Source: New Consumption Think Tank (ID: cychuangye)
Introduction: I've been busy making year-end plans for many new brands recently, and without exception, all brands ask me one question: where is the next wave of growth opportunities?
Tmall and other traditional e-commerce main battlefields can be understood as conventional weapons. If you want to achieve leapfrog growth, you need nuclear-level weapons.
Clearly, the biggest changes and incremental space for this nuclear weapon appear in the Douyin system or the Kuaishou system. But as the Douyin traffic ecosystem gradually rises, many people fall into greater confusion: Should Douyin e-commerce be done at all? Is it worth doing? How to understand Douyin e-commerce from the most essential perspective?
Should we still understand Douyin according to traditional e-commerce logic? Can Douyin really build a brand? How much effort should be spent on it?
This is a good question. From the perspective of a marketing observer and bystander, I give 10 brand-new thoughts on Douyin e-commerce. Welcome corrections and criticisms.
My 8 Cognitive Views on Douyin E-commerce
1. What is the biggest difference between Douyin e-commerce and traditional e-commerce?
Traditional e-commerce is actually a typical rigid-demand e-commerce + cost-performance e-commerce logic, solving the products that users have clear needs for.
The core is what users want, what they look for. It means user needs are very clear. However, most of the demand in Douyin e-commerce is not the logic of what users want, but the logic of not knowing what they want, but coming to see, and triggering in the process of browsing.
In the classic user role stratification, we can divide users into three categories based on their purchasing behavior:
The first type is the "Daming" user, i.e., the so-called deterministic demand customer, corresponding to the need to use and leave.
The second type is the "Xiaoxian" user, i.e., those who have needs, but the needs are not obvious, and they need to browse before buying.
The third type is the "Benben" user, i.e., those who currently do not buy.
Douyin e-commerce users obviously correspond to the second and third types, while traditional e-commerce corresponds to the first type.
We can understand it as male-thinking buying products vs. female-thinking buying products.
So this determines that traditional product-oriented shopping products must be rigid, high-frequency, and continuously purchased.
This determines that Douyin e-commerce purchases are largely long-tail, low-frequency, emotional, and disloyal purchases.
So the traditional e-commerce logic is the logic of big explosive products and big single products. Douyin e-commerce is personalized e-commerce, long-tail e-commerce, niche e-commerce, and interest e-commerce.
The conclusion is that straight-man thinking has no survival space in Douyin. Continuously mining personalized products and matching personalized groups is the way to increase volume in Douyin e-commerce.
We can further elaborate on this thinking.
2. The biggest value of Douyin e-commerce so far is truly achieving equalization of brand communication.
Imagine a scenario: you only have 300,000 RMB as startup capital. How do you complete a lean startup?
This is not a random scenario I imagined; there is indeed a young popular brand that started with such capital.
For anyone who wanted to start a business and build a brand in the past, they needed factories, marketing teams, and capital barriers and costs for large-scale advertising.
But with massive user pools like Douyin and Kuaishou, the path to finding the first wave of seed users or minimizing the closed loop of demand testing can be found with very little.
The underlying factor of this logic change is that the short video era is an era of equal communication rights. And mobile internet for business is an opportunity for spatial equalization.
Here, we can actually talk about a huge social significance and value. Suppose a young person one day escapes from Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. What industries can this young person choose?
Is it to go to a new energy industry with higher technical barriers, or to a service industry, or to combine short video + local products to create a unique personalized brand?
Obviously, in terms of low entry difficulty, choosing short video + brand is an optimal solution.
This is the story of starting a business with 300,000 yuan cost I mentioned at the beginning. The bottom line of the business society ultimately emphasizes communication efficiency and trial-and-error efficiency.
Whoever has higher trial-and-error efficiency and fault tolerance mechanism, then theoretically, a 3 million angel startup fund can also be tested 10 times.
Society needs a fault-tolerant mechanism, and entrepreneurship also needs an efficient demand testing system. The equalization of communication ultimately brings about an improvement in overall social efficiency.
In an exchange with a brand that grew up in the Douyin system, he compared Douyin to a monster-leveling system:
First, a good game monster system must make it easy to start, that is, the entry threshold should not be too high. If the entry difficulty is too high, many novice users will hang up before they grow up, and the game design mechanism will be worthless. So Douyin is very friendly to novice e-commerce practitioners.
But a good game must have a level system and a continuously rising difficulty system. Without difficulty, it will make the difficulty unattainable, which also has big problems.
So Douyin e-commerce is both difficult and not difficult. It is not difficult to enter, but difficult to advance. Every step up to the next stage requires upgrading the brand expression system and advancement mechanism.
So the equalization of communication is not a mechanism for common prosperity in business, nor is it an average mechanism, but it gives everyone an equal starting move at the beginning.
So at this time, it makes me think about a question: Can you only build products in Douyin, but not brands?
3. Why is it difficult to create real brands solely through the Douyin e-commerce system?
Douyin e-commerce is certainly good, but for brands with real brand ambitions, Douyin may only be a communication medium, not a place to fully shape the brand across the entire chain.
Those who have read many of my articles know that I have a conclusion: brands are chosen by users. The only thing we can do is create an opportunity for users to choose, or a chance for free competition.
So a brand must be found in various channels and seen for a long time.
In the view of traditional media, a brand must first complete pre-sale in the user's mind. Users already have a choice, just find a place to buy a product.
But in interest e-commerce, when users just enter the Douyin ecosystem, they actually mainly consume content, not buy products. So this determines that many purchases on Douyin are not planned purchases but random purchases. Random purchases are definitely not products that are urgently and frequently purchased in the long term.
So this logic is first there are people, then there are products. This logic also determines that it may be difficult to let users make multiple game purchases in the Douyin system. After all, Douyin is content looking for e-commerce, not e-commerce looking for content. Under this inverted logic, it may be difficult for the Douyin system to produce real brands.
But saying this does not deny the value of Douyin e-commerce. For the first wave of new product incubation, there are still many dividends and value points.
4. Let's talk about the good aspects of Douyin e-commerce: the greatest value of communication equalization is that good products can stand out.
In fact, many people know the logic of Amazon e-commerce. On Amazon, there is no survival space for volume brushing and order brushing.
So Chinese brands, which are used to creating bubbles, encountered a crisis on Amazon.
Because they brought the bad money habits abroad. This is also the problem of this wave of new consumer brands: in order to obtain financing, they frantically create bubbles.
What is the harm of bubbles? I think it is that unfair selection mechanisms prevent good products from coming out, but let products that are good at brushing orders and playing with traffic run out.
That is, whoever shouts the loudest runs out. In an exchange with a brand that ran to the very top in Douyin this year, he mentioned a very important point: after the equalization of communication in Douyin, it is most friendly to merchants who seriously make products.
We know that the essence of a good explosive product is to have repurchase and secondary word-of-mouth communication. After communication becomes relatively simple, it can make product brands focus more on product polishing and the transmission of the product's own value.
This is a good thing for productism and craftsmen, allowing craftsmanship and productism to return. It also allows even the smallest brands to be seen.
5. Douyin e-commerce is a honeycomb-like, networked multi-platform touchpoint e-commerce ecosystem.
The complexity of Douyin e-commerce itself greatly exceeds the ecological relationships of traditional e-commerce. In the traditional e-commerce ecosystem, there is only a single-layer relationship chain between products and people.
In the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem, the complexity is higher. In addition to people, there are products and content. And the relationship of people is divided into two layers: one is people who consume content and products, and the other is people who produce and sell products. If these roles are separated, it is even more complex.
First, there is the relationship between content consumers and content producers. Second, there is the relationship between product sellers, product recommenders, and product consumers. Such a multi-layer e-commerce relationship chain makes the relationship between Douyin e-commerce and traditional e-commerce clearly differentiated.
Another important point is that Douyin e-commerce is a multi-level touchpoint e-commerce. Different interest content may contain recommendation algorithm mechanisms, allowing a product to be pushed to users at multiple levels.
In this context, theoretically, users' implicit needs can be stimulated, and they can buy more.
The more touchpoints, the more precise touchpoints, and the more segmented touchpoints, the more users will buy.
6. In Douyin e-commerce, there may be opportunities for truly consumption-upgraded brands.
Frankly speaking, this wave of new consumer brands is likely just new brands, but not enough for consumption upgrade.
Many just redo the product in terms of functionality, but do not start from the demand side to evolve products from functionality to personalized needs.
The direction of true consumption upgrade is non-rigid demand. The underlying essence of non-rigid demand is emotional value and personalized value.
Today, most brands are insufficient in the emotional layer and product expression layer, and insufficient in the degree of personalization. In the final analysis, traditional e-commerce does not allow you to be personalized or niche.
On the other hand, personalized and emotional brands need their own unique expression methods. This unique expression method may be better displayed on short video platforms.
For example, to show a lifestyle of specialty coffee, no matter how many text expression methods you have, it is far less effective than a video-based visual expression method to better present the feeling and sensation of this beautiful life.
Truly consumption-upgraded brands are unique, personalized, and interactive in expression. Except for short video platforms, no text platform can present high-quality interaction.
7. Personified interaction mode is the core path for short video e-commerce.
If a brand is in traditional e-commerce, its interaction with users is single except for comment interaction.
But in the short video era, as well as the era of virtual humans and live streaming rooms, your interaction with the brand is complete, comprehensive, and three-dimensional.
You feel that you are not interacting with a brand, but with a living person.
People mean trust. Brands, in addition to guaranteeing value, are trust value.
Using interactive short videos and live streaming, as well as virtual human brand images, can achieve zero-distance interaction with users.
Some big brands are old because the transmission mode of brand values and emotions is too long, making users unable to see or touch them.
Only with living people can the brand's sense of interaction truly improve.
8. Let's talk about a negative aspect: how to solve the problem of users buying without a shelf?
The Douyin platform may have a natural bug for e-commerce: it cannot accumulate truly loyal users.
Why do I say this? Because Douyin is essentially a media. If we compare Douyin, Douyin e-commerce is a premium shopping guide.
But a premium shopping guide has a neutral role. When users come to the Douyin platform, is their first need to consume content or consume products?
If it is to consume content, then users are incidentally consuming products. If content is more than selling goods, it is like when mixing dough, if you add too much water beyond the flour, then the flour is more than the water.
So, the relationship between water and flour is a very interesting topic. Similarly, if the people on the Douyin platform mainly consume content and incidentally sell goods, will users return to this Douyin account to find goods next time? If users do not make a second purchase, how can brand repurchase be formed?
Conclusion
Among my 8 thoughts, most tend to believe that Douyin is a valuable position for incubating explosive consumer products. But I think under the current form, hoping to match traditional Tmall e-commerce platforms and produce their own Taobao brands may still be very difficult.
Because the current promotion of new brands is more about marketing value itself, not much greater than the value of Xiaohongshu grass planting, because the logic of brand formation is wrong.
But I also believe that the Douyin system can give birth to some brands that completely rely on the traffic of the Douyin ecosystem. However, from a brand that is partial to a traffic pool to truly becoming a long-lasting brand, the difficulty coefficient is still very large.
This is a reminder for founders who want to ALL in on the Douyin ecosystem and think they can build a brand: don't be kidnapped by a traffic ecosystem, otherwise, the deliciousness becomes poison.
So, my ultimate view is that the Douyin system is a sharp tool for the start-up stage, suitable for new brands to rise in the first wave when they have no cost. But expecting a traffic life, or purely relying on content forms to incubate a brand, the value itself still needs time to prove. After all, there is still a long way from a temporary popular brand to a long-lasting popular brand.
For those who are superstitious about traffic and think traffic is the life of a brand, the Taobao brands of many years ago, which rarely truly left Taobao, are the best lesson.
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