In recent years, major Internet companies have favored the matter of "planting grass", and I believe that friends who often pay attention to the Internet circle have feelings about it, because the next step of "planting grass" is to "pull weeds", that is, to buy. After all, there is no manufacturer who does not care about how to get money out of the user's wallet.
Previously, in the summer of 2022, Douyin launched a new grass planting app "Ke Song", but it was removed from all platforms just a month later. While it wasn't surprising that the croissant was abandoned, what the outside world didn't expect was that Douyin rebooted the app just two years later.
Recently, it has been reported that a new version of the croissant has reappeared in major app stores, and its version number has come directly to 2.1.0, and the slogan of this App has also changed from "a new lifestyle for young people" to a more Douyin style "Unlock the trend of highlight lifestyle", and the main operator has changed from Beijing Weibo Vision Technology (Douyin operator) to Shenzhen Face Meng Technology Co., Ltd. According to relevant sources, the Croissant App will be operated by the Light Camera team.
Comparing the old and new versions of the Croissant App, it is not difficult to find that although the content layout is in the form of a double-column waterfall, rather than a single column of Douyin, and the themes are also around food guides, travel, pets, good things sharing and other consumer orientations, the specific content sources have changed dramatically. Previously, the content in the old version of the croissant mostly came from the creators of Douyin, and it was more of a carrier for Douyin to try to make a difference in the field of graphics and texts, while the new version of the croissant is more like a replica of Xiaohongshu, and even the latter's hot gameplay has been reproduced.
In the current situation where the penetration rate of online shopping is almost close to the peak and consumers who are really shopping online for the first time are becoming more and more scarce, e-commerce platforms are struggling with how to stimulate consumer demand, so by publishing content that everyone is interested in, mining potential demand, and thus reaching a transaction, the "grass" has naturally entered their field of vision. This is the key to Douyin doing Kesong, Taobao launching shopping, Pinduoduo Youpinxiaoquan, Jingdong creating a grass show, Tencent developing Youji, Zhihu having CHAO, and even Momo making raspberries.
"Planting" refers to the process of sharing the experience with others to make them love and have the desire to buy/consume. The explosion of information brought about by the Internet is the basis for the birth of "planting grass", because the enrichment of information makes the act of filtering valuable, such as "what is worth buying" and other consumer content communities are based on this phenomenon. More importantly, grass growers are also born from consumers, who screen out a part of their own interests from the massive products on e-commerce platforms, and then recontextualize them, reducing the confrontation between consumers and merchants with the attitude of "their own people".
Compared with the traditional hard broad, the model of "planting grass", which induces consumers to make their own decisions, is obviously more mild and less likely to be resisted. It's a pity that there are too many grass planting apps nowadays, and the grass planters who can take on this big responsibility are too small, and the final result is that Xiaohongshu's market position in this track has been difficult to shake.
But why did Douyin restart Cosong after two years? After all, Internet companies usually like the new and hate the old, and projects that have proven to fail often change their appearance even if they are restarted, but Cosong did not do so this time.
There is a view that this may mean that even two years ago, Douyin did not think that the Song was a failure, and its removal from the shelves immediately after a month of launch was not due to poor data performance, but to other hidden reasons. According to the relevant data released by Qimai Data, even if the new version of the croissant that has just been launched is on the shelves in a cold start, and Douyin has not carried out large-scale publicity, this App is also firmly in the TOP10 on the social list of the App Store, with an estimated average daily download of nearly 50,000.
To a certain extent, this data also proves that the name "Croissant" has left an impression on the user group. Different from other grass planting apps, Douyin actually has an extremely obvious advantage, that is, it brings together almost the largest content creation group on the whole network, and also provides a clear monetization chain for the latter. What's even better is that, driven by recommendation algorithms, it is common for creators on Douyin to dance with the baton, and as a grass planting app, there is obviously no shortage of content for users to consume.
So the real reason why Kesong was abandoned that year may be that in the summer of 2022, Douyin's e-commerce mentality has not yet been established in the consumer group, and Douyin e-commerce at that time is obviously not the same thing as the current e-commerce giant that has achieved 2.2 trillion yuan GMV. At that time, the Douyin App only had the characteristics of live streaming, and it was normal for consumers to watch live broadcasts on Douyin and then place orders because of passion or price, but not too many users thought that Douyin was an e-commerce platform.
At that time, after consumers were planted with a product on an App, the first reaction in their minds was to open Taobao, Jingdong and other platforms to search for the same model. That's right, even Xiaohongshu was actually working for free for these head platforms. Therefore, Douyin gave a guide to the croissant at that time, but after the user saw a product of interest on the croissant, he would not open Douyin, but click on Taobao and JD.com, which was obviously not the scenario they wanted to see. Therefore, there is a story that the croissant was removed from the shelves after being launched for a month and before it was seen.
Time has changed, and today's Douyin e-commerce has become a climate, otherwise the person in charge of Douyin e-commerce would not have said in an interview with the media that the launch of the independent Douyin mall version of the App is because he sees a strong demand from users in active shopping. Nowadays, shopping on Douyin is a commonplace thing for many people, and restarting the croissant at this time means that after the croissant is planted, there is a high probability that the weeding will be completed on Douyin or the Douyin mall version of the App, and the real realization of "rotting the meat in the pot".