"If your brand does not conduct promotions and does not provide the lowest price, can you sell it in live broadcast?"
Zhang Mofan, who has been in the industry for 10 years and has successfully transformed from a top internet celebrity to a super popular anchor, faced more than 2,000 merchants and more than 2,000 brands, and raised a straightforward question. Everyone in the audience looked at each other.
"In fact, most brands cannot." Zhang Mofan gave his own conclusion.
"Why do many brands fail to live broadcasts? Because during the live broadcast, I found that many brands are particularly anxious. They forget everything about the previous consumer awareness, brand tone, brand sublimation, etc. They only remember one thing, conversion, I want to convert, I want to promote, they only care about short-term interests."
However, she also admitted that 2020 will be the most memorable and the most difficult year in recent years, especially in the beauty and retail industry. Many brands and merchants are thinking about making a comeback by relying on live broadcasts and celebrity anchors.
This meeting that made Zhang Mofan speak out was the 2020 mid-summit of Tao Beauty Business Association. A few years ago, Jian Weiqing (Lao Jian) combined beauty alliances scattered across the country to try to let beauty merchants develop together.
Today, Tao Beauty Business Association has become a behemoth in the beauty e-commerce industry, covering tens of thousands of retail stores. Among the top 1000 Taobao beauty shops, 80% are members of the business association.
Like the weather vane of beauty e-commerce, any turbulence, the "old Jianshe" of the Business Friends Association must be the first to feel it. And this year, they keenly realized that the entire beauty industry is entering the "Warring States Period".
This year is too difficult
When Lao Jian said on the stage, "2020 may be our most difficult and unforgettable year", Taobao beauty merchant Qiyue, who came from Guangdong, kept nodding, "Many of my peers say this year is too difficult."
Qiyue runs a beauty store and a corporate store, and also sells some goods through social channels. The profit last year reached more than 2 million, but in the first three months of this year, "almost no money was made."
After April, business gradually rebounded, but compared with previous years, the gap is still not small. She has tried to do live broadcasts several times, and each time it can drive some sales, but after the broadcast is suspended, the sales are still not satisfactory. She even considered whether to find a side job.
Many colleagues around her have also begun to seek change.
Many people have added food, maternal and infant categories based on the original beauty and makeup, and the consumer population is consistent, and they can also increase loyalty. "The main purpose is to overcome the difficulties." A friend of hers, after adding pregnant women's supplies, sales rose significantly, but he was still not happy. "The main business is still beauty makeup after all. Many lipsticks are still not sold now."
Qiyue has summarized that after young people get used to wearing masks, lipsticks appear "not that important and inconvenient."
How difficult is the entire beauty industry this year? Lao Jian gave a set of data. In the first quarter, due to the impact of the epidemic, national cosmetics retail sales fell by more than 10%. Yifei Group investigated the business situation of 2,000 distribution customers among its cooperative customers from January to July. The types of customers covered include Taobao stores, WeChat public account e-commerce, social community e-commerce, offline physical channels and other customers. The results showed that up to 67% of the customer's business declined significantly year-on-year, with 18% of the customers remaining the same, and only 15% of the customers still maintaining growth, but the profit growth is not large.
One type of stores that can grow against the trend is to add related categories.
Another type is to build a cross-border big-name store.
The Warring States Period of Beauty
For domestic beauty brands and retail merchants, there are worries and joys in 2020.
According to the data from the Forward-looking Industry Research Institute, benefiting from factors such as the expansion of beauty population, consumption and retail upgrades, China has become the world's second largest cosmetics consumer, with a market share of 12.8%, second only to the United States, which accounts for about 18.2%.
Taobao Global Shopping Brand and Supply Chain Director Tu Xian also said that from 2018 to 2019, China's beauty retail market growth rate reached 14.2%, with a compound growth rate of 9.9% in the past five years, but the growth rate of domestic cosmetics production only reached 6.86%, which cannot meet the growing demands of domestic consumers for beauty products.
Therefore, the importance of overseas brands in China is constantly increasing, and global shopping has grown by 30% to 40% during the epidemic. It is expected that the number of people focusing on overseas shopping products will reach 235 million in 2020.
On the one hand, there are beauty brands that are recovering from the epidemic, and on the other hand, overseas brands that are constantly entering. This year, the shipment prices of overseas big brands have plummeted severely, down by about 20-30% from previous years. The price advantages of domestic beauty products are constantly being eroded.
2020 was considered by the beauty industry as the "Warring States Period", and the market competition this year is particularly fierce.
"The vortex center of competition will undoubtedly revolve around brands." Lao Jian said, "Brands are the traffic of platforms, retailers, and celebrities, and those who win brands will win the world."
This year, there are many cases of brand price breaks, and some international brands have reduced their dimensions to seize the market. Domestic small and medium-sized retailers and brands feel tremendous pressure.
Lao Jian believes that new and small brands must not follow the trend. For truly influential brands, diving is just a short-term strategy. "They can still get ashore by cleaning them clean and changing clothes. Our new small brands will also jump along. That is a jumping hole and cannot get ashore." For brands, sticking to price strategies is the core focus, and price strategies are the brand's lifeline.
IP, traffic, out-of-the-box
But the core assets that can really make retailers stand out in this "Warring States Period" are still traffic. This era is an era of IP. If you build yourself into an IP, you may become an Internet celebrity, a big Internet celebrity, a super Internet celebrity, and then you will become an Internet celebrity and occupy a huge amount of traffic.
The manager of the Taobao enterprise store "Lao Zhong has arrived" took Lao Zhong two years to finally get this road through.
In 2018, Lao Zhong became popular on the Internet because he looked similar to Yi Nengjing. But few people know that before the big fire, Lao Zhong had been struggling in the e-commerce industry for 16 years.
After her beauty company was opened, in less than two years, she attracted hundreds of thousands of fans and had annual sales of hundreds of millions of yuan, and had long dominated the top list of Taobao's beauty industry corporate stores. She insists on updating her circle of friends every day, and has accumulated 500,000 private domain fans for 7 years, with an interaction rate of 12%.
"I don't think I am already a super IP now."
Lao Zhong's growth, or the success of "Old Zhong arrived" this IP may be one of the future trends of Taobao's beauty industry and even Taobao.
Lao Zhong is a Taobao store owner. If you want to upgrade to an IP, where do you come from?
She said bluntly: "The reason why fans know us is because they buy things. Over time, they trust you very much. He knows to buy things and find you, but in fact, fans have a blank understanding of us. He only knows that I want to buy things and I want to find this person, but what kind of person is this person? He doesn't know."
As a Taobao store owner, he must even cast out his image.
At the beginning, my colleagues around me saw that she looked like Yi Nengjing, so they used the "Scheming Yi Nengjing" meme, and everyone remembered it.
But having a face alone cannot guarantee the sustainability of the business. More and more celebrities have continuously confirmed this.
So, they started cultural operations.
The costume palace dramas in China were very popular back then, so Lao Zhong designed his store into a palace called "Zhong Palace". Of course, he was the "emperor" in the palace, and fans were all called "beloved concubines".
The team responsible for store operations has obtained the alias of "Interior Affairs Office". Their responsibilities are summarized very carefully as "specially serving the various ladies in the palace", that is, all fans. These harem ladies will also have a system to play according to their beloved concubines. When the "Emperor" is happy, he will also give gifts to his fans on his special day of beloved concubines and favored concubines.
Fans are familiar with each other. Over time, buying and selling is no longer a connection between goods, but more of an emotional link. Some fans follow each other for a few years, and sometimes they are not just for buying things, but they are afraid that they will lose favor if they don’t come for a few days.
In fact, since 2019, Taobao Beauty has included incubating special small and medium-sized brands in its annual plan. These Taobao brands with content production capabilities, or brand stores with IP authorization, as well as beauty selection stores with strong product grouping and explosive product capabilities, will have the opportunity to receive strong support from Taobao platforms in the future.
