Editor's Introduction: Tide Play has been quite popular with young people in recent years, and many platforms have also tried to enter the Tide Play market to attract more users to promote subsequent growth. Recently, the "flying window" launched by Little Red Book is its attempt to enter the tide play market. So how well does Little Red Book fit in with the tide play business? The author of this article has expressed his opinion, let's take a look.
In 2013, Xiaohongshu was officially established in Shanghai. Perhaps at that time, no one would have expected that this PGC-based shopping strategy community would subvert the business logic of traditional e-commerce.
In 2016, founder Qu Fang led Xiaohongshu to transform the content traffic platform and began to introduce creators to experience the product "planting grass". Overnight, Xiaohongshu quickly broke through the circle among female consumers, and the traffic became larger and larger.
Public information shows that the current valuation of Xiaohongshu has exceeded 10 billion US dollars, and the number of monthly active users has exceeded 100 million, which is in a leading position in the domestic grass planting community. But it turns out that Xiaohongshu's ambitions do not seem to be more than "planting grass", and after completing the operation of the "planting grass" community, how to "pull grass" is obviously one of the next goals of Xiaohongshu.
According to 36Kr, Xiaohongshu recently launched the trendy top goods sale IP "flying window", which plans to gradually expand from the tide play sale to the entire trend category sales, creating a domestic head trend top goods sales channel.
From food to beauty, from tourism to luxury, Little Red Book is eager to find a way to break the circle, but will tide play be a good choice?
First, the Little Red Book "planting grass" tide to play business
For its own positioning, Xiaohongshu has always taken "young people's lifestyle platform" as its official positioning. It's just that in the eyes of the majority of users, Xiaohongshu is just a simple "planting grass" platform.
As a result, Little Red Book began to want to get rid of the single label of "planting grass". Tide play, become a new piece of cake on the eyes of the Little Red Book.
At the end of 2021, Xiaohongshu opened the RTS (RED TOY SHOW) online tide play exhibition. What is different from the past is that Xiaohongshu is not a simple media channel for sharing the content of tide play, but an online tide play exhibition that integrates tide play display, content sharing and purchase on the site.
Little Red Book will choose to play the market, not without purpose.
In recent years, China's trendy toy market has entered a state of accelerated growth. On the one hand, the improvement of the domestic economic level has raised the expansion of residents' consumption demand; on the other hand, the Z generation group with a stronger willingness to consume new things has begun to become the main force of consumption.
Under the promotion of both parties, the domestic tide play market has expanded rapidly. According to the "2021 China Trend Toy Market Development Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") released by the National Conditions and Big Data Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the scale of the mainland tide play industry has reached 6.3 billion yuan in 2015, and the compound annual growth rate from 2015 to 2020 is as high as 36%. It is estimated that the retail market size of China's entire trendy toys will reach 47.8 billion yuan in 2022.
The "Report" pointed out that trendy toys belong to the "surprise economy", with social attributes such as socialization, collection, entertainment, etc., and are becoming an important carrier for the leisure and exchange of a new generation of young people. It is also based on this logic that the user group structure tends to be younger, and the little red book will choose to cut into the tide play market.
However, the road to the tide play track may not be so easy to walk.
Second, the meaning of "Little Red Book" is not to play in the tide?
In the eyes of Little Red Book, there may also be a certain passive factor in doing tide play.
For a long time, Little Red Book has been running on the road of seeking commercialization. From overseas, or through investment to expand the territory, you can see the efforts made by Xiaohongshu in commercialization. But the truth is that first the news of the IPO in the United States in April 2021, the rumors of the IPO in Hong Kong in October, and then the denial of the listing rumors. Obviously, Xiaohongshu wants to go public, but the weakness of the business model makes it impossible to find the opportunity to ring the bell.
For users, the value of Xiaohongshu is nothing more than to share their own consumption experience and trigger more users' interaction and resonance to obtain post-consumption satisfaction; at the same time, this logic will prompt other users to consume, so as to trigger more sharing and form a logical closed loop of "planting community".
Although the Little Red Book can indeed stimulate consumers' consumption impulses, it is ultimately necessary to spend "real money and silver" consumption, whether it is offline food exploration, or the real experience of skin care products, or the feeling of tourist attractions... In short, Xiaohongshu itself is difficult to trigger the user's consumption action, and it is naturally difficult to monetize this part of the traffic. Xiaohongshu also thought about doing e-commerce. After Double 11 in 2017, Qu Fang said in public: "In theory, users enter the community to see content to purchase, and do not have to jump out of other apps to search is a smoother experience closed loop." Positive competition will surely come, so it is urgent to improve e-commerce capabilities at this stage. ”
Perhaps it was found that there were still shortcomings in the transformation to e-commerce, and since then, the founders and executive teams of Xiaohongshu no longer mentioned e-commerce, but said that Xiaohongshu was a "community". However, it turns out that Xiaohongshu does still have great expectations for e-commerce. Choosing to use tide play as the entry point is the best example. Although in the short term, Tide Play cannot bring too many economic benefits to Xiaohongshu, the online purchase model based on the Xiaohongshu platform is at least the first step on the road of e-commerce.
From another point of view, the little red book selling tide play may also be regarded as a "professional counterpart".
The first is that Xiaohongshu has a huge group of young users. According to iResearch's Xiaohongshu user portrait data, as of October 2020, the proportion of female users of Xiaohongshu is close to 80%; and according to the age distribution of users, Xiaohongshu mainly uses young people under 30 years old and some users aged 31-35.
The young and female-dominated user structure means that Xiaohongshu has a user base that is naturally suitable for community sharing and e-commerce.
If you compare it with the consumer group of Bubble Mart, this advantage will be further magnified. In the bubble mart user research report released by Reed Smith Consulting, it can be seen that the overall user portrait of bubble mart is mainly composed of young people aged 18-35, and female consumers account for 70%-80%.
The highly repetitive user structure of the two seems to explain why Xiaohongshu chose to break into the tide play market.
From the perspective of Maslow's pyramid of needs, when people meet the basic material needs of life, they will pursue more needs at the higher levels of the pyramid such as emotion, social status, and self-realization. Generation Z young consumers will pursue deep emotional needs such as self-pleasure, interest pursuit, personalization, and social identity, which is also the underlying logic of why the tide play culture can rise.
However, the greater the opportunity, the greater the competition. At least in the domestic market, there are many brands and the competition is extremely fierce.
On December 11, 2020, the "first share of the blind box", Bubble Mart, was listed on the Hong Kong stock market, and its market value exceeded HK$100 billion on the first day. But now, the hong kong dollar 105, which is the highest value of the stock price, has been cut.
The main reason is that the market competition has almost reached a white-hot stage. "TOP TOY", a chao play collection store brand under Mingchuang Premium, accelerates the opening of stores nationwide; 52TOYS has opened brand stores in Beijing, Chengdu and other places; station B launches tide play crowdfunding... Suddenly, large factories are gathered and capital is piled up, all of which are hinting that the second half of the tide play battlefield will be extremely intense.
In addition, there is a deep binding between tide play and content IP, and in order to complete long-term growth in the tide play market, content IP is always a hurdle that all players cannot bypass. Taking the world-renowned IP giant Disney as an example, the rich IP content from animation to film and television, and the fan economy based on high-value IP, are important underlying logics for Disney's growth.
Obviously, compared with other late-entry players, Xiaohongshu has sufficient traffic and a strong purchasing power user group, which is also a solid foundation for Xiaohongshu to embark on the tide play market. But on the other hand, Xiaohongshu from the Internet content community lacks precipitation in content IP, manufacturing and production, etc., and compared with players such as Bubble Mart and TOP TOY, Xiaohongshu also has no accumulation of offline channels.
This also means that Xiaohongshu wants to cut from the tide to e-commerce, and this road may also be very difficult.
This article was originally published by @Songuo Finance and is not reproduced without the permission of the author.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.