International duty free and travel retail operator, Gebr. Heinemann, is in the process of developing a website specifically targeting Chinese travelling consumers in their own language that is expected to launch in 2016. 

The move underscores the importance of the Chinese shopper to the Hamburg-based retailer. Speaking at the second Global Shopping Forum in Frankfurt on Friday which was organised by travel accessories company, Travel Blue, Anja Zettel, Head of Trade Marketing at Heinemann, said: “Chinese passengers are hugely important to our business and we need to build a consistent dialogue, but it is a challenge.”

Heinemann is looking to attract Chinese travellers from the very start of their journey. “In the past we focused very much on point of sale to maximise transactions,” she says. “But of course many of them already did their shopping, for example in shopping villages, before reaching our stores. So now we want to build up a whole chain of touch-points along their journey and so increase the penetration in our shops.”

Therefore, next year, Heinemann plans to launch a dedicated website in Chinese language and hosted in China [to overcome firewalls in the country].

“At the same time we plan to have WeChat and/or Weibo [social media] accounts so that we can bring traffic to the website and connect the touchpoints in a smart way in order to really activate this target group,” says Zettel.

VARIED CONTENT FOR SUB-GROUPS

Chinese language speaking personal shoppers at Frankfurt Airport [in association with the landlord Fraport] have already proved successful for the retailer. “But we know there is no ubiquitous Chinese traveller because they are so diverse: we have to differentiate and prepare varied content for sub-target groups,” says Zettel who admits, “Right now we are learning and developing in this area.”

This differentiation process and segmentation has been taken in-house after being initially handled by an external agency. One trend that will be closely watched is the move from group/cluster shopping to free individual travellers (FITs).

DIGITAL IN-STORE ASSISTANT

Another technology investment from the company is what is called a Digital In-store Assistant (DIA) which will allow any staff member to interact with a Chinese shopper by showing product assortment information on a screen in English with the same details presented to the Chinese traveller in their language on the same screen.

“For more detailed and complex questions we of course have Chinese speakers on the floor,” says Zettel. She also underlines the key point that Heinemann is differentiating itself from its rival DF&TR retailers on its service element. “The brand lives very much through the staff members and we know that customer satisfaction comes through employee satisfaction and this is where we invest a lot,” she adds.