Kuaishou is looking for growth points in the consumption upgrade of the sinking market

Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1165

Kuaishou is one of the most easily misunderstood platforms. This kind of misreading is largely derived from the very early stories of Kuaishou: the stories of early rural users, which brought a stereotype of low user value to the public; The six major family forces represented by Simba made the outside world think that the family monopolized the traffic and business on Kuaishou; MCN, represented by Yaowang Network, who entered the game in the second half, invested tens of millions to make the list for its anchors, which seems to imply that Only those who are well versed in the rules of private domain traffic can gain a foothold here.

But in fact, the backward sinking market, family and ranking-style traffic rules are only the product of a certain era, not the constant label of Kuaishou.

Domestic content platforms mainly in the form of community, while moving towards a larger scale, almost have to go through the process of washing off the past labels. In order to hit the target of 400 million MAU, Station B has constantly washed away the label of the second dimension; if Kuaishou only focuses on the basics of Laotie’s economy and private domain traffic, it will not be able to reach the current user scale of nearly 600 million MAU.

Facts are also proving the changes in Kuaishou. When Kuaishou goes public in 2021, the GMV contributed by the Simba family will account for nearly 22.3%, but after a year, the combined GMV of the six major families will only account for 6%; The sinking crowd is considered to be unattractive to the brand, so it reinforces the impression that Kuaishou can only be a private domain, but this year, international brands such as Laneige, Coach, and LG Group have entered Kuaishou one after another.

Xiaogu, the head of Kuaishou E-commerce, also mentioned a detail in an interview with “LatePost”: when the slogan of this year’s Kuaishou E-commerce conference was conceived, they invited the media to choose together and chose “Connoisseur goods, old iron” price”, but Kuaishou users said they didn’t understand it. Kuaishou users choose “reality”, and their demands for consumption are not just low “old iron prices”, but “real people, real goods, and real prices”, which are also reflected in the requirements for product and service experience. Genuine products, cost-effective prices, better service, and trustworthy anchors add up to the fact that they think this consumption is “real” and an experience that has the desire to repurchase.

Xiaogu said that if you think about it, whether it is team employees or the media, they are mainly first- and second-tier people. It seems that Kuaishou users are always downgrading their consumption, but in fact, many of the hundreds of millions of Kuaishou users are upgrading their consumption.

The consumption upgrade of the sinking market has strong strategic significance for all parties: for brands, this is a huge, profitable and unsatisfied market; An important opportunity for Douyin to follow suit.

These changes constitute the core logic of Kuaishou’s “three big events” last year. Driven by this logic, the GMV (total transaction volume) of Kuaishou e-commerce in 2022 Q1 reached 175.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 47.7%. The next “big and fast brand” that extends from the “big industry belt” is aimed at the most underdeveloped new consumer groups in the sinking market.

The consumption upgrade of “old iron”

Japan is the best reference for domestic consumption upgrades, and its consumption development process is highly formulaic. In Miura Exhibition’s “The Fourth Age of Consumption”, some phenomena that develop linearly over time are discussed.

For example, in the first consumption era, social productivity has been greatly improved, and people began to consume a lot under mass production, but the consumption patterns tended to be homogeneous;

In the second consumption era, people’s consumption no longer converges, and they begin to pay attention to labels and personal preferences, and spiritual consumption and cultural consumption begin to connect with each other;

In the third consumption era, society has entered an aging population structure, and some new convergence points will emerge. Consumers are more concerned about cost performance than high brand premiums; the single population is increasing, and life convenience services and living alone support are valued; people are also More emphasis on emotional sustenance and connection, pet economy began to explode and so on.

The difference is that although China has entered an aging society, China is far more complex than Japan in terms of geography and class. The consumption upgrade does not develop horizontally, but is reflected vertically in cities at different stages.

This change is more obvious in the sinking market of Kuaishou. In the early sinking market, the price is the decisive factor. Therefore, products with high bargaining power such as white-label and non-standard products have become the main force in Kuaishou. The e-commerce operation will teach skills: a pack of 99 yuan candy split into 9.9 yuan individual packaging will sell better, and if you can get discounts, gifts, and users will be more recognized.

But now the consumption trend on Kuaishou has changed. The first is the increase in the unit price of customers: Yanghe M9, the best sold in the official live broadcast room of Kuaishou Yanghe, has a unit price of 1213 yuan per customer; Feigua data statistics from July to November last year According to the sales data of Kuaishou live broadcast of beauty and personal care brands, the best seller is the Korean brand WHOO, and the unit price per customer is about 533 yuan.

Including Zhu Fangxuan, the founder of the GG fashion brand who settled in Kuaishou, his own original brand, sold 30 million yuan in Kuaishou last month, and the unit price was nearly 1,000 yuan.

This batch of sinking market users, with the increase in income, has approached the consumption logic of Japan’s second consumption era. Xiaogu calls them “new consumer groups” in the sinking market, and they also show some characteristics: they are more than 24 to 30 years old, and it is speculated that they may be people who have made money and go home in first- and second-tier cities. The crowd is more.

With the increase of income in the sinking market, the pursuit of brands is inevitable, because brands can bring differentiated consumption experience.

But for Kuaishou, the uncertainty lies in whether the current brand can cover the huge sinking market demand?

Obviously not enough.

In general, the increase in the income of the sinking market allows veterans to accept part of the premium brought by cost-effective products, but these premiums need to be reflected in the consumer experience, which is reflected in the service level, content recognition, and trust of the merchants. , brand recognition, but the premium part cannot be as high as the brands in first- and second-tier cities, which will exceed their spending power.

Kuaishou summarizes this consumption concept as the concept of “experience price ratio”, which means to provide the best price ratio while trying to improve service and product experience.

Compared with the price/performance ratio of e-commerce platforms, the experience price ratio has several differences:

1. The price-performance ratio focuses on the performance and price ratio of the product, and the experience price ratio pays more attention to the comprehensive service ability;

2. As the basis for trusting e-commerce, merchants make experience price ratios, so that consumers can trust them and form private domain repurchase;

3. Compared with Taobao and JD.com’s text description of products, the transaction scene has become a live broadcast room, which is a test of service ability.

There are still a lot of gaps in brands that can do a good job in the experience-price ratio, which has also become an opportunity for Kuaishou. “The unit price of Kuaishou e-commerce is now 50-60 yuan, Douyin is 90 yuan, Taobao and Tmall are 120 and 150 yuan, and JD.com is 200 yuan. There is a brand price band in the middle, which is also an opportunity for fast brands.” Xiaogu said.

Who has the ability to become a fast brand?

The emergence of the Kuaishou brand is closely related to the development history of Kuaishou e-commerce, with inheritance and new derivation.

In the early Kuaishou e-commerce, there were mainly three consumption logics: reward logic, low price logic, and customer extension logic.

The reward logic is mainly based on the show family. The user regards the order as a gift to the anchor, and can get one more item after placing the order than the direct reward, which often appears in several major families; low price means a lot of Low-price strategy for white-label, OEM, and non-standard products.

The last kind of extension logic is a unique feature of Kuaishou: users themselves do not distinguish between their own life and business on Kuaishou, and some merchants who have achieved success on Kuaishou have found more and more in the process of socializing and sharing. big business opportunity.

For example, Bai Xudong, who originally only ran an agricultural machinery repair shop on the national highway, has won the trust of a large number of farmers by answering the farming methods for farmers on Kuaishou. Many of these farmers have developed into customers, and his repair shop has also become An agricultural machinery factory with an annual turnover of more than 10 million.

Kuaishou, a real estate agency’s anchor, “President Li Talks about Housing”, by answering complex real estate questions and providing guidance on buying and selling houses for different users, the transaction volume of repeat customers has increased from 10% to 30%.

Kuaishou has changed the user’s transaction drive, the merchant’s customer acquisition method and transformation, and some consumption concepts have also been gradually changed: the core of user transactions is not only price and quality, but more importantly, service – service is not only reflected in The efficiency of contract performance is more reflected in the communication experience between users and hosts.

Whoever achieves the highest experience-price ratio will be able to catch the Kuaishou users in the consumption upgrade and become a member of the Kuaishou brand.

However, it is not easy to really be a fast brand. The fast brand splits the selling point with price as the core into several selling points such as price, quality, service and experience, and also tests the operation ability of the brand.

At present, some of the top fast brands on Kuaishou that have reached the scale of tens of millions, such as Lairun, Ai Ruiwan, GG tide brand, etc., have obvious common characteristics.

The first is to be close to the production side. Most of these brands have built their own factories or cooperated directly with factories to save market channel costs, and the profits of goods mainly come from this part. Ai Rui Wan chooses to build its own factory to produce health care products, and GG has two factories in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

The second is to have professional knowledge. The founder of Lairun is a returnee student, and its partner Mu Chun is a doctor of science from the University of Utah. They know how to answer users’ questions and know what kind of advice to give; GG fashion brand founder Zhu Fangxuan herself He is a successful designer. He has 16 offline stores and has excellent experience in the whole clothing chain.

The last point is service, and in these studios, sales are not promotional. When Irevan founder Sam Ye sells health care products, he will inquire about the physical condition of the specific user in detail, and give suggestions on whether it is applicable or not. By building such a trust relationship, he has become a Kuaishou “nutrition” in just two years. One Brother”, the highest monthly sales reached 22 million.

Factory, professional knowledge and service level basically constitute the core competence of Kuai Brand, the former determines the profit margin, and the latter two determine the user’s trust level.

The main responsibility of the platform is to help merchants to cold start after they settle in.

Kuaishou now also has a single-column mode like Douyin. After merchants settle in Kuaishou, the first thing they face is a single-column up and down scene. How to get customers from the single-column mode? Where did the first fans come from? Both are important issues during cold starts.

Brands are not like individual anchors who can do content first and then monetize them. They have to consider sales from the first day they arrive on the platform.

Kuaishou needs to help merchants do interest matching and help them find suitable users; it also needs to summarize some feasible methodologies to help brands and Kuaishou brands quickly complete the cold start.

Another major responsibility of the platform is regulation. Compared with Taobao and JD.com, which describe products in words, Kuaishou’s management is more difficult, because the live broadcast room cannot be pre-reviewed like text, and it is impossible to control the anchor’s sales words in the live broadcast room. Kuaishou has strict rules for fraudulent and shoddy goods, but the real difficulty lies in the degree of truth-seeking when the anchor sells, whether it will be too exaggerated.

For example, Xiaogu, for example, sells a bottle of ordinary water, but the anchor says that it comes from the Alps or the source of the Himalayas. This is an exaggeration, which is difficult to manage, but affects the user’s consumption experience. Therefore, a better way is to call on users to supervise together, give pop-up prompts, and let users participate in supervision. At present, there are 450,000 users in Kuaishou who have participated in supervision.

The most important ability on Kuaishou is still content ability

Private domain is Kuaishou’s strongest attribute, but it is not the only attribute.

In terms of public domain traffic, the way brands play on Kuaishou is not much different from Douyin. For example, Kuaishou’s summary of a set of operating methodologies, such as “new products, explosions, daily sales, and clearance”, has begun to be widely applied.

Regardless of whether it is a private domain or a public domain, it is still the content capability that determines the brand upper limit on Kuaishou.

For example, after the recent launch of the K50 mobile phone, Xiaomi produced 1,000 short videos on Kuaishou in the last month. These 1,000 short videos contributed 48% of the entire Xiaomi e-commerce traffic, and at the same time helped the first sale of the K50 new product launch a single live broadcast Exceeded 8 million GMV.

The flow of Xiaomi K50 depends on the production capacity of short videos. For the K50’s Dimensity processor, optical image stabilization, and gaming-level liquid cooling functions, scene-based processing that is easier for users to understand has been done, and some short-term cooperation has also been done. The content of popular memes in the video to maintain users’ high attention to it.

The scene of Kuaishou e-commerce is mainly divided into two scenarios: live broadcast room and short video. The live broadcast room needs to know how to create topics that can make users feel trust and communicate desire. Short videos need to give users enough information in a short time. , which all depend on the content capabilities of the merchant.

The same is true for the success of the beauty brand Banmu Huatian. The founder, Sister Ximei, ended up in person. She is a treasure mother and a professionally qualified family education practitioner. Bringing babies, family education, skin care and beauty have become her topics and content sources. Through the trust relationship built with fans in the live broadcast room, she has achieved a repurchase rate of more than 70%, which is much higher than the data of other brands live broadcast.

Different from Taobao, the bottom layer of Kuaishou is content logic, and users stay more for content. Xiaogu also said, “Private domain precipitation, personal IP, these are things that can make a tiger even more powerful, but what really determines the brand’s upper and lower limits in Kuaishou is the ability to build content. Kuaishou is still a content platform from beginning to end.”

driven by e-commerce

Advertising revenue has become a new growth point

According to Kuaishou’s financial report for the first quarter of 2022, the contribution of online marketing services to revenue is 53.9%, far exceeding the live broadcast sector, which accounts for 37.2% and ranks second.

Under the uncertainty caused by the epidemic and supervision, the number of platform advertisers has increased by more than 60% year-on-year, which basically shows the logical correctness of “big brand”. Brands such as Coach, Amore Group’s Laneige, LG, Coca-Cola, and Anta are not unacceptable after stepping into Kuaishou.

E-commerce still carries the imagination limit of Kuaishou’s future business. In 2021, the total GMV of Kuaishou has reached 680 billion. In addition to direct e-commerce revenue, brands and merchants are buying more and more advertisements on Kuaishou in order to sell goods. According to Kuaishou’s latest quarterly earnings report, this has become the biggest growth driver for Kuaishou’s advertising business.

The short video industry where Kuaishou and Douyin are based has always been a content industry, and advertising is the most efficient business model in the content industry. Kuaishou sees this clearly.

This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1165
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