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

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Supplementary material

Other Title

Authors

Zhang, Lingjun

Author ORCID Profiles (clickable)

Degree

Master in Applied Management

Grantor

Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT)

Date

2020

Supervisors

Sibley, Jonathan

Type

Masters Dissertation

Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (Māori subject headings)

Keyword

New Zealand
China
small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
digital marketing
marketing
knowledge transfer
interviews

Citation

Zhang, L. (2020). An exploratory study of the potential for SMEs in New Zealand to learn from Chinese SMEs regarding digital marketing. (Unpublished document submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Applied Management). Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), New Zealand. https://hdl.handle.net/10652/5754

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).

Publisher

Link to ePress publication

DOI

Copyright holder

Author

Copyright notice

All rights reserved

Copyright license

Available online at