---
title: "Decoding Content Growth Strategy from Douyin E-commerce Upgrade"
description: "Content growth is the only driving force to break through the 'impossible triangle of growth'. Following Douyin's recent upgrade to 'Omni-Interest E-commerce', this article analyzes the upgrade's implications and provides a four-part framework for brands to comprehensively plan content growth."
author: "狮明亮谈增长"
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published: "2022-06-09"
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# Decoding Content Growth Strategy from Douyin E-commerce Upgrade

> Content growth is the only driving force to break through the 'impossible triangle of growth'. Following Douyin's recent upgrade to 'Omni-Interest E-commerce', this article analyzes the upgrade's implications and provides a four-part framework for brands to comprehensively plan content growth.

**Content growth is the only driving force to break through the 'impossible triangle of growth'!**

Preface: Yesterday, Douyin E-commerce released a new upgraded system. As a leading platform with a large domestic user base, long user engagement time, and rapid growth in GMV, Douyin holds undeniable business value for almost all merchants and brands. It has evolved from a single short-video content platform to a 'content e-commerce' and even partially 'content omni-channel' platform, achieving a growth loop that connects in-platform conversion and out-of-platform spillover.

The author, Shi Mingliang, founder of Omni-Growth, is one of the earliest practitioners in the industry to build a branded million-fan matrix on Douyin, integrate e-commerce and private domain, and manage all forms of content growth. As a former general manager/director/founding partner at companies like Xiaohongshu, P&G, Yili, Maileduo, and Xiran, he has hands-on experience in all mainstream business models of consumer retail.

This article is divided into the following sections to explain how brands can reasonably and comprehensively layout content growth from the perspective of Douyin E-commerce upgrade.

_**1\. The upgrade of Douyin E-commerce and the reasons behind it?**
**2\. What does Douyin E-commerce expect brands to do?**
**3\. Four strategies for brands to layout omni-channel content growth!**

******Douyin E-commerce upgrade and the reasons behind it?**

##### Let's first talk about the confidence behind Douyin E-commerce upgrade:

**1\. Sales:** 1) Annual GMV grew 3.2 times year-over-year (as of May, comparing May 1, 2021 to April 30, 2022 against May 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021); 2) It has become the largest online business battlefield for 220 top brands across the internet.

**2\. Products:** 1) The cumulative number of products processed in the past year reached 10 billion; 2) New merchants joining the platform grew to 1.8 million.

**3\. Ecosystem:** 1) E-commerce creators exceeded 3.86 million; 2) Service providers such as MCNs exceeded 20,000.

##### Based on this, Douyin has upgraded from the 'Interest E-commerce' proposed last year to 'Omni-Interest E-commerce' that meets the diverse needs of users for a better life.

It can be seen that the core upgrade is the addition of 'omni'. So how to understand 'omni'? In this article, I will analyze it from two levels:

1\. Platform perspective: What does Douyin E-commerce's 'omni' cover? Why did Douyin upgrade to 'omni'? What 'omni' does Douyin expect brands and merchants to do?

2\. Brand perspective: As a brand, what is the content growth strategy that can make good use of Douyin without being constrained by the platform?

First, let's understand Douyin's proposed 'Omni-Interest E-commerce Panorama'.

Here, I propose the first key sentence of this article, hoping everyone remembers the most core upgrade of this platform:

**Key Sentence 1: From a single 'content field' to a 'content field + center field + marketing field' covering short video, live streaming, city, and search.**

Why does a decentralized platform need a 'center field'? What implications does it have for brands? For managers of brands and merchants, this requires careful thought and attention. I will explain in detail later, especially in Part 3, not only how to do Douyin but also how to achieve brand growth on content platforms.

**Upgrade Focus 1: Content Field**

As a comparison, let's review last year's Douyin first proposed content + e-commerce operating architecture. The core thinking was:

A content-centric e-commerce operating architecture, through the FACT operating matrix, to achieve from traffic aggregation, to conversion promotion, to accumulation and sedimentation, thereby achieving circular growth.

Among them, the most clearly systematic and brand-merchant actionable is the FACT operating matrix:

The FACT operating matrix at that time was a field thinking centered on 'content', i.e., the 'content field', based on the core that 'Douyin is content, Douyin can sell goods, Douyin can do local... but Douyin is ultimately a content platform'.

The four core handles are:

Field: Self-operated battlefield, i.e., brand's own battlefield, such as Blue V, self-broadcasting;

Alliance: Creator matrix, i.e., content marketing cooperation with creators at all levels.

**The above F and A serve as 'daily sales operation' handles.**

Campaign: Theme activities, i.e., platform-level marketing resources;

Top-KOL: Top influencers, i.e., cooperating with top creators to form momentum and endorsement.

**The above C and T serve as 'brand and sales explosion' handles.**

In this upgrade, the value of the content field remains core, corresponding to the FACT four major operating matrices, each with its own upgrade and optimization direction. The specific details can be seen in the mind map I organized below. The core for brands and merchants on the content side is to achieve through self-operation and creator cooperation:

1\. Short video: deep interest seeding; 2\. Live streaming: efficient transaction conversion.

**Upgrade Focus 2: Center Field**

**Key Sentence 2: The emergence of the 'center field' means that brands have the possibility to achieve a 'full closed loop' on the Douyin platform, covering from 'goods find people' to stimulate interest, to 'people find goods' to meet demand!**

If we have to pick the most commendable and noteworthy upgrade for brands and merchants, it is the proposal of the 'center field' represented by the mall and search.

The two growth points that contribute to this full closed loop are 'mall' and 'search'.

Mall, as a stable center field, brands need to:

1\. Provide good product supply;

2\. Optimize product detail display;

3\. Do store decoration well;

4\. Participate in channel activities.

Search, as a destination for precise demand matching, brands need to:

**1\. Let users find you:** i.e., do keyword optimization and content matching;

**2\. Let users click:** i.e., optimize search display to increase user clicks.

**There are two key words here: the first is 'full closed loop', and the second is 'possibility'.**

Let's talk about 'full closed loop' first. This comes from two major opportunity points:

The first, I call it **'The Curse of Interest E-commerce'**.

Previously, Douyin called itself 'Interest E-commerce', which means stimulating consumption interest through content. The typical path is 'interest-demand-purchase', creating incremental business for brands and merchants.

Where does incremental business come from? Mainly from **'non-existent' demands and 'novel and unique' products and services.**

In all the content forms and platforms I have experienced in the past 15 years, I would call Douyin a **'square'**. All creators and brand merchants on Douyin are essentially individuals active in a square, attracting the attention of every passing audience. To attract the audience, they need:

**1\. Extremely innovative programs:** Because the audience in the square comes for entertainment, not for professional/standard/mainstream programs. Correspondingly, various intuitive, eye-catching, interesting, and novel products on Douyin, such as Gatling bubble blowers, farmland goodies, bubble masks, etc., continuously become hits;

**2\. Extremely exaggerated performance:** Because the square audience doesn't follow the program list, and the cost of attraction and switching is extremely low, they can turn their eyes to others in an instant. Correspondingly, Douyin's feeding-style immersive content model, and the browsing behavior of swiping away, the golden opening (5-second completion rate) is key;

**3\. Extremely diverse changes:** Because the audience attracted yesterday may not pass by today, and today's passersby don't know that yesterday you were the most dazzling gai in the square. Correspondingly, on Douyin, account followers are not a guarantee of traffic for each new video, because the algorithm mechanism uses the quality indicators of each short video to drive the leap of multi-level traffic pools (completion, interaction, collection, etc. In the past and before, it was broad fans; this year, the weight of iron fans is strengthened, but the core indicators are still based on individual short videos);

So, Douyin E-commerce has indeed tapped a large amount of user growth demand in the past, i.e., the purchase driver of 'this is interesting, let me try it'.

But Douyin's interest e-commerce that digs growth has three low problems from a brand perspective. **These three lows are the curse of interest e-commerce:**

**1\. Low user loyalty and repurchase rate:** Because novelty brings 'dopamine' style immediate short-term stimulation, and quick satisfaction, a sense of excitement rather than heartfelt pleasure. At the same time, as a content-centric platform, it naturally downplays purchase-related functions (for example, most people find it difficult to find the shopping cart order page on Douyin or Xiaohongshu), resulting in lower repurchase rates for users who purchase products, both subjectively and objectively, compared to e-commerce-centric platforms. You can review how many products you repurchased on Douyin in the past year?

**2\. Low sustainability and resilience of demand pull:** Because many demands pulled by content interest e-commerce are 'non-existent', based on extreme System 1 positioning (System 1, as described in Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', human thinking and decision-making consist of two systems: System 1 is emotional, impulsive, and unthinking; System 2 is rational, thoughtful, and deliberate. System 1 is the core driving impulse purchases).

It is mainly driven by novel displays, highly infectious creators/streamers, and lower prices. Such purchases are elastic but lack resilience. Especially under trends such as users' pessimistic future expectations, the ups and downs of top creators/streamers as strong influencers, and the dopamine of novelty not bringing high-value product experiences, many interest-based 'non-existent' incremental demands can disappear in place;

**3\. Low brand asset accumulation:** Content interest e-commerce pulls demand with interest, and the puller of interest is often creators and streamers. Users' interest is naturally built on trust in creators and streamers. Often, 'xxx recommended/xxx same style' has much stronger conversion power than 'xx brand' (except for a few strong brand asset brands). In the user's purchase path 'watch creator/streamer - generate interest - purchase - continue to wait for creator/streamer', the role of the brand is completely weakened or even ignored. Therefore, the most critical brand asset accumulation for brand growth is very weak (awareness, unaided recall, brand associations, etc.);

So, although interest e-commerce has risen and grown rapidly, behind the rapid rise of the building is the relatively unstable foundation of underlying demand. What is missing is two major demands:

**1\. Demand for mass essential categories:** For example, mass food and beverages, basic skincare, daily chemical care, basic household appliances, maternal and infant essentials, etc. The product prototypes and attributes of these categories were established in the earlier offline distribution era and brand positioning era. They naturally lack intuitive novelty, are not suitable for video-based seeding, have strong channel and price stability, and creators look down on them or don't know how to sell them. But compared to the novel and emerging niche categories of interest e-commerce, these categories have a user base ten or even a hundred times larger, with fixed purchase frequency and usage scenarios;

**2\. Demand with clear purchase intent:** All purchasing users are essentially divided into three types.

**1) The first type** are browsers without clear category or product needs;

**2) The second type** are explorers with clear category or scenario needs, but who need to understand before deciding which brand and product to buy. For example, I want to give a gift to my girlfriend on Qixi, but I don't know what to give that represents taste. For example, I recently became obsessed with following Liu Genghong's aerobics and want a suitable fitness outfit, but I don't know which brand's product is suitable;

**3) The third type** are target users with very clear specific brand and product needs. For example, I heard from my best friend that lululemon's yoga pants are very comfortable, I want to buy one, see if there are any promotions;

So, we can see that the first type of browser users are the people covered by Douyin's previous interest e-commerce, and it covered them quite well.

But the user base of the second and third types is still huge. They often search and have stronger purchase certainty, and their long-term lifecycle is longer, meaning they are relatively higher-value users for brands. However, due to Douyin's natural platform characteristics (content first, purchase experience not as good as e-commerce; video has lower search precision than text; mass essential product supply is weak, and merchants don't understand/don't know how/don't dare to enter), these two types of users have never been captured. Moreover, in the new stock era:

  * **From the platform perspective**, business growth will shift from capturing incremental new users to capturing existing old users. These two types of users are the basic market of shelf e-commerce like Tmall and JD;
  * **From the brand perspective**, through short video forms, adapt gradually suitable product forms and features to acquire users and increase brand penetration;

So, for these two core demands of mass essential categories and clear purchase intent, Douyin must and has to establish corresponding growth handles for brands and merchants, namely: **mall and search.**

Up to here, this is the reason and logic behind the first keyword 'full closed loop' I mentioned above, and it is also the most important growth point that every brand and merchant needs to seize in this Douyin interest e-commerce upgrade. I will share specific methods in Part 3.

Besides **'The Curse of Interest E-commerce'**, another opportunity point for 'full closed loop' is **'Brand's high cost ratio on Douyin'**.

Although Douyin mentioned that Douyin E-commerce has become the largest business battlefield for 220 brands, based on my first-hand experience and understanding of many representative brands, Douyin as a new e-commerce channel, although still in a relatively early stage of rapid development, has a fairly high operating cost ratio for brands on Douyin E-commerce. Many brands' cost ratios are higher than the heavily competitive Tmall and offline distribution business.

But it is undeniable that making money on Douyin E-commerce is difficult. From the perspective of brand merchants, it is a common dilemma: not doing Douyin is afraid of falling behind, doing Douyin is hard to make money!

But the money is spent on short videos and live streaming, because short video content is a high-cost investment for most brands that haven't yet found the template secrets of content creation, and the involution in live streaming further increases the cost of creator cooperation and self-broadcasting investment.

And **mall and search are actually opportunities to significantly reduce marginal costs or even to zero, obtaining essential traffic and long-tail traffic**. So Douyin E-commerce's proposal of 'mall' and 'search' this time is necessary and must be seized by brands and merchants; otherwise, this is not a sustainable business.

And the other keyword **'possibility'** is not that I doubt whether Douyin can achieve the full closed loop of 'goods find people' to stimulate interest, to 'people find goods' to meet demand, but that it requires the joint efforts of all brands and merchants.

If **'goods find people' is potential matching, stimulating interest, creating increment, but with weaker sustainability and resilience of demand and purchase, then 'people find goods' is precise docking, clear conversion, long-term stock, and strong sustainability and resilience growth with user and brand asset accumulation.** Moreover, search is only the tactical representation of 'people find goods'. Its essence is the base occupation of user mind, behavior, and relationship. Its benefit output is continuous, with decreasing marginal costs, and it is one of the omni-channel solutions to make up for the high cost ratio of 'goods find people' interest e-commerce. And the result that best reflects the success of 'people find goods' is the effective establishment of brand assets.

So this is what I mean by 'possibility'. If our brands and merchants blindly follow, **just burying our heads in making novel explosive products, licking creators for the lowest price on the internet while losing our category pricing power, and ignoring the effective positioning of brand assets on user mind, behavior, and relationship**, then 'goods find people' cannot be achieved unilaterally by the platform. After all, the platform only sets up the stage; the ones performing for the audience must be brands and merchants.

**Upgrade Focus 3: Marketing Field**

After the native core content field and the incremental handle center field, it is the marketing field for scale and efficiency.

This involves **for omni-interest scenarios such as short video, live streaming, search, and mall, Douyin has upgraded and laid out a full marketing capability matrix**, including:

1\. Covering seeding/new customer acquisition/repurchase purposes: brand advertising, content IP, search advertising, Ocean Engine Star Map, Ocean Engine Qianchuan, marketing activities and IP;

2\. Covering asset accumulation: Ocean Engine Cloud Map;

In addition, there are proposals for organizational building (integrated operation team adapted to Douyin E-commerce) and capability building (platform FACTor certification plan).

******What does Douyin E-commerce expect brands to do?**

In addition to what was mentioned in Part 1, Douyin's omni-interest e-commerce upgrade this time expects brands and merchants to:

**1\. Based on the native core 'content field'**, build a more efficient and larger-scale FACT content operation matrix;

**2\. Seize the incremental opportunity of the 'center field'**, provide high-quality products and activity supply for the 'mall', and provide precise display matching and investment for 'search';

**3\. Utilize the marketing amplification of the 'marketing field'**, through brand and sales synergy, accelerate the scale growth of business (of course, also pay the platform to co-create marketing value);

More core, it expects brands and merchants to upgrade the omni-channel operation of 'people, goods, and fields' on Douyin. The official statement is as follows. In Part 3, I will talk about the cognition and implementation from the brand perspective:

**1\. People strategy:** That is, around Douyin's 5A people strategy, quantitatively diagnose user value, obtain people insights, and cover the complete consumption path from seeding to repurchase;

**2\. Product strategy:** Provide high-quality products at good prices, through diversified operational means and rich marketing plays, maximize the opportunity for product growth, and cooperate with content trend insights to discover new opportunities, guide new product development, and further achieve greater growth;

**3\. Field strategy:** With content field operation as the core and FACT operation matrix as the handle, achieve deep seeding and efficient transaction, and extend from the content field to the center field of mall + search, improve conversion efficiency, seize conversion increment, and at the same time, in the marketing field, use a combination of paid and free to broaden traffic openings and conversion efficiency;

In addition, operating **Douyin E-commerce tools** well is also a handle that the platform expects brands and merchants to pay attention to, including:

**1\. Ocean Engine Qianchuan:** Integrated intelligent marketing for e-commerce, covering

 _1) Scenario traffic: including short video and live streaming traffic + search traffic + mall traffic_

 _2) Intelligent delivery: including scenario crowd targeting + deep conversion goals + automated delivery + automated bidding_

 _3) Decision measurement: including pre-delivery insights + mid-delivery optimization + post-delivery measurement_

**2\. Ocean Engine Cloud Map:** Including

 _1) Brand asset management_

 _2) Panoramic data diagnosis_

 _3) Marketing strategy output_

 _4) Marketing value measurement_

******Four strategies for brands to layout omni-channel content growth**

**Strategy 1: Integrate content and brand to break the impossible triangle**

**Strategy 2: Build the four-step brand content growth in steps**

**Strategy 3: Seize the four major growth scenario handles in content platforms**

**Strategy 4: Build the brand's own omni-channel based on user journey**

**Strategy 1: Integrate content and brand to break the impossible triangle**

This is divided into 3 parts:

**First, break the impossible triangle of growth**

In the past 2 years, I have proposed to brands and merchants on various occasions that content should be upgraded to a strategic-level growth focus. Because from my tenure at Xiaohongshu, my content operations on Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Kuaishou, Zhihu, and my more than ten years of experience in all content forms, I can intuitively feel that content has gradually become a major growth force to break the 'impossible triangle of growth'. The so-called 'impossible triangle of growth' is a growth concept I personally proposed, meaning that most growth operations cannot simultaneously achieve optimization and improvement in the following three dimensions:

1\. Precision; 2\. Cost; 3\. Scale;

**Second, do content with content thinking, not advertising thinking**

This is a principled mistake made by many relatively mature enterprise brand marketing departments. I remember when I was the head of the FMCG industry at Xiaohongshu, a market head of a well-known daily chemical group came to me to consult why their brand invested in thousands of pieces of content but had no results. After I looked at their published and creator-cooperated content notes, I immediately pointed out the problem.

The content they invested in, although there were thousands of pieces, was essentially one piece! Because all the content had similar images, staged traces, 4A advertising copy deliberately created puns, copy that didn't speak human language used in TV commercials, and logos that wished to be bigger and bigger.

So no piece of content broke through the traffic pool, interactions were pitiful single digits (you can imagine they were simple likes from brand and advertising agency people), and even a large amount of content was judged as duplicate by the platform.

So, whenever I see brands operated by traditional brand people and traditional advertising people, they basically can't make waves on content platforms. The decentralized content algorithm mechanism and diversified user behavior have already eliminated them.

**Third, integrate content and brand**

But for brands, content and brand are naturally difficult to be compatible. Because:

The attraction of content is based on human nature. Most high-quality content satisfies underlying human needs (such as eroticism, entertainment, pleasure) and low business ethics (for example, recently, live streaming rooms using the background music of 'Compendium of Materia Medica' increase user retention, but it is used without authorization, and truly big brands would not rashly use it).

Brand building needs to return to business, is anti-entertainment, and brands need unique, unified, and continuous display of visual and textual elements (the so-called visual hammer and language nail) to achieve target users' memory and preference for the brand.

But it is undeniable that doing content acquires users, and doing brand retains users. Although some categories have high-quality content positively promoting brand asset building (such as Durex, and also hard tech categories), for most categories, the natural opposition between content and brand is something that brand and merchant management teams and brand marketing teams must face squarely. Of course, we 'want both, and also want more'.

**Strategy 2: Build the four-step brand content growth in steps**

So how should brands and merchants layout growth on content platforms? I propose the 'Content Growth 4 Steps' here. Any brand and merchant can achieve reasonable and sustainable growth in order on mainstream content platforms including Douyin. The four steps are:

**1\. Understand growth: Including**

**1) User platform differences:** Have a clear and deep understanding of users' needs and content preferences on different platforms. For example, on Douyin, as I mentioned above, the essence of Douyin is a square, so we should understand users' needs and content preferences on Douyin from the perspective of 'in the square'. Therefore, short, fast content + novel products is the only path on Douyin to take users from interest to demand to purchase. But for content platforms like Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Zhihu, and WeChat Channels, users present completely different needs and content preferences;

**2) Product explosive features:** Understand how products in your category can adapt to the user needs and content preferences of target content platforms through product form, packaging, unboxing, and other nodes, create platform hits, and build **'Product-Platform-Consumer Fit (PPCF)'**;

**2\. Leverage growth:**

For most brands and merchants, growth first relies on holding thighs and finding friends, leveraging growth. The order of leveraging basically follows:

1. Mid-tier creators to start the base; 2. Top creators for endorsement; 3. Creator army for scale.

**3\. Self-growth:**

Holding thighs, finding friends, can leverage, but also limited and unsustainable (creators cannot continuously recommend you) and has a ceiling (creator quantity ceiling and creator recommendation power ceiling). After achieving initial growth, you need to start self-growth to produce sustainable and breakthrough next-level growth.

The main handle for self-growth is the comprehensive operation of the brand's own battlefield, including: 1. Brand account fan acquisition; 2. Self-broadcasting conversion; 3. Investment scaling; 4. Quietly guiding to private domain.

**4\. Sustainable growth:**

After achieving internal and external integration and self-breakthrough, you need to implement growth points with decreasing marginal costs and increasing marginal benefits to achieve sustainable growth, including: 1. Seize search; 2. Create viral articles; 3. Overflow traffic; 4. Strengthen live streaming.

**Strategy 3: Seize the four major growth scenario handles in content platforms**

If standing from the perspective of brand operation on the Douyin platform, it is the occupation of four major scenarios:

**1\. Short video scenario:** 1. Short video marketing: creator videos + Qianchuan videos + content co-creation + effect amplification (secondary creation + investment);

2. Official account videos: account positioning + content uniqueness + battlefield building + fan operation + investment expansion;

**2\. Live streaming scenario:** 1. Self-broadcasting: streamer characteristics + self-broadcasting product mix + self-broadcasting decoration + self-broadcasting operation + self-broadcasting traffic investment;

2. Creator broadcasting: creator selection + cooperation conditions + creator broadcasting product mix + creator broadcasting amplification;

**3\. Search scenario:** Achieve four-in-one: search positioning + search ranking + search taste + search grabbing;

**4\. Mall scenario:** Mall adapted products + brand day + mall advertising + mall marketing.

**Strategy 4: Build the brand's own omni-channel based on user journey**

Douyin's upgrade this time is called 'Omni-Interest E-commerce'. Compared to last year's interest e-commerce, the new addition is 'omni', but this 'omni' is still limited to the fields within the Douyin platform. However, if colleagues who have done various consumer, retail, and channel work, you should understand that true omni-channel is bound to be a multi-field linkage of online and offline public and private domains based on user journey.

So from the brand perspective, from Douyin's upgrade to omni-interest e-commerce, how should you layout your own controllable content-based people-goods-field growth? Here I provide the people-goods-field overall thinking and corresponding implementation behind my industry-first omni-channel growth.

**1\. People strategy: Understand and design the complete journey of users in your category and brand. You can start from Douyin, but don't be limited to Douyin.**

Douyin's 5A, i.e., six-stage people: including O opportunity people, A1 understanding people, A2 attraction people, A3 seeding people, A4 new customer people, A5 repurchase people. This is the staged refined operation of user operation capability in my four major growth capabilities of omni-channel growth.

However, the people division of various platforms, including 5A people, is essentially the user journey (Consumer Journey or Path to Purchase). Based on the classic consumer journey and the characteristics of the content-based user era, I have created the **'AIDPLR Omni-Growth User Journey'**:

The user's complete omni-channel journey is A awareness, I interest, D decision, P purchase, L loyalty, R recommendation. These 6 stages progress in sequence, each point can be operated and transitioned and forms a closed loop. Special emphasis is placed on the newly added importance of D decision and R recommendation. For specific introduction, you can watch my speech at the growth conference as follows (the E evaluation in the video has been iterated to D decision recently):

From the perspective of the real user journey, you need to understand that users going from not knowing your brand to purchasing and generating true loyalty and word-of-mouth is a process of multi-channel integration, multi-point fusion, and multi-capability accumulation. The 0 to 1 start of a brand can achieve closed-loop growth through saturated penetration on a single platform, but 1 to 10, and certainly the comprehensive growth stage of 10 to 100, requires brands to find the most core field for each journey point transition from the user's perspective (for consumer brands, interest may rely on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, conversion on self-broadcasting, repurchase on Tmall, recommendation on private domain. For retail brands, awareness may rely on local traffic, interest on store exploration creators, decision on review endorsements, repurchase on guide private domain, etc.);

**2\. Product strategy: Have a 'product mix matrix' thinking to meet the various user purchase needs mentioned above (fixed needs + interest needs), including:**

1. Novel explosive products;

2. Essential mass products;

3. Target stocking products;

4. Strong insight new products;

5. Differentiated attack products;

6. Long-tail discount products.

At the same time, from a broad product perspective, in addition to products, content is also a strategic-level 'product'. As a brand, you need to provide real, diverse, and beautiful content. All valuable content is nothing more than two values:

 _a. Functional value_

 _b. Emotional value_

**3\. Field strategy:**

Not only the three major fields within the Douyin platform (content field, center field, marketing field), but also based on the brand and merchant's own business type and model, build a true omni-channel field chain AICR that adapts to your target user journey (see the AIDPLR omni-growth user journey in the people strategy above). This true omni-channel covers all consumer retail business types, including:

**1. Touch field R:** Including content seeding fields (such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Kuaishou, Zhihu), physical retail same-city fields (same-city traffic matrix), advertising fields (performance advertising and brand advertising customer acquisition);

**2. Interaction field I:** Including brand battlefields on content platforms, user groups. User touchpoints in private domain such as 1-on-1, Moments, communities, etc.;

**3. Conversion field C:** Including content e-commerce platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou live streaming rooms, e-commerce content platforms like Taobao, Tmall, JD stores and live streaming rooms, e-commerce social platforms like Pinduoduo, community group buying spawned by the pandemic, offline distribution, etc.;

**4. Relationship field R:** Including the brand's own user pool private domain, dynamic membership systems with social currency, etc.;

When you, as a brand and merchant, stand from the perspective of a truly full-time and omni-channel user journey, you can truly create a smooth journey experience suitable for users at each stage.

**【Summary】**

**1\. The upgrade of Douyin E-commerce and the reasons behind it?**

From the native core 'content field' + FACT operation matrix, upgraded to FACT+ operation matrix combined with the incremental opportunity 'center field' and marketing amplification 'marketing field'.

The reason behind it is the need for comprehensive efficiency improvement and sustainable development of brands and merchants. Especially the proposal of the 'center field' is to create necessary conditions for sustainable profitable growth for brands and merchants, facing two major opportunity points: 'The Curse of Interest E-commerce' and 'Brand's high cost ratio on Douyin'.

**2\. What does Douyin E-commerce expect brands to do?**

1\. Base on the three major fields: native core 'content field' + incremental opportunity 'center field' + marketing amplification 'marketing field';

2\. Build and strengthen the people-goods-field strategy on the Douyin platform: 5A people strategy + product strategy of high-quality products at good prices and diversified marketing + field strategy of grasping the three major fields;

3\. Use and make good use of Qianchuan and Cloud Map marketing growth tools (and pay more fees by the way);

**3\. Four strategies for brands to layout omni-channel content growth!**

Strategy 1: Integrate content and brand to break the impossible triangle; Strategy 2: Build the four-step brand content growth in steps; Strategy 3: Seize the four major growth scenario handles in content platforms; Strategy 4: Build the brand's own omni-channel based on user journey.

**Source: Shi Mingliang Omni-Growth (ID: omnigrowth)**

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