Analysis of JD.com’s 618 event promotion and operation methods!

Are there too many tricks in this year's 618 activities? After all the fierce operations, in the end, there is only two dollars and fifty cents, and the rest are discount coupons?

Speaking of which, this year marks the 10th year of the 618 Shopping Festival. The event cycle is as long as ever (many people started shopping 18 days in advance), there are more and more "organizers" of the event, and the ways of playing the event are getting more and more bizarre every year.

On the surface, 618 is a promotional festival, but behind it is actually a competition among e-commerce giants.

Looking back at the past ten years of 618, there have been constant sparks between e-commerce giants. For example, one year, Tmall’s 618 pre-heating posters implied JD.com’s “renovation scandal”; another year, JD.com announced that it would open up the right to use the 618 trademark, implying Tmall’s pettiness…

This year, they started fighting again, but the fighting styles of both sides were more advanced.

In fact, 618 was initiated by JD.com. This day was originally a carnival for JD.com alone. Why did other e-commerce giants also join in and enjoy it so much?

The ten-year feud between e-commerce tycoons

We know that 618 is a festival created by JD.com, which has evolved into a day of chaos for e-commerce over the years. What have the e-commerce giants experienced from the initial price war to the current war of gameplay?

1) Price war

In 2010, JD.com launched the 618 anniversary celebration;

In 2011, Kuba Shopping Network (Century Appliance Network) followed suit and held an event on 617 to block JD.com;

In 2012, Suning, Tmall, Kuba, and Dangdang joined the battle with their price advantage, triggering the most popular 618 mid-year celebration of the year;

In 2013, e-commerce platforms such as Yihaodian and Yixun also followed up with the 618 event, but this year's 618 was not as popular as expected;

The 618 event in 2014 was a war without the smoke of gunpowder, as e-commerce platforms showed their trump cards and confronted JD.com head-on.

It is worth mentioning that in 2014, JD.com embraced the thigh of WeChat (WeChat opened a shopping portal to JD.com) and cooperated with a series of exclusive activities, including 1 billion red envelopes for everyone to grab and a 5 yuan return on the first order. Generally speaking, JD’s activity rules are very simple, without so many twists and turns.

JD.com 618 event in 2014

The only company that is more "direct" than JD.com is Gome. Gome launched the "Sword 618" campaign during the 618 period, fighting its way into the e-commerce melee with its price advantage, and offering red envelope discounts of up to 3.2 billion. The event poster can be said to be very bloody.

2) Poster War

Following the price war, e-commerce companies are now thinking about promotional posters:

In 2015, Gome and Tmall announced in May that they would join this year's 618 battle to encircle JD.com. Judging from the pre-event posters of various companies, sparks are already flying before the war even begins.

618 promotional posters on various platforms

With the participation of more and more e-commerce platforms, 618 has become a "mid-year carnival" covering multiple industries such as finance, telecommunications, real estate, entertainment, and technology.

In 2016, less than a week after JD.com announced the launch of the "618 Quality Carnival", Alibaba announced the official launch of the "618 Super Fans Carnival". Suning stands on Alibaba's side, and they form a team called "A-Su Combination" to block JD.com. On June 2, Alibaba and Suning also held a party in Beijing.

It is worth mentioning that JD.com was exposed to be selling refurbished phones in the previous year. In this year, Tmall’s main campaign slogan - "Self-operated brands, no renovations", was a subtle satire on JD.com’s "refurbishment scandal", which attracted a lot of attention from the public.

Tmall's 618 poster satirizes JD.com's "renovation scandal"

The most ruthless thing is that Tmall invited celebrities such as Hu Ge, Zheng Kai, Jia Nailiang, and Zhao Liying to join in the #RealNewAndCheap# topic, calling for "rejecting refurbished products", which caused quite a stir at the time.

During the 618 shopping festival in 2017, JD.com opened up its 618 brand logo and image, welcoming “all kinds” of e-commerce companies to hold events on this day, alluding to Tmall’s stinginess.

ps: In 2014, Tmall registered the Double Eleven trademark and authorized Tmall to use "Double Eleven" exclusively. Many e-commerce companies had to cancel their promotional advertisements prepared for Double Eleven, and JD.com even temporarily cancelled its Double Eleven promotional press conference.

This time, Suning directly challenged JD.com, saying "We deliver goods more on time", "We get new products faster", and "We have better value for money". The offline posters are full of "provocative meaning" and full of gunpowder!

Suning offline posters and pictures from the Internet

3) Gameplay War

Starting from June 18, 2018, e-commerce platforms are no longer just engaging in price wars and poster wars, but have come up with a variety of activity rules, and each one is more ruthless than the other.

This year, in addition to the usual direct discounts and discounts, JD.com has also added many new ways to play, such as brand carnival city and fun cheats.

Although there are various forms of activities, after all these operations, you will find that the merchant has only one purpose, which is to let you get coupons so that you can keep buying.

Tmall is not to be outdone. In addition to the usual shopping allowance-style discounts, it has also added a variety of fun activities, such as raising cats to share cash red envelopes (raising three 8kg cats can share 120 million red envelopes), grabbing large-value discount coupons, etc.

During this year's 618, JD.com played Rocket Girls' brainwashing advertisements in elevators in major cities. There are different like channels in different cities, and you can share them with friends with one click to help like them. It’s not enough to ask you to shop, we also want you to get your friends to shop with you.

To be honest, I have no desire to click on links like this now (I have been cheated by many platforms).

In addition to getting users to like posts, there are also various forms of activities, such as birthday red envelope battles, cash distribution in every city, etc. The purpose is to get you to share with your friends and ask them to help you or like posts. (OS: How come JD.com is also learning from Pinduoduo...)

Tmall’s 618 event is even more bizarre: stacking cats. This activity is to trick users into browsing various brand homepages, various venues (staying for more than ten seconds), and signing in at Tmall Farm, etc. When you feel you've been fooled and are ready to leave, it will trick you into going to Tmall Farm in the name of giving you fruit.

Tmall 618 cat stacking event

Suning has also learned bad things and started playing the red envelope collection game. The main way to play is to get expansion gold by inviting friends or completing tasks such as visiting venues, browsing products, downloading other apps, etc., and then users can redeem "no threshold coupons" at a 100:1 ratio.

How to play Suning's expanding red envelope

In fact, the underlying logic of these activities is to allow users to invite friends, complete tasks to earn points (meow coins, inflation gold), and then redeem them for cash or vouchers.

Needless to say, Pinduoduo has many tricks and ways of playing. This time, it found various big Vs to endorse it and invested tens of billions to enter this melee, claiming "low price and authenticity", attracting a large number of users who want to take advantage of it.

Okay, I don’t want to list them anymore. There are so many different activities and ways to play that it makes me dizzy just looking at them.

What’s even more confusing is why these e-commerce platforms are all holding big promotions during the 618 shopping festival. After receiving the coupons, I still have to compare prices on various platforms. After all the hassle, in the end you only save a few dollars.

So, why do so many people like to hold events together?

Why do all the platforms focus on organizing activities during 618?

Why do all the major e-commerce platforms love to hold promotions during 618? To understand this problem, we first need to understand why the platform holds shopping festivals, and secondly, we need to understand why 618 is so popular among all shopping festivals.

1) Festival symbols, rituals + consumer social background

When talking about 618, we have to think of another big promotion festival - Double Eleven.

On November 11, 2009, Taobao Mall (renamed Tmall in 2012) held the first "Singles Day" low-price promotion under the slogan "You can still shop even if you don't have a date on Singles Day." Originally, we just started with the mentality of testing the waters, but we didn’t expect that the single-day transaction volume on the day of the event would reach 52 million, far exceeding the usual turnover income of Taobao Mall.

The “Singles’ Day” promotion that year allowed Taobao Mall (Tmall) and various merchants to reap the benefits of the event. The following year, Alibaba invested 300 million yuan in large-scale publicity for the event, proposed the "Double Eleven" event concept, and pre-promoted the event three months in advance. The number of participating merchants in the event grew from the initial 27 to 711, and ultimately achieved a single-day sales volume of 936 million yuan.

November 11th originally meant a way for singles to relieve their loneliness, but with the invasion of commercial forces, this day has become tied to the online shopping spree and even penetrated offline, becoming a massive consumer carnival.

By comparing the Baidu search indexes of "Double Eleven" and "Singles' Day" in the past ten years, it was found that the search index of "Double Eleven" has soared all the way, leaving "Singles' Day" far behind.

Source: Baidu Index

Tmall has tasted the sweetness of Double Eleven, and other major e-commerce platforms are eyeing the benefits of shopping festivals. Following the first "cat" to try it out, more and more platforms have started their own festival-creating campaigns - Taobao has "Double 12", JD.com has "6.18", Suning.com has "818"... Platforms have tried to increase sales and strengthen their own brands through a variety of festivals.

A review of e-commerce platform festival creation

(Source of the table: Xu Chiyu's "Construction of Consumption Symbols in Online Shopping Carnival")

For a time, people had the feeling that there was a festival every day in the 365 days of the year; as long as the platform wanted you to spend money, there would be no problem in creating a shopping festival. So, why are shopping festivals so effective? Why are platforms so obsessed with creating festivals?

Plato once wrote in his Dialogues on Literature:

"In the beginning, the gods felt pity for the hard labor that humans were born to endure, so they established a system of festivals and celebrations so that people could work from time to time and rest from time to time."

In fact, no matter whether it is 618 or Double Eleven, just spend the money and the party is over. All shopping festivals that are created are festivals, and festivals themselves have the attributes of celebration and entertainment. Without mentioning the distant past, thinking back to the Dragon Boat Festival that just passed, wasn’t it closely related to recreational activities such as dragon boat racing and eating rice dumplings?

Festivals, as a symbol of carnival, naturally suggest people to reward themselves, while the backdrop of a consumer society and the big promotions during shopping festivals give people even more reasons to consume. I have to say that the e-commerce platform’s strategy of creating festivals is really clever.

What’s even more interesting is that creating a festival is only the beginning of the “routine”. The greater magic of a shopping festival lies in its “annual” nature and ritualized operation – it happens once a year, and makes you think about it every year, just like looking forward to Chinese New Year; moreover, a series of actions such as planting grass, comparing prices, adding to cart, grabbing coupons, placing orders, flash sales, looking forward to receiving goods, and unpacking express parcels, don’t they make you unable to stop?

It can be said that shopping festivals, like the Chinese New Year, have successfully dominated people’s psychology and behavior, and even constructed a kind of cultural identity and social cohesion.

Do you remember last year’s Double Eleven? When the day is approaching and you suddenly find that your shopping cart is empty, do you suddenly feel a little anxious? When your friends are enthusiastically discussing their shopping lists and their experiences in getting bargains, do you feel like you've been abandoned by society if you don't join in?

Therefore, shopping festivals have become a symbol that carries consumption information and can firmly grasp consumers. Naturally, major platforms will make a big fuss about shopping festivals.

2) Head effect in festival-building campaign: super brands and super symbols

The "New Trends Report on China's E-Commerce Promotions" released by JD.com, the 21st Century Economic Research Institute and Digital 100 shows that June and November are two significant retail order peaks throughout the year, and China's retail has formed a dual-peak pattern of 618 and 11.11.

The question arises again, with so many shopping festivals, why do e-commerce giants only focus on a few individual festivals such as 618 and Double Eleven? Why aren’t other festivals so grand?

In this regard, the book "Super Symbols Are Super Creativity" puts forward the concept of "super symbols":

Super symbols are the symbols with the lowest memory and communication costs. Everyone can understand them, and everyone will act according to their instructions without thinking.

JD.com told a reporter from Southern Metropolis Daily on the eve of 618 in 2017 that they had registered the 618 trademark a long time ago, but JD.com is open and its competitors can use it at will. From the perspective of "super symbol", JD.com's move is likely to expand the influence of 618 in order to expand its own influence.

From this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why major platforms are fighting fiercely during the 618 shopping festival. As an e-commerce giant, JD.com has already made 618 into a super symbol and implanted this symbol deeply into the minds of consumers. Whenever the day comes, consumers will go shopping like a conditioned reflex.

When 618 becomes a super symbol, people may still remember that it is the child of JD.com, but this can no longer stop people from directly associating it with big sales and shopping sprees, nor can it stop other e-commerce platforms from taking advantage of the opportunity and reaping the benefits by standing on the shoulders of the giant JD.com. They also promote sales vigorously during the 618 period, which not only saves marketing and communication costs, but also boosts sales.

author: Routine Editorial Department

Source: Operation Research Society