The thing is that now a lot of foreign companies have found that China is not just an interesting place to look for products to export, or establish production facilities. It is a very interesting market to sell to too. The amount of strong buyers is rising steadily, which calls for stronger, better and more modern marketing channels.

I am unaware of how precise the “online marketing” market is in China, but I would expect it to grow very dramatic at the moment. The service sector “only” amounts to about one third of the Chinese economy. Due to increasing trade, not just exports, and increased privatization of the sector, I would expect a higher demand for domestic services.

The amount of internet users in china is growing like no other place on earth. That fact would itself support the thought that online marketing is growing too. I think that if there is ever going to be another klondyke.com era it would be starting right now, and in China. There are so many new businesses appearing daily in China, and they all more or less need to deliver their message. The online Channel is perfect for that, and is a relatively cheap instrument compared to TV commercials. It also gives the company the opportunity to delivery whatever message they want, when they want it. Once the channel (website) is established, the marginal cost of that channel will decline, because what is costly, is the implementation. The maintenance of content has relatively low cost, because neither expert knowledge nor production is needed. And unlike print ads, or TV commercials, the message can be changes from minute to minute.

According to Alexa, 3 of the top 10 sites are Chinese at the moment. All of them are targeted at the middle country, and none has a wider international target. But maybe that will be the newt step?

I initially found this version of Gartner’s hype cycle in an entry from Dion Hinchcliffe, and I asked him who made it. Apparently he repurposed this from a Marketing chart, and he encouraged me to blog about it… So here I am.
I especially like the placements of “RSS” and “word of mouth”. I am convinced that “word of mouth” has disappointed a lot now as a marketing stunt, and did not live up to the hype it had received. Though I think that currently the term viral marketing will be hyped up, and then we just start over again with another word for roughly the same thing. Word of mouth can indeed be a very powerful tool and have helped a lot of emerging technologies and websites to gain momentum and reach a critical mass. But as a sole marketing strategy I believe it can turn to be very unreliable. But maybe it will all go better for viral marketing!!!
I also agree on the placement of RSS. Even though it has existed a long time now, it is still being hyped as “The truth” by many. There is so many ideas for its usage and, and I thinks one of its powers is that it is relatively (to what?!) simple to make and use. It has soon to disprove some of the hyped usages, and reach a more realistically position. Personally I have a hard time seeing what the major problems and disappointments should be, but then again I only use it at a moderate level, and don’t expect it to do much more for me that it does now. My guess is that RSS will reach the plateau of productivity by the time Microsoft Launches Vista. While they are the incumbent and thereby naturally have a large amount of inertia, we still await them to implement and use RSS.