After more than 6 months, Pinduoduo announced the phased progress of the "New Brand Plan" for the first time. On June 28, at the Yangtze River Delta Communication Conference of the "New Brand Plan", Jing Ran, vice president and spokesperson of Pinduoduo, said that under the promotion of the "New Brand Plan", Pinduoduo has achieved more than 57 million customized product orders in more than 6 months.
According to Jing Ran, after launching the "New Brand Plan" on December 12 last year, it has received applications from more than 6,000 manufacturing companies, nearly 500 companies and brands participated in the pilot project, and finally 62 official members were selected.
In this "new brand plan", many popular products have been launched: a thickened tempered glass pot worth 9.9 yuan, a 30-pack of paper for 24.9 yuan, and a stainless steel steamer worth 69 yuan... How are these popular products quality? Are products with low prices and free shipping reliable? We decided to visit the factory that produces 9.9 yuan thickened tempered glass pots.
It is understood that tempered glass pot uses high-temperature tempering technology. The product is crystal clear, light in weight, high hardness and good heat resistance. Even if it is taken out of the refrigerator freezer layer and poured directly into boiling water, it will not explode. Its manufacturer, Deli Co., Ltd., has 218 valid patents independently developed, and the high-end wine utensils produced are sold overseas.
Why does Pinduoduo launch a new brand plan?
After years of development, the increase in traditional e-commerce platforms has almost reached the ceiling.
The original gameplay was to optimize the supply chain , canceling middlemen to compress the circulation link and optimize logistics, and increasing bargaining power by increasing scale, making the product at a lower price when it comes to consumers. However, now the supply chain cost has basically been compressed to the extreme, and user growth has also slowed down; e-commerce platforms have begun to explore new ways of combining online and offline, on the one hand, expanding consumption scenarios and reaching more new users, and on the other hand, new gameplay maintains and consolidates the original consumers.
Under the attack of giants, if Pinduoduo wants to grow and grow, it needs to choose a new way of playing. Pinduoduo's route is C2M (Customer-to-Manufacturer, direct connection to the user) , working hard on the user's demand side, collecting user needs, forcing the supply side to make reforms, and "tailor-made" products for users.
The team of Zhang Chunyu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was a team that started to study social e-commerce and Pinduoduo earlier. They visited the "Pin Factory" on the spot and went to the front line to observe the C2M model.
Zhang Chunyu said that now China's economy has entered a "new normal". Against the backdrop of economic slowdown, the focus of the three major driving economic growth has changed from "investment" to "consumption". However, "the current concepts, abilities and methods of consumers have undergone tremendous changes. It is very difficult to develop new consumer fields. Whether it is similar to the way government home appliances go to the countryside or the traditional e-commerce Double 11 method, it is very difficult to develop new consumption."
Professor Chen Xian of the Antai School of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiaotong University, analyzed that Pinduoduo's new brand plan is to promote a revolution in supply-side at the micro level. From an economic perspective, the demand side and the supply side, demand is purchasing power and money; supply is production, cost, or technology and innovation. In the past, the problems on the demand side and the supply side were manifested as information asymmetry, and the demand side did not know what good things the supplier had and the price geometry; the supplier sometimes struggled to find consumers and did not know what the demand side needed. How to implement the new brand plan for
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Simply put, it is how Pinduoduo selects new brands and what it can provide for new brands. Jingran introduced at the communication meeting that the new brand plan mainly provides key support to factories with the following characteristics:
1. It has a strong supply chain and is highly competitive in the regional market, but it is urgently needed to go to small and medium-sized enterprises across the country.
2. It has long been OEM for foreign first-line brands and has the ability to compete in the international market.
3. Its own brand influence and production and manufacturing capabilities do not match.
4. It has weak ability to resist risks and is susceptible to fluctuations in the international economic situation.
Pinduoduo also provides data empowerment of for brands. Jing Ran said, "First, provide data, product development and pricing suggestions to make products that are more popular among consumers; second, establish a supply and demand model that directly reaches consumers, significantly reduce the cost of corporate circulation, marketing, and brand reach, and work together to create the most price-advantage champion single product, and quickly form brand awareness and reputation effects through sales scale in a short period of time."
takes Anhui Deli Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Deli), a Chinese OEM factory of South Korea, as an example. Deli started out in foreign trade in 1996, focusing on mid-to-high-end glassware, mainly supplying five-star hotels and catering companies. It has four sub-brands: Qing Apple, Yidelita, Kerui and Deli, and also performing long-term OEM for international first-line brands. Its technical strength is unquestionable. However, Deli's brand influence in the domestic market does not match its manufacturing capabilities.
In November 2018, on the eve of the launch of the new brand plan for Pinduoduo, Deli and Pinduoduo started contacting. Deli took out 500 boxes of trial and error products and began to test the waters in activities such as 9.9 seconds and cut one knife. By collecting user feedback, the direction of product improvement is determined.
Deli's glass production line, the operator picked out unqualified glass cups. Observer.com photographed
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” and Pinduoduo cooperation is also an attempt to transform Deli as a traditional enterprise. ” Deli's e-commerce person told Observer.com that when the 2B dealer model was originally adopted, user feedback could only be collected from dealers, but the information feedback from dealers in various places was not completely accurate. Some dealers put forward some opinions out of selfishness, and Deli improves them based on their opinions, which in turn causes inventory backlogs.
Now, after Deli and Pinduoduo cooperate, they will be directly targeted to consumers in the C2M mode. According to the larger, thicker and stronger demand from Pinduoduo users, Deli decided to transform Kerui, a brand that originally supplied three-star hotel glassware, into a cost-effective brand positioned in third- and fourth-tier cities, and specially customized a thickened tempered glass pot with a discount of 9.9 yuan and 6 thickened heat-resistant glass cups at 8.8 yuan for Pinduoduo users. The person in charge of
Deli e-commerce introduced that after the New Year’s Festival, the products quickly sold out, and the annual e-commerce transaction volume reached 80 million to 100 million. The company also decided to invest more energy in Pinduoduo. He confidently gave 1/3 of the answer to the future share of e-commerce channels in Deli's omni-channel sales. What are the resistances in the implementation of the new brand plan?
Speaking of the difficulties in implementing the new brand plan, Jing Ran said that after the new brand plan was established, the strategic engineering team had been thinking for a long time. Because the new brand plan is contrary to the traditional model, the traditional brand development model is to pursue high added value and promote large-scale expansion and product R&D investment with high profits.
, and the new brand plan is to remove almost all added value such as channels and marketing, so that the product can return to its useful value. "Every customized product we launched has greatly broken the historical price of homogeneous products. This is not only a change brought by the new model, but all member companies and pilot brands have also made great concessions in it."
Jing Ran said that the new brand plan will never "choose one of two" for incubated brands. Observer.com photographed
In order to make users trust platform and products, the new brand plan also opens a live broadcast to present the workshop production process to consumers. In addition, all factories that join the new brand plan must upload raw material procurement records, inspection reports, production logs and other information, and synchronize them to the Pinduoduo data system for filing, so as to facilitate the full link traceability of products.
"It was not until the platform has more and more Sanhe (pots), Deli (glass), and Silk Piao (paper towels), and we were just relieved." Jing Ran said that looking at so many high-quality production capacity, from incubating brands to quickly becoming well-known brands, it was only after we fully confirmed the feasibility of the "inclusive brand" and we were determined to deepen the new brand plan.
In addition to the trust of consumers, Pinduoduo is also facing the attack on by other e-commerce giants in .Pinduoduo has only been established for four years. In Pinduoduo's own words, "is still a growing boy." In terms of new brand resource support, the 1,000 factory target proposed by Pinduoduo is not large for this supply side; compared with the strong industry resources of traditional e-commerce giants and the e-commerce foundation of more than ten years, Pinduoduo's strategy seems a bit "lightweight".
In addition to single products and hot products, users also have other diversified consumer needs. Whether Pinduoduo’s “extreme cost-effectiveness” and “supply-side innovation” can be applied to all platforms and all categories is still a test.
