A brief discussion on the rules of Kuaishou live streaming

Amid the epidemic, offline stores are bound to be deserted, and it is inevitable for major brands to close stores or limit flow of customers. In the process of self-rescue, the importance of online channels began to emerge. Live streaming and short videos may have been a supplement for many brands in the past, but now they are about to become a mainstream.

Taking this opportunity, e-commerce live streaming should be able to completely become the infrastructure of the retail industry, and the live streaming rooms and offline stores can truly be "on the same page". What is reshaping the people-goods market is not only the new retail being promoted by e-commerce giants, but also "live streaming + short video + social" platforms like Kuaishou .

On Kuaishou, the people who promote products are actually Kuaishou’s KOLs. For example, during the live broadcast of Kuaishou Super Brand Day by Metersbonwe and Kuaishou anchor “Brand Shopkeeper,” nearly 50,000 pieces of the same sweatshirt worn by the anchor were sold. For users, they will make purchasing decisions based on a host’s recommendation or outfit. Because compared to traditional store owners and online shop owners, Kuaishou Internet celebrities pay more attention to interactive communication with "fans" and complete fans' consumption projection of symbolic meanings through the shaping of personal IP.

At the previous press conference for the upgrade of Kuaishou's marketing platform Magnetic Engine, Yan Qiang, senior vice president of Kuaishou, said that Kuaishou has a unique "people + content" social ecosystem. Based on this ecosystem, a sense of trust is generated between users and between users and brands, thereby increasing the overall marketing value of public and private domain traffic, and creating the commercial capability of turning everything into "commodity".

In the past two years, the system of Kuaishou Magnetic Engine has been continuously improved and has become the standard for brand marketing growth and social asset accumulation. To some extent, Magnetic Engine is providing the digital infrastructure for the e-commerce live streaming era. On this basis, Kuaishou is reconstructing the "people, goods and place" in its own way.

01 Accumulating brand assets of “goods”

Judging from Kuaishou’s recent intensive actions, in terms of brand e-commerce, Kuaishou can be roughly divided into two types from the perspective of empowering merchants. One is a brand that already has a certain degree of popularity and has considerable user recognition in its respective field. We can understand that Kuaishou is building a brand flagship store, which is a Tmall-like model.

The other type is small and medium-sized brands that have not yet gained widespread recognition, or high-quality merchants that have not yet established a brand. Kuaishou helps Kuaishou's native brands accumulate fan assets and form a brand effect through the operation of its own public and private traffic, as well as the capabilities of its upstream and downstream partners, and finally go out of the circle and bring sales conversions. This is similar to Pinduoduo's C2M model.

Let’s talk about the brand flagship store model first.

There are many Kuaishou festivals centered around e-commerce. For example, there used to be a sales festival where anchors would select SKUs, and the top anchors could have total sales of over 100 million yuan in one day. For the Kuaishou Super Brand Day that Metersbonwe participated in, the brands provided their SKUs, and the platform and anchors helped the brands to sell their products.

What’s more important is that Metersbonwe’s official Kuaishou account gained 300,000 followers in one day. In other words, after a live broadcast, Kuaishou not only gave the United States fish, but also taught it how to fish.

After that, these fans become Mebon’s own private traffic base. By maintaining these users, Metersbonwe can conduct longer-term operations, such as conducting node marketing and linkage traffic diversion, laying the foundation for subsequent sales conversion and continued spread of word-of-mouth.

Judging from the brand C-position plan and the "Shopping in Place" activity brand recruitment jointly launched by Kuaishou Commercialization and Kuaishou E-commerce, cloud shopping is not only for Mebon, nor does it only happen during the epidemic. This should become a normalized measure for Kuaishou. On the official account of "Kuaishou Business Observation", we can see more detailed support policies for the brand C-position plan. For example, there is zero threshold to join a Kuaishou store, step-by-step operational guidance, exclusive marketing activities, account traffic support and pre-sale capacity support, delivery delay, technical service fee reduction, etc. In addition, Kuaishou’s celebrity and influencer resources are also a powerful tool for brands to promote their products.

Brand C position, as the name suggests, is to become a leading brand, or to make a powerful brand become a leading brand. When Taobao was booming, Alibaba launched Tmall. If Taobao is a market with many stalls, then Tmall is a shopping mall with many well-known brands. In the past, when we went shopping online, we mostly went to Tmall and JD.com, but now there are more and more choices. Kuaishou’s brand C position plan is actually an evolution of the Tmall model on Kuaishou.

As the Internet population continues to migrate, brands are in urgent need of expanding new positions to attract more customers. So we see Xiaohongshu becoming popular, and communities including Zhihu also launching the product promotion function.

At present, Kuaishou’s traffic pool, which frequently refreshes sales records, is still full of dividends. For brands that already have a certain status in the market, occupying the C position in the Kuaishou mall at this time can win more business opportunities.

So, what should small and medium-sized brands and start-up brands do? Kuaishou is a content platform that combines e-commerce with its advantage. Its advantage lies in that many businesses have accumulated free fans and consumer groups through continuous operations. The quality of these brands has been tested by fans' purchases and repurchases.

In order to continue to gain recognition from fans, these brands continue to invest in quality and products, forming a unique growth model based on private domain traffic. Coupled with the improvement of Kuaishou's magnetic engine tool, many native small and medium-sized brands have actually formed a deep emotional connection with their fans. Some of these brands are domestic products that are already rising on Kuaishou, and some are dark horses in the making waiting to explode.

For example, the person in charge of the beauty category of Kuaishou’s merchant account previously stated that the country’s largest perfume brand, Snow Fragrance (which owns brands such as Vivinio, Medon, and Longin), has grown rapidly relying on the Kuaishou business platform. By opening up sales channels through public domain products provided by Kuaishou advertising, live broadcasts can achieve sales of up to 3 million+ in a day.

Xue Yuan, co-founder of Xingluo, believes that Kuaishou becoming the preferred entrepreneurial venue for small and medium-sized start-up brands is the choice of the times. "In China, where the manufacturing industry is so developed, new commodities/products emerge every day, hoping to be known by more people and occupy the minds of consumers. When the endorsement of creators on Kuaishou even exceeds the role of spokespersons, the form of video and live broadcast also better interprets the brand image and product value."

However, the road to developing your own brand is very difficult in the early stages. Under the influence of the epidemic, small and medium-sized brands have reached a turning point in their destiny. In order to help small and medium-sized businesses achieve sustainable branding development, Kuaishou launched the "Kuaishou Brand Growth Acceleration Plan". Specifically, Kuaishou has joined hands with its partners Locke Shared Design Platform, Chaos University, Xingluo and other top institutions to help start-up brands create popular products and accelerate their growth through a number of policies such as design creativity, supply chain docking, operational guidance, and integrated marketing support.

Kuai Brand is somewhat similar to Pinduoduo’s new brand plan, but not exactly the same. Pinduoduo's C2M model allows factories to understand consumers' specific needs and thus produce and manufacture corresponding products. At the same time, manufacturers can quickly change the supply chain and improve production efficiency based on market demand.

Fast brands can also collect information on consumer demand at the front end by leveraging Kuaishou’s huge user base and consumer base.

demand and feed back to upstream production decisions. But the more important feature of fast brands is that they concentrate the resources of Kuaishou and its partners to solve things that merchants are not good at, such as upgrading brand image and product design, integrated marketing, and IP incubation.

For this type of brand, what they lack most at this stage is effective exposure and visibility. Kuaishou's magnetic engine platform links five major product lines, including Jinniu e-commerce, merchant accounts, work promotion, fast order acceptance and fast collaboration, to provide fast brands with integrated marketing support in terms of traffic, operations, policies, certification, etc., to achieve more effective operations. In this way, once the brand successfully goes viral, it will be a win-win situation for the merchant and the Kuaishou platform, which will not only meet the growth needs of start-up brands, but also create a strong binding relationship between the incubated brand and the Kuaishou platform.

02 Give full play to the node effect of "people"

In the Kuaishou field, merchants and KOLs can better convert fans into consumers and achieve the combination of social points and emotional points.

The social point is that fans, as consumers, have real-time voice. In many cases, the type of fan group determines the IP path of the e-commerce brand.

The excitement point is to start from the content and reach the aesthetic resonance of fans through "content + interaction + product + service".

The data is also confirming the grass-planting scenarios happening in the Kuaishou field. Taking beauty products as an example, the “Marketing Value Research of the Beauty Industry on Kuaishou Platform” report released by Miaozhen System last year showed that short videos have a significant impact on consumers’ purchase of beauty products. More than 70% of Kuaishou users choose to obtain beauty information from short video channels; nearly 90% of Kuaishou users expressed their willingness to purchase beauty products recommended by anchors during live broadcasts.

What Kuaishou brand e-commerce practices is actually the SICAS consumer behavior model. This model was previously proposed by the DCCI Internet Data Center. After the rise of "live streaming + short video + social" e-commerce, this model has once again been interpreted in more dimensions.

SICAS means: brand-user mutual perception (Sense), interest generation-interaction (Interest & Interactive), user and brand-merchant connection-interactive communication (Connect & Communication), action-purchase (Action), experience-sharing (Share), a total of five stages.

This is a panoramic model, in which user behavior and consumption trajectory are a multi-dimensional interactive process in such an ecosystem, rather than a one-way progressive process. Its characteristics are the addition of new key factors that need to be considered in the marketing process, such as micro-audience, dialogue, niche market, coupling, on-demand, relationship, and perceptual network.

In this model, KOLs and users play the role of coupling and nodes. The "2019 China Digital Marketing Trends" report released by AdMaster pointed out that 81% of advertisers will increase their social marketing investment in 2019, with an average budget increase of 21%. KOL and short videos/live broadcasts are the focus of the digital marketing industry, and KOL promotion accounts for 60%, becoming the most popular direction.

The core of private domain traffic lies in individuals. KOLs can create content, accumulate fans, and sell goods, thus bringing about monetization models such as payment, live streaming, and e-commerce. The core of public domain traffic lies in the platform. The platform can do content matching and advertising recommendations, and thus can realize advertising monetization. The combination of private domain traffic and public domain traffic by Magnetic Engine provides brand e-commerce with rich possibilities.

03 The future of “market” is commodity content

It has to be said that nowadays content is marketing and marketing is content. E-commerce platforms are becoming more and more like content platforms, and content platforms are becoming more and more like e-commerce platforms. To a certain extent, the top live streaming platforms and the top e-commerce platforms may eventually have a battle.

With the development of technology and the iteration of platform-level products, two major trends should emerge in the future.

First, our consumption decisions will be increasingly influenced by our social relationships. As Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing, said in Marketing 4.0: "In this era, the most important F-factors are Family, Fans, and Followers. Family, friends, and people you care about can most influence your opinions and choices."

On the other hand, online shopping will become increasingly similar to the experience of offline shopping. When we discover and purchase products, they are more often presented in the form of live broadcasts or short videos.

Kuaishou has long been product-oriented. With the increase in the number of creators and content pools, Kuaishou has now added more operating methods that are suitable for Kuaishou. Magnetic Engine is a commercial infrastructure that mobilizes Kuaishou's products, content and creators. What is certain is that for brand e-commerce, Kuaishou is still a traffic depression and a gold mine of assets in terms of people, goods and markets.

Author: Wu Duidui

Source: Wu Duidui (ID: esnql520)