"Our Neighborhood Market News via KakaoTalk"... Kakao Launches Market Talk Channel

Kakao's win-win program 'Our Neighborhood Regular Market,' which collaborates with 100 markets nationwide, is launching its second half business.

On the 20th, Kakao announced that it held a launch ceremony for the 'Market Representative Talk Channel' project, inviting merchant associations participating in the Our Neighborhood Regular Market program's second half public offering project, together with Kakao Impact, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the Small Enterprise and Market Service, and MKYU.

In August, Kakao conducted a three-week recruitment of markets to participate in the Market Representative Talk Channel project. After evaluating project suitability and sustainability, 75 participating markets from 16 districts nationwide were selected. The selected markets will receive ▲ six weeks of digital education ▲ 3 million KRW in free cash for operating Talk Channels ▲ 3 million KRW in support funds for Talk Channel activation. With this, Kakao can complete the traditional market digital transformation project by partnering with a total of 100 markets, including 20 markets that participated in the 'Store Talk Channel Support Project' in the first half public offering and 5 markets that conducted the Market Representative Talk Channel pilot project.

Meanwhile, the 'Store Talk Channel Support' project, conducted by Kakao as part of the Our Neighborhood Regular Market first half public offering this year, completed its six-week digital transformation project starting in July and held a completion ceremony on September 8. The 'Store Talk Channel Support' project provides digital transformation education by professional digital tutors to market merchants who want to communicate with customers via KakaoTalk channels. This education involved 20 market merchant associations nationwide and 899 merchants, resulting in the creation of a total of 919 KakaoTalk channels. The channels recorded approximately 79,492 KakaoTalk channel friends, averaging about 86 regular friends per channel.

Kakao is also running the 'Kakao Soshin Merchant Support Benefit,' which supports the cost of sending channel messages so that any small business owner can use KakaoTalk channels for marketing. So far, it has supported about 4.7 million small business owners with approximately 14.2 billion KRW worth of Talk Channel message sending costs. Kakao plans to provide support funds worth 30 billion KRW to 80,000 small business owners by the end of this year.