Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Photon Planet, author 丨 Wu Xianzhi, editor 丨 Wang Pan
Eight years later, when it was finally Jingdong's turn, the red envelope had swelled to 1.5 billion.
It should be pointed out here that JD.com has prepared cash red envelopes and goods worth 1.5 billion yuan for it, and although it was reported on January 18 that the Spring Festival Gala welfare data has been notarized, the specific ratio of money to goods is unknown.
Last year, Pinduoduo won the 2021 sponsorship, but because of negative public opinion, it was temporarily changed to Douyin, so Jingdong is the second e-commerce platform to take over the baton after Taobao won the Spring Festival Gala red envelope in 2018. During this period, neither Baidu, Kuaishou nor Douyin reproduced the grand situation of "paradigm innovation" like WeChat Pay and Alipay in the past.
Users have gradually lost their sense of the red envelopes that have not changed every year, and it is difficult for JD.com's activity process to jump out of the previous years. The launch of in-kind sponsorship by the e-commerce platform is actually to think of three ways to eat an event: activate platform transactions, activate the logistics system, and of course, there are plans to destock.
Over the years, the Spring Festival Gala is still the Spring Festival Gala, and it is still the peak of annual traffic and social consumption. However, it is increasingly difficult for the giants of the flowing water to give users a refreshing "red packet".
In recent years, the Spring Festival red envelopes and the festival promotion are becoming more and more similar, and Jingdong has not jumped out of the homogenization of previous years, and intends to break the growth bottleneck through the Spring Festival Gala red envelope counterattack seems to be somewhat wishful thinking.
No more new tricks
In the past six Spring Festival Gala red envelopes, only three new traditions have been formed, namely WeChat red envelope covers, Alipay Collection Wufu and cash red envelopes from Various Internet giants.
In 2018, the cooperation between Taobao and the Spring Festival Gala was properly controlled in rhythm, and the unprecedented traffic and transaction volume finally "played" the system, and even the technical leader of the Taobao Spring Festival Gala project left a sigh of "we really don't know anything about the power of the Spring Festival Gala".
In the following three years, Baidu, Kuaishou and Douyin successively won the Spring Festival Gala red envelope cooperation, and the daily activities of the three companies on the day before New Year's Day of that year were 161 million, 300 million and 600 million, and the peak during the Spring Festival reached 300 million, 500 million and 700 million respectively. In addition to the traffic brought by the Spring Festival Gala to Kuaishou and Douyin, the more important value is to quickly mature the new business - e-commerce. As for what Baidu has gained, it is a mystery.
Winning the Spring Festival Gala cooperation is not a skill, but it is the real skill to excavate and make good use of the value of the Spring Festival Gala. An observer believes that if the event itself is not innovative in mode, then the Spring Festival Gala red envelope is roughly equivalent to a shopping subsidy.
In eight years, the WeChat red envelope cover from individuals to enterprises, and then to some of today's user customization, relying on manufacturing scarcity and personalization, almost every year can be four or two thousand pounds, to obtain huge traffic. The same is true of the Alipay Five Blessings campaign, where brands get efficient links and exposures in the process of competing to get "Dedication Blessings", even if the amount of red envelopes is only a few yuan in the end.
Of the 7 red envelope cooperation in the past 8 years, only the "new tradition" created by WeChat Pay and Alipay, because the fun can continue to attract users, and the rest of the platforms can only increase the amount of red envelopes to get attention. It is reported that this year's Kuaishou red envelopes reached 2.2 billion, Douyin "New Year Goods Festival" 1 billion, Baidu "Good Luck China Year" 2.2 billion - almost all through e-commerce to complete the conversion.
This year, it is Jingdong's turn, and it is difficult to play any more flowers.
There is no doubt that JD.com's primary task is to obtain traffic through the Cooperation of the Spring Festival Gala and convert it into users. As of 2021Q3, the number of annual active users of JD.com was 552 million, compared with 867 million in Pinduoduo and 863 million in Alibaba in the same period.
Photon Planet combed through the last seven quarters based on public data, and the annual net increase in users can be found that the new users of Jingdong have grown slowly among the three heads.
As we all know, the sinking market is the main channel for Maopin to obtain new users in recent years, and JD.com is no exception.
In September 2019, JD.com, which is facing the sinking market, was upgraded to "Jingxi", when the WeChat Mini Program was once placed on high hopes. Since jingxi's independent operation, JD.com's single-quarter net increase in users has peaked at 32.1 million in 2021Q2, and in the past seven quarters, most of the time the net increase in users has a big gap with Maopin.
Jingdong's shopping (Jingxi) and social e-commerce (Dongxiaodian) have not successfully established advantages in the sinking market, and if you compare the increase brought by Taote for the Ali retail system, it is more in stark contrast: in the first three quarters of 2021, Jingdong has accumulated 80.1 million new users, and Ali's e-commerce business has added 84 million users.
The difference between the two in the user base is 300 million, and the net increase in the number of users has also been widened by 4 million. Jingdong is unwilling to accept the result of the failure of the sinking market, and sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala can be regarded as its "second sinking".
What is puzzling is that in early January, Jingdong announced that it had won the Spring Festival Gala red envelope less than ten days before announcing that its social e-commerce platform "Dongxiaodian" would stop operating, which seemed to indicate that even if Jingdong wanted to rely on social power, in addition to WeChat, what else could it rely on?
Looking back not long ago, Tencent used JD.com shares to share dividends, which can only be said that Tencent is very angry.
It is worth playing that after the closure of The East Small Shop, the translation policy will be launched in conjunction with Fenxiang, and the entire social e-commerce business will be transferred to the latter. The Fenxiang platform is relatively special, and the relationship with JD.com is imminent, and many reports have questioned the compliance of its business model.
The Spring Festival red envelope was greatly promoted
"Either like WeChat red envelope shake and Taobao, the activities are carried out synchronously with the Spring Festival Gala, and interact organically; or just like the fast shake, the Spring Festival Gala is moved to new media such as short videos and live broadcasts for transformation."
An analyst believes that undertaking and digesting the peak of the Spring Festival Gala traffic is the most critical part of the Spring Festival Gala red envelope activities in previous years, "if there is no follow-up scene to complete the transformation, then it is likely to repeat the mistakes of Baidu." He believes that although JD.com does not lack the scene of final realization, its weak content capabilities may face difficulties in retention.
The lesson is that in 2019, Baidu's "Good Luck China Year" brought 200 million daily active peaks with 1 billion yuan in Chinese New Year's Eve, and only 2% of the retention was exchanged for 5 days later. In the following years, Baidu has been trying to create a "good luck Chinese year" to form a Spring Festival IP that can compete with Alipay's "five blessings", but the effect is not good.
A person close to Baidu told Photon Planet that the internal evaluation of Baidu App in the previous two years was a bit too optimistic. "The purpose of the activity is to divert traffic for Baidu App, which is not as good as WeChat and Taobao, coupled with complicated rules and high withdrawal thresholds, the market feedback effect is not good."
We see that after Jingdong wins the cooperation, it mainly emphasizes its own advantages, such as the immediacy of logistics, the reliability of quality, and the closed loop of e-commerce and payment, but ignores a problem: even if users download the App to participate in activities, JD.com itself lacks other attractive functions to enhance interest.
A merchant believes that "perhaps JD.com hopes to rely on the experience of 'good things' to move consumers, after all, JD.com can deliver goods to users on the first day of the New Year." ”
In addition to the advantages of timeliness, in recent years, under the trend of e-commerce content and gamification, cat and dog fights have successively embarked on the road of competing for user time.
In terms of content, on October 29 last year, Jingdong updated the homepage "Discovery" channel to "Shopping", mainly including treasure cheats, big-name markets, grass planting for the whole people, good things, digital and other vertical categories, the core of which is mainly recommended graphics, short video content and keywords as the core of the "tribe".
It's hard to say how much JD and other platforms can take advantage of the UI, some merchants believe that JD.com found that the page lacks attractive design, and the platform does not have community attributes. We noticed that there were very few likes and comments under the recommendation column, and the average number of members of only eight "tribes" was about 6,000, and their activity was obviously not comparable to that of cat fights.
Another noteworthy detail is that JD.com has also begun to launch a large number of casual and cultivation games to improve the fun of the platform.
At present, the seven mini-games that have been launched on the Taobao App have opened up to each other and formed a unified "Taobao Gold Coin" with the nature of game tokens. The game category includes four categories: chess and card, cultivation, social, and leisure. Different from Taobao, Pinduoduo's casual game mainly plays a "cool" word, because the function of "spelling" is interesting, so even if they do not open up to each other, they can still feed e-commerce.
In comparison, the games on the JD App are a bit rough. The "interactive game" interface includes 12 games, although there are a lot of them, but they are not as functional as Taobao, but also because of the lack of community and lead to poor interactivity, it seems to be for the sake of making games for the sake of making games.
Due to the lack of content and interest, there are views that JD.com can only make a fuss about the shopping experience.
According to the process that has been disclosed recently, the activity arrangement includes three stages and two forms. The first stage is Chinese New Year's Eve that night, log on to the JD App to follow the host's password to shake and participate in the "Drumming welcome" activity, the main task of this stage is to obtain customers.
The second part is to continue to participate in the "DrumMing welcome" to receive benefits from thereafter until the Lantern Festival, and the purpose of this stage is to maintain and cultivate user habits. The third part is that on the day of the Lantern Festival, JD.com distributes a round of gifts to achieve transformation.
The shadow of the shopping festival can be seen from the process: the first and last two segments are similar to the second sale; the interactive game in the middle maintains the heat. No wonder some people think that the Spring Festival Gala red envelope activities have become more and more promoted for many years.
epilogue
"All the staff of CCTV wish you a happy family, all the best, and a happy Spring Festival."
In 1983, Zhao Zhongxiang said the first line of the Spring Festival Gala nearly 40 years ago, and no matter how the media changed in the process, watching the Spring Festival Gala almost became a habit of the Chinese people to celebrate the Spring Festival. We have witnessed countless brands going to glory because of their sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala, and also witnessed the form of cooperation between brands and the Spring Festival Gala from the simple brand promotion to content implantation in the past to creating a new "paradigm" for the festival.
In 2015, the Internet held hands for the first time at the Spring Festival Gala, and the success of WeChat Pay was to use social networking to make the traditional Chinese people send red envelopes online, thus opening up a private domain. Later, Alipay relied on Ji Wufu, although it could not be compared with the influence of WeChat red envelopes, but at least it has become an IP before the holiday.
Subsequently, Baidu intended to use the Spring Festival Gala to obtain traffic, and finally did not solve the retention problem for various reasons. In contrast, douyin and kuaishou have laid the foundation for their own commercialization from the Spring Festival Gala due to the new media forms of short video and live broadcasting, coupled with interactive games.
It is easy to find that the Internet giants have gradually lost their paradigm innovation for the Spring Festival Gala and are moving towards the "involution" similar to shopping festivals.
Think of e-commerce ten years ago, when the big factory red envelopes were crisp, the discount was also large, and now the pre-sale is divided into two batches, and the "liver" game is also available. Looking at the Spring Festival Gala red envelopes in recent years, the big factories have increased the threshold for obtaining benefits through check-in, games, and extended cycles, can't they be as simple and rude as the e-commerce promotion of that year?
Anyway, this year at JD.com, we don't see any signs of improvement.