Author | Guo Ji'an
When there were ten days left before November, Dalin stayed in the company all night. The 20th is the official launch of the Double Eleven promotion of her domestic home appliance brand. In previous years, the team collectively guarded the large screen to see that sales generally started from spot sales at 0:00 on November 11 or 11.11, but this year it was early this year. "Everyone in the team must watch it, from 8-12 pm or 0-4 AM."
, and the office area of the e-commerce department next door has already been filled with many folding beds. Since early October, colleagues from the e-commerce department have been "stationed in the company" to prepare for Double Eleven.
"I am busy every year, but this year is different. I feel like I am returning to 2014 and 2015. Whether it is the tension or everyone's motivation." Dalin sighed.
skin care field is also very cool, "The whole company wishes all employees can turn into the sales rhythm. After all, big brands such as lamer are using this word, who can imagine that it will be two years ago. The layout is still very advanced. In the main picture, you can buy XXml and get XXml for free, but the essence is still promotion. That's the mystery of sea blue !" said the practitioner Seser.
e-commerce operator Thirteen also agreed with this. He has been in the platform for three years, and the preparations for Double Eleven in 2020 and 2021 are also booming, but under the squeeze of the live broadcast room of the top anchors, the platform's consumption has shown signs of fatigue. But this year, there was a tension in all employees, but the right to speak was lost. "This year, we are trying hard to beg for the brand and promised to recommend various resources, but there are still many fewer people supporting the audience." The live broadcast team of
also has a mountain pressing over its head. Xiao Yang, who broadcasts Taobao live on , has met nearly 10 live broadcast teams in the past week, including many of them, which have just officially announced their entry into Taobao in the past two days, and was originally closely bound to Douyin .
"This is the first year when only Li Jiaqi ." In the interview, Xiao Yang repeated this sentence no less than three times. Katherine of the beauty brand marketing department of
is in a state of distortion after excessive anxiety. "I know this year will be bad, but next year will only be worse." They failed to enter Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. Compared to worrying about the ugly performance that Double Eleven is destined to be seen, she has begun to worry about her work next year.
"It can be imagined that our marketing department budget will be cut by about 60% next year. What else can I do with this job at that time?"
With less than a week left in November, the Double Eleven War has already begun.
Brand: Generally lowered the Double Eleven KPI,
High-end big brands do not fight price war
Uncertainty is the keyword for many brands to participate in this year's Double Eleven.
"Normal at the end of August and early September, we must set the entire Double Eleven playing method. We must prepare our own stocks and channels. But this year until early October, the boss was hesitant about how much resources to invest and how to play." Dalin told Entertainment Capital Theory (ID: yulezibenlun).
Source: Debang Securities
The home appliance brand where Dalin is located is a big domestic brand, but his performance in the past two years is not satisfactory. The overall home appliance market showed an uptrend year before yesterday, but the GMV of home appliances declined severely, and the small home appliance field was significantly divided by a large number of new brands. Dalin is the latter in the midst of joy and sorrow. Last year, the entire home appliance market was oversaturated, and the sales volume of his brand only reached about 70% of the expected, and the best small household appliances sold were also extremely profitable under the promotional battle.
This also made Dalin's brand appear particularly hesitant this year. "On the one hand, I'm worried about the main products, and on the other hand, I'm worried about the key channels. There is no need to talk about traditional channels such as JD.com and Tmall Suning, but the interest emphasized by Douyin must not be released."
But the problem is that under this year's brand situation, Double Eleven is destined to no longer "lose money and make a lot of publicity", which means that the route of discount promotions and low-priced special sales will not work.
"Two months ago, our team positioned this year's Double Eleven to not fight price wars, and mainly promoted high-end products above 4,000 yuan. But this also brings problems. How to market high-end product marketing? Is it a way to spend money to tell brand stories and plant grass consumption? Or just grab a little bit of hard exposure resource positions to do wild consumption? It seems that in this year's situation, it is not very applicable." Although the brand building of
is indeed a moat for high-end products, this year when the overall marketing budget is reduced, the early preparation is far from enough. "You can't start planting at the end of October, and you just expect to pull weed on a large scale in November." And Wild consumption of means sufficient concessions to empathize with users . Not to mention that the former is prone to falling into the price quagmire, "Who can still inspire users to consume large-scale impulsively on the market now?"
Xiaohongshu 3C Home Appliances Industry Research Report
After more than a month of entanglement, the response idea adopted by the Dalin brand is "Segment Category Customization Strategy" , which proposes different interest target groups and refined KPIs for different categories. Compared with the previously emphasized pulling new customer groups, maintaining existing users and increasing repurchase rates have become the sales department's goal.
"I have never seen the past, just like this year, marketing and sales indicators have been so detailed. If I say it is also a way to reduce the boss's expectations. After all, it doesn't mean how much you can get, but if you change it to how much you can, you will most likely know what's going on. But even if the sales task is 20% lower than last year, we still feel it's difficult to complete it."
But in comparison, Dalin is still lucky. Sofi, a staff member of a second-tier home appliance brand in China, told Xiaoyu that they have given up the front battlefield of Double Eleven this year, and "I took the path of low-price measurements before, and I can't afford it this year."
The brand where Sofi focuses on kitchen appliances, and microwave ovens are its key product line, but this year's Double Eleven gives Sofi a Sofie It is obvious that "there are more options, but in order to grab traffic, the platforms are increasingly favoring big brands and high-priced products, which also increases the cost of advertising resources. For us, ROI has dropped."
. In the absence of strong differentiation advantages, Sophie's brand's self-report curve is unclear, so she gave up hedging with the resources of high-end brands. 6. Choose to spend the winter with dogs, "We will lay channels normally and do store broadcasts. The budget investment is about 30% of last year." Polarization such as
does not only occur in the home appliance industry. According to the Thirteenth E-commerce Operations, the resource recommendation logic of major traditional e-commerce platforms this year is more inclined to "strive to big brands" , and diversion of high-end and low-price.
"We also want GMV to look good. We even don't encourage merchants to reduce prices significantly, but use preferential means such as supporting products and buy and get free products to promote categories. Not only this year, next, the Double Eleventh Session will be more clearly divided between the concept of price depression."
Live broadcast: Li Jiaqi is still the winner, and
The beauty industry is generally difficult to bear
. Corresponding to the corresponding story that happened in the live broadcast room is even more "thrilling". Skin care, beauty and life brands have transformed the logic of e-commerce platform promotions in the past two years, and have used the live broadcast room as a key new battlefield.
Domestic skin care brand practitioner Seser told Yuzijiang that this year, she had already done everything she should do and is now waiting for the results.
started to stop broadcasting in June, Sesse's boss began to pray every day, "Burn incense every day and wait for Li Jiaqi to resume broadcasting. He is the big part of our performance." Since September, the head of the e-commerce team of his company and even the head of the group began to overcome Li Jiaqi's Double Eleven product selection. "From here from other places, he is basically in the United States, and he wants to take down Li Jiaqi."
result is no disappointing. This year, this Double Eleven, Sesse's brand still reached in-depth cooperation with Li Jiaqi. And they correspondingly lowered their expectations, so they felt that victory was in sight, and they even began to worry about the gap next year."This is also the norm for brands that rely on super-head anchors. They have to increase the amount every year. This year has been over, but where will the traffic come from next year?"
has been much sadder than the beauty brand that has not entered Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. Katherine of an e-commerce team of a new consumer beauty brand, used "standing the last shift" to describe this year's Double Eleven. Her brand's rated sales indicators this year are only 50% of last year. But the entire team was still swept by a "lying flat" emotion. "Everyone knows that 50% of them are difficult to achieve. I am working hard now to avoid being laid off. I will wait for job change next year to make my resume look better."
This year, the entire beauty industry has been halved, and the entire market has shown a cliff-like decline. Since April, Catherine's department has paid less than 70% of its salary for several consecutive months. Double Eleven is a life-saving straw for the team to look forward to in the second half of the year. Since we learned that we had not entered the Li Jiaqi product selection library, the entire company has been shrouded in a "swept wind and rain".
Image source: China Merchants Securities New Consumer Team
"Our company has been staring at the Ali backend to watch the sales curve of competitors every day, but everyone is the same bad, it is nothing more than the difference between unhealthy sales structure and even more unhealthy." Katherine sighed.
In fact, her company is also trying to transform, but in the case of cash flow being in jeopardy, the marketing budget of large-scale investment in the past has shrunk significantly, but the brand has not established a complete "story". In this case, the makeup strip line that originally undertakes the big revenue is also easily listed as "non-essential" by old users this year.
According to Catherine, since last year, the company has tried to transfer to the skin care lines, but the results have been very little. The most typical example is this year's Double Eleven. The main skin care product line was not attracted by Li Jiaqi and failed to enter the ranks of "end-up products".
A person close to ONE in the United States revealed to Yuzijiang that Li Jiaqi’s Double Eleven product selection this year is unprecedentedly strict. "The traffic depends on what products are easy to sell. If the entire line of beauty and makeup has plummeted, the overall number of cooperation will be reduced, and it is mainly to cooperate with international big brands. At the same time, the brand concept will pay more attention to technology and components. Therefore, transformation products are not very good at cooperating. After all, mid- and low-end products cannot make users imagine high customer unit price imagination. Li Jiaqi does not want to take the risk of losing the car." Further digging of off-site traffic corresponding to product selection. It is reported that this year, Li Jiaqi's team's ad pre-order on Double Eleven off-site this year Considering that investment has further increased, "the marketing expenses of Weibo channel alone have increased to more than 1.2 times. Under this year's circumstances, he is under great pressure."
Catherine's view is that the beauty and skin care field will only be more and more controlled by international brands this year and in the future. The more users' consumption is, the more popular the brand effect of overseas brands, the fewer opportunities left to the national brands, especially the new national brands.
"Otherwise, why do you really think L'Oreal takes so much money to hire artists? The live broadcast room of Double Eleven alone has uninterrupted traffic. Are you really hoping to sell goods? Or just building a brand, but the difference is that they have money and keep doing it, and we don't have money. Reduce costs and increase efficiency, the first thing to reduce the brand marketing budget. It is not obvious in normal times, but it will be revealed on Double Eleven." The situation of
will only be even worse next year. According to Catherine, although the company has not yet clarified the overall marketing budget for next year, they have received the news that they must be prepared to cut below 440% of this year's .
platform: the right to speak inverts the rules and changes, and the key to maintaining traffic is
. Such an anchor budget decline will naturally affect the platform. "This year, major platforms have frozen a lot of communication budgets, and everyone in 618 is so quiet that they don't even dare to post a battle report. But there is no excuse for the epidemic and logistics on Double Eleven. If the GMV still cannot be increased, the brand's budget for us next year will probably be less than half." Thirteen said worriedly.
Therefore, many e-commerce operations this year have put their postures unprecedentedly low, "In the past, we chose one of two and were very strong. This year, we became begging brands to join and invest more budgets in."
But the weakness of the brand does exist. According to Thirteen, many of the popular new consumer brands this year have tended to be conservative, especially SKU's relatively single brands and brands with relatively virtual concepts, and their investment has significantly shrunk. However, brands with relatively strong brands and traditional big brands with good cash flow on the supply chain side are still insisting on high-profile bidding.
But the opposite trend to these brands' investment is the weakening of overall discounts.
"This year, brands will generally strictly control prices. Strictly buy free or reduce prices. In addition to some new products in the live broadcast room, many relatively high-quality products have a trend of price increase on the pure e-commerce side. This will give users an intuitive feeling that "Buying things on Double Eleven is not cheap." "Thirteen said.
This is closely related to the high cost of raw materials and logistics costs. In the post-epidemic era, whether it is imported raw materials from overseas, domestic OEM costs or logistics investment, it has continued to rise. Among the many brands interviewed by Yuzijiang, the cost of raw materials rose by 7% at least, and the most was as high as 45%. They all brought a big test to the brand's profit margin.
"And in the past, the logic of many brands was to achieve good results on Double Eleven and make money back during the New Year's goods festival. Now I can’t even care about this year, so I can’t care about next year. Therefore, it will inevitably enter a vicious cycle of traffic. "Thirteen said.
users who are already tight-knit, and after sensing the signal that "consumption is not cost-effective", their enthusiasm for participating in Double Eleven has also decreased. It also makes traditional e-commerce platforms generally face a situation of decline in traffic. Strong e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD have also begun to try their best to search for more external traffic to enter.
According to Thirteen, when connecting with many brands, the resource cooperation plan they provide will clearly encourage brands to attract traffic from newly promoted short video platforms to import into traditional e-commerce. Typical celebrities on Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu are all regarded as off-site traffic entrances with key value. ht "Digging" such as ml6
is not only happening in the traditional e-commerce side, but also in the hot live broadcast room, such "poaching and anti-poaching" are everywhere. The Double Eleven pair of Taobao live broadcasts with only Li Jiaqi, a super-headed anchor, is unprecedented. In order to make up for another missing super-headed traffic, not long ago, Taobao Live has successively cooperated with well-known live broadcast institutions such as Make friends, New Oriental , Yaowang (click to view the previous article), and these institutions were originally deeply bound to Douyin live broadcast.
"In addition to these top anchors, this year, it is also a key indicator to focus on mid-level anchors, and making the vertical track low anchors is also a key indicator. "Xiao Yang from Taobao Live broadcast on said to Yuzijiang.
Of course, the Douyin platform has also had a lot of counterattacks this year. "Since the beginning of last year, many anchors in Taobao have had a clear trend towards Douyin. The real-time distribution of Douyin traffic and horse racing logic are a brand new opportunity for many anchors below the waist with a fixed track in Taobao. This liquidity trend has also accelerated significantly after June. There are new changes before Double Eleven. "Xiao Yang said.
This also means a change in brand selection tendency. " Many new consumer products, especially strong technology and concept products, have shown a very obvious Douyin budget diversion since 618. This year's Double Eleven is no exception. The anchors are typical voting logic with their feet, and they can go wherever they rise and sell well. Brands value real ROI, and this year's Double Eleven data will also determine the new budget distribution on the channel side next year. But we can do it well now, so we can only focus on our own platform. "A person close to Douyin Live summarized this.
is different from the smoke of gunpowder competitions in previous years. This year's Double Eleven is more like internal wars.
brands urgently need to use high sales data to boost morale and save the shaky KPI. The platform also longs for more vivid gmvs to clean up 618's "pre-shame", which proves that the attractiveness of e-commerce nodes is still there.
After all, every Double 11 is definitely not just this month’s promotion. It determines the brand’s marketing investment next year and also measures the advertising revenue ceiling of the platform.
Especially this year when consumption popularity has dropped significantly, this node carries the "last expectation" of countless people, allowing all participants to have the courage to fight back and the determination to go all out.
. What is the result? The battle report will be revealed in three weeks.
