Text | Tao Weibin
The sun is also rising, and from another point of view, November 11 is just an ordinary day.
But in China, the day was once rendered as a national shopping day – as to whether it was a "carnival", everyone's experience may be different.
It is inevitable that this "Singles' Day", which originated from the self-deprecation of single netizens, has made hundreds of millions of seasons of consumers generously open their wallets on November 11, and they even spent weeks preparing shopping lists for this purpose.
It's a spectacle all over the world: for this day, retailers, factory workers, platform operators, and network programmers (who need them to keep online transactions running smoothly) have to work all night for days, while young couriers wearing their company logos stand at the door of the community late at night, competing against who is the first to knock on the door of the consumer's house who is still lying in the bed to place an order.
There is always a day when the tide rises and falls, people are always enthusiastic about new things, and it is clear that the noise of Double 11 is calming down, but this does not mean that this shopping festival similar to the Western "Black Friday" will be cold - it is still an important day in our current business order.
In Chinese culture, twelve years is a decade, from the first "double 11" in 2009 to 2021, this year is exactly the thirteenth double 11, in a sense, this will also be a new beginning.
If we use the perspective of business research to review the past twelve years, in fact, the "invisible hand" that pushed Double 11 to the climax is also changing.
The initial power came from the consumer.
Stimulated by large discounts such as "50% off", consumers became the "smart" consumers, and their motivation to stay up late came from "discounts" and enjoyed it, which was completely unexpected by the platform and merchants, at the time of Taobao Mall (later renamed "Tmall"), only 27 brands "confused" participated in the first double 11.
The large-scale participation of merchants and becoming the protagonist of "Double 11" is 2016, the landmark data is that in that year, Ali's "Double 11" transaction volume exceeded 100 billion yuan for the first time, participating in 98,000 brands, and then the main logistics service Jingdong, in this year, claimed to use only 12 minutes and 49 seconds, a Philips TV set was delivered to consumers, this year after double 11, Xu Lei, who was originally in charge of the market, officially rose to the position of senior vice president of the group.
But soon, merchants and consumers began to complain about "Double 11". Brands claim that they are kidnapped by the platform, or "locked in price" or have to face the challenge of "choosing one of the two", while consumers face a variety of "combination discounts" that even test their computing power, and they believe that they are not actually getting the benefits.
That is to say, the platform dominates the "double 11" every year: they have formulated endless rules and the intensity of promotions.
On the other hand, the platform's strong operation of Double 11 is also because the competition between platforms has become "bayonet red". Originally thought that Tmall, Jingdong ironclad e-commerce competition, the slash killed Pinduoduo. In 2017, the young Pinduoduo GMV reached a volume of 100 billion, this number Ali used for 5 years, and JD.com used 10 years. The following year, Pinduoduo was successfully listed in the United States.
This is not to mention, the short video platform Douyin, Kuaishou in the process of commercialization, invariably aimed at the "live streaming with goods" model, so double 11 is not only the exclusive e-commerce platform - people brush short videos, conveniently use coupons to solve the shopping cart problem.
The direction of the plot must have been unexpected by the imagination of the Daniel Zhang of Xiao Yaozi.
Consumers, brands, platforms, these three forces have never entered a state of "equal strength" on the annual "Double 11" stage.
"Triangular balance", in this year's double 11, has a trend signal.
The most important changes come from the market context. Regulatory concerns about the platform have been transformed into a kind of "vigilance" in the past ten months, and the most important thing that follows is the landing of relevant regulatory policies in addition to changes in attitudes.
This is not a bad thing. Common sense tells us that starting from the most primitive "barter", "commerce", a unique behavior of high-level civilizations, carries the "reciprocity" gene when it is born in the womb.
Shopping is returning to its essence.
Phil Knight, Nike's co-founder, chronicled the story of Jeff Johnson, Nike's first-ever full-time employee, in his book Shoe Dog.
For today's post-00s, in 1966, which is enough to be called "distant", Johnson opened Nike's first store in California. He likes to read, and there are many books in the store that he thinks runners should read, and he even built a file for each customer to record their mailing address and size style.
Every Christmas, Johnson sends them cards, which isn't enough, and he writes a congratulatory letter when customers win a running race. Of course, many people will also write to Johnson, seeking his support and advice. Johnson will reply one by one, especially when it comes to sports injuries.
This sounds like a "goosebumps" story, in fact describing an "intimate one-on-one customer relationship" between the merchant and the customer.
To some extent, there should be no "antagonism" between business and consumers, and this "antagonism" is formed by the two inherent thinking of "making money" and "taking advantage".
It is precisely because of this thinking that there will be a "special" phenomenon such as "Double 11" that essentially violates the "essence of commercial transactions".
Diego Aparicio and Roberto Rigoben, academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe in a paper that the prices of corporate goods have become "erratic" — that when merchants adjust the prices of goods, they are often not fine-tuned, but relegated to other existing price points. They boil this down to "quantitative pricing."
This also proves that price is not the only tool for merchants to adjust sales.
But to let consumers and merchants "stand" together is to break the "interconnection" of past business thinking.
Another "interconnected" force is a real breakthrough in information technology. The first "double 11" in 2009 was the shopping behavior in the PC era, but now, the "wireless interconnection" technology progress brought about by the "live streaming with goods", scene consumption and other new things, so that the platform began to integrate.
Double 11 is no longer a "take what you need" buffet: the fusion of demand implies that the long stream of fine water should make more sense than a single point breakthrough. In the observation of finance and economics, the emergence of samples in this year's double 11 is particularly obvious:
Haier Zhijia, a home appliance giant from Qingdao, China, has received its due rewards in the global market with its ecological brand;
Debon Express, with the help of science and technology, normalized to the integration of double 11 to improve capacity and effectiveness;
Leisure snack head enterprise "good shop" with the standard of "high-quality development" to embrace this era;
Ali's "every flat and every house" uses the appearance of an "ideal home" to let young people feel the home meta-universe;
The "Himalayas" that liberated both ears are reconstructing the "ear economy" and telling a new story;
Bosideng, which has focused on down jackets for 45 years, has become a new generation of "domestic products" leading brand with soft and hard strength;
Li Jiaqi in the spotlight uses "national tide + public welfare + experience" to spread new commercial achievements in the live broadcast room;
Pinduoduo, which has become one of the largest retail platforms in China, still insists on practicing business inclusion and helping the rise of domestic products;
The electronic lock "Cadiz", which completely changes the lifestyle of consumers, uses the interconnection of technology to create new life scenarios
……
Thanks to the unevenness of Chinese business, the Internet of Everything has become particularly valuable in this era, and its direction is clear. As Knight said in describing the sport of running:
Running is not only painful, risky, but also rewarding and completely insecure. When running around an oval track or road, there is no real destination at all, at least nothing that can fully justify an individual's efforts. Running is the action itself the destination, not only because there is no finish line, but also because you can define the finish line yourself. Whatever pleasure or gain you derive from running, you have to unearth them. It all depends on how you design it and how you embrace it.
The adventures of the business world seem to be similar to running – destinations without ends that need to move forward to the beat of the times. On November 11, 200 years ago, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky became the second child in a family of doctors in Russia, who was not wealthy. Today, the name "Dostoevsky" has become a mountain towering high in the history of human literature.
In Dostoevsky's later works, a motif that is difficult to get out of is how humans deal with the relationship between "poetry and the distant" and the "present self".
This is like today's double 11, we are facing the current sales pressure and the future trend of the times, how to find the best balance between the two. After experiencing the reckless stage, to the double 11 that gathers the background colors of "business", "technology" and "humanities" today, where has it changed?
Dostoevsky's understanding is that spiritual maturity is achieved through blindness, loss, and suffering.