The baton was passed to the hands of "Brother Dong", how many steps is Jingdong Live from "rising"?
Text: "Chinese Entrepreneur" reporter Li Yanyan
Edited by Yao Yun
Header picture source|Douyin screenshot
In order to compete for the user's mind, Liu Qiangdong personally went down.
With the end of the countdown slogan of "321, welcome Dongge digital person" of the procurement and sales personnel, at 6:18 on April 16th, the screen switched, and the AI digital person "Dongge" appeared in the live broadcast room of @Jingdong Supermarket and @Jingdong Home Appliances at the same time.
"I can only say that Jingdong Supermarket is cheap. "Before you get on the link, you have to prepare a little surprise for everyone. "Liu Qiangdong", who is the anchor with goods, frowns slightly, has a serious face, and is wearing a dark blue suit, sitting in a precarious position. At the beginning of the broadcast, he rubbed the fingers of his right hand from time to time — a common movement he does during internal meetings. When talking about the discount of a certain product, he also waved his hands to "emphasize".
Source: Douyin screenshot
In the live broadcast, the tone of the digital person Liu Qiangdong's "bringing goods" language is relaxed, but the atmosphere it creates has been complained by many netizens about bluntness, like "having a meeting", and some netizens even shouted to Jingdong and asked Liu Qiangdong to broadcast in real person. However, the more than 20 million views still prove the founder's popularity and ability to bring goods. According to the public data of Jingdong Blackboard News: During the live broadcast, the AI digital human "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" explained a total of 13 products, and the overall order volume increased by 8 times compared with last Sunday.
Obviously, behind this number "Liu Qiangdong" is Liu Qiangdong's own will to the ecology of live broadcast content.
This track, which has been developed for more than ten years, is still scorching. In May last year, Wei Wenwen, president of Douyin e-commerce, disclosed that in the past year, Douyin e-commerce GMV maintained a year-on-year increase of 80%, and Pinduoduo's net profit in 2023 exceeded 60 billion yuan, and the annual revenue was 247.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 90%. Recently, Ma Yun, who has "retired", spoke again after five years and personally spoke for Ali. Just when Ma Yun kept reiterating that "Ali will change, Ali will change", Liu Qiangdong chose to use "real money" to prove his sincerity in increasing the content ecology.
Benchmarking Li Jiaqi, shouting Dong Yuhui, calling for Pinduoduo, and cultivating procurement and marketing anchors...... In the past year, JD Live has done its best. Compared with other e-commerce platforms, JD.com lacks the head well-known anchor and the "splashing" traffic it brings, and the founder with his own traffic ended up "proofing" to win popularity for JD Live. And the outside world is concerned, can this wave of traffic really be retained?
After many times of momentum, "Brother Yi" finally came on the field
The live broadcast has not started, and the "momentum" goes first.
On April 15, the news that "Liu Qiangdong, founder and chairman of the board of directors of JD.com, is about to start a live broadcast on JD.com APP" came out. That night, Jingdong posted a "confirmation" on its official WeChat. In the head camp of domestic e-commerce platforms, there is no precedent for the founder to rush to the front line. This time, Liu Qiangdong personally went down, although he was broadcast live in the form of a digital person, it still attracted a lot of attention.
According to the observation of "Chinese Entrepreneur", at 6:18 p.m. on April 16, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Home Appliances and Jingdong Supermarket reached 2.99 million and 2.22 million respectively. 10 minutes later, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Supermarket exceeded 6.24 million, nearly tripling. At 7 o'clock that night, Liu Qiangdong's AI digital human went off the air, and the views of the two live broadcast rooms exceeded 10 million.
According to the data disclosed by JD.com, "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" appeared in less than 1 hour, and the number of views in the live broadcast room exceeded 20 million. In addition, for the debut of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge", JD.com has also prepared a lot of benefits, such as tickets for the 2024 European Cup finals, 618 yuan supermarket cards, etc. In terms of product promotion, Jingdong also combined Liu Qiangdong's image IP to make some pictures full of life and entertainment, which look very down-to-earth.
During the 42-minute delivery time, "Brother Dong" skillfully introduced a variety of food and electrical products, and also directed the goods to be put on the shelves, guiding netizens to comment and grab red envelopes. Liu Qiangdong's digital human image, accent, gestures and other action habits are almost the same as those of real people, but the lack of emotional ups and downs and the live broadcast tone of real human interaction inevitably lacks vividness.
It is worth noting that the "Procurement and Sales of Dongge AI Digital Human" participating in the live broadcast this time uses the AI-driven large-profile digital human technology developed by JD Yunyanxi. It is understood that at present, more than 4,000 brands have used the same digital person as "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" in the Jingdong live broadcast room, and the conversion rate has increased by more than 30% in idle time, and the cost is less than 1/10 of the live broadcast.
Liu Qiangdong, who has not been seen for a long time, started his live broadcast debut. In some news comment areas, some netizens left messages, "Is the boss so involved now?" Many users who have watched the live broadcast said with emotion, watching the whole process, "It feels like the boss is in a meeting." There are also users who open the live broadcast and place three orders in a row on the spot, "The main reason is that the discount is large, the price is cheap, and the delivery is fast, and the goods are received early the next morning." ”
To a certain extent, Liu Qiangdong's AI digital human participation in this live broadcast demonstrates JD.com's determination to increase its content ecology and short video business. Judging from JD.com's actions, JD.com hopes to cultivate anchors and talents who grow up on its own platform, among which waist anchors have become the main target of recruitment.
Source: China Attempt Library
On April 10, JD.com announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan in cash and 1 billion yuan in traffic to support the content ecology and attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to settle in. On the one hand, JD.com subsidizes creators in more than 20 fields such as digital 3C, home appliances, mother and child, and pets. In addition, JD.com will also bring more exposure opportunities for high-quality and original videos, and reward traffic by providing fixed traffic coupon subsidies.
In order to build a content ecology as soon as possible, MCN institutions and talents have also become the targets of JD.com's recruitment. JD.com said that as long as the number of people successfully introduced by the institution reaches a certain scale, they will have the opportunity to receive a generous one-time cash subsidy every month, and the platform has also set up an institutional incentive list of up to 5 million yuan. At the same time, JD.com is preparing for the incubation of top talents, and plans to select the "Top 100 Talents" at the end of the year.
According to the latest Research Report on the Development of Online Audiovisual in China (2024), 71.2% of the surveyed users make online purchases because of watching short videos and live broadcasts, and more than 40% of Internet users believe that short videos and live broadcasts are their main consumption channels. Content consumption is becoming a key track for major platforms to compete for, and the anxiety of traditional e-commerce giants has long been unable to hide.
At the end of 2022, after the return, Liu Qiangdong "regained the low price" strategy and set up JD.com's four "must-win battles": sinking market, supply chain middle platform construction, open ecological construction, and intra-city business. At the beginning of this year, "content ecology, open ecology, and instant retail" have become the three "must-win battles" of JD Retail in 2024. The fierce battle of content e-commerce is in full swing, the growth rate of "friend business" has repeatedly reached new highs, and JD.com has arrived late.
Jingdong's live broadcast room still lacks a head anchor
The domestic Internet traffic dividend is gradually turning to the stock era, and how to attract more users in this context is very important to JD.com.
At present, live broadcast has become an important means of e-commerce platforms, just like Dong Yuhui is to Douyin e-commerce, Li Jiaqi is to Taobao - and Jingdong's live broadcast and head anchor position has been vacant. JD.com is clearly aware of this, too. Whether it is increasing short videos or betting on live broadcasts, they are moving in the direction of content ecology.
In November last year, Pinduoduo, which rose with a low price advantage, once surpassed Ali in market value. According to the financial report, Pinduoduo's annual revenue in 2023 will be 247.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 90%, and the net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders will be 60.0265 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 90%.
At the same time, short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have complemented the e-commerce sector based on their content traffic.
According to Douyin's official data, Douyin's GMV will exceed 1.41 trillion yuan in 2022, accounting for about 40% of China's live e-commerce transaction volume in 2022. In 2023, GMV has increased to 2.2 trillion yuan, and the gap with JD.com is narrowing. Kuaishou's financial report for the fourth quarter of 2023 shows that other service revenue was 4.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.2%, mainly due to the growth of Kuaishou's e-commerce business, which is reflected in the increase in the total transaction volume of e-commerce goods. According to the data, GMV in the quarter increased by 93.1% quarter-on-quarter to 403.9 billion yuan from 209.2 billion yuan in the previous quarter, and increased by 29.3% year-on-year from 312.4 billion yuan in the same period last year.
And the "barrel" of e-commerce is gradually upgrading the height of all "boards". In addition to the growth of data such as users and GMV, which were once commonly used, it has begun to enter the stage of intensifying and improving the supply chain. At the same time, with the rise of live e-commerce and the change of user consumption habits, the e-commerce logic of "people, goods, and fields" has changed, especially when all parties have maintained a high level of "goods" and "fields", and "people" have also been mentioned in a more critical position - which also puts forward higher requirements for traditional e-commerce.
Whether it is Ali or JD.com, the once stable e-commerce fundamentals are being impacted by short video and other content e-commerce, and its response strategy is: continue to increase the content ecology. At the end of March this year, Taobao announced that it would add 10 billion yuan to promote content e-commerce operations, and set an annual target of "100% year-on-year growth in user scale, 100% year-on-year growth in anchors with monthly transactions exceeding one million, and 80% year-on-year growth in GMV".
Not long ago, Ma Yun emphasized in an internal letter that Ali should return to the track of customer value.
Compared with Taobao, JD.com's content ecology is relatively weak. According to incomplete statistics, including Luo Yonghao, Jin Xing, Huang Shengyi and other stars with their own traffic, have come to the Jingdong platform to start broadcasting, but failed to set off a trend of "out of the circle". Last year, Dong Yuhui's "small composition" incident broke out, and it was rumored on the Internet that the vice president of JD.com's human resources personally "poached", and it was also over.
In terms of incubating native anchors, JD.com has also spent a lot of effort, but there has been no obvious effect. Until the end of last year, Jingdong's live broadcast of "really cheap and no routines" was unexpectedly "out of the circle". In addition, Jingdong's live broadcast room has benchmarked Li Jiaqi, shouted Dong Yuhui, and called Pinduoduo, although it was questioned by the outside world as a hot spot, but it also attracted a certain amount of attention.
In addition, with the method of "no pit fees, no talent commissions, and no routines", Jingdong procurement and sales live broadcast emphasizes "low-cost and good things on the whole network", and tries to find a differentiated way to break the situation. Backed by JD.com's huge category library, JD.com's procurement and sales live broadcast has horizontally expanded a number of vertical live broadcast rooms. During JD.com's Double 11 last year, the total number of views in JD.com's live broadcast room exceeded 380 million.
In the past year, JD.com is stepping up the layout of the content ecology and making efforts in creation. During JD.com's Double 11 in 2023, JD.com launched a topic challenge in 20 vertical tracks, producing 382 topics and 26,000 authors bringing a turnover of nearly 100 million. The 30 hot topics during the New Year Festival received more than 50,000 video submissions, and the GMV of more than 20 million videos was transacted through videos.
Users need new experiences, and the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain are also looking forward to JD.com, which is in transition, can tell a good story of sustainable growth. On March 29, Liu Qiangdong issued a letter to all employees, announcing that the company's mission was upgraded to "technology-based, making life better". He emphasized that JD.com, which has passed the age of 20, will be more active in embracing this world full of changes and starting a new evolution.