As the most important festival for Chinese people in the world, the Spring Festival stalls have long become a competitive highland for e-commerce platforms, Internet manufacturers, movies and TV dramas. On January 24, the Value Research Institute (ID: quanwaicaijing) reported on the Spring Festival traffic war between JD.com, Xiaohongshu and Alipay, and the article "The Spring Festival Traffic War Begins: Jingdong Xiaohongshu Fights the Spring Festival Gala, Alipay Sacrifices Five Blessings!" sparked heated discussions. Today, the director found that the Spring Festival Gala war has spread to many Internet subdivisions, such as local life, which has become the highlight of this year.
On January 25, Douyin's "New Year Eat, Drink and Play Festival" was launched, which also marked the official entry of Douyin Life Service into the Spring Festival war of local life.
In the past year, the performance of Douyin's life service has not been stable, and the route of the food delivery business has not been fully launched after several adjustments, while the in-store business has made significant progress, stealing many users from Meituan and Ele.me. The upcoming Spring Festival Golden Week is an important node for the explosion of local life traffic, and Douyin must certainly seize the opportunity to pursue it.
In the face of the menacing Douyin, the two big brothers Meituan and Ele.me will not sit still.
Meituan recently released a Spring Festival consumption report for the Year of the Dragon to warm up, and Ele.me acted more quickly, launching the Year of the Dragon Festival on Laba Festival (January 18). Each platform has given full play to its own advantages in order to take the lead in this Spring Festival war.
The atmosphere has been set in place, and next, the Spring Festival war in the local life service market is about to be staged.
There is a focus on going to the store and home, and the Spring Festival war of local life begins
Looking at the Spring Festival activities that have been disclosed, several head platforms have their own focuses on the three main routes of in-store, home, and comprehensive (comprehensive business).
1, the boss Meituan: three arrows at the same time, the most ambitious and highest-key.
In terms of comprehensive business, bookings for hotels, homestays and entertainment projects in Meituan Station soared compared to the same period last year, while the platform gave more exposure and subsidies to merchants in popular tourist cities. For example, in terms of wine and tourism reservations, Meituan has launched the "Overseas Hotel Sale", which provides users with a selection of low-cost hotels around the world by comparing prices three times a day.
On the home side, in addition to ensuring the normal operation of Meituan Takeaway during the Spring Festival, Meituan Flash Sale, Meituan Preferred, and the Little Elephant Supermarket, which was just upgraded a year ago, also occupied a lot of roles. On January 5th, Little Elephant Supermarket officially launched the New Year's goods promotion and launched an exclusive New Year's gift box. According to the data, only two weeks after the event began, orders for gift boxes in Little Elephant Supermarket have skyrocketed by 50% year-on-year.
In terms of in-store visits, Meituan has made great efforts in group buying and booking business, launched a special area for "Advance Booking for Year-end Reunion Night Family Banquet", and provided traffic tilt in the app to meet the needs of catering stores and users. Meituan and Dianping have also joined forces with merchants to launch a large number of discount packages and preferential reunion meals to make profits to users. Official data shows that as of January 21, the number of Chinese New Year's Eve restaurant table bookings has increased by more than three times year-on-year, and a large number of popular restaurants have been sold out.
(Image from Meituan)
2. Eleme: Take the lead in making moves, focusing on the two branches of home and store. This is not only to give full play to its advantages in merchants, commodity resources and fulfillment capabilities, but also to form a differentiation from other businesses of Alibaba. After all, Fliggy and AutoNavi are also actively preparing for the Spring Festival, and they have more experience in the comprehensive business.
On January 18, Ele.me launched a special area for the Year of the Dragon, uniting catering, department stores, supermarkets, fresh food and other categories of merchants to carry out instant retail promotions, including Unilever, Pepsi, Cotton Times, Starbucks, KFC and other leading brands have participated. As long as users search for the keyword "Chinese New Year" on Ele.me, they can go directly to the main venue, and the platform will give full traffic support from various fields such as information flow and search.
Like Meituan, Ele.me also provides two-way support for merchants and users in terms of traffic and subsidies, including the issuance of 5% off coupons and the joint creation of special gift packages. Among them, fresh food, pre-made dishes, and household products are popular categories for this event, and customized gift boxes are also very popular. According to the official data, the search volume of "Year of the Dragon gift box" in the station has increased nearly eight times year-on-year, and the search volume of cherry gift box has increased nine-fold year-on-year.
(Image from Ele.me)
3、抖音：扬长避短，All In“到店”单点突破。
Douyin's "New Year Eating, Drinking and Playing Festival", which has just kicked off, will create 14 category days such as "New and Beautiful Day", "New Year Hoarding Day" and "Year-end Gathering Day" according to different vertical categories, and unite hundreds of thousands of merchants to launch a large number of group buying preferential activities. Judging from Douyin's propaganda offensive, "saving money" is the main trump card of this year's Spring Festival war.
Among them, from January 25th to February 17th, the platform will distribute 188 yuan New Year coupon packages at 8 o'clock every day, and users can search for "New Year Eat, Drink and Play Festival" in the APP to reach the main venue to participate in the lottery. It is reported that the coupon package contains 10 full reduction coupons of different denominations and different thresholds, which can be used by all participating group buying merchants and commodities with the "New Year Coupon Package" logo.
(Image from Douyin)
In general, the enthusiasm and resources of the major platforms are undoubted. So the question is: how much return can be exchanged for a large amount of investment?
Before answering this question, we must first figure out one thing: what exactly do Meituan, Ele.me, and Douyin want to win from the Spring Festival stalls.
In order to fight for the user's budget, the Spring Festival of "Beauty Hungry and Trembling" went crazy
China's Spring Festival and Spring Festival travel are unique in the world in terms of population migration. Before the holiday, people from first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen flocked to various provinces, cities, villages and towns, bringing the most considerable flow of people in a year to the sinking market. After the holiday, I squeezed on the northbound and southbound trains as scheduled and returned to a hard-working life. Of course, there must be retrograde people in the middle - after the epidemic subsides, Chinese people's desire to travel will explode, which will lead to the New Year consumption in first- and second-tier cities.
In the middle of this back-and-forth, the gap between consumer demand and consumption capacity between first-tier cities and lower-tier cities has been temporarily erased, providing a good opportunity for local life platforms to leverage new increments. On the other hand, the dominant platform must also guard against the plundering of competitors, and must stand on the Spring Festival post to defend its own advantages - attacking and defending around the acquisition of new users, retention and increasing activity is the primary purpose of the three giants of local life to compete in the Spring Festival stalls.
Meituan has never concealed its coveting of the lower-tier market, and as early as 2020, it accelerated its penetration into third-tier cities and below through community group buying business. Taking the opportunity of the Spring Festival homecoming tide to expand its sinking market share is Meituan's ambition engraved on the brain.
Meituan mentioned in last year's Spring Festival consumption report that dining out has become a new trend in small cities, and the growth rate of Chinese New Year's Eve meal reservations on the platform by users in fourth- and fifth-tier cities has caught up with that of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. This year will be no exception, and Meituan will provide necessary support to merchants in the sinking market to promote the growth of pre-orders and achieve the goal of attracting new customers.
In addition, Meituan, the main force of sinking in the past few years, is expected to play an important role. Meituan Optimal shouted the slogan of not closing during the Spring Festival last year, and snatched many users of e-commerce platforms through the Fresh New Year Festival. Meituan, which has tasted the sweetness, will make persistent efforts to launch the "Zhenhui Buy New Year Festival" activity this year, and tomorrow's delivery service will cover more than 2,000 cities and counties across the country.
Compared with its old rival Meituan, Ele.me has a lower user base and greater growth pressure, so it can only find its own way. In the past two years, Ele.me has paid great attention to the interaction with users in the sinking market, and has been praised for its ability to play with memes and be down-to-earth. The linkage between online and offline is also expected to become an important issue.
For example, in 2022, the Spring Festival consumption trend insight report released by Ele.me, Ali New Service Research Center and CBNData summarized consumption patterns in the form of emojis and won the favor of young users.
Thanks to the contribution of short videos and live broadcast e-commerce, the growth anxiety of Douyin life services is not as obvious as that of Meituan and Ele.me. The problem faced by Douyin is how to quickly direct users of short video and live broadcast e-commerce to the life service sector to enhance stickiness and increase activity. The Spring Festival is undoubtedly a good opportunity to polish the golden signboard of Douyin life service and develop user consumption habits.
However, unlike Meituan and Ele.me, Douyin life services, which are mainly based on in-store business, have breakthroughs in first- and second-tier cities.
The in-store business of Douyin life service is highly bound to the creation of content such as store visits and live broadcasts, and the creative ability of merchants and influencers in the sinking market is obviously not as good as that in first- and second-tier cities. In addition, judging from the data of all parties, this year's Spring Festival is a year of tourism explosion, and the first and second-tier popular tourist cities will not have the "empty city" phenomenon in the past, which provides soil for the expansion of Douyin's life services.
The three platforms have their own plans, clear goals and full preparations, and then, they just have to wait for the results.
Fight for resources, capacity, and creativity, who can laugh at the Spring Festival stalls?
The competitive barriers in the local life service industry are not high, and there are only a few factors that determine success or failure: merchant and user resources, performance capabilities, and preferential measures. The competition of several head platforms can only be carried out around these dimensions.
The preferential strength and user resources have been introduced above, so I will not repeat them here. In general, Douyin is very generous to users, and Meituan and Ele.me are also very generous, and there is no obvious gap between them. On the side of user resources, it is really difficult for Douyin to find opponents in China, and Meituan's volume is also huge, and Ele.me is one position behind. However, large-scale marketing and subsidy discounts can greatly narrow the gap between them.
From the perspective of user demand, merchant/commodity resources and fulfillment capabilities will probably become the main factors determining the outcome of the contract.
On the side of merchant resources, Meituan takes the lead, Ele.me also has its own advantages in some vertical categories, and Douyin has also made great progress in the past year, but there are still limitations.
Meituan's strength lies in its comprehensiveness: restaurants, supermarkets, hotels, homestays, and all kinds of entertainment venues are readily available, which really meets the needs of users in all aspects of eating, drinking, entertainment, clothing, food, housing and transportation. Meituan also knows how to make good use of resources, and has launched "live + play" preferential packages in various popular tourist cities and consumption scenarios to build cooperation channels for businesses in different fields. For example, users can participate in the free welfare lottery by booking a hotel.
Ele.me's advantage is in the consumption scene, and the cooperation resources of convenience supermarkets, restaurants, and home appliance stores are abundant, which is closely related to the support behind Alibaba. Douyin has a relatively obvious partial phenomenon, catering, leisure and entertainment business resources are abundant, but travel service resources are lacking, which is also an important reason why Douyin is limited to the store track.
In terms of performance ability, Meituan's strength is outstanding, and Ele.me also has the strength to fight. Douyin, whose home business is basically lying flat, may not have the opportunity to sit at the table during the Spring Festival this year.
In the real-time retail scenario, fulfillment capability is definitely the focus of the competition. The Spring Festival does not close, and it has long become the norm for major platforms, and the basic capacity is not a problem. The key task of Meituan and Ele.me this year is to improve the quality of service - improving the welfare, treatment and life and work security of the riders on duty is the main means to achieve this goal.
Ele.me has announced earlier that it will invest 1 billion yuan as incentive subsidies for riders, including running order incentives, new recruitment awards, newcomer incentives and transportation subsidies. Han Liu, senior vice president of Ele.me, said that the Blue Knights who stick to the Spring Festival are amazing, and the platform will try to do more, "so that they have a higher income and more security". Meituan announced an increase in the Spring Festival special job stabilization subsidy, and it is reported that the riders who stay on the job can receive up to more than 10,000 yuan in additional income that month.
Based on the above analytical dimensions, Meituan's comprehensive strength in the field of local life services is undoubted, and its hegemony is still quite stable for the time being. If Douyin and Ele.me want to counterattack, they need to find shortcuts - for example, the former wants to give full play to their advantages in content creativity.
In addition to merchants, influencers are also the backbone of Douyin's "Eat, Drink and Play Festival". During the event, the platform will launch a "Summoning Little Dragonman" submission activity, and users only need to upload content according to the regulations to participate in the lottery. In addition, Douyin also launched special activities such as "Douyin New Trend, Year of the Dragon" in January, expanding the influence of the brand through the linkage of influencers and brands.
According to the official "Douyin Life Service 2023 Store Visit Report", the number of influencers entering the platform in the first three quarters of last year increased by 289% year-on-year, with a total of 1.27 billion videos released and more than 119.4 billion likes. Such a huge creator resource is one of Douyin's most valuable assets. As long as it is used properly, even if the transportation capacity and merchants do not have an advantage, there is still a chance to take a piece of the cake from Meituan and Ele.me.
It can only be said that the game has just begun, and the winner will never be decided so quickly. Meituan, which has a bigger chance of winning, cannot be taken lightly, and Douyin and Ele.me, which are temporarily lagging behind, do not need to be discouraged. From the user's point of view, as long as you can enjoy real discounts and convenience, you will naturally be satisfied. It doesn't matter who wins or loses.