In-depth analysis of marketing: Why has Pinduoduo gained 300 million users in just three years?

We all know that it is not easy to survive in the fiercely competitive red ocean. It is even more unrealistic to want to break out of the siege on this basis, especially when the market is controlled by giants.

But Pinduoduo did it. With the two giants Taobao and JD.com controlling the market and the e-commerce landscape already saturated, Pinduoduo managed to seize the blue ocean in the red ocean, breaking through people's inherent cognition and successfully carving out a path of its own. So we need to talk about Pinduoduo. What is its operating model and marketing strategy?

【 Brand influence】

【Creative Disassembly】

【Communication Disassembly】

【Disassembly of Human Nature】

【Brand Disassembly】

Brand influence

Pinduoduo was officially launched in September 2015, and it has been 3 years since then.

In the past three years, Pinduoduo has become another e-commerce giant after Taobao and JD.com, with a monthly GMV (total transaction volume) exceeding 4 billion. It has received investments from institutions such as Tencent and Sequoia, and officially landed on the Nasdaq in July this year, ringing the bell simultaneously in Shanghai and New York to complete its listing. In the same month and August, the number of installations surpassed JD.com, becoming the APP with the highest number of installations after Taobao.

From this we can see that Pinduoduo's influence is not small.

Creative disassembly

One of the important factors that enabled Pinduoduo to emerge as a dark horse is that it redefined e-commerce, integrated social networking into e-commerce, allowed users to start and join groups in a C2B format, and leveraged the power of WeChat to make brand communication smoother and more effective.

To make it easier for everyone to understand, I will explain Pinduoduo's group buying process in detail below.

As shown in the figure above, Pinduoduo divides users into active users and passive users.

Active users are responsible for finding products and sharing them with friends after finding suitable products, which is called starting a group. Passive users are those who see a product link on WeChat, think it is affordable, and choose to buy it, which is called joining a group.

Therefore, the essence of so-called social e-commerce is sharing, which takes advantage of people's desire to get a bargain and encourages users to share actively. Something that originally cost 50 yuan only costs 10 yuan when bought in a group. Everyone would be tempted just by thinking about it, and everyone would send the group purchase link to their Moments , WeChat groups , and WeChat friends. When friends see the group buying link, and the product is of good quality and low price, and is exactly what they need at the moment, they will share and buy it without hesitation.

This cycle repeats itself over and over again, and users gather enough people to join the order, buy the goods at a low price, and are very happy. Pinduoduo was also very happy because it gained publicity and traffic thanks to users’ sharing. It really killed two birds with one stone.

This is Pinduoduo's creativity, and it is also the difference that distinguishes it from other e-commerce platforms. Compared with buying and being done, Pinduoduo goes an extra step of sharing, using the form of group buying at a low price to encourage users to actively share. This is also the reason why Pinduoduo can seize the blue ocean in the red ocean.

Communication Disassembly

Sharing and dissemination within WeChat alone is not enough to create a strong influence, so Pinduoduo has to carry out multi- channel dissemination.

For example, in the past three years, Pinduoduo has sponsored variety shows with large traffic such as "Extreme Challenge", " Happy Camp ", "If You Are the One", "Happy Comedian", and "I Am a Detective", which have obtained sufficient exposure for the brand.

For example, offline advertising, a large number of advertisements are placed in subways and bus stations.

At the Guangzhou subway station, Pinduoduo even booked the entire station hall. When people walked through the subway corridor, all they saw were Pinduoduo advertisements. The advertising efforts were quite impressive.

For example, as for mobile phone binding software, BBK Chairman Duan Yongping is the master of Pinduoduo CEO Huang Zheng and one of Pinduoduo's angel investors . Therefore, Vivo and Oppo, owned by Duan Yongping, set Pinduoduo as pre-installed software on their mobile phones, which directly brought a large amount of traffic to Pinduoduo.

In addition to the above-mentioned means of communication, in May 2017, Pinduoduo launched its advertising hit song - "Pinduoduo", which was adapted from Zhu Zhuai's "I Miss You So Much". Once you listen to it, the lyrics and melody will keep replaying in your mind, and you can hum it unconsciously while walking on the street.

This magical song cleverly combines e-commerce and entertainment, allowing people to automatically remember the Pinduoduo brand and the benefits Pinduoduo can bring to users while humming it to themselves. It not only helps the brand gain a lot of publicity but also adds entertainment value to the brand.

When people see Pinduoduo’s advertisements on variety shows or offline, they may search for the brand word “Pinduoduo” on search engines out of curiosity, which is the so-called secondary search.

Therefore, in order to make users see Pinduoduo at first glance when searching for the brand word "Pinduoduo", Pinduoduo placed bids on search engines, specifically for brand words, so that people can see Pinduoduo's advertisements at first glance, guiding users to download Pinduoduo.

(PC)

(Mobile)

While doing a lot of dissemination, it also uses bidding to guide users to download the APP, reducing unnecessary user loss , and to a certain extent achieving "product and effect integration".

Deconstruction of human nature

More viewing effect

When people see something often, they will gradually be impressed by it, develop a favorable impression of it, and then buy or use it.

Pinduoduo has gained a large amount of exposure for its brand by sponsoring variety shows and expanding offline channels, allowing people to see Pinduoduo anytime and anywhere. The more you see, the more impressed you will be, and the greater the chance of downloading and using the APP.

Free Psychology

Everyone loves to get a small bargain, and everyone wants to get something without having to pay for it.

Therefore, Pinduoduo launched a function module that allows users to bargain and get items for free. Just send the product link to your friends and ask them to help you bargain (each user can only bargain once). When the price of the product is chopped to 0, you can get the product for free.

In this way, users can get their favorite products for free and satisfy their desire for a bargain; at the same time, the brand can be promoted and gain traffic.

Scarcity Psychology

Scarcity itself represents value. The scarcer an item is, the more likely it is to arouse people's greed, making people choose to buy it out of fear of losing it.

Therefore, Pinduoduo launched a limited-time flash sale function module, which allows users to purchase designated products within a specified time at a price far lower than the original price. The remaining time is presented to users in each flash sale period to increase the sense of urgency, take advantage of users' fear of loss, and implant the word "scarcity" into users' minds, allowing them to place orders quickly and complete the conversion .

Bandwagon effect

People prefer to believe in others rather than in themselves. As long as everyone thinks something is good, it must be good.

Therefore, whether Pinduoduo is placing online or offline advertisements, it likes to include a copy "300 million people are on Pinduoduo."

300 million people are using Pinduoduo. People who don’t know Pinduoduo must be curious about what kind of product can attract 300 million people to use it? I will definitely search for relevant information about Pinduoduo on search engines and download it to experience it for myself.

Brand Disassembly

Brand Origin

In September 2015, Pinduoduo was officially launched. Prior to this, Pinduoduo was a game operation company, which means that Pinduoduo was incubated from within a game company, and its early team was also from the game company.

In September 2016, Pinduoduo merged with Pinhaohuo, which was founded in April 2015.

Both companies belong to social e-commerce. The difference is that Pinduoduo was incubated by a game company and has greater advantages in technical capabilities and understanding of consumer needs; while Pinhaohuo is a pure e-commerce team and is much stronger than Pinduoduo in back-end supply chain management. Therefore, the merger of the two achieved complementary advantages, and rapid development was natural.

Brand market positioning

The brand market positioning should be the first or only one.

Pinduoduo is able to stand out when giants monopolize the market by following this rule.

Starting from the third and fourth tier cities that the giants cannot reach, focusing on low prices and social e-commerce, it essentially distanced itself from the giants and overtook them.

Traditional e-commerce focuses on speed, quality and economy, with the goal of enabling users to quickly find the products they like and complete the purchase, focusing on efficiency and quality. Pinduoduo is different. Sometimes people go to Pinduoduo and don’t even know what they want or need to buy. They just browse around, take pictures of what they like and find suitable, and share them with their friends, so that their friends can place an order together and buy the products at a low price. This gives people a feeling of online shopping, and relatively speaking, efficiency and quality are not so important.

This is also the reason why Pinduoduo can be popular in third- and fourth-tier cities. People in third- and fourth-tier cities have free time but no money. They don’t pay much attention to the quality of the goods. As long as they can be used, the price is very low anyway. Pinduoduo just meets the needs of this type of people. If they have free time, they can go shopping to find their favorite products; if they have no money, they can ask their friends to place orders together and purchase the products at extremely low prices.

By meeting the needs of people in third- and fourth-tier cities, Pinduoduo naturally became very popular in third- and fourth-tier cities and became one of the must-have software for people to install.

Summary: Pinduoduo's success is a success in its positioning. It has successfully penetrated into third- and fourth-tier cities, fought a battle of differentiation with giants, and successfully broke through. Pinduoduo's success is also inseparable from WeChat. It was WeChat that supported it, gave it the first traffic, and enabled it to grow more smoothly.

Pinduoduo has completed its IPO three years after its establishment, but the IPO is not the end, but a new starting point. It still has a long way to go.

What will Pinduoduo's future be like? Let's wait and see.

Source: Xinmo Marketing