This article is from the WeChat public account: Yifan Finance (ID: finance_yifan), text |
The epidemic is over, and Meituan is surprised to find that life is still not good.
Taking advantage of the bright spring light, more and more large factories began to pour into the local life track——
Douyin's GMV target for local life this year is 400 billion yuan; Kuaishou Local Life has just opened Hangzhou as the fourth city after Shanghai, Qingdao and Harbin; Xiaohongshu opened the official account of local life "Tujia Potato", and launched group buying and note delivery; Even Alipay has joined the short video live broadcast to directly attack local life services... It is no wonder that Meituan's own data shows that the scale of national catering consumption in the first three days of the "May Day" holiday increased by 92% compared with the same period in 2019; According to data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the total number of domestic tourism trips nationwide was 274 million, recovering to 119.09% of the same period in 2019 on a comparable basis.
And the temptation behind all this has led to the entry of more big factories, and also attacked Meituan's other "self" head-on - no one can beat Meituan's iron army in the takeaway field, but lying flat for many years in public comments, this lucrative cash cow raised by Meituan was bitten hard by Douyin.
Like e-commerce, local life giants also need to maintain their own traffic entrances, and when Meituan's Dianping, like Ali's mother in the past, was attacked by Douyin, where did Meituan go to find its own content moat?
01 Tearing open from "Dianping"
For the short video platform's "planting" to "pulling grass", Meituan should not be surprised. After all, in the latest quarterly earnings report, its core local business revenue growth rate was as high as 17.4%, which is already quite valuable in the "traditional" Internet industry, and it is impossible not to be targeted. The goal of the platform represented by Jitter Kuai is to fight the "pan-e-commerce" industry, including local life.
In the face of the threat of Douyin, Meituan's "shiver" has been truly reflected in the financial report.
Meituan's advertising revenue growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2022 changed from positive to negative from 8.0% in the third quarter to -4.8%, and the gap with commission income further widened to 18%. At the same time, increased marketing expenses and declining operating profits can be confirmed together.
Meituan's 2022 financial report
These data directly point to Meituan's marketing promotion platform Dianping.
In the era of graphics and text, Meituan knew the need for "content planting", or would not have acquired Dianping in 2015. But Dianping's daily activity today is only 15 million, which is no different from when it was acquired 8 years ago, less than 2% of Douyin. It's still used as a search tool by users, not as a "gold mine" — a content community. Dianping's transformation over the years has been difficult for the same reason as many of its former overlords: the business itself is still very profitable.
According to a late LatePost report, the sum of Dianping's commission and advertising revenue in 2021 exceeded 10 billion yuan, and if calculated according to the operating profit margin of 43.3% of the in-store wine and hotel business announced at that time, the operating profit of 3.4 billion yuan is exactly equivalent to Meituan's operating profit in 2021. Compared with the takeaway business, which is often passively out of the circle, Dianping is Meituan's real cash cow.
However, in the face of the migration of mobile Internet traffic, nowadays, the non-essential attributes of local life consumption make contentization more urgent. If Meituan loses its content moat in the short video era, then demand may be intercepted by platforms such as Upstream Jitter or Xiaohongshu.
Screenshot of Meituan APP
Meituan naturally also made some defensive moves commonly used by Internet giants: forming an alliance with Kuaishou at the end of 2021; In February last year, the "Meituan Live Broadcast Assistant" covering almost all business lines such as takeaway, wine hotel, group good goods, and new flash sale was launched; In February this year, it began to test takeaway short videos internally.
So far, Meituan has not launched a product that can block Douyin at the tactical level, nor has it been able to find a reservoir of content traffic in its own product matrix. Meituan has long been the most late-mover internet giant, with little first-mover advantage in all areas of its success, including more recently community group buying and instant retail.
However, although it is a latecomer in the field of video planting, it is difficult to exert its own efficiency advantages, because in the content field, Meituan's best at improving efficiency with action standardization has no use.
02 TikTok bite, Kuaishou is an ally, Xiaohongshu follows
It was Douyin that ate up a chunk of Meituan's local life advertising business. Local life is Douyin's focus this year. According to a late LatePost report, Douyin's GMV target for 2023 is 400 billion yuan. Among them, the in-store and wine hotel business was 290 billion yuan, and the takeaway business was 100 billion yuan.
There is no doubt that becoming a universal entrance is TikTok's ambition. As Zhang Nan said at an internal meeting in 2022, Douyin can be used not only to swipe videos and shop, but also to choose restaurants, buy airline tickets, book hotels and make travel plans. Douyin still adopts the routine of "strength + benchmark customers" in local life: first allow anchors to hang POIs and links on short videos, and representatives such as "big LOGO eats all over China" appeared, and then head brands such as McDonald's, KFC and Luckin were also made into successful cases.
TikTok screenshot
Douyin did steal a lot of business from Meituan in the restaurant market. According to the data of Jiuqian Zhongtai expert minutes, in the first half of 2022, 60%-70% of the budgets of merchants who participated in group buying on Douyin and Meituan were invested in Douyin.
However, Douyin's current local life style is more suitable for KA brands, as long as they can afford to hire a professional team familiar with Douyin's gameplay. This is good news for Meituan, which means that they can continue to maintain the market of small and medium-sized businesses.
Moreover, Douyin is mainly based on urban agents in local life, and in a short period of time, it cannot rely on direct sales like Meituan to handle a series of tasks such as merchant system, rider capacity, BD team, and back-end customer service.
Another short video giant, Kuaishou, has partnered with Meituan at the end of 2021. Although allies in the Internet world are of little significance, the stability-oriented Kuaishou can at least point out the focus of Meituan's defense.
Kuaishou itself is also accelerating the competition for local life, opening Hangzhou as the fourth city in April, after model validation in Shanghai, Qingdao and Harbin in February this year. Hangzhou will learn from the experience of Shanghai in East China and Qingdao, which is also a new first-tier city, which also shows that the verification data of these two cities is good.
In terms of specific playing methods, Kuaishou fully draws on Douyin's experience in the local life field and summarizes its own "three-step" methodology - first select standard industries such as buffets or hot pot; Select several chain brands from among them; Large-scale promotion of the brand's food products that are suitable for video, such as baking and desserts.
Kuaishou screenshot
In general, Kuaishou's playing style still conforms to the general trend of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" in the whole industry, playing steadily and steadily, and paying attention to category ROI. To a certain extent, Kuaishou just wants to eat some local life video oil, subversion is not the intention. For Meituan, Meituan's repeated actions mean that it is likely to lose a large part of the marketing budget of large chain brands in high-tier cities. This is the sadness brought to Meituan by the times, after all, the product promotion effect of short videos is much stronger than that of graphics and text, and the brand is valued by large chain companies.
However, another Xiaohongshu, which also ushered in a highlight moment in the graphic era, is still alive and well, and it is also entering local life.
Last month, Xiaohongshu launched the group buying function and launched notes to bring goods. Due to the impact of the epidemic, the coffee and tea beverage industries in first-tier cities that actively embrace the private domain have become Xiaohongshu's choice to test the local life. Many Xiaohongshu users in Guangzhou and Shanghai will find coupon links in the lower left corner of food exploration shops, especially tea and coffee notes.
In fact, Xiaohongshu, which focuses on growing grass, has always had the genes of local life. Last year's "camping fever" due to the epidemic achieved a closed loop of consumption on Xiaohongshu, and data from Wilderness, a well-known brand of outdoor camping, showed that 70% of orders last year came from Xiaohongshu.
03 Meituan is the way out by being yourself
In the history of Internet commerce, the defensive side is usually the losing side. Meituan knows this well, so it has expanded without boundaries as it grows.
But this time, in terms of local life content, Meituan had to choose defense, because the long-slack public commentary, let alone go to Douyin, and even the pace of Xiaohongshu, which emerged in the graphic era, could not keep up, and Dianping learned Xiaohongshu as early as 2018. Meituan should face up to the reality that it lacks content genes, after all, Dianping has been on the verge of diversion for a long time after being acquired. It's hard to call it a content community, because users usually only go up to check it out when they're looking for a coupon for a restaurant.
Screenshot of Dianping
For the current Meituan, it is a pity that the high-profit business of Dianping continues to lose, but this is an irreversible fact, and the most important thing is how to further stably play Meituan's own advantages. The urban delivery system created by Meituan Takeaway is still unmatched by content platforms. The average unit price of Douyin testing takeaway exceeded 1.5 million yuan, which is to cover the delivery fee of more than 10 yuan per kilometer for third-party delivery. The 9.2 million active merchants accumulated by Meituan's strong ground push team over the years are far more than Douyin's more than 700,000. The back-office management software for settlement, analysis, and supply chain provided by Meituan to offline merchants has also been polished for a long time and will not be replaced in the short term.
Therefore, Meituan should focus its resources on the city operation it is good at, and the content will be handed over to partners. Ali integrated word-of-mouth with AutoNavi, then Meituan can consider cooperating with Baidu Map; Since 2019, Xiaohongshu's tourism content has grown rapidly, becoming the second largest category after beauty, which can match Meituan's wine tourism business.
In addition, the cooperation between Meituan and content platforms can extend from local life to instant retail. Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu's live streaming e-commerce all need a strong fulfillment system. Ideally, this system can also be provided by companies other than traditional e-commerce giants. The real-time retail field that Meituan is investing heavily in is indeed very suitable for the high gross profit category that is easy to stimulate consumption impulse in the live broadcast room.
After in-depth cooperation, Meituan can even consider including those content communities that have not yet been listed. After all, that's how Dianping came from.