An exploratory study of the potential for SMEs in New Zealand to learn from Chinese SMEs regarding digital marketing

Abstract

"An Exploratory Study of the Potential for SMEs in New Zealand to Learn from Chinese SMEs regarding Digital Marketing" aims to investigate the potential for improving New Zealand SMEs’ digital marketing capabilities by learning from Chinese SMEs. Digital marketing can increase SMEs’ competitiveness, while digital marketing development and innovation in China received little attention from academic literature.

Therefore, this study is seeking to answer the main question: What is the potential for New Zealand SMEs to develop their digital marketing capabilities by learning from the experience of Chinese SMEs’ adoption of digital marketing applications?

The main question can be further broken-down to two subside questions: 1) How are SMEs in China adopting digital marketing strategies and platforms? 2) Can New Zealand SMEs learn from Chinese SMEs’ adoption of digital marketing for SMEs in New Zealand?

Survey and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 Chinese participants to gain insights of digital marketing applications by Chinese SMEs. After acquiring data from Chinese participants and building the framework of online marketing strategies and platforms in China based on data analysis, semi-structured interview questions were designed and interviews were conducted with 5 New Zealand participants. Findings from this study reveals that Chinese SMEs increase their online customer traffic through three resources: e-commerce platform, social media, and private traffic, a controllable traffic pool of loyal customers or brands’ social media followers. In addition, digital marketing technologies from China have the potential of being transferred to New Zealand, however the process can be long-term due to cultural and attitude barriers. This study also suggests a tentative model examining the likelihood of transferring (LOT) based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).