The night of Oct. 10, Beijing, Water Cube.
Inside the National Aquatics Center, formerly a swimming pool used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ aquatics events, now looks similar to a NASA control room right before a missile launch. A big LED screen shows a map of China, a smaller map of the world and a massive calculator. Inside the dark control room, press, employees of Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) and Jack Ma himself are waiting anxiously in front of the screen for the launch time at midnight.
At the same time, millions of users worldwide are counting down in front of their own screens for the moment to come.
China’s Singles Day, Nov. 11, was nothing but a fake festival Alibaba made up less than a decade ago. The name “Singles Day” stemmed from the four ones in the date. The festival is gaining momentum each year partly due to the growing singles’ culture in China. As an anti-Valentines’ Day event, Singles Day is considered to be the day that singles should buy something for themselves. According to a 2011 survey by China National Ministry of Civil Affairs, more than 180 million men and women who are above the legal marriage age are single in China. That’s almost one in every eight people in China. The number is only growing.
What’s more important here is that this day has been recognized as a big sales day by presumably every consumer in the vast Chinese market. The scale of the sales multiplied in 2009, when large e-commerce sites, not just Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, but including JD (Nasdaq: JD) and others, joined the brick-and-mortar shops in this sales battle and intensified the competition overnight. This year, 2015, marked the seventh Singles Day sales event, and another victory for the country’s e-commerce sites.
As Alibaba closely monitored its sales number, the company also knew how anticipation, a good spirit and a huge party could affect consumer behaviors. Alibaba’s Singles Day sales event, titled “the Nov. 11 Shopping Day (a trademark registered by the company in 2014. ),” started the buildup since October. Merchants listed the anticipated pricing on Nov. 11. Majority of the items were half off, others were 30 to 40 percent off.
At 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 10, just hours before the sales, a live show started on Hunan TV, China’s flagship entertainment TV channel. This show, directed by Chinese movie director Xiaogang Feng, is a collaboration between Hunan TV and Alibaba. The show invited celebrities worldwide, most famously, “007” Daniel Craig, and aimed to create a vibe that the rest of the world is shopping/partying with you.
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