So how did yoga pants become publicly accepted in China?

While the rise of athleisure and growing interest in sports and fitness has fueled some of this change, one of the main drivers behind Chinese consumers’ acceptance of yoga pants, especially in lower-tier cities, was the re-framing and re-naming of yoga pants by top fashion bloggers into just another type of pants, removing the athletic connotations.

Let’s take a closer look.

Lululemon Drove Popularity in 1^st Tier Cities

The brand entered the Chinese market in 2016, with the athleisure trend. Many of China’s 1^st-tier fashionistas knew about the popularity of Lululemon abroad and were quick to embrace the brand. Plus, because of Lululemon’s fashionable design, for example, its pants don’t show underwear lines and they have a butt-lifting effect, people start wearing those pants in public places. Around this time, fitness also started becoming trendy in China, mainly among white-collar workers in 1^st-tier cities. Wearing yoga pants showed you were part of that trend.

Giving Yoga Pants a New Name Helped Them Go Mainstream in China

But at that point, yoga pants were still only being worn by a small group of people. One of the limiting factors keeping them from going mainstream was the price (we’ll talk more about that in a moment). The other was the name “yoga pants” or “exercise pants”.

This name signaled that one needed to be exercising in order to wear them. But at that time, the vast majority of women in China, especially in lower-tier cities, didn’t have the habit of going to gyms or doing yoga. This means they didn’t have a reason to wear yoga pants.

So in 2016, popular Taobao fashion influencer Eve Zhang (Zhang Dayi) gave them a new name: Shark Skin Pants or Shayu Ku (鲨鱼裤). The name described the look and texture of shiny, thick yoga pants and the tightening and slimming effect they have.

Because it is such a fashionable and easy-understanding name, it took off. Many Taobao stores started following Eve and referring to their yoga pants as shark pants.

Now with the new name, wearing yoga pants was no longer confined to a specific occasion. People started wearing them with their everyday looks.

They really went mainstream in 2020. I remember in winter last year, I saw so many girls wearing them on the street. Girls love matching shark pants with an oversized hoodie or a sweater on top. They also wore long socks with a pair of sneakers.

Top Chinese celebrity Yang Mi (杨幂), whose street looks influence fashion in China, wore shark pants in one of her airport looks, causing them to become even more viral. But the funny thing is that she was wearing Lululemon’s yoga pants when the picture was being taken.

Nowadays there are many KOLs promoting yoga pants such as Douyin influencer Hu Chuliang (胡楚靓). Hu launched yoga pants in her store last year. She managed to sell 253 million RMB worth of yoga pants within the first year.

Mass production makes prices affordable

Now alongside the new name, another key reason why yoga pants were able to go mainstream was that they became cheaper. At around 800 RMB a pair, Lululemon is expensive which made it hard for the trend to spread to the mainstream.

Before 2016, only a few factories in China produced yoga pants. But after Eve Zhang introduced the name shark pants and the trend started taking off, some factories spotted the potential popularity of yoga pants and started transforming their business.

For example, a factory called Mutuzhe (沐途者) used to mostly produce swimwear (80-90%) and yoga clothes (10-20%), and most of its products were sold overseas.

With the history of producing swimming wear, Mutuzhe easily shifted its business into yoga pant production for the domestic market. Because the needs for yoga pants grew dramatically, Mutuzhe opened another two new factories in 2018 and 2020.

To create ordinary yoga pants, it doesn’t require expensive materials and high-end technology. It only costs around 45 RMB to produce one pair, and that’s why there are many cheap yoga pants on Taobao or Pinduoduo.

E-commerce platforms are speeding up the yoga pants trend

Besides the new name and lower prices, e-commerce and social channels such as Taobao Live, Douyin, Kuaishou and Pinduoduo really helped spread the trend to lower-tier cities.

Live streaming has become a key sales channel for yoga pants, especially those that promise slimming or lifting effects. Unlike skincare products, which require days to see its effects, or bras, which are not appropriate to wear outside publicly, yoga pants, on the other hand, are easy to show viewers their effect.

For example, a Chinese yoga clothes brand molyvivi, which was just founded in 2020 managed to achieve over 5 million RMB sales through its livestream. It has a store on Pinduoduo, and the best selling pants in the store are only 49 RMB.

Key Takeaway

While price, sales channel, and product quality are all important – sometimes these alone are not enough to make a new trend take off. Cultural factors need to be considered as well. Reframing yoga pants as shark pants changed consumers’ perception and made them a product anyone could wear at any time. This case study is important to keep in mind when bringing any product to the China market. 

Read more: 下沉的【瑜伽裤】|趋势分析

The post How Yoga Pants Finally Became Popular in China, Even in Lower-Tier Cities appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

A recent report (淘宝直播男性消费报告) from Alibaba-run WeChat Account Taobangdan (淘榜单) found that from 2018 to 2020, the number of male consumers shopping through livestreams has increased dramatically. From 2019 to 2020, the number of male consumers watching live streams grew 205%. In comparison, the number of female consumers grew 111%.

KOLs have taken note. For example, if you watch top live streamer Austin Li’s broadcasts, you will notice that his pet phrase has changed from “Listen, all the girls” (所有女生) to “Listen, all the girls and boys” (所有女生和男生).

So who are these men? Where are they from and what are their consumption habits? Let’s take a look: 

Chinese Male Livestreaming Consumer Demographics

According to the report, male consumers from 6th-tier cities make up 27% of the total male consumers in the livestream industry. Following this, are male consumers from 2nd and 3rd tier cities. They take up 23% and 18.7% respectively.

Male consumers tend to shop on livestreams between 8:00 to 10:00 PM. The vast majority of viewers are post-80s and post-90s. 

In general, Chinese male consumers love watching livestreaming to shop for cars and car-related products, home appliances, furniture, and electronics.

Product preferences depending on the city 

For example, male consumers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou mostly shop for pet products. Chengdu and Chongqing boys love buying flowers and plants. Boys in Tianjin and Shenzhen love buying blind boxes and models.

An interesting trend is that, last year, a Tibetan boy named Ding Zhen (丁真) from Ganzi (甘孜) in Sichuan Province went viral because of his look. (By the way, he looks very good). Statistics show that since then, male consumers in the local area have increased interest in watching livestreams and shopping for fashion products such as watches, sunglasses, shoes, clothes and accessories. 

Product preferences based on age

Post-90s male consumers care more about their looks, and they tend to spend more on clothes, beauty products, watches and sunglasses. Actually, post-95s are driving the growth of China’s male beauty industry. 

For post-80s, their consumption falls more on family, such as baby’s products, cars and home appliances.

Post-70s male consumers tend to spend more on jewellery, flowers, and pets.

Beauty, Clothes, and Baijiu

There are three product categories worth digging a bit deeper into, those are beauty, clothes and baijiu, a distilled Chinese liquor.

Talking about beauty, cosmetic surgeries and related products have become Chinese male consumers’ TOP5 favorite. In 2019, the number of male cosmetic surgery clients grew 52.3% from the prior year. A common need among male consumers is hair implants.

In terms of apparels, clothes ranging from 50 to 200 RMB are most popular among male livestream consumers. Men tend to have loyal preferences toward certain brands, and they love choosing basic ones. Bosideng, Heilan Home (海澜之家) and Uniqlo are where they looking for to fill their closets.

The third category: baijiu. The consumption of domestic baijiu increased 700% in livestream in 2020. Baijiu’s reputation and consumption setting is changing from something older consumers drink to something young and trendy. What may be somewhat surprising is that post-80s and post-90s were the two main consumer groups. Among baijiu, Maotai is the top runner. So much so that Maotai ranked #1 in the food category on Tmall during this year’s 11.11 Shopping Festival.

More Male Livestreamers as Well 

Not only are more male consumers shopping through livestreaming, but there are also more and more male livestreamers. Male live streamers make up 40% of total livestreamers on Taobao. Among Taobao’s top 10 male live steamers, 50% of them are KOLs while the rest are celebrities. Behind Austin Li, the next four big names are Timor小小疯, 林依轮, 南风Cheney, and 吉杰. 

Read more: 男人在直播间消费起来有多野？这份报告告诉你

Post-95s Driving the Growth of China’s Male Beauty Industry

How Did Chinese Liquor Brand Maotai Rank #1 in the F&B Category During 11.11?

A Popular Activity for Chinese New Year 2021 Was Cosmetic Surgery?!

The post The Number of Chinese Male Consumers Shopping Through Livestreaming Grew Dramatically in 2020 appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

How did Xinba develop his strong personal brand and maintain such loyal followers, even after the scandal?

The Xinba Livestream Scandal – A Quick Backstory

In case you haven’t heard of the scandal. Last fall we talked about Xinba’s ambition to earn 8 billion RMB during the Double 11 shopping festival in 2020, and he made it! 

But not long after, he was caught selling fake products. There were rumors saying he might be sentenced to 15 years in prison. But in the end, he was fined 900k RMB and he and his team were suspended from livestreaming for up to 60 days. 

And this is no small incident. Trust is everything when it comes to ecommerce live streaming. If Xinba lost the trust of his followers, that could be the end of his livestream career. It could also affect Kuaishou. According to a ranking of top e-commerce live streamers in China published by Jinri Wanghong (今日网红), Xinba and his team took up 4 of the TOP10 positions.

But he seems to have maintained his followers’ loyalty. How did he do it? 

His Down-to-Earth Image

Xinba has crafted his image since the beginning. He is the spokesperson of farmers and everything he does is for the public, for the ordinary people. Though in reality, Xinba has fancy cars and mansions and he has huge property, he doesn’t position himself as a wealthy person standing above the public. That would alienate his followers and make him unapproachable.

Xinba will do everything to please his followers. For example, we mentioned he was once involved in a scandal where he yelled at a security guard and hotel workers in public because he felt they mistreated his followers.

During his livestream, Xinba also makes sure his followers get the lowest price and best deal on the Internet. He stopped his collaborations with HONOR (荣耀), a domestic mobile phone brand, and asked his teams to do the same thing, simply because the brand wouldn’t allow him to give away earphones for free. Xinba even asked all of his followers who had purchased the phone from his livestream to return the product.

Other examples

A down-to-earth image is really important if you want to reach the masses. There is another example of KOLs in the auto industry. There are two well-known Douyin accounts, one is HuGe Shuoche (虎哥说车) and the other is HouGe Shuoche (猴哥说车). 

Huge is a forerunner in the industry and he tended to introduce cars in a very formal way. Houge is a late-comer, but within 6 months he surpassed Huge because he had a video series where he provides suggestions for followers who want to buy a car. This kind of content is more relatable to followers and it generates more interactions with them as well. Spotting this, at the beginning of 2021, Huge launched a new series giving car advice to followers.

Even in the entertainment industry, you often find celebrities who begin their careers as an ordinary person but after they became famous, their popularity decreased. This is because their image changed and they became less relatable. 

The Ultimate Objective For Content

When many people first start creating content, they often focus a lot on the content and not on how to get it to spread. To get it to spread, your content must resonate with the audience, either make them happy, sad, or angry, etc.

Xinba expands the reach his content by his personal image. In public, he is a loving husband who cares for his wife so much. He is a strict boss for his teams or apprentices. He is also a caring KOL and spokesperson for his followers. All of these characters attach charm to Xinba and that’s why his followers are so loyal to him. 

Xinba is also very popular among many mothers from lower tier cities as he often gives the lowest price on the Internet. There are funny sayings about this, such as “I don’t worry about my wife not coming back home but she watching Xinba’s livestream” or “I earn money for my wife and my wife earn money for Xinba”.

Xinba Created His Own Holiday

We have big shopping festivals every year such as 618 and Double 11. Well, at some point, KOLs are commodities as well and they need big days to promote themselves. For Xinba, his big day every year falls on August 18 (818). In Chinese, the pronunciation of this date is similar to “Xinba”.

On August 18, 2019, Xinba held a concert for his followers in the National Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. This is the huge stadium where the opening ceremony of 2008 Summer Olympics was held. To hold a concert here, you have to go through lots of processes and the price to rent the place for a day is around 3.6 million RMB. But a concert usually needs more than one day as you have to decorate it.

Second, to please followers and create buzz for the concert, Xinba invited many top celebrities in China, including Jackie Chan (成龙), G.E.M (邓紫棋) and Wang Leehom (王力宏). 

This is the scale not many companies are able to create. This location and number of celebrities could rival the 11.11 Gala that Alibaba holds! 

For his comeback in March, Xinba promoted the livestream on many social media platforms and on huge LED screens across 9 major cities. For Xinba’s loyal followers, this concert or seeing him on LED screens would make them proud to see their “friend” or their idol that they support becoming well-known. 

And for someone who had never heard of Xinba before, hearing about the event or seeing the ads would leave impressions in their minds. If they happen to search for Xinba and watch his livestream, they may become one of his followers.

Copy-and-Paste Followers Are Loyal

What does copy-and-paste followers mean? They are people who follow multiple accounts from the same person across different platforms. For example, they follow the influencer or celebrity on Weibo, Xiaohongshu, WeChat official account, etc. For the influencer, this is great because they will have many ways to reach this follower, which is useful as it is increasingly harder to get traffic these days. 

To boost this effect, Xinba leads his fans to follow other accounts from his team and family. 

How does Xinba introduce or guide traffic for his team?

It’s by dashang (打赏). In the livestream industry, besides selling products, dashang or giving virtual gifts is one of the important ways to monetize. On most live streaming platforms, there is a ranking board for each influencer showing who contributed the most gifts in this livestream. 

Back when he was first starting out, Xinba actually gave a lot of gifts to other streamers. This way, viewers began to notice him on these ranking boards, and then would come to watch his livestream. 

So now, his team members are doing the same thing to grow their fan bases. You will often find that the Top 10 on the contribution ranking board are his team members. If other people keep sending gifts aggressively, Xinba will ask the person to stop. If they don’t, he will actually kick the person out of the livestream. That’s how much he wants his family and team to appear on that ranking board. 

He did this on his comeback livestream on March 27. He had over 5 million viewers, so even if he can just funnel a small amount of those viewers to other accounts it would help them. 

Other than this, Xinba also officially introduces his team members in his livestream. He once introduced his team member Lu (鹿) and in just one minute she gained nearly 400K followers.  

Xinba is a controversial person and that’s what gains him buzz. But one thing we have to admit is that he is very good at personal branding and marketing himself.

Read more:

辛巴4天涨粉1500万，你学不会

Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Aims to Earn 8 Billion RMB During This Year’s 11.11

Top Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Caught Selling Fake Products

Top Live Streamer Xinba’s Massive Scandal Barely Affected Kuaishou’s IPO

The post Xinba Makes a Comeback: Gains 15M Followers in His First Livestream Since the Scandal appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

The GDP of Hohhot in 2019 was 27M and in the first six months of 2020, the average city resident’s disposable income was 18k RMB and permanent resident’s (meaning people who do not have a Hohhot hukou) disposable income was 23k RMB.

Skeptical Voices 

Currently, SKP has locations in Beijing, Xi’an, Kunming, Chengdu and Hangzhou, covering most of China except the Northeast. Hohhot fills that gap. What’s different is that all of these are 1st and 2nd tier cities. 

Some people worry that as a 3rd-tier city Hohhot will not be able to meet SKP’s sales ambitions. However, there were also sceptical voices when SKP announced it would open a store in Xi’an in 2018. Because before that, SKP was only located in Beijing which is a 1st tier city well-known for its high-end consumption.

Xi’an didn’t let people down. In its first half year, its sales volume reached 2.4 billion RMB, and in 2019, its sales was close to 4.2 billion RMB. In April in 2020, which was the birthday month of Xian’s SKP, its daily sales was close to 100M RMB. 

Within 3 years, SKP has quickly gone from one location to six, from which we can see Chinese consumers’ passion for domestic luxury consumption, especially after COVID. In 2020, the sales volume of SKP Beijing grew 15% to 17.7 billion RMB, which was the TOP1 among Chinese shopping malls for 10 years. It was also the first time for SKP Beijing to surpass Harrods in London, becoming the TOP1 internationally in terms of sales per unit area. 

SKP’s Growth Strategies 

Xiachen or opening stores in lower tier cities is one of SKP’s key strategies.

The shopping mall also wants to target young consumers. In the end of 2020, it opened a new shopping mall called SKP-S in Beijing, which features art exhibitions and requires brands to have constantly changing themed stores. Many of the stores offer co-branded products and limited edition drops here – consumers can’t find these products anywhere else. 

According to LADYMAX, it is expected that China will account for the largest percentage of sales in the global luxury market, and domestic luxury consumption is expected to grow 30% in 2021. 

Read more: 深度｜再次出人意料，国内第六座SKP选址呼和浩特

The post Luxury SKP Shopping Mall Announces New Hohhot Location, its First Foray into a 3rd-Tier City appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Pinduoduo (NASDAQ: PDD) is one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms, known for its Xiachen (lower-tier city) marketing strategy, extremely low prices, and its famous use of social group-buying. The company stock surged 295% in 2020, becoming the second largest ecommerce platform in China. And in late December, Colin Huang, the founder and chief executive overtook Alibaba Group Holding’s Jack Ma and Tencent Holdings’ Pony Ma Huateng to become the country’s second-richest person with a current net worth of US$63.1 billion.

Yet at the same time this was happening, a young employee died from overwork and now the company is facing a PR crisis so bad that consumers boycotted its sponsorship of the annual Spring Festival Gala, one of the most-watched TV programs in China. The boycotting was so sever that it has been confirmed that Pinduoduo has pulled out of the Gala.

So what happened? 

Mishandling of Employee’s Death From Overwork

At 1:30 am on December 29, a Pinduoduo employee suddenly collapsed while on a work trip in Xinjiang (新疆). After 6 hours of attempted rescue, she passed away. The time that the employee fell to the ground (1:30 am) was the usual time that she finished her work. 

The accident was kept silent until January 3, when a user on Maimai (脉脉), a Chinese platform similar to LinkedIn, posted on the platform saying the girl was her friend and asking why there was no official response from Pinduoduo for the past few days. The next day, the page featuring this post was blocked. 

People also discovered that on Zhihu (知乎), the official Pinduoduo account had responded to questions about the accident with a cold-hearted response saying that “People at the bottom of society are making a living with their lives. If they want to have better lives, they need to pay for it with their health.”

1 minute after it was posted, Pinduoduo quickly deleted the post and claimed that the screenshot was faked. Well, the official Zhihu account came out and said that the Pinduoduo account was verified and Pinduoduo indeed posted those words. So Pinduoduo responded to Zhihu’s announcement saying that it was posted by its employee’s personal mobile phone and wasn’t approved by the company. 

After this incident, people were very angry with Pinduoduo’s cold and irresponsible response. 

What made people angrier was a video published by a former employee of Pinduoduo, Weibo @王太虚 (Wang Taixu). In the video, he was saying he got fired because he saw one of his colleagues being carried to an ambulance and he posted the news on the anonymous platform Maimai. 

Wang also said that at the Pinduoduo headquarters, employees are required to work for 300 hours every month, and in the department which the woman who died in Xinjiang worked for, which manages the fresh produce business, its employees are required to work for at least 380 hours every month. 

Consumers Showing Support and Sympathy

Across China’s internet, people are showing an outpouring of support for the woman that died. Some of them are saying they are so happy to see young people bravely standing out and speaking for themselves, and some are sharing their similar experiences working in some of China’s other major internet giants. In China, employees often need to stay up late until 11pm or even 1 am. Getting off work on time sounds impossible for the majority of them.

This Problem is Not New, and Unlikely to Change Anytime Soon

In fact, this issue is not new, in 2019 China’s 996 work culture (a reference to working from 9AM to 9PM for six days a week) became a buzzed-about topic worldwide after the number one trending GitHub repository was a collection of work grievances against China’s biggest tech companies including Alibaba, Huawei, Bytedance, DJI, and others.

This recent Pinduoduo scandal goes to show that despite the complaints, little has changed. If anything, things became worse this year as consumers were stuck at home due to COVID, and it became even harder to create boundaries between work and personal life.

This Bad PR Will be Hard for Pinduoduo to Get Over

To make matters worse for Pinduoduo’s PR team, Pinduoduo had planned to be a headlining sponsor of this year’s Spring Festival Gala, which is one of the most-watched TV programs in China, it is a CNY tradition for Chinese people and almost every household in China will have the gala playing in the background during family gatherings. 

In response to the overwork scandal, people began going online to boycott Pinduoduo’s sponsorship of the Gala and request CCTV to remove them as a sponsor. 

This incident has also let loose a whole host of other complaints about the platform. For example, many people are saying they are sick of seeing so many Pinduoduo links in their WeChat Moments or WeChat groups, and that they don’t want to see those anymore. 

Unfortunately, we’re not optimistic that this incident will drive any meaningful change, considering the results of past incidents and Pinduoduo’s response to date. But will it have a long term impact on the company? Only time will tell. 

Read more: 拼多多员工猝死背后：疯狂公司奔逐疯狂赛道

The post Consumers Boycotted Pinduoduo’s Sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala – Here’s Why appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

On Oct 18, Xinba held a concert in Shanghai and at the event, he revealed that his goal for this year’s Double 11 is to achieve over 6 billion RMB sales at least, and he hopes his team can make a combined 8 billion RMB ($1.2 billion).

This number would be an impossible number for many people’s lives. So, gossip time, can Xinba achieve this? Or is he just gaining eyeballs? 

Xinba’s performance

Up to Oct 16, Xinba has done 20 live streams in 2020, 2 live streams each month on average. In total, he achieved over 5.3 billion RMB sales. The largest one was his stream for 618. On that day, he made 1.25 billion RMB in sales. 

You may already notice that, compared with Austin and Viya and other live streamers, Xinba streams at a much lower frequency. This is because he’s got a good team behind him who often run streams on his behalf. His team includes: Dandan (蛋蛋) who made 8 billion RMB sales last year, Shidapiaoliang (时大漂亮) who made over 3 billion RMB sales and Zhao Mengche (赵梦澈) who achieved over 1.5 billion RMB in sales. And that was even before live streaming got as popular as it is now, incredible…

In total, Xinba’s team has 14 live streamers including himself. And the team’s sales performance from January to October 16 is 14.7 billion RMB. On average, each order is 115 RMB, and each month his team achieves over 1.5 billion RMB in sales.

The numbers are pretty, but can he achieve his goal on this Double 11? 

While Xinba does 2 live streams per month throughout most of the year. Based on his performance during last year’s 11.11, he will raise his frequency to daily live streams during the 11.11 pre-sale period. He was live streaming for 21 hours non stop on 11.11 last year, and his wife was pregnant and accompanying him to until the end of the live stream.

Xinba has also got more followers this year. Last year’s Double 11 he had around 30M followers and this year, the number has doubled to 60M. Besides, his team has also become stronger. In an interview, Xinba said in his “family”, there are 7 top live streamers and at least 4 of them can compete with Austin Li and Viya.

The live streamer Dandan (蛋蛋) we’ve mentioned before, she once achieved over 650M RMB sales in one live stream. And Shidapiaoliang (时大漂亮), he just started his first live stream on April 18 this year but has already achieved 3 billion RMB in sales.

Xinba said he wanted to develop at least 30 live streamers like them.

Why is Xinba so popular?

Xinba has 70.5M followers on the video platform Kuaishou. He chooses the right platform for the reason that the majority of Kuaishou’s users are located in third and fourth tier cities and Xinba grew up in the countryside, so he relates to and understands his followers very well.

Xinba initially grew his following by sending virtual gifts to other content creators and live streamers on the platform. He was very generous and his name often showed up on the top ranked gifter board. By supporting others, he actually guided traffic to his own Kuaishou account.

On top of that, Xinba’s wife Chu Ruixue (初瑞雪) is also a top live streamer on Kuaishou with 29.4M followers. Chu’s parents and Xinba’s parents all have Kuaishou accounts, and the family is guiding traffic to each other.

Taobao is not the only place where we will see live streaming play a big role in this year’s 11.11. I am really curious whether he and his team can achieve his goal!

Read more: 保60亿冲80亿，辛巴的双十一目标能成吗？

The post Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Aims to Earn 8 Billion RMB During This Year’s 11.11 appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Pinduoduo is one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms and an industry leader who helped popularize the concept of social commerce in China. Yet while it initially became famous for its wildly popular group-buying feature, Pinduoduo has since evolved into much more than just a group buying platform. 

In this episode Ada Yang, Head of Social Community at Pinduoduo gives us an overview of the platform, and then shares several other features and initiatives you many not have heard of such as:

• A virtual farming game where users can earn real fruit sent to their home for free
• Its relatively new live streaming feature and how PDD is iterating on the popular live streaming trend
• Its New Brand Initiative that leverages user data to help export factories who have been hard hit by COVID and the negative geopolitical situation to create entirely new brands aimed at the domestic market, guiding them through product development, branding, and marketing.

Guest: Ada Yang

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pinduoduoinc/

Twitter: @pinduoduoinc

The China Ecommerce Podcast

Medium

Learn more about the topics we discussed:

• Pinduoduos effort to help farmers with technology and alleviate poverty in rural areas
• New Brand initiatives 
• Shanghai vintage brand Campaign 
• MIT Tech Review article on PDD C2M model
• An article about Duoduo Live

The post Understanding Pinduoduo’s Evolution, with Ada Yang appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

For this whitepaper, Data100 surveyed 3106 people in 1st-4th tier cities across China. The survey was done in May 2020 so the results are very recent. The report is full of interesting data and trends in live streaming viewer/consumer demographics and it explores the competition between various platforms and gives some predictions for future trends.

• In 2019 China’s e-commerce live streaming industry was worth 433.8 billion RMB; in 2020 it is estimated to reach almost 1 trillion.
• Around one fourth of China’s internet users have watched an e-commerce live stream.

• This slide shows how consumer shopping behaviors have changed since the start of COVID19. The number of people who have purchased products while watching a live stream has grown 6%, through a WeChat Official Account or WeChat group 4%, and through a short video 2.6%.
• At the same time, purchases through e-commerce apps decreased 1.9% and webpages 0.4%.

• Among platforms, Taobao live stream is the clear winner with 77% of consumers saying they have heard of it, 68% have watched it, and 61% have bought something through it.
• Douyin came in 2nd place with 67%, 52% and 39% respectively, showing the conversion rate is still much lower on Douyin.
• Next was Kuaishou, Jingdong, Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, VIP.com, Mogujie, Douyu, and Huya
• Interestingly the report did not include WeChat mini program live streaming

This report is 33 pages long and filled with a ton of other insights!

The post Whitepaper: E-commerce Live Streaming Post COVID-19 appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

CNY is typically a peak season for video apps with people having more free time to kill. This year that was magnified with the virus outbreak as people were asked to stay indoors and there were even less entertainment options. Naturally many Douyin and Kuaishou accounts saw massive growth spurts with three accounts each gaining over 10 million new followers. 574 accounts gained between 100k-500k new followers.

The People’s Daily Douyin account saw the most growth with 12.8 million new followers. Popular science Douyin account 回形针PaperClip shared a video educating people about the Coronavirus that went viral and got over 1.5 billion views.

Governmental organization and state-run media accounts experienced the most growth on both platforms, followed by funny videos and celebrity videos on Douyin and gaming, funny, and food videos on Kuaishou. Check out the article for lists of the top 30 fastest growing accounts on each platform and a full breakdown of growth by content type.

Read More: 我们统计了800名抖音快手达人，谁是今年春节档最大的“黑马”？

Effect Of The Virus On The Media Industry

As this meme above shows, Q1 is not only rough for brands, but for KOLs and the media industry as well. By and large, brands have cancelled their advertisements and KOL campaigns for February. This article predicts the industry will recover by May, but may not have a full recovery until the 618 shopping festival.

Media related to the dining, real estate, movie promotion, and cross border e-commerce are suffering the most while some businesses in the gaming, health & fitness, and insurance industries are actually increasing their ad budgets. 

Government mandates to stay at home and not gather in groups are affecting new content creation, particularly KOLs that rely on teams for video or live streaming content production. WeChat Official Account KOLs and WeMedia are not as affected because their teams can easily produce content from home. 

Read More: 2020开局这么难，来聊聊自媒体行业怎么办吧

Alibaba Heavily Promotes Juhuasuan During This Year’s Spring Festival Gala  

Alibaba once again collaborated with the Spring Festival Gala, this year focusing on the group-buy platform Juhuasuan(聚划算) in an effort to gain a stronger foothold in the Xiachen Market (下沉市场). Xiachen market refers to consumers in China’s 3rd tier cities and below. These consumers are seen as the next big opportunity for brands, commerce platforms and apps in China. According to Alibaba, about 70% of Taobao and Tmall’s new users are from Xiachen market. 

The Spring Festival Gala reaches over 1 billion viewers every year. It is a tradition for Chinese families to sit together and watch the show as a family and Xiachen users are the largest viewer demographic. 

Two interesting campaigns: 

1. During the gala they ran a special campaign choosing 50k platform users and paying for all of their products placed in their shopping carts. This incentivized people to download the app and browse through it and find products they like. 
2. For the first time since the Gala launched 37 years ago it created and sold a Gala-branded product. Taobao sold a bowl called a Chunwan(春碗) which was a play on words for the Chinese name of the Gala or 春晚. “Wan” in Chinese means bowl(碗) and evening(晚). The Gala is following in the steps of the Palace Museum, leveraging its IP for product collaborations. 

Read more: 淘宝又上春晚了，10亿补贴背后是一个超级流量洼地

The post Douyin and Kuaishou Accounts Gained 10M Followers During CNY appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Never’s image is featured on one of the eyeshadow palettes in the Discovery Collection. The shades in the palette are created by Austin and inspired by Never’s personality. Profits from the palette will be donated to an animal protection fund in Beijing. The product is going fast – during the live streamed launch Austin already sold out 180k palettes. 

Read more: 美人计｜连李佳琦的狗都开始联名带货了

Key Takeaways From Questmobile Report on Young Consumers in Lower Tier Cities

As of November 2019 there are over 200 million post-90s consumers located in 3rd-tier and lower cities in China. This is 10.1% growth YOY. In Chinese these consumers are referred to as 小镇青年 (Xiaozhen Qingnian) or “small town youth”. Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Their average monthly screen time is 127.9 hours, slightly higher than young people in 1st and 2nd tier cities (127.3 hours).
• Students and white-collar workers make up 60% of Xiaozhen Qingnian. Their income is lower than 6,000 RMB. The average amount per month is around 4,000 RMB.
• Yet since living costs in lower tier cities are much lower, they have more disposable income. 
• Xiaozhen Qingnian’s favorite topics to search online are: food, travel, fashion, ecommerce shopping, auto, and wealth management. 
• Xiaozhen Qingnian spend on average 7.1 hours/month on ecommerce platforms. 
• The top 3 e-commerce platforms they use are Taobao, Pinduoduo, and Xianyu. 
• The group places more value on recommendations from friends and acquaintances, and often group buy together. 
• They are sensitive to price and are willing to spend more time browsing other platforms to compare prices. They love searching for coupons and discount information as well. But when it comes down to it they care even more about quality and brand name.  
• They show great interest in second-hand products. 
• When it comes to planning travel, Xiaozhen Qingnian’s interest in vacation rentals like Airbnb has increased significantly since 2018. 

Read more: QuestMobile2019小镇青年洞察报告：2亿青年每月128小时都在干嘛？

Art & Aroma Essential Oil Skincare

Art & Aroma (Chinese name 芳研社) is a small Chinese essential oils skincare brand founded in 2014 by two friends, a chemist and a biologist. While still small at only 10 SKUs, the brand has been featured by one of China’s top business writers Wu Xiaobo Channel (吴晓波频道) and has a very loyal customer base, with a repurchase rate of 80%. Here are some of the things they have done to grow such a loyal customer base: 

Emphasis on Private Traffic: 
Art & Aroma focuses heavily on private traffic. They operate 4 personal WeChat accounts with a total of 4,000 connections across all accounts. All of their private traffic users are customers of their Tmall store. After each and every person purchases a product, the team will actively encourage the person to add the company’s WeChat. After adding the accounts, the users are segmented into different categories and WeChat groups, such as skincare, hair care, new products launching and discounts.

These four accounts regularly post content on Moments with 25% of content about skincare, 25% about event and live streaming notifications, and the rest is about the daily lives of the three founders and other lifestyle content. They also actively participate in customers’ lives by liking and commenting on customers’ Moments posts.

Passion for Proving Product Quality Helps Gain Visibility:
Once team members shaved part of their hair just to test whether their shampoo product could increase hair growth rate. The story was later featured by the popular WeChat Commerce platform Youzan(有赞). On that night Youzan posted the article, Art & Aroma did over 200k RMB in sales, and sold out 3,000 hair care sets within 4 hours.

Giving Consumers Ownership:
Similar to a domestic beauty brand Chioture(稚优泉), Art & Aroma invites its customers to participate in the decision making process. This includes choosing scents, ingredients, packaging styles and product names. Co-founder Qing Fen(清芬) said involving customers in this process makes customers happy while simultaneously promoting new products. 

Offline Aromatherapy Certification Courses:
In the past the brand has held offline aromatherapy certification courses. This is a great way to interact with customers in real life and for the co-founders to demonstrate their professional expertise and inspire trust. Right now a growing number of Chinese beauty and skincare consumers are known as 成份党 or consumers that pay great attention to the ingredients. Classes like this would appeal to that consumer base. 

Livestreaming:
Art & Aroma’s livestreaming is very different from most brands. One of the co-founders Xiao Ke(小珂) live streams three times a week. Unlike other brands, she doesn’t actively try to sell products. She typically sits in her kitchen or dining room drinking a cup of tea and chatting with viewers. Usually, she shares a book, a movie or her hand-made crafts. Sometimes she shares her thoughts on essential oils and skincare. 

Read more: 仅靠4000好友做到复购率80%，被吴晓波频道看中的“她”如何打造强信任关系？

China Marketing Podcast Ep. 64: An Overview of China’s Burgeoning Fragrance Market 

Today’s conversation is with Dao Nguyen, founder of ESSENZIA, a boutique marketing creative strategy agency helping fragrance and cosmetics brands reach young Chinese consumers. We dive deep into China’s rapidly growing fragrance market which has changed dramatically over the past 5 years.

Dao gave an overview of the market, answering questions such as:

• Who are the main consumers?
• What types of fragrances tend to appeal to a Chinese audience?
• Which brands are doing well in the China market and why?
• Are there any mistakes brands tend to make?

Later in the episode we also discussed China’s beauty industry and I ask Dao to share her thoughts on the rise of China’s domestic beauty brands.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, or XimalayaFM

Women In China Marketing

This is a new online directory dedicated to women who specialize in helping brands market to Chinese consumers.

It was created by the wonderful Olivia Plotnick after a report on China marketing trends for 2020 in which only 1 of the 22 report contributors was a woman.

Check it out here
And if you’d like to add someone to the list, feel free to submit a profile!

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