Text/Lu Shiming
Edit/Gale
As an upstream industry for weddings, wedding photography now has an overall market size of about 60 billion. Weddings, an ancient industry with a history of thousands of years, are also regarded as the most difficult industry for the Internet to penetrate.
The industry is chaotic, and the business routine runs through the entire process, which makes the overall competitiveness of the wedding photography industry continue to decline. At the same time, this is also a very typical "big and scattered" market, in the domestic development of thirty years, there is still no particularly prominent brand, and no one can stand up through integration and mergers and acquisitions, the cake is bigger.
Of course, there are also brands that have tried, such as Platinum Jue Travel, which is prominent in the market with brainwashing advertising. Unfortunately, this form of change has not improved the status quo of the industry. After all, as a market that focuses on offline services, the penetration ability of the Internet is too limited.
For the demand for weddings, in most cases, the couple will choose the "acquaintance business". For most people, good is once, bad is also once, and there is almost no repurchase. Therefore, it is also difficult for related enterprises in the wedding industry to do user operations. Relying on word of mouth and relying on the introduction of acquaintances has become the basic status quo of the industry.
In the past thirty years of China's Internet, this 60 billion just-needed market has become a barbaric wasteland that is difficult to penetrate.
Chaos under the lens
When it comes to wedding photography, many people may think of "huge profits".
The fact is also that in the wedding photography industry, production and photography are not separated, and the overall fee has been inherited for a long time, which has indeed bred a lot of industry chaos. Especially in some small and medium-sized wedding photography companies, in addition to their own profitable projects, some hidden consumption also accounts for the majority of profits.
【Source: Meituan Mrs. Kim Wedding Photography】
"For example, the choice of clothing, many photo studios will be divided into free area, mark-up area, VIP area, etc., of which the free area clothing style is small, poor quality, other areas of clothing are good-looking, but often not in the package, customers want to shoot, must add money." For example, many wedding photography agencies do not provide shooting negatives (or only partially), only provide a small number of retouching films, want to shoot all the negatives or more retouchings, and have to add extra money and so on. A newlywed who has just taken wedding photos recently told Zinc Finance.
In addition, Zinc Finance learned that some photo studios will deliberately add a little flaw when taking photos in the early stage, and use consumers' fear of ridicule to induce consumers to choose a better photographer, because the price of different levels of photographers is different, the higher the level, the better the technology, and the higher the price. This is undoubtedly a disguised increase in consumption.
In the shooting stage, most of the disposable items such as ampoules and eyelashes used by newcomers are not allowed to bring their own, which is equivalent to forcing consumers to buy high-priced products in the studio. If it is a location shooting, it is a good time for the studio to take wool.
The newcomer said: "When I went out to shoot, everything was taken to the car, and the boss said that he would have to pay an additional 500 a day for the car in the store. After arriving at the scenic spot, we also have to pay for the tickets, as well as lunch at noon, and the takeaway of photographers and makeup artists is also ordered by us. ”
However, even after the shooting session is completed, the routine of the studio is not over.
In the film selection stage, the merchant will increase many secondary sales. If you want to take away the original negatives, you have to add money, and if you want to thicken the album, you have to add money. If you are not satisfied with the photos and want to refine them, you still have to add money. Under normal circumstances, newcomers will take hundreds of photos, and finally 90% of people will buy negatives and photo albums, and it is not uncommon for the later selection of films to be more expensive than the package.
Such routines, although the achievement of the wedding photography building "huge profits", but the entire industry competitiveness.
As an industry with a low threshold, the wedding photography market has evolved over the past thirty years, and now there are hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized photo studios in China, and the market has formed an extremely fragmented pattern. In such a pattern, marriage photography is a highly regional industry, and newcomers are more inclined to the principle of proximity.
Such market characteristics have supported a large number of small and medium-sized wedding photography buildings, but they have also hindered the integration and mergers and acquisitions of the market.
Travel photography is also full of routines
Marriage is a major event in life, you need to prepare in advance, and many consumers pay special attention to wedding photo shooting, for them, to find the right wedding photography store, often need to spend a certain amount of time and energy.
Interestingly, although wedding dresses are a multi-billion market, there are very few brands that can be named in this market.
Due to the strong regionality of traditional photo studios and the serious homogenization, this model has been difficult to meet the needs of the current consumption upgrade of young people. Faced with the bottleneck of industrial development, how to make wedding photos more personalized, more convenient and break through geographical restrictions in an innovative form has become the entry point for industry practitioners to break the bottleneck, and the only way for traditional enterprises to survive.
In the context of the Internet, travel brands such as Platinum Travel Photography have taken the lead in taking this step. The wedding travel photography created by Bojue Travel Photography combines traditional wedding photography with travel marriage, and completes the transformation and upgrading from traditional wedding photography to "Internet + wedding photos" through a large number of online and ladder media marketing.
【Source: Platinum Jue Travel Auction Publicity Advertisement】
In fact, travel photography does meet the individual needs of consumers to a certain extent. Tencent Insight data shows that among the married people, the proportion of post-90s and post-95s has exceeded half, and they are more willing to show their real and casual selves, and do not want to enter the traditional studio, 80% of the post-95s have chosen "travel photography" and "street photography".
However, the change in form did not eliminate the "routine", and even the routine of travel photography was more deceptive than that of the traditional studio.
On the black cat complaint website, a netizen directly said: "Platinum Jue Travel Photography is suspected of false publicity and defrauding consumers. ”
It is understood that the netizen took the wedding photo service of The Earl Travel with a deposit of 1,000 yuan on Taobao in July 2021, and went to the Dalian branch of the Platinum Jue Hotel on October 1, 2021 to take wedding photos, with a package content of 5726 yuan. According to the content of the contract, it includes shooting while walking, professional photographers, makeup artists, star experience classes and so on.
But on the day of the shooting, the netizens were connected with a photographer of about 20 years old and an assistant who seemed to be underage. The so-called star experience class was only five minutes long and only taught a neck extension and a smile. In addition, the netizens chose the scene the day before including the pigeons in St. Mark's Square, but because the platinum tour failed to arrange the itinerary, it was already evening when they arrived at the beach, and they could not shoot well.
After not shooting the favorite scene, the platinum tour shooter said that it was made up for by the interior, but compared to the exterior, the cost of the interior scene was very low, and the day was filmed until the early morning. At the same time, during the shooting, a series of problems such as single action, unprofessional photographers, and poor service attitude caused great dissatisfaction among netizens.
However, the matter did not end, to the next day's film selection link, the staff in charge of film selection of Platinum Jue Travel took out several refined pictures and the original film for comparison, and said that there is a professional team, there are special people responsible for color grading, portraits, background... After being induced, netizens added 31 photos on the basis of the original package, and the final contract amount was 9226 yuan.
After a long wait, the photo finally reached the hands of netizens after refining, but he said: "The texture is rough, the clothes are obviously old clothes, the skin color of the characters is dull, and they can't bear to look at it directly." Directly exposed the problem of their lack of professional level, the photos are out of shape, there is no beauty. The services are totally out of their price point..."
【Source: Black Cat Complaint】
Known as a model of industrial upgrading, Platinum Jue Travel Photography failed to complete the integration and mergers and acquisitions of the industry, but compared with the traditional studio, it fell deeper and deeper in the "routine".
In fact, not only the wedding photography market, there are many companies in the entire wedding industry that are trying to solve industry problems with Internet thinking, but most of them focus on C-end users, and B-end enterprises, at present, are less famous for wedding records, Taopai Pai and so on.
There will be such a phenomenon, the fundamental reason is that the implementation of industry services is still heavily dependent on people, dependent on offline, the Internet can play more only the "tool value".
Difficult to integrate markets
Since the wedding photography market entered the mainland in the 1990s, after thirty years of evolution, it has formed a large market size.
According to the data of Tianyancha, in 2021, there are about 2.3 million photography-related enterprises in China that are in business, existing, moving in and out.
Such a "popular" market, but from 2017, the growth rate of the entire market size is far less than before, and it is expected to be 64 billion yuan by 2023, which is also due to the growth of customer unit prices, and in essence, the source of customers has been reduced.
According to the Civil Affairs Bureau, the marriage rate dropped to 5.8% in 2020, the lowest value in 40 years. In the first three quarters of 2021, 5.886 million pairs were married in China, down 1.245 million pairs or 17.5% from the same period in 2019.
【Source: Prospective Industry Research Institute】
"Integration" as a means to enhance the competitiveness of the industry, but the impact on the industry is not large.
On the one hand, wedding photography is an extremely fragmented market. There are tens of thousands of marriage photography industry practitioners in each city, and there are a large number of new and dead wedding photography companies every year, which are generally concentrated in the medium-sized scale development stage and the small growth stage.
The brand chain business model and professional photo studios are the market leaders, with advantages such as brand and capital, while ordinary photo studios mainly use low-cost advantages to compete, and small photography studios focus on service advantages and differentiation.
Large-scale photo studios are more competitive than wedding photography studios and still occupy a major position in the wedding photography industry. However, large-scale photo studios are in a stage of relatively slow development or facing bottlenecks; while wedding photography studios have relatively large changes, indicating that wedding photography studios are showing vitality and greater growth ability.
On the other hand, because the wedding photography itself is a market that focuses on offline services, the thinking of the Internet is difficult to penetrate for a long time, and it will not occur after a rapid expansion through the integration of mergers and acquisitions to form an oligopolistic Internet style.
Before the industry has been completely upgraded, the wedding photography market will continue to maintain the existing pattern for a long time to come.