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Wen/Wang Mai
Source: Baobian News
Recently, Xiaohongshu launched the Community Business Convention. On the basis of the former Community Convention, new regulations on marketing, trading and other aspects have been added. At the beginning of this year, Xiaohongshu merged the two business segments of community and e-commerce. These signs indicate that Little Red Book, which has been established for 9 years, intends to open its own "business closed loop" after stabilizing the community content.
Little Red Book has always given the outside world such an image: as a content sharing community, "people enter this playground to stroll and play, see what they want to buy, they can buy, that's all". Even though the world knows that "e-commerce is at the end of the community", it seems that Little Red Book always has a "Buddhist" attitude towards "e-commerce".
At the beginning of 2022, Little Red Book merged the two business segments of community and e-commerce in its organizational structure. In order to promote the in-depth integration of content and transactions, Little Red Book launched the Community Business Convention in May.
All kinds of signs indicate that after stabilizing the community content, Little Red Book, which has been established for 9 years, began to accelerate its exploration of how to better open up the "grass planting - grass pulling" closed loop between content and transactions.
In the dialogue between Xiao Hongshu COO Conan and merchants, Panther Change found that the growth engine of the brand's future development is to find a unique new business environment and gradually establish a long-term business logic based on its own advantages in the face of the consumer market with peak flow dividends. Little Red Book is trying to provide brand merchants with such a new possibility.
What is the brand's definition of Xiaohongshu's business context? From grass planting "amusement park" to grass pulling "trading ground", how does the brand view its business prospects on the Little Red Book?
To do e-commerce, create a business atmosphere first
Over the past few years, Alibaba, JD and other traditional e-commerce businesses have cultivated and precipitated consumer groups, making many people believe that the overall capacity of the e-commerce industry seems to have reached saturation, and Xiaohongshu's inclusion in the industry inevitably missed the early traffic dividend.
If there are problems, there will be solutions. The best way to solve the structural challenges of e-commerce industry growth is to effectively avoid the "pain points" such as the killing of both quantity and price, and low level growth brought by the stock game. The "incremental" approach may start from two dimensions, one is to enter a new consumer group, the other is to launch a new transaction model.
The natural intersection of the two falls on Generation Z, which is now under heated discussion. Echoing this, whether it is content e-commerce, interest e-commerce, or social e-commerce, the existence of these emerging e-commerce is to keep the same frequency resonance with Generation Z.
However, we can also see that in the consumption view of Generation Z, there are both rational and emotional aspects.
On the A side, they pay great attention to information symmetry and are good at using various Internet tools to "consume transparently". To put it more generally, in the face of certain types of goods, they pursue the ultimate cost performance, and are "not easy to be fooled" groups.
On the B side, they demonstrate freedom, independence and individuality, advocate value recognition, and are willing to pay for their own interests, preferences, favorite brands and KOLs. This way of spending money that makes them happy also shows the side of emotional consumption.
Generation Z, a combination of rationality and sensibility, gathers here, which is also the biggest "confidence" for Little Red Book to trade. Therefore, many new brands will make their first stop in Little Red Book and find seed consumers at the initial stage of brand creation through content sharing.
Zi Yi, the founder of the children's clothing brand KUUYOO, is a post-85 entrepreneur who has just become a mother. Before starting her business, it was difficult for her to find out the children's clothes with satisfactory materials, code numbers and fashion sense in the market, so she teamed up with a friend to create the brand KUUYOO.
At the beginning, she just published the dress scheme on the Little Red Book with interest, which was soon recognized and liked by many users, and many people also asked for clothing links in comments. Under the strong voice of fans, Ziyi officially opened KUUYOO's brand store on Little Red Book in March this year.
In Ziyi's view, brands that can become popular on the Little Red Book must have their own unique product understanding and content expression, so that users can be "planted grass" when obtaining information, and then generate the power to "pull grass".
KUUYOO User's Little Red Book Notes This is also Pang Xiaomin, founder of the sports life brand Zanthoxylum Planet,'s biggest business feeling: Xiaohongshu users are not resistant to the content of goods, and even have a high acceptance.
"The ultimate purpose of their browsing content is to find out what has recently emerged as a highly Amway product. What they care about is whether notes, live broadcast and other content are suitable and attractive to them," Pang Xiaomin said.
With the expansion of small red book creators, consumers, brands and businesses, this platform ecology with content sharing and business transactions needs to explore a set of mechanisms to let the various roles on the platform harvest their own growth paths. Therefore, Little Red Book recently launched the Community Business Convention.
It is understood that the Convention is based on the Community Convention published in April last year, adding several regulations on marketing, trading and other aspects. For the first systematic transfer of the platform's business attitude, Xiaohongshu COO Conan said: "The Community Business Convention is a common agreement between the community and businesses. It is not governance, but development. It is the community's expectation to work with businesses to establish a healthy, efficient and sustainable business environment."
Xiao Hongshu COO Conan's Understanding of the Community Business Convention Zi Yi said: "As a commercial organization, the platform needs to develop a set of reasonable mechanisms. First, it needs to restrict the behavior of users/consumers, businesses and brands, and the business ecology needs to be built together. Second, Xiaohongshu takes' commercialization 'seriously, which also gives our brand a reassurance."
Rely on the content field to build the trading field
It should be noted that the launch of the Community Business Convention is not the first iteration of Little Red Book to create a "commercial closed-loop" in the station.
As a platform dedicated to building a closed trading loop with content community characteristics, Xiaohongshu launched an exclusive marketing platform "Dandelion" for businesses to "plant grass" in 2020. In the second half of 2021, Little Red Book will merge and upgrade the enterprise number and personal number into a professional number, and launch the business note function to connect content to transactions through stores and business notes.
The transaction closed-loop can also better ensure the transaction security of users. In this way, whether for the authenticity of information on the site, the security of transactions, or for the goodwill of businesses and the platform itself, it is beneficial but harmless.
At the same time, Xiaohongshu also further distinguishes the boundary between advertising and fake notes on the site, and severely attacks the fake grass planting notes that are written and distributed on behalf of others. The launch of the Community Business Convention more directly reflects that the platform is always on the premise of maintaining a healthy business environment in the process of exploring content and transaction integration.
As a brand founder with rich marketing experience, Pang Xiaomin is more inclined to do live seeding, marketing and promotion activities directly in Xiaohong Bookstore. Although the operation of Pepper Planet in Little Red Book is still in the process of exploration, one thing is certain, "the shorter the communication link, the faster the consumption decision".
Notes on Xiaohongshu of Zanthoxylum bungeanum users Pang Xiaomin said: "Compared with jumping to other platforms, I prefer to achieve transactions closer to the 'marketing place'. On the one hand, it can directly promote the transformation, and on the other hand, it can help the brand summarize experience while reviewing data and improve the repurchase rate."
In Pang Xiaomin's opinion, the flow in the e-commerce platform station is becoming more and more expensive, which makes the significance of diversion outside the station smaller and smaller. In order to expand more opportunities on the basis of the basic plate, "we are indeed actively seeking different channels to try to gain more sales capacity, which is also a necessary change process for brands."
Zi Yi also gave the same opinion. "For traditional e-commerce platforms, their style is more like 'science students', and they pay more attention to the change of data. But Xiaohongshu's style is more like' liberal arts students', focusing on the guidance and interaction of content. Users will build greater loyalty to the brand through the consumption behavior of content transformation."
The logic of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce is based on the content logic in the final analysis: from the perspective of consumers' cognition, most of their understanding and perception of the brand comes from notes, videos and other presentation methods. Through KOL and high-quality content, the "grass planting" effect is achieved, which is also a new path for future brand building, that is, content building is equal to brand building, which is a "energy storage" Process.
In the process of content dissemination, consumers will have two other behaviors after being "planted grass": one is to directly convert and purchase, and continue to repurchase after getting a better experience; The other is word-of-mouth communication, which actively expands the brand's reputation. By doing so, the brand has generated sales and gained reputation, realizing a process of "value-added".
Both Ziyi and Pang Xiaomin believe that opening a store on Xiaohongshu is "not the time to really break out", and "it is not the stage to actually pursue sales". It can be seen that in their eyes, what Little Red Book brings to businesses is "stable growth" driven by content and "long-term operation".
The second half of content driven new consumption
The first half of the new consumption was more like a battle for traffic dividends.
Many brand merchants have rushed into some new types of e-commerce, such as Tiaoyin and Fasthand, and opened the situation by crazy discounts. In order to quickly boost sales in the short term, many brands are spending heavily on marketing. In a way, it is more like harvesting the brand value of the past.
In the second half of the new consumption, with the improvement of people's living standards, the disposable funds in their hands are more and more abundant, and the commodities themselves are oversupplied. When you go shopping, you may not have any specific needs, but you can start when you see what you like. Most of the new trading platforms based on content are "shopping logic".
In this scenario, the consumer demand of users may not be very clear. The core advantage of content e-commerce is to actively help them find potential good products. Obviously, Little Red Book builds such a scenario.
Nowadays, many brand businesses have begun to try notes planting grass, KOL planting grass, and live broadcast interaction on the Little Red Book. These contents are multi-dimensional, interrelated, and mutually supportive, which has greatly amplified the "content effect", and thus the content has become the leverage fulcrum to leverage brand sales.
The diversified content matrix helps businesses complete brand building on the Little Red Book, and also promotes the building of new brand potential.
From the perspective of the big market, in recent years, Internet enterprises such as Tiaoyin and Fasthand have entered the e-commerce field, and expressed their interest in e-commerce, market e-commerce and other concepts, hoping to quickly expand their e-commerce base.
This has formed a cruel and true situation: the more entrants, the more fierce the competition will be, and the challenges faced by brand businesses will be more specific and unified——
"Cold start" is difficult. How to quickly attract fans to Zero Pink account to ensure the subsequent stable traffic conversion;
It is difficult to scale up. The quality of content materials determines the upper limit of investment. It is more painful to have money but not to have it;
It is difficult to make profits. In the face of the low price strategy of white brand and factory brand, the higher cost brand can achieve a 1:1 ROI, which may also be difficult to escape the dilemma of "losing money and making money";
The stability is weak. There are many stories of "overnight success" in all kinds of e-commerce. Without long-term planning, few brands and businesses can continue to get "compound interest".
There are more and more emerging e-commerce and more and more marketing tools, but people are also increasingly questioning: Do brands and businesses really make money on non-traditional e-commerce? New e-commerce can only win by low price? Or can it help brands and businesses to truly achieve product efficiency integration?
The starting point of all this confusion is that the new e-commerce platform should have a certain uniqueness, but this uniqueness must conform to the changing trend of market demand. Only in this way can brand businesses continue to operate on this platform.
Compared with "weeding", there may still be many people's understanding of Xiaohongshu on "grass planting", but in fact, Xiaohongshu continues to grab users' attention in many APPs frequently used by the people, which means that if we can successfully connect the "grass planting" of the content field with the "grass pulling" of the trade field, The platform will naturally share more purchasing power in the market.
Although Xiaohongshu is still exploring the development path of e-commerce, for brands and businesses, they have clearly realized that Xiaohongshu is not an e-commerce platform that can undertake the "heavy task" of sales in the short term. Their high hopes for the platform lie in: returning to the long-term principle, from the business strategy card to the content dissemination landing, to achieving "business closed-loop" in the content field, to explore the new imagination of both GMV and brand strength growth.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
