Little Update on ShangHai Expo China

ShangHai Expo China – Chinese Marketing Strategy

While I was touring around China in the past 10 days, I would be looking for places to sit down to watch the World Cup at night time, be it in the middle of the buzzling street or hotel room. The whole world is crazy about football and there are people willing to take a day off or even skip exam just to watch their country playing. No wonder it is claimed that there are only two (2) languages in the world – one is Football and the other one is Music.

One thing that really inspired me in China is how the Chinese Government doing business. I took the opportunity to visit the ShangHai World Expo for 2 consecutive days (it is too short) during my China trip. I was amazed to see thousands of tour buses lining outside the expo park, and hundreds of thousands people lining inside the expo park. On the very first day of my visit, there were 540,000 visitors to the expo (source- ShangHai Expo). That is equivalent to the whole population of Kuching, the city where I come from. Having said that, I guess around 70% of the visitors were from the home country itself. WHY?

Buses 0 00 07 15 Little Update on ShangHai Expo China

Buses Outside the Expo Park

This is only one of the Parking lots for the buses. There are more than 30 bus parking lots there!

Check out the Huge Crowd at the South Africa Pavilion

The effort put in by the ShangHai Government in staging this world class event definitely deserved the compliment. To make sure all the people of ShangHai benefit from this event, the ShangHai government has given each family of ShangHai a FREE Expo ticket and a transport card. And that amounts to around 7 million FREE tickets. But with 7 million free tickets given out, it will easily bring in another 15 million paying visitors as there are definitely more than 1 family member in each household. On top of that, the ShangHai Government has also encouraged the students to visit the Expo at least 2 times over the 6 months Expo.

So if you are an online marketer or affiliate marketer, isn’t this strategy sounds familiar to you? Don’t you have to give first before you take? All the leads capture exercise and also the freebies given out via the newsletter are similar to the game plan of the Expo. Don’t forget the upselling of the Expo – the 3000 ranges of souvenirs.

Nothing much to complain about the Expo, except the long Queue!!! If you want to visit the popular pavilions like China, Great Britain, Japan, Saudi Arab, Thailand etc, you may have to queue up to 6-7 hours sometimes. Of course this is definitely a No No for me, unless I were granted a Green lane entry like Malaysia Pavilion where no queue is necessary.