Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group
The author | Huang Qingchun
The title image | Visual China
Many of the demolitions and reconstructions occur silently.
From January 1, 2022 to January 3, 2022, the strategic interconnection and cooperation between Kuaishou and Meituan has entered the landing stage - whether it is the "value-added food group, the old iron enjoys the welfare" New Year group purchase package, or the "New Year's Good Food" celebrity store visit package has been launched on the Kuaishou Meituan Mini Program. In this "marriage", Kuaishou is responsible for opening up scene marketing through content diversion, while Meituan undertakes services and is responsible for online transactions and offline performance.
On the surface, this seems to be a win-win alliance - Kuaishou has old iron, and Meituan has infrastructure. Some insiders analyzed to Tiger Sniff, "Kuaishou has a broad market increase in local life, just lack of the back end of the performance of the US group, in theory, the two complement each other, and Kuaishou can also save a lot of local life business trial and error costs." ”
However, on the same day (December 27), Kuaishou's stock price still fell by 4.43%, and an analyst friend told Tiger Sniff that the two sides only temporarily formed an "offensive and defensive alliance", "The so-called 'one-stop' consumption link of the American Fast Alliance is not you have me, I have you, but rely on the efficiency of their respective resources to fight against the expansion of Douyin's local life, this cooperation will not be particularly deep, so it is not stable." ”
Another media person also supports the views of the above analysts, and is not optimistic about the cooperation between Meituan and Kuaishou, "From the perspective of product user portraits alone, Dianping relies on the support of one or two lines, while Kuaishou users sink to the third and fourth lines, which is obviously insufficient for public reviews - after all, takeaway group buying is more in the first and second line scenarios, and the third and fourth line traffic conversion is limited (consumption habits, business resource limitations). The reason why douyin local life can run is because users are expanding from the first and second lines to the third and fourth lines, and Kuaishou has not yet completed the mental occupation of the first and second lines. ”
Same trench, two "careerists"
Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing are Fellow Longyan and are also two "outliers" who broke through from under the BAT barrier.
Frankly speaking, the United States has Google/Facebook/Amazon, China has bred BATJ, the United States has Uber/Apple, China has killed Didi and Huawei, JD.com grew up in the shadow of Tencent, didi and Millet grew up in new areas, but they only filled the blank of the old territory of the BAT era, and did not have the ability to rewrite the map. The Difference between Meituan and ByteDance, Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing are unwilling to follow the old "order" from the bottom of their hearts and obey the existing pattern, leaving a strong mark in the history of China's mobile Internet.
"Venture capital queen" Xu Xin once put forward a "super platform" theory: "In the era of mobile Internet, there is no regional boss, all competition is a national battle, all business is concentrated on mobile APP, in such a new era, Internet companies either become bigger and become super platforms, or out." ”
Reviewing the expansion trajectory of Meituan: from deeply cultivating the catering business to various life services such as wine tourism, travel, entertainment, and beauty industry, it has been extended borderlessly again and again, covering multiple scenarios such as going to the store, going home, traveling, and traveling. The more services it links, the more it moves towards the super platform — Meituan's 2021Q3 earnings report shows that it had 670 million trading users and 8.3 million active merchants in the 12 months ended September 30.
Before founding Meituan, Wang Xing's entrepreneurial experience was not a success, and the 10 projects he tried ended in failure. In the school, after the meal was folded, he summed up the famous "four vertical and three horizontal" theory, accurately deduced the intertwining point of future entrepreneurial opportunities in the mobile Internet and business, so he did not turn his head back into the hundred regiments war - in the HUNDRED regiments war in which BAT was heavily guarded and all kinds of funds were frantically poured in, he threw off the handle net and the nest group, escaped the encirclement and suppression of Ali Juhua, survived Baidu glutinous rice, merged with public comments, and laughed to the end.
Some Meituan insiders have exposed to the media: Wang Xing has a strong personality and great ambitions, and will never be willing to become a vassal of anyone, but hopes to make Meituan no less than Alibaba's enterprise, which determines that Meituan and others are always enemies and friends.
Originally, meituan aimed at service, Ali did consumption, but the mobile Internet derived more and more new services, catering as a high-frequency category to build the infrastructure solid, users can do more things on it and even form a "dive" on consumption, so the two in the local life launched a comprehensive war - word of mouth vs public reviews, hungry vs Meituan takeaway, Taobao tickets VS cat's eye, Hema fresh vs small elephant fresh, hummingbird that is matched with VS Meituan delivery.
Today's ByteDance also hides an ambition to become a super platform.
In the past nine years, Zhang Yiming has led ByteDance to crash into the forbidden hunting places of Ali and Tencent, and attacked the city under the strategy of "rapid business expansion, rapid investment of resource trial and error, and rapid adjustment". The young giant has stood in the center of the stage for too long, and the expansion has become borderless - it has extended its tentacles to various fields such as medical care, education, corporate services, social networking, consumption, real estate, etc., and even if it is blocked by heavy fire from other giants, it still inadvertently rewrites the information and short video layout, giving birth to a national entertainment platform.
Frankly speaking, zhang Yiming's byteDance product capabilities are beyond doubt, a large factory middle-level manager is full of praise for Zhang Yiming, in his view, ByteDance has been making great progress in recent years, "aggressive" is too strong, "sometimes the risk of business expansion is not only in the business itself but also in the jianghu order, as a representative of the new power of the Internet, Zhang Yiming single-handedly built a set of traffic systems in the BAT jungle." ”
In fact, ByteDance's marching route has long advanced into local life, and its earliest layout is to be pulled back to 2018.
At that time, with the establishment of the Douyin POI (Point of Interest) team, the LBS life service function had been launched (the Douyin enterprise account can attach the store location when publishing the video, and use this positioning to add the POI detail page to show products, coupons, store activities, etc.). According to the "Deep Net", at that time, ByteDance set the local life strategy level as "P0" after high-level discussion, and compared with meituan Dianping.
After the second half of 2019, ByteDance's senior management reorganized its business goals, and the commercialization department tried to expand local businesses through "talent visiting stores", but in the end, the low ROI led to a decline in the number of visiting stores. The store visit business, which was highly anticipated, did not meet expectations, and ByteDance quickly withdrew from 22 cities, retaining only important "strongholds" such as Beijing and Shanghai.
Even so, ByteDance is still not dead hearted - in December 2020, Later Last Reported that ByteDance's commercialization department set up a "local direct business center" to expand its local life business, and about 10,000 employees were adjusted to the center in January 2021 to conduct customer mining around the local life business.
According to iResearch data, the size of China's local life service market will be 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020, and this figure will grow to 35.3 trillion yuan by 2025, which is indeed a good track of "big water and big fish".
The turning point occurred in March 2021, Douyin group buying from the dark line task to the card table, providing two consumption modes of in-store verification and logistics distribution, blue V and food masters can sell major chain brand group purchase coupons in the live broadcast room; in November, after the launch of the Darento visiting the store activity, the Douyin group buying business tentacles reached out to leisure and entertainment, tourism and accommodation.
Douyin's local life is fierce and determined, in the narrative inertia of traffic leading the tide, ByteDance has torn a hole between Meituan and Ali, and the local life track is also full of male hormones under the new (Douyin, Kuaishou) old (Meituan, Ali) players.
According to Photon Planet, as of the end of November 2021, the GMV of Douyin's local business reached 10 billion yuan, although it is difficult to complete the 20 billion target set at the beginning of the year, but Douyin's expectations for local life business are still very high, "The target set for 2022 is 40 billion yuan." ”
This is also doomed that Douyin and Meituan will inevitably go against each other - even if meituan and douyin are still in the same trench in 2020 (in September 2020, meituan and douyin jointly launched the "Meituan super live broadcast special" activity), but at that time, the two companies had their own concerns.
On the one hand, while Douyin and Meituan cooperate, they continue to expand on the local life track, which not only effectively imitates the layout of the Meituan to the hotel and tourism section, but also links users and merchants to the same city recommendation plate iteration - not only attaching group purchase links to the merchant page, but also zoning against the benchmark public reviews. Even, in July 2021, the takeaway business should also be tested to launch the "heartbeat takeaway", forming a chain brand promotion tide from point to line, which undoubtedly makes the US group feel a stronger sense of urgency than the Ali attack.
"The essence of the content form of Douyin is to plant grass, and local life is a touch of planting grass in the store, and it can produce the accumulation of customer reviews, which is indeed completely in conflict with public reviews." Byte as a whole gives me the feeling of being ambitious, wanting to eat everything and looking more terrifying than Ali. An industry insider said to Tiger Sniff.
On the other hand, Xu Xin previously studied the habits of a new generation of consumers and put forward three observations: getting lazier, more and more homely, and shorter and shorter attention. Meituan wants to fight the encroachment of Douyin on local life, and can only break through from the demand side - whether it is ordering food, movies, tourism, entertainment, and social networking, it has an intrinsic connection, and it needs to be connected by new marketing methods to complete the traffic linkage between different scenes.
Screenshot of the Dianping page
According to statistics, meituan tried nearly 100 kinds of "new ways of life" service categories in 2020, including unmanned restaurants, 360 immersive script killing, illustration handicrafts, 2-hour nucleic acid quick test, pet personal training weight loss class, hair transplantation, shared recording studio, etc.; in August 2021, it was also rumored that meituan App internal testing a social sharing function "rice circle".
In this regard, a product manager said to Tiger Sniff:
"Not only is the US group doing live broadcasts and short videos (one store and one broadcast), even the public reviews have become 'four different', the main entrance has both food planting, recommendation, raiders and talents to visit the store, pets, fitness, movies, brush up the content is very 'rough', plus everyone's cognition of it is still stuck in the tool attribute, but it will feel messy and destroy the use experience."
Why did Wang Xing set his sights on Kuaishou?
After the parting of the US group and Douyin, Kuaishou undoubtedly became the best ally of the united front.
On the one hand, the penetration of vibrato into local life is fast in the eyes and anxious in the heart. Time to pull back to 2019, Kuaishou has upgraded the business account and launched the local life service function; in July 2020, Kuaishou officially launched the local life portal; in May 2021, the Kuaishou "same city" entrance was fully opened, and the "same city" page added "preferential group purchase" and "list recommendation" sections; in June, the "Eat, Drink and Have Fun in Kuaishou" WeChat Mini Program was launched - the acceleration of the business promotion rhythm shows the desire of the entire Kuaishou ecology for local life.
Secondly, from 2018 to 2021, the overlap of Douyin and Kuaishou users climbed from 10.3% to 60%, and the rate has been rising continuously. To make matters worse, as mobile traffic growth peaked, douyin soared from 400 million to 600 million, while Kuaishou's Q2021Q2 DAU decreased by 20 million compared to Q1 and fell to 293 million.
Source: Guosheng Securities Research Institute
The corresponding live e-commerce has also been affected, Kuaishou will adjust the 2021 e-commerce GMV from 750 billion to 650 billion yuan, while Douyin will set the GMV at 1,000 billion yuan, and there are even rumors that Douyin has reached the trillion target at the end of November 2021. Therefore, under the tearing of the stock price in the secondary market, Kuaishou can only reduce costs and increase efficiency while increasing the refined operation of existing traffic.
An industry insider said when analyzing the reasons why Kuaishou is more suitable for cooperation with Meituan:
"Douyin only has a traffic field, for users to deliver value only content and lack of customer value, will only want more and more 'put the meat in the pot'; Kuaishou human dimension, each Kuaishou big V can also be a public comment big V, and about the traffic outflow, Kuaishou is more generous than Douyin - because the Kuaishou traffic private domain attribute is stronger, he does not mind your outflow outside the guide, the user is because the Kuaishou station anchor to go."
As for Meituan, the advantages accumulated by Dianping in the graphic era are gradually deconstructed by the short video era. As early as 2017, Dianping has begun to try to use short video elements to transform into a content platform, helplessly, the cognitive solidification of the Dianping scene, users will only open it when they need it, so the content is always its weakness, and meituan urgently needs to enrich its own content ecology.
Secondly, whether it is meituan preferred, meituan buying vegetables or meituan flash buying are all grabbing traffic in the sinking market, coupled with the 2021 anti-monopoly investigation, rider social security and other events on cash flow, meituan must find a huge pool of traffic to alleviate growth anxiety.
Drafting: Inside the surface of the table
According to the latest "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of June 2021, the scale of short video users in China was 888 million, an increase of 14.4 million over December 2020, accounting for 87.8% of the total netizens. Short video live broadcasting platforms represented by Douyin and Kuaishou are becoming the mainstream content consumption model, and bringing new demand scenarios and growth possibilities to the local life service industry.
Among them, more than 140 million users on Kuaishou visit the operator's homepage every day, and there are rich people, content and scenarios in this abundant traffic ecology, coupled with the trust mechanism and high repurchase rate of private domain traffic, which has great potential in the local life track. No wonder, Zhang Chuan, president of the Meituan Store Business Group, is willing to take dozens of people to Haikou to cooperate in the "Kuaishou E-commerce Ecology Year-end Summit".
However, with the deepening of this "marriage", Kuaishou is likely to become the "pipeline" of the US group - although Kuaishou can stimulate more consumer demand through content and help the US group obtain new customer traffic, the US group has always controlled the business and transaction settlement discourse, the channel role played by Kuaishou lacks bargaining power, and in the long run, Kuaishou will become the traffic entrance of the US group, and this cooperation is more like Kuaishou taking short video dividends to stabilize the advantages of the US group.
"I think that no matter who the US group cooperates with is the beneficiary, it tried hundreds of scenes and finally found that it is the advantages of the catering vertical class that are feeding back, Wang Xing, I think the ambition and pattern may be Zhang Yiming is not the same, but Cheng Yixiao can't catch it." A friend joked.
Moreover, an industry insider pointed out to the "Deep Net" that Jitter quickly tried to do a transaction closed loop, first to verify whether this realization path can really run through, in fact, the transaction closed loop is very difficult to achieve, because the user stay time under the same city label is very short. "The advantage of the short video platform is that the content before confirming the service transaction is planted, but it is still unknown whether the user will directly click to buy or go to the store to consume."
It must be admitted that since the second half of 2021, Douyin has been fierce in its offensive against local life, and has leveraged many well-known brand chain stores, such as Wangshunge Fish Head Bubble Cake, Jubaoyuan, Huluwa, Subway, Spicy Shangge Spicy Pot, Jingge, etc. Some merchants even give preferential prices than public comment group purchases for the solicitation of customers, and it is not uncommon for copywriting such as "99 yuan four plates of meat" and "20 full per capita". As for the transaction, for example, the Subway group purchase package, its 49.9 yuan double package has only been traded 1.6w in the "Eat, Drink and Have Fun 49 Cities" live broadcast room (data source from Blue Hole Commercial).
Image source: Alphabet list
However, most of the Douyin group needs to be booked in advance, which is not as convenient as the public reviews. A Douyin restaurant partner told Tiger Sniff, "Many of the store consumption of Douyin are lower than the price of Dianping, these people are a wave of traffic, there are few repeat customers, and the customer flow of these recognized chain brands can be completely covered by Dianping." ”
Another media friend also said to Tiger Sniff:
"It is obvious that the push of douyin in the second half of the year is too strong, although for some second-tier cities, the coverage is rapid, and the growth rate once exceeds the public reviews." But too many food exploration shops, store recommendation content poured out at once, netizens were diverted to the offline to find that the package was affordable and discounted, and even the consumption experience was not as good as expected, they would not buy a second time, which is why some Douyin exploration shop bloggers ' overturned' the reason. ”
Moreover, the high-pitched progress of Douyin group buying has put some Douyin catering partners in a dilemma. "Blue Hole Business" wrote in related articles that the low-priced package on Douyin is sold at a loss, and consumers think that the wool of Douyin is actually losing money. "The first thing to talk about group buying is to hit the price, and the price is so low, the amount of customer orders, the consumption of ingredients, and the workload have all come up, but the total flow has dropped a lot."
In view of this, some brand merchants who cooperate with Meituan and Douyin at the same time will use Douyin as a "supplement" to public reviews.
A person close to Ali told "Blue Hole Business" that "earlier, Ali also tried traffic play. After the acquisition of Ele.me, Ele.me merged with word-of-mouth, and then proposed a local life platform with Ant Financial as the carrier, but the results proved that simple traffic play could not pry local life. ”
At the end of the day, local life is a complex service system from supply to fulfillment. Today, Douyin has capital and traffic, but it lacks the most important set of underlying capillary service networks.