Click to read the original article for details. Preface: The "traffic dividend" is disappearing—how did brands like Zhong Xuegao rise? There's a common anxiety: "The traffic dividend is about to disappear." Does this anxiety exist in the food and beverage industry? Let's look at two pieces of news: A piece of bad news: purchases are actually declining. According to a Kantar Worldpanel report, in 2018, food industry sales grew by 4.7%, and beverage industry sales grew by a slight 1.5%, both below the overall FMCG industry growth of 5.2%. Moreover, the growth was largely driven by price increases, while purchase frequency and volume per purchase both declined.[1] A piece of good news: online shopping still contributes to growth. In 2016, when the concept of new retail was introduced, offline channels saw a wave of innovation, with new formats like unmanned retail and fresh food retail experiencing ups and downs, and their performance still remains to be seen. On the online front, Kantar data shows that in 2018, online shopping played a more significant role in driving the growth of the food and beverage market, contributing 73% to the growth in sales value, leaving much room for growth in the online e-commerce market.[2]
In 2019, the year-on-year growth rate of monthly active users on mobile internet slowed down. Source: QuestMobile
However, can the food and beverage industry guarantee growth by relying solely on online channels? The dilemma is that the traffic dividend from online channels is disappearing. QuestMobile data shows that in Q1 2019, the growth in MAU (monthly active users) for mobile internet was only 7.62 million, with the year-on-year growth rate dropping below 4% for the first time.[3] One of the most important indicators for online channels—traffic growth—is slowing down.
Suddenly, voices claiming "the era of traffic dividends is coming to an end" are everywhere. Yet, there's nothing new under the sun. In 2003, when platform e-commerce represented by Taobao rose, offline stores were crying out about the end of "traffic dividends"; in the 1990s, when shopping malls rose, department stores were crying out about the end of "traffic dividends"... Is the traffic dividend really over? Or has it just shifted to the next new channel?
Searching "Zhong Xuegao" on Xiaohongshu yields over 5,000 notes. Source: Zhong Xuegao Tmall flagship store, Xiaohongshu
When platform e-commerce was still called a new channel, Three Squirrels went from Taobao all the way to listing. In recent years, Zhong Xuegao, which became popular, has treated "social e-commerce" platforms like Xiaohongshu as strategic partners for market expansion. Now, searching "Zhong Xuegao" on Xiaohongshu brings up nearly 5,000 notes, and behind these notes is the astonishing achievement of selling 7 million ice cream sticks in just one year after launch. Those who understand new channels first will be rewarded.
For the food and beverage industry, in the retail game of "people-goods-places," growth challenges are endless:
- "People": In an era of fragmented channels, how can we reduce costs and improve efficiency in consumer communication? Brand data is concentrated on large platforms—how to reverse this passivity? How to build a brand's "private domain traffic pool" to enhance consumer insights?
- "Goods": Products are highly homogenized—how to break through? New product iterations are accelerating—how to respond quickly and make accurate decisions?
- "Places": After all this talk about going to lower-tier markets, how can we efficiently and cost-effectively reach the blue ocean of consumption in lower-tier cities?
All answers point to the exploration of a new online channel: social e-commerce. In recent years, more and more food and beverage companies have started to enter social e-commerce, tapping into existing markets while opening up incremental markets. Today, let's understand the new channel: social e-commerce.
Warning: A lot of dry goods ahead! Given the length of the article, here's a structure for your preview:
- Why: Why did social e-commerce emerge?
- What: What are the main models of social e-commerce? How does the food and beverage industry use them?
- How: What's new about social e-commerce? How can the food and beverage industry leverage it to ignite new growth?
Why did social e-commerce emerge?
1. To understand new channels, we must first understand new retail
At the "2013 China Economic Person of the Year Awards Ceremony," Ma Yun and Wang Jianlin presented awards together. Source: China Economic Weekly
In 2012, Ma Yun and Wang Jianlin publicly made a bet of 100 million yuan: whether e-commerce would account for more than 50% of China's retail industry in 10 years. Just four years later, Ma Yun proposed "new retail," and the game was no longer a battle between "Taobao" and "physical stores," but a return to the essence of retail: "people-goods-places." In the traditional retail transaction chain, "goods → places → people" was the mainstream: merchants produced "goods" and, through channels (the "places" where goods are sold), tried to maximize touchpoints to reach the "people" who buy. When materials were not so abundant, having "goods" meant sales; later, as competition intensified, "places" became the core, and securing good locations was key to winning. With the development of mobile internet, consumers can now shop anytime, anywhere, making the emphasis on channel competition (including online and offline) meaningless. Thus, "people"—the consumers—became the most critical factor. Understanding and meeting consumer needs through data, and coordinating online and offline to provide a seamless shopping experience, is the path to growth in new retail.
Under new retail, the transaction chain has become "people-goods-places," with "people" at the center. Source: Nielsen
Therefore, the "newness" of new retail is essentially the reconstruction of "people-goods-places." The retail transaction chain has shifted from "goods → places → people" to "people → goods → places." Correspondingly, for channels, the rules of the "place" have also become people-centric.
On one hand, this is reflected in the increased initiative of consumers. In the era of offline supermarkets, brands used shelves and materials to unidirectionally convey information about "goods" to "people"; in the era of platform e-commerce, consumers began to look at reviews to learn about products; with the advent of social e-commerce, consumers' initiative has greatly increased, incorporating social interactions like selfies, sharing, complaints, and recommendations into the purchasing process, subverting the previous "goods-centric" marketing and enhancing the shopping experience.
On the other hand, channels have also shifted from "birds of a feather flock together" to "people of a kind gather together." Whether it's Pinduoduo's group buying, Yunji's distribution, or Douyin's content communities, the underlying logic is "gathering people through people." Fission is generated under this logic. Compared to traditional platform e-commerce, where traffic is distributed by a central algorithm, social e-commerce, with its "decentralized" innovative model, improves the efficiency and cost of traffic acquisition.
Under the general trend of new retail, social e-commerce, centered on "people," captures the essence of the retail model: consumers have a better shopping experience, and online merchants are more efficient and cost-effective in the crucial "traffic acquisition." This new channel has naturally risen.
2. Achieving new growth is the essence of every "new channel"
Back in 2015, platform e-commerce was in its prime: the traffic dividend dilemma hadn't yet appeared, and platform e-commerce wasn't yet called "traditional e-commerce." Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com were seen as new channels distinct from "traditional offline channels," using new retail models to create new shopping scenarios and achieve new growth. In just three years, online retail experienced the gradual disappearance of traffic dividends. According to the "China E-commerce Report," the year-on-year growth rate of China's e-commerce transaction volume began to decline after 2015's 36.5%: 25.5% in 2016, 11.7% in 2017, and 8.5% in 2018, with growth slowing year by year.[4] Also during these three years, online retail witnessed the gradual rise of social e-commerce. In 2015, Pinduoduo and Yunji were born. In 2018, Pinduoduo, which started with "group buying," went public. In less than three years, its market value approached half of JD.com. In 2019, Yunji, which follows a "distribution" route, went public, achieving a GMV of 20 billion yuan in four years, with growth rates far higher than offline and traditional e-commerce channels.[5]
After new retail began in 2016, the market size and share of China's social e-commerce continued to rise. Source: Chuangqi Social E-commerce Research Center
According to the "2018 China Social E-commerce Industry Development Report," the market size of China's social e-commerce in 2018 was expected to reach 1,139.778 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 66.73%.[6] In comparison, the "previous new channel" platform e-commerce, which was thriving in 2015, had a year-on-year transaction growth rate of only 36.5% in the "China E-commerce Report," making social e-commerce's development quite rapid. Moreover, the Ministry of Commerce predicts that by 2020, China's online retail market will reach 9.6 trillion yuan, and social e-commerce is expected to reach 3 trillion yuan, accounting for about one-third of the total.[7] Social e-commerce, which is expected to "divide the world into three parts" in online channels, is not to be underestimated.
Social e-commerce, represented by Yunji and Pinduoduo, emerged at the point when the traffic dividend of platform e-commerce was gradually decreasing, keenly discovering a new traffic entrance: the WeChat ecosystem, which has a large base of 1 billion monthly active users and covers multiple scenarios.
In this new scenario, which is social by nature and naturally advantageous in traffic: Pinduoduo focuses on consumers, especially those in lower-tier markets that Tmall and JD.com, busy with "consumption upgrading," have overlooked. It emphasizes low prices and quickly enters with group buying. Yunji focuses on merchants, using distribution models to attract a large number of merchants who left Taobao due to difficulty in acquiring traffic.
In this way, social e-commerce, based on the new retail logic of "gathering people through people," has opened up new growth in new social scenarios like WeChat, which differ from "platforms." This also means that social e-commerce has taken over from platform e-commerce as the new online retail channel.
What are the main models of social e-commerce? How does the food and beverage industry use them?
1. WeChat business (Weishang) fired the first shot in social e-commerce
Is WeChat business considered social e-commerce? On the surface, WeChat business, which mainly uses Moments and WeChat groups as channels, has inherent social genes. However, non-standard operations have caused WeChat business to overdraw trust among acquaintances, and the multi-level distribution model has made developing downlines the main profit driver for WeChat business. Therefore, WeChat business does not possess the people-centric essence of social e-commerce. Thus, most voices hold a negative view on whether WeChat business belongs to "social e-commerce." But it's undeniable that the "first shot" of social e-commerce's rise was fired around 2013 with the rise of WeChat business.
AKOKO cookies leveraging the WeChat business channel. Source: AKOKO Weibo
In 2016, AKOKO cookies, seeing the potential of this new channel, bypassed the traditional e-commerce platforms that were crowded with big brands and already showing signs of growth fatigue, and adopted a "Buddha-style selling strategy" on WeChat Moments.
Like most food and beverage industries, baking has a low entry barrier and severe homogenization. As a new brand, how can it stand out from thousands of cookies? AKOKO's approach: cultivate initial fans into seed users and agents. Through these fans, AKOKO promotes word-of-mouth and drives fission for new customer acquisition, efficiently and cost-effectively gaining more loyal fans. At the same time, fans are organized into communities, and based on community feedback, products are adjusted and improved in a timely manner, from "people" to "goods." This people-centric channel strategy allowed AKOKO to break through successfully, securing nearly 100 million yuan in financing in the second and third years after its founding in 2016, and during Tmall's "Double 11" in 2018, it jumped to the top in cookie sales.
Mengniu's first WeChat business product: Manran. Source: Mengniu official website
During these two years, many food giants like Mengniu, Wahaha, Yili, New Hope Dairy, and Daliyuan also began to test the waters in WeChat business, renaming this channel to the more acceptable "new social retail channel." Test products included Manran (Mengniu), children's drink "Jingjing" (Wahaha), Xianyue Xiaowei ambient yogurt (Nestlé), and Xinshiji (Yili). Among these, some achieved 400 million yuan in sales in six months, while others caused chaos in the product price system due to irregular pricing. But attempts never stopped.
2. Under the WeChat ecosystem, a group of social e-commerce based on strong relationships emerged
After the rise of WeChat business, in WeChat's super traffic pool with strong social attributes, many social e-commerce platforms based on strong relationships emerged. Communities, Moments, personal accounts, official accounts, mini-programs... together form a WeChat ecosystem full of imaginative gameplay. The most common and representative are group buying represented by Pinduoduo and distribution represented by Yunji.
The group buying model, represented by Pinduoduo, mainly relies on strong relationships like family and acquaintances to drive fission. In terms of market, it takes a different path, using low prices to quickly enter lower-tier markets, achieving differentiation from traditional e-commerce that is moving toward high-end, and gaining rapid development opportunities. Group buying is essentially a C2B (consumer-to-business) model, where the user side reversely drives and influences the supply-side manufacturers or merchants, thereby guiding more precise product reproduction.[10] For the food and beverage industry, which needs rapid iteration and quick feedback for decision-making, this type of social e-commerce can become an ideal channel for quickly testing new products.
In 2019, the popularity ranking of 7 food and beverage subcategories on Pinduoduo. Source: "Pinduoduo Food and Beverage Industry Marketing Trends Insight Report"
With the continuous influx of traffic, the "group buying" model has brought rapid growth to many vertical food and beverage categories. In 2019, among 7 food and beverage subcategories, snacks/nuts/specialty products became the most popular category on Pinduoduo.[11]
The distribution model, represented by Yunji, also mainly relies on strong relationships, but compared to the C2B model of group buying, distribution is essentially a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model, focusing more on the design of merchants' profit models. For example, Yunji, Global Catcher, Beidian, etc., all mainly rely on rebates and coupons given by platform merchants to users, using social software for promotion, traffic acquisition, and fan attraction.
Although this model is also controversial due to multi-level distribution, the most essential difference between distribution-based social e-commerce and WeChat business is the upgrade of the "goods" link: on Yunji, supply chain and logistics are standardized by the platform, and store owners do not need to stock goods; supply, logistics, warehousing, after-sales, etc., are all uniformly handled by the platform. It is reported that Yunji also has strict control mechanisms for "goods," and products with a return rate exceeding 5% will not be listed.[12] Under this model, the "goods" link is standardized and formalized, improving consumer experience, avoiding the various three-no products prevalent in WeChat business, and optimizing the efficiency and cost for store owners, who only need to share through social channels to acquaintances, facilitating transactions and earning sales commissions. Distribution-based social e-commerce has become a sustainable business model.
Correspondingly, growth has become an inevitable answer. Between 2016 and 2018, Yunji's active buyers increased from 2.5 million to 23.2 million, and GMV grew rapidly from 1.8 billion yuan to 9.6 billion yuan to 22.7 billion yuan, with a year-on-year GMV growth rate of 136.5% in 2018.[13]
Bright Dairy White Rabbit candy-flavored milk. Source: Tmall Bright Dairy official flagship store
This growth has also been noticed by the food and beverage industry. On July 22, 2019, "Bright Dairy White Rabbit candy-flavored milk" was first launched on the "Yunji" platform, one day earlier than the Tmall flagship store and offline supermarkets.
3. Outside the WeChat ecosystem, social e-commerce based on weak relationships has also emerged
The WeChat ecosystem, with 1 billion daily active users, is the natural home field for social e-commerce. But outside the WeChat ecosystem, a number of social e-commerce platforms with different models have also risen: content-based social e-commerce represented by Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Since the platform genes are more content-oriented than social, this type of social e-commerce is more based on weak relationships, relying on content, forming sticky communities through interests and hobbies, and precisely "planting grass" (recommending) to consumers.
At the Tmall ceremony, Ma Yun and Li Jiaqi competed in live-streaming lipstick sales. Source: Screenshot from the 2018 Tmall "Double 11" ceremony live stream
How powerful is content sales conversion? Take the particularly eye-catching live streaming as an example:
- From the platform's conversion capability: During the 618 shopping festival in 2019, Taobao Live drove over 13 billion yuan in transactions, and Taobao Live even shouted the slogan "3-year GMV of 500 billion yuan";[14]
- From individual streamer conversion capability: Take Viya, Taobao's top streamer who has collaborated with over 5,000 brands, as an example: a single 2-hour session guided sales of up to 267 million yuan, the highest single product sales reached 27 million yuan, and in 2018, she guided a cumulative transaction volume of 2.7 billion yuan...[15]
Why can content-based social e-commerce in the form of live streaming become a channel with super strong traffic acquisition and conversion? The answer lies in its name: content, social, e-commerce.
- "Content" - higher dimension: Compared to text and images, live video is a more multi-dimensional medium with sound + image + text, which can more efficiently attract attention, reach user minds, and generate resonance. In addition, live streaming has a hidden dimension: time. Real-time live streaming enhances the urgency of the shopping scenario, to some extent avoiding actions like cross-platform price comparison that can cause loss, further strengthening conversion.
- "Social" - more trust: Streamers, like other internet celebrities, KOLs, and big Vs on other platforms, have a star effect, and their interaction with consumers is similar to the "fan economy," creating an illusion of "one-on-one" communication. Moreover, the people gathered by streamers have certain commonalities, forming communities. These all increase consumer trust, making conversion easier.
- "E-commerce" - more convenient: The purchase path in live streaming is shorter, without too many cross-platform actions like "copy link - jump out of WeChat to Taobao - place order." At the moment of watching the live stream, consumers often go through "receive grass-planting stimulus → click link → place order and pay," a "what you see is what you get" purchase process, which is more convenient and smoother, naturally making conversion efficient.
Happy Lemon × Douyin's "Record Your Half-Ripe Life" themed activity page. Source: SocialBeta
In 2018, a short video recommended by a netizen on Douyin, while quickly gaining over 260,000 likes, made Coco's "pudding, highland barley, sugar-free, with ice caramel milk tea" a hit. Happy Lemon × Douyin's "Record Your Half-Ripe Life" themed activity increased its total revenue by 70% during the activity period.[16]
For the food and beverage industry, this model is worth learning from:
- Find content channels where the audience highly overlaps with the brand's target audience, and select content themes that can ignite active sharing.
- Have internet celebrities/KOLs/big Vs drive users to generate a large amount of UGC content.
- Display the high-quality content in offline stores to achieve mutual traffic between online and offline.
What's new about social e-commerce? How can the food and beverage industry leverage it to ignite new growth? The most direct difference between social e-commerce and traditional e-commerce is in traffic acquisition and conversion. To understand the innovation points of social e-commerce and leverage it for greater growth, it's also helpful to look from the perspective of traffic.
1. Traffic acquisition: the natural advantage of social e-commerce
In terms of traffic acquisition, in traditional platform e-commerce, a major pain point for merchants is that traffic is decreasing, and acquiring traffic is becoming harder and more expensive. For social e-commerce, in traffic acquisition, it has two natural advantages: horizontal "sharing fission" and vertical "downward reach."
On traditional e-commerce platforms like Taobao, there is generally one traffic center. Sellers need to passively follow the platform's algorithms, optimizing keywords and rankings both on and off the platform to seek more exposure. However, with the slowdown in buyer growth and a large number of sellers, the cost of acquiring a single piece of traffic is increasing, and most merchants are drowned out of consumers' sight.
In contrast, social e-commerce's traffic acquisition is "decentralized," meaning it doesn't rely on a single traffic center but actively builds and relies on multiple online and offline traffic entrances based on social or content platforms, using group buying, distribution, content communities, etc., to make traffic acquisition easier and cheaper.
Dali Group, for example, in August 2018, used a "three-level distribution" method to launch a social e-commerce project called "fuluota" platform to test WeChat business. How effective was the traffic acquisition?
In the initial phase, within less than 12 hours of launch, registrations exceeded 60,000, nearly 100,000 boxes of products were sold, and the WeChat index climbed to over 300,000 on the activity day. In the end, the platform system crashed twice due to the popularity exceeding the operator's expectations.[17]
Three Squirrels has a longer-term layout, starting to deploy social e-commerce business in April 2018. By the 2019 New Year's goods festival, it sold 190 million yuan through social e-commerce in one month. In February this year, it formally signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Meiri Yitao.
On one hand, data analysis shows that the overlap between Meiri Yitao users and Three Squirrels' old users is almost zero, and this cooperation can help Three Squirrels seek new incremental markets through social e-commerce.
On the other hand, Three Squirrels can also leverage the inherent dissemination attributes of social e-commerce to create "super hit" snacks. Currently, Three Squirrels' giant snack pack has become one of the best-selling items on Meiri Yitao.[18] Moreover, the innovation points that enabled the rapid rise of social e-commerce not only lie in discovering new retail scenarios and developing new traffic acquisition models, but also in targeting new consumer groups: shifting to lower-tier markets.
Founded in 2015, with users exceeding 100 million in September 2016, active users exceeding 300 million in March 2018 (second only to Taobao and JD.com), and listed in July 2018... Behind the astonishing growth of Pinduoduo and others are the 400 million people who are not overlapping between WeChat's 1 billion and Taobao's 600 million active users.
Town youth, middle-aged and elderly people, housewives... these groups are highly price-sensitive, have great fission potential, and are numerous, but were ignored by traditional e-commerce taking the high-end route during the "consumption upgrading" wave... The once marginal forces in retail have become the incremental dividend for social e-commerce.
According to Kantar's report "Brand Growth Logic in the New Retail Era," in 2018, lower-tier cities (referring to prefecture-level cities, county-level cities, and counties) increased their contribution to food and beverage sales value from 50% to 57%, making the lower-tier market a very objective growth engine.[19] To reach the blue ocean of consumption in lower-tier cities, the food and beverage industry can cooperate with Pinduoduo, Douyin, etc., and also leverage the power of new channels to go down more efficiently and cost-effectively.
2. Traffic conversion: a model disruption from new channels
In traditional e-commerce, consumers typically engage in "people looking for goods," i.e., search-based purchasing. However, today's food and beverage industry has relatively low entry barriers and severe product homogenization, with countless products under numerous subcategories drowning each other in vast data. On traditional e-commerce platforms, it's easy for "people" to find "goods," but making "people" find "your goods" is already a significant challenge. In contrast, social e-commerce's gameplay is "goods looking for people," i.e., recommendation-based purchasing.
After typing "potato chips" on Taobao, you face an "ocean of homogenized products." Source: Taobao screenshot
Imagine selling products on different online channels. The connection between a potato chip brand and its consumers is like this: A. You want to eat potato chips, search on Taobao, and filter through 100+ pages of similar-looking chips. B. You haven't even thought about eating chips, but you see a friend's recommendation or a group buying invitation on Moments/live stream, and you can click to order directly.
There's a saying in the industry: "Moving countless products online is Taobao, moving supermarkets online is JD.com, and social e-commerce is moving word-of-mouth and verbal recommendations online." As early as 2014, Zhang Yiming of Toutiao said: "Recommendation is the iteration of search." Precise matching and recommendation have become more efficient solutions. For social e-commerce, matching can be done with big data and algorithms, and recommendation is naturally aligned with their inherent "social" genes.
Especially for the food and beverage industry, when products are highly homogenized and marketing information is excessive, to prevent your "goods" from being drowned in rows of shelves or pages of Taobao, using social e-commerce as the "place" to communicate more proactively and reach the matching "people" more precisely is undoubtedly a suitable solution.
At the 2019 Huaying Capital × 36Kr WE Conference, Sun Taoyong, Chairman and CEO of Weimob, discussed the evolution of traffic. Source: Weimob
The "recommendation" behavior model in social e-commerce is backed by the psychological mechanism of "trust." Unlike the WeChat business channel, which has overused trust, social e-commerce based on "recommendation" emphasizes trust mechanisms, thereby settling traffic and pulling it from the increasingly expensive public domain traffic into your own "small fish pond," transforming it into what Weimob CEO Sun Taoyong mentioned as "identifiable, reachable, and operable private domain traffic." For this model, Guan Yu, CMO of Youzan, said in a 2018 interview with Southern Metropolis Daily: "The dividend period of online traffic growth is over, and the era of 'single-customer economy' has arrived. Doing business around a group of people and letting this group bring you more business is the only business model that is still growing."[20]
When trust is in place, conversion becomes easier. From this perspective, the transformation from public domain traffic to private domain traffic, and the formation of communities for refined operations, is an iteration of CRM under the new channel model. And through social e-commerce, diverting consumers from traditional channels to personal WeChat accounts, WeChat groups, mini-programs, or self-owned apps as "private domain traffic pools" can also become a new growth driver for the food and beverage industry, mainly in two aspects: improving communication efficiency and upgrading data insights.
Improving communication efficiency: As FMCG products, the food and beverage industry is already flooded with marketing information like promotions and new product launches, and merchants also face channel fragmentation and scattered consumer attention. The establishment and operation of "private domain traffic pools" can help achieve precise, repeated, and low-cost reach and communication, thereby more efficiently driving repurchases, associated consumption, and social fission.
Upgrading data insights: Data accumulated in the past is mostly concentrated on large platforms like Taobao and JD.com, and brands have relatively passive control over data. Social e-commerce not only has the advantage of data acquisition from online channels but also, due to the more common interactive gameplay in social scenarios and user groups different from traditional channels, makes data more multi-dimensional and referenceable. Using "private domain traffic pools" to collect and settle data from these new channels helps brands gain more timely and comprehensive data insights, which in turn feed back into business decisions.
Summary: Understand new channels, unlock new blue oceans Under the background of new retail, "people-goods-places" has been reconstructed, and social e-commerce, as a new channel centered on "people," has risen rapidly. The new model of "gathering people through people" has brought new growth to players in social e-commerce in the second half of the e-commerce game, where the traffic dividend of traditional e-commerce is gradually disappearing.
The differences between social e-commerce and traditional e-commerce channels mainly lie in easier and cheaper traffic acquisition, and more efficient and lower-cost conversion.
In traffic acquisition, social e-commerce has discovered new retail scenarios like the WeChat ecosystem and content platforms, "decentralizing" traffic, triggering fission, and also turning to lower-tier markets, opening up new incremental markets and harvesting traffic dividends together with merchants.
In traffic conversion, social e-commerce uses "recommendation" to iterate "search," uses "private domain traffic pool operations" to iterate "traditional CRM," and uses a more proactive, more precise, and thus more efficient retail method to help drive growth.
Food and beverage companies have been practicing new gameplay and achieving new growth. At the same time, the traditional pain points of "people," "goods," and "places" have found new solutions worth trying in the new online channel of social e-commerce.
Further thoughts From the love-hate relationship between platform e-commerce and social e-commerce: traditional platform e-commerce is starting to "+social," while social e-commerce can also "+platform." How will e-commerce evolve in the future? What form will newer channels take?
From social e-commerce itself: In the post-traffic era, Pinduoduo no longer positions itself as social e-commerce, and Yunji has transformed from social e-commerce to membership e-commerce. How should we view the latest evolution of social e-commerce?
From an omni-channel perspective: In the new retail era, binary opposition bets are no longer meaningful, because in an era of fragmented channels, consumers can enter shopping scenarios anytime, anywhere. Against this backdrop, how should food and beverage companies lay out new channels?
From the overall retail perspective: Does laying out new channels necessarily guarantee new growth? When new channels rise and "places" change, "people" and "goods" must change accordingly. The key is: what changes have occurred? In terms of big data and supply chain, how should food and beverage companies plan?
In the game of growth, things change rapidly, and the "cake" is limited. Those who understand first are destined to eat the "cake" first. Regarding these new channels and the food and beverage industry, what aspects are you most interested in? Do you have any ideas? Welcome to scan the QR code at the bottom of the article poster to join the "New Channels" WeChat group and participate in industry discussions.
References: [1] "Brand Growth Logic in the New Retail Era," 2018, Kantar Worldpanel [2] Same as above [3] "QuestMobile China Mobile Internet 2019 Spring Report" [4] "China E-commerce Report (2016)(2017)(2018)" [5] "In-depth Analysis of Yunji: A Complex Entity," May 5, 2019, 36Kr [6] "2018 China Social E-commerce Industry Development Report" [7] Same as [6] [8] "Valuation 350 Million, How Was the Internet Celebrity Cookie Brand AKOKO Made?" January 23, 2019, Jingtun.com [9] AKOKO official website [10] "Starting from WeChat Groups, Look at the Evolution Opportunities of China's Social E-commerce and New Retail," November 14, 2018, Lan Community [11] "Pinduoduo Food and Beverage Industry Marketing Trends Insight Report" [12] "Yunji IPO: From WeChat Business Improvement to Membership E-commerce," April 11, 2019, 36Kr [13] "What Exactly is Yunji?" May 5, 2019, East Money.com [14] "Transaction Volume Soared 600%, Tmall 618 Opens a New Era of E-commerce Live Streaming," June 5, 2019, E-commerce News [15] "'Taobao No.1 Sister' Viya's Entrepreneurial Dream," July 26, 2019, China Entrepreneur Magazine [16] "Top 10 Douyin Innovative Platform Marketing Cases in 2018," February 15, 2019, Social Beta [17] "The Story Behind Dali Group's New Brand 'Frota' Fu Xiaoxian Entering WeChat Business," August 18, 2018, Phoenix Net Business [18] "Official Announcement! Meiri Yitao Joins Hands with Three Squirrels to Do Something Big!" February 28, 2019, China.com.cn [19] Same as [1] [20] "'First Share of WeChat E-commerce' Draws a Line with Pinduoduo, Five Models of Social E-commerce Each Form a School," August 6, 2018, Southern Metropolis Daily
Source: FBIF Food & Beverage Innovation (ID: FoodInnovation)