Alibaba chairman Jack Ma was in Detroit this week for Gateway 17, his company’s biggest-ever event stateside, to discuss opportunities for American small businesses to tap into the Chinese market through the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. But his chief creative officer Chris Tung was in the south of France unveiling a new suite of marketing data tools for all the brands and agencies gathered at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, to better use Alibaba’s consumer data.
本周，阿里巴巴主席马云现身底特律，为阿里巴巴最大的“连接世界”美国峰会（Gateway 17）站台，意在能否通过阿里巴巴这个世界最大的电商平台，帮助美国小型企业进入中国市场。与此同时，阿里巴巴首席创意官董本洪则在法国南部，为戛纳国际创意节（Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity）上的各大品牌机构展示全新的营销数据工具，借此推广阿里巴巴的消费者数据库。

Often, especially in Western press, Alibaba is dubbed “the Chinese Amazon.” But with the consumer-to-consumer marketplace Taobao, the business-to-consumer T-Mall, and Alibaba’s business-to-business, plus the social media, maps, Laiwang messaging, a cloud computing service, it’s a bit more far reaching than that.
西方媒体特别喜欢将阿里巴巴比作“中国亚马逊”。但是，淘宝是消费者对消费者的市场平台，天猫属于商业对消费者，阿里巴巴则是商业对商业，再加上社交媒体、地图、即时通讯软件“来往”以及云计算服务，阿里巴巴涉猎的领域比亚马逊更广。

“It’s very different from the Amazon model,” says Tung. “We don’t buy products from brands, we don’t buy and sell and take a margin, as a channel. We service as a marketplace, a bridge between the seller and the buyer, through data. A lot of transactions happen on our platform–$550 billion US worth of gross merchandise value a year. The largest commerce platform on Earth. It’s bigger than Walmart. Much bigger than Amazon.”
董本洪说：“阿里巴巴和亚马逊的运作模式完全不同。阿里巴巴不从品牌那里购入产品，所以我们既不是卖方也不是买方，更不从中抽取利润，阿里巴巴不是一个渠道。我们以市场的形式存在，通过数据连接买家和卖家。阿里巴巴每年的交易总商品价值为5500亿美元，是全球最大的贸易平台，远超过沃尔玛，也比亚马逊大得多。”

If you want to make analogies, Tung says think of Alibaba as a combination of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, in one. Brands set up and operate their own e-commerce flagship stores on the Alibaba platform. And global brands have flocked to it, including Nike, Apple, Coke, Uniqlo, Zara, and L’Oreal.
如果要做类比，董本洪认为阿里巴巴是集谷歌、脸书、亚马逊于一体的存在。各大品牌在阿里巴巴的平台上注册，然后自行运营电子商务旗舰店。包括耐克、苹果、可口可乐、优衣库、Zara（某西班牙服装品牌）和欧莱雅在内的国际品牌无一不对阿里巴巴平台青睐有加。