In the digital era, the rise of content platforms represented by short videos and live broadcasts has injected new vitality into rural development.
Through technological innovation, these content platforms have broken the traditional model, emphasizing more real-time interaction and strong social attributes. The global interest e-commerce model they have built is leading to a new consumer experience.
Through these content platforms, not only can rural residents obtain information and expand economic channels more conveniently, but rural products can also transcend time and space barriers and quickly move towards a larger market.
In the past, when "rural" was mentioned, the key words that came to mind might be "backwardness" and "depression", but now, many villages are full of vitality. For example, on the Douyin platform, you can see all kinds of digital farmers showing their skills to speak for their hometowns, a dazzling array of agricultural products going out of the village and into the city, and beautiful rural scenery jumping online.
Data shows that in the past year, Douyin e-commerce helped sell 4.73 billion orders of agricultural products, with an average of 13 million packages sold to various places every day, and the number of agricultural merchants increased by 83% year-on-year.
Jin Wencheng, director of the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said that Internet platforms, including Douyin, are guided by consumer interests, rely on content, and help agriculture in new ways such as live broadcasts, reconstructing "people, goods, and scenery", extending the rural industrial chain, enriching the rural value chain, and reconstructing the rural supply chain, bringing new opportunities for the development of "native products", and also giving birth to new rural business formats. This not only injects new momentum into the transformation of traditional rural industries, but also provides new possibilities for overtaking in the modernization of rural industries.
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Let high-quality agricultural products get preferential prices
Ten years ago, Yang Muwang, a doctor of architecture from Tongji University, and his wife opened a small farm in their hometown of Jingde, where they often gave organic vegetables and chickens to friends. Because of the good taste, everyone has been suggesting that they open an online store to sell.
At the beginning of 2020, Yang Muwang and 3 classmates partnered to establish Anhui Yunhe Ecological Agriculture Co., Ltd., whose main business is raising chickens. They have adopted the business model of "enterprise + farmer", but in the process of cooperation with farmers, Yang Muwang's team has established standardized regulations on a series of feeding links such as feeding density, feed ratio, and breeding cycle of native chickens, and will also provide standardized production materials for farmers, and conduct strict sampling testing on farmers' adult chickens to ensure the quality of native chickens.
In addition, Yang Muwang also has high requirements for the water quality and soil quality of the farm, and will be tested in advance to avoid excessive heavy metals. He also set up a special seed preservation plant and hatchery to ensure the purity of the breed of local chickens.
In Yang Muwang's view, the relevant people who pay high attention to food health and nutrition are the main audience groups of his local chicken products. However, in terms of sales channels, Yang Muwang's initial choice of model did not work, so he began to turn to the hot live broadcast e-commerce, and organized a special team to run a Douyin account.
At first, Yang Muwang's development on Douyin was not very smooth. Later, he realized that the sluggish sales may be due to the fact that consumer trust has not yet been established, so he began to shoot videos and live broadcasts on the spot, and conveyed the information of local chickens fed with grains, refusing to use antibiotics, insisting on free-range farming in the mountains and forests, and the meat quality and taste of firewood to consumers truthfully and accurately.
Authentic product presentations are really the best way to build trust. Since then, more and more consumers have begun to trust Yang Muwang and place orders in the live broadcast room. Now, "Dr. Yang Wannan Native Chicken" is not only very famous in Jingde, but also has gained a large number of fans on the Douyin platform.
By the end of 2022, Yangmuwang had more than 100 alpine ecological farms with a total area of more than 10,000 mu, and opened two flagship stores and one personal account on Douyin. Among them, Yang Muwang's Douyin account "Dr. Yang's official flagship store" currently has more than 1.2 million fans.
Wang Xiangdong, member of the Agricultural and Rural Informatization Expert Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and director of the China Rural Development Foundation, said that how to achieve high quality and high prices of agricultural products is not only a key problem to be solved in agriculture from large to strong, but also a major challenge in the practice of agricultural product e-commerce.
Through the case of Yang Muwang, it can be seen that the global interest e-commerce platform created by Douyin has promoted the organic combination of people, goods and scenes, and enhanced consumers' intuitive experience of the consumption venue. This has contributed to the realization of high quality and high prices of agricultural products, so that users can buy good products and farmers can obtain good income.
Assist the e-commerce transformation of traditional agricultural enterprises
In 2015, Inner Mongolia Yinshan Youmai Food Co., Ltd. was established in Ulanqab. At present, Yinshan Youmai has become a leading enterprise in China's domestic oats (naked oats), but a few years ago, it also struggled with operations.
For agribusinesses, product sales are a challenge. Initially, Yinshan Youmai was selling oat products in offline supermarkets, and in terms of brand and communication, it also mainly took traditional marketing methods and disseminated through TV advertising, but the communication effect was not good, and the sales effect was not ideal.
This also led to the fact that in 2018, due to the investment of a large amount of money in equipment procurement and personnel recruitment, Yinshan Youmai had just finished building an oat processing plant, and there was pressure on the capital chain. At the end of 2018, in order to open up sales, Yinshan Youmai decided to follow the trend of e-commerce, recruited e-commerce talents in Inner Mongolia to form an e-commerce team, and began to sell oat products on e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, Taobao, and JD.com.
When entering the e-commerce platform for the first time, Yinshan Youmai has a small brand influence, a small audience, high product production costs, and a relative lack of e-commerce talents, which makes it in a disadvantageous position in the e-commerce environment. In order to promote sales, Yinshan Youmai can only adopt a follow-up strategy, aiming at products with high sales on e-commerce platforms and creating homogeneous products. From 2018 to 2020, in the past 3 years, the sales volume of Yinshan Youmai e-commerce platform has continued to be sluggish, and the annual sales volume of the e-commerce platform has been between 1 million and 3 million.
Faced with the continued sluggish e-commerce sales and the lack of local e-commerce talents, Yinshan Youmai moved its e-commerce team to Hangzhou, where the e-commerce industry is more talent-intensive, in 2021. Yinshan Youmai hired an excellent e-commerce team leader with a high salary in Hangzhou, re-established the e-commerce team, a stronger e-commerce atmosphere, a more professional e-commerce team, and a newly formulated differentiation strategy, so that Yinshan Youmai's e-commerce channel sales continued to grow. Only three months after the establishment of the new e-commerce team (October to December 2021), Yinshan Youmai sold more than 3 million.
After the e-commerce business has improved to a certain extent, in 2022, Lu Wenbing, chairman of Yinshan Youmai, took the initiative to sign up for the Douyin Rural Business School public welfare project specially opened for entrepreneurs in the field of agriculture, agriculture and agriculture in China. After learning Xi, Lu Wenbing quickly raised his awareness and turned it into action - Yinshan Youmai's e-commerce team began to invest more energy on Douyin.
On the one hand, Yinshan Youmai focuses on disseminating the brand characteristics of organic large-grain domestic naked oats on the Douyin e-commerce platform, and popularizes the advantages and advantages of domestic oats to the public in the form of short video grass planting and live broadcast e-commerce, which has achieved the improvement of brand awareness and the rapid growth of sales.
On the other hand, in the choice of live broadcast methods, Yinshan Youmai first invited three rural experts to assist in broadcasting to enhance brand influence, and later with the continuous improvement of market popularity, Yinshan Youmai gradually increased the proportion of self-broadcasting. After continuous adjustment of e-commerce strategy, the compound annual growth rate of Yinshan Youmai's e-commerce sales from 2020 to 2022 will reach 335%.
It can be seen that Douyin's interest e-commerce not only helped Yinshan Youmai achieve the goal of bringing goods, but also started the company's brand reputation. The core reason is that the global interest e-commerce model can help enterprises create products and brands that meet market demand and have accurate positioning according to their own product characteristics, and then find the right market segment in the market and fill the gap in the market.
A new stage for the industrial belt
Fujian is a major province for the production of edible fungi in mainland China, and has formed concentrated production areas for edible fungi in Ningde, Fuzhou, Longyan and so on. Among them, Pingnan County, Ningde City, is known as the "hometown of Chinese summer mushrooms", and more than 40% of the county's rural labor force is engaged in the production and sales related to edible mushrooms, with an output value of nearly 1 billion yuan in 2021, accounting for 1/3 of its total agricultural output value.
In recent years, the new sales channels spawned by global interest e-commerce have not only created new development opportunities for returning entrepreneurial talents in the new era, but also provided a new stage for the development of these traditional industrial belts.
"Oda Girl" is a typical representative of using the Douyin platform to carry out live streaming of edible mushrooms. In 2018, Tian Xiaoyu, the founder of the "Xiaotian Girl" brand, returned to his hometown with her husband Yang Ruiqiang after graduating from university, but in 2020, they failed to start a business and owed some debts.
At this time, Tian Xiaoyu saw the sales plight of the mushroom farmers around him, so he thought of shooting a short video on Douyin to promote local edible mushrooms. Under the training and guidance of the government department, after more than 2 years of hard work, the live broadcast room of Oda Girl has gone from being unattended at the beginning to a daily shipment of 30,000 pieces in 2022, and the agricultural product brand "Oda Girl" has gradually launched, with a cumulative sales volume of millions of orders.
Through live broadcasting, Tian Xiaoyu not only paid off his personal loan, but also opened up a market for the mushrooms in the village. In addition, she also established Zigui Village Broadcasting (Pingnan) New Media Co., Ltd. to share her experience in bringing goods to the villagers, so that more and more villagers can embark on the road of self-production, self-broadcasting, and self-selling e-commerce entrepreneurship.
At present, there are more than 50 enterprises and teams engaged in live broadcast sales in Pingnan County, directly driving the employment of more than 2,000 people, and more than 300 anchors have a monthly income of more than 5,000 yuan, some of which exceed 10,000 yuan, of which more than 60 local anchors have been directly signed by Zigui Village Broadcasting.
Different from the "Xiaotian girl" who brought goods through live broadcast, Jiangye Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. in Gutian County is a typical representative of the use of e-commerce experts to promote the integrated development of production, addition and marketing of the edible fungus industry. Jiangye Agriculture is a comprehensive company integrating the production, research and development and sales of edible fungi established on the basis of Jiangyue Fruit and Vegetable Professional Cooperative.
Jiangyue Fruit and Vegetable Professional Cooperative was initially driven by Zheng Renjiang, the local village party secretary, to grow edible fungi and other special agricultural products on a large scale. In 2016, Jiangye Agriculture was established and began to lay offline supermarket channels to produce and sell agricultural products. In 2017, Jiangye Agriculture started e-commerce sales, and in 2020, Jiangye Agriculture established a Chinese fungus food franchise store on Douyin, mainly through cooperation with Dongfang Selection, Make a Friend and other talent anchors.
In the past few years, Jiangye Agriculture's online sales have grown by more than 20% per year. In 2022, Jiangye Agriculture's sales volume on Douyin e-commerce will be on par with traditional channels. In the first half of 2023, Jiangye Agriculture sold 600,000 orders of Gutian white fungus products through Douyin. At the same time, there are as many as 223 farmer households in Jiangye Agricultural Cooperation, which has led to the employment of more than 1,000 people.
It is no exaggeration to say that the rapid development of Fujian's edible fungus e-commerce industry is inseparable from the e-commerce platform. On the one hand, the e-commerce platform provides a platform carrier for direct communication and interaction between the production and marketing parties, and opens up new sales channels and sales methods, especially for new entrepreneurs, with a low entry threshold, which has successfully attracted a large number of young people.
On the other hand, relying on information advantages, e-commerce platforms can better grasp consumer needs and actively guide industrial transformation and upgrading. In addition, global interest e-commerce focusing on live broadcasts, short videos, and shopping malls will also help build personalized brands for anchors and promote agricultural products to better achieve high quality and high prices.
Talking about the help of global interest e-commerce to rural development, Jin Wencheng pointed out that in the digital era, online live broadcast has become a new farm work, smart phones have become new farm tools, online platforms have become new farmland, and Internet experts have become rural guardians. The development of platforms such as Douyin has shortened the intermediate links, brought local specialties into the big market, brought small farmers to the big stage, and brought remote mountain villages to big cities.
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