Starting yesterday, when you open some popular apps, you will see promotions filling the screen. Sometimes they will automatically jump to shopping apps, making people mistakenly think that they have opened the wrong app. Whenever this happens, it reminds us that Double Eleven is coming again. This year’s Double Eleven happened about a week and a half earlier than before. Tmall started pre-sales last night, and JD.com also launched a major promotion. But the enthusiasm for Double Eleven is becoming less and less.
Enthusiasm fades
In recent years, as Taobao and Tmall have gradually lost ground to Pinduoduo and Douyin, Double Eleven has long lost its former glory.
The most popular time for Double Eleven was around 2015. With the successful listing of Alibaba, Taobao and Tmall could hardly find any rivals. At the same time, Alibaba’s “innovation” has not increased much, so that Tmall’s gameplay is still at a relatively simple stage.
At that time, Double Eleven started strictly according to the time, that is, starting at 0 o'clock, and the promotion was strong. Many people stay up late to buy, even staying up until midnight to shop. During the working day, many consumers will even be late for it. The popular word at that time was "chop-out", which was used to refer to the act of buying too much, emptying your wallet and regretting it. Friends and colleagues always ask "Have you bought anything?" "Have you done any shopping?" when meeting.
The growth rate of Double Eleven at that time was nothing short of miraculous, with annual sales perfectly fitting the mathematical curve. In April 2019, a Weibo user stated that the Double Eleven data was almost perfectly distributed on the cubic regression curve, with a fitting degree exceeding 99.94%. It was so perfect that it was suspected to be fraud.
In 2019, Double Eleven sales reached 268.4 billion, once again fitting the mathematical curve.
However, Moore's Law will also expire one day, and this popularity will not last forever. In 2020, Tmall split Double Eleven into 11 days; in 2021, Tmall quietly changed the caliber of the battle report from "sales" to "transaction volume", with the latter referring to all successful transactions and having a wider scope. By 2022, Tmall will no longer publish Double Eleven GMV data, but simply summarize it with the sentence "This year's Double Eleven is stable and improving, and the transaction scale is the same as last year."
In fact, according to the Baidu Index, the popularity of Double Eleven has already begun to decline in 2019, and has been declining for 6 consecutive years, and is not even as popular as the search popularity in 2014. Although this year it started earlier than before, apart from advertisements flying all over the place, there was hardly much discussion.The original grand occasion has disappeared visibly to the naked eye.
Double Eleven is no longer new. This is certainly an important reason. It is also an important factor that consumers do not have the strong desire to consume in the past. But more importantly, e-commerce companies continue to make additions, overdrafting consumers' enthusiasm.
Change the soup but not the medicine
During Double Eleven in 2017, the popular Papi Jiang released a short video complaining about Double Eleven.
The subject of the video is that I don’t know how to calculate the discounted price. "20 off cross-store purchases over 200, Taobao coupons of 30, store coupons over 999 to purchase designated products, 300 yuan off, 20 yuan deposit doubled, team up with 500,000 naughty points to share 4,000 yuan..." With this series of gameplay, it is extremely difficult to calculate the discounts.
actually,From the moment the gameplay becomes complicated, Double Eleven has changed and consumers are gradually losing. Once lost users want to win them back, they need to pay a higher price.
However, from a practical perspective, Tmall still does not have much willingness to make such efforts.
This year, Double Eleven started significantly earlier, but many gameplay features were still retained. The deposit gameplay is still the key point. The reason why Tmall started Double Eleven so early is because it is currently mainly in the "deposit" stage.
In addition to deposits, Tmall also distributes red envelopes to 88vip members, as well as cross-store discounts. Among them, 88vip’s full discounts are 560 off for purchases over 7,000, 240 off for purchases over 3,000, and store discounts include “50 off for every purchase over 300” and official instant discounts of 15%. In addition, there are store memberships, store coupons, etc.
In addition, Alibaba still has not given up on the "head-pulling" and "time-consuming" games. This year, the "energy value" game is currently online. Invite friends, browse for 15 seconds, browse 10 products...you can even go to Baba Farm to fertilize, browse Taobao Life, etc. You can end up with a few bucks in coupons.
From Tmall’s perspective, in the past two years, Double Eleven has begun to reduce sales. For example, during the heyday of Double Eleven, there were discounts of 30% off purchases over 300, and discounts of 20% off purchases over 200, corresponding to different stores. But despite this small tinkering, the core gameplay of Double Eleven remains unchanged.
In fact, the deposit method has always been criticized. In order to increase the enthusiasm of the deposit method, Tmall has launched a "full price guarantee". However, in addition to not being able to participate in the full discount for the deposit, for many people, it is better to collect the full discount for a discount.
When you really start to get full and reduce, these gameplays will be mixed together and many situations will occur. For example, the deposit balance does not support 88vip consumption coupons, and some stores do not support or not all support 88vip full discounts. Adding another variable - store discounts, membership discounts, recharge discounts, etc., will make the algorithm for coming up with discounts very complicated. Once you buy a lot of things, there is no way to arrange and combine them to find the most favorable solution.
However, mini-games such as watching advertisements to save energy points and forming teams are more "empty-handed" games. Usually, a lot of time is wasted and a discount of more than ten or even a few dollars is obtained.
If you want consumers to really return to their enthusiasm for consumption, it is unreasonable for them to waste time on collecting orders and discounts. In recent years, the reason why Pinduoduo has defeated Taobao and Tmall steadily is because of its simple and direct style of winning people's money and tens of billions of subsidies. Unless it can continue to be simple and crude, Double Eleven will still remain in the past impression and cannot be reversed.
dilemma
However, there is no going back to Double Eleven.
Thinking back to the original gameplay, Double Eleven involves stores participating and platform subsidies, which is simple, direct and effective.The success of this IP is largely due to its simplicity., but as the scale grows, Alibaba’s logic of addition begins to add more missions to this shopping festival.
We mentioned before in the article "Collecting Five Blessings" thatAlmost all of Alibaba's products are constantly adding to the mix, constantly asking consumers to give as much time and energy as possible.By the same token, the more valuable the Double Eleven IP is, the more stores must be added to it so that consumers can spend more.
As Double Eleven traffic continues to expand, more and more merchants have joined. By 2021, the number of participating brands will reach 290,000.So many shops need to be "evenly exposed to rain and dew".In the early days of gameplay, traffic was generally concentrated on top brands. For participating small and medium-sized sellers, the annual centralized sales would indeed increase the pressure on merchants to stock up, and they would not be able to get too much traffic. Therefore, Tmall needs to use various activities to allow more brands to be discovered and consumed, so as to increase revenue.
Passed from the seller to the client,Alibaba needs to dig into consumers as "fine-grained" as possible.If you want consumers to stay longer, you must not leave after shopping, nor only buy from a few stores. Therefore, on the one hand, consumers cannot easily complete their coupon goals. If the coupon is 30% off for purchases over 300 yuan, you cannot allow 300 yuan products to participate in this event, because this will not help increase consumption. On the other hand, in order to retain consumers, in addition to products, we can only increase the number of games as much as possible to delay the use time, so that consumers can visit more stores and attract more people.
The consequence of Alibaba's logic of mining the value of IP is that consumers' experience will decline and gradually disappear. With the loss of consumers, the seller's ecology will also deteriorate, forming a vicious cycle.
Compared with Black Friday, the reason why it has been able to do so for so many years is largely due to the simple gameplay. McKinsey's 30-second elevator theory pursued by businesses is to explain the business model clearly in one sentence.Simple and direct is the most effective approach.
The reason why Double Eleven can never go back is because in recent years, the shopping festival has lost its carnival basis. The early success of Double Eleven attracted platforms to follow up, and all platforms wanted to create competition. The normalization of promotions has eliminated the demand for shopping on Double Eleven. Live e-commerce has further reduced the impact of the shopping festival. Most top anchors have extremely high bargaining power. In the daily process of bringing goods, they usually have given lower prices. It is too difficult to compress the shopping festival again.
Specific to Tmall, Taotian has lost many sellers and consumers in the process of upgrading consumption. Nowadays, in order to achieve GMV growth, it is necessary to increase preferential investment as much as possible. However, the capital market has become increasingly demanding on profitability, and the natural flow has been lost. It will be much more expensive to regain it by increasing subsidy investment. In the first quarter of this year, Alibaba's net profit fell by 96%, bringing about overwhelming negative news.
The IP of Double Eleven is already in decline. Looking at this year’s shopping festival, Alibaba has neither been able to completely overturn the previous logic nor the need to transfer more profits. The enthusiasm for participation in exchange will most likely not be the same as it was ten years ago, so it can only forcefully carnival.
Originally, Double Eleven was also called Singles’ Day.
On November 11, 2007, I received a lollipop from my deskmate. He told me, "Today is Singles' Day. The custom is to eat lollipops." This was my earliest perception of this day.
Until this day in 2012, I went to see "33 Days of Love" with my classmates. This was the last glory of "Singles' Day".
Later, "Double Eleven" replaced "Singles' Day", making this festival completely irrelevant to singles. Nowadays, the situation has reversed, there are more and more singles, and Double Eleven is getting less and less popular. Perhaps, one day in the future, "Double Eleven" will return this day to "Singles' Day".
Digital reading business originality
Author|Rousseau