than six months ago, says the site has 10,000 registered members. The company plans to expand into Beijing and Shanghai."
The first team buyers realised they could get a better price if they went shopping together, says the story,also pointing out, "Getting a discount is also a sort of insurance policy against ending up with badly made or fake goods from Chinese shops."
Some retailers, "dislike the practice" but others, "hope they can recover lost margins through the extra volume," says The Economist, adding:
"Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen in a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem.
"In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics—if only for shopping. However, if China’s economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation."
Will China’s Tuangou phenomenon be picked up elsewhere in the world?
Stay tuned.
Also See:
The Economist – Shop affronts, June 29, 2006
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