Meituan’s short drama is launched on Douyin, is the local life war coming to an end?

The competition and cooperation between Meituan and Douyin in the field of local life services has always been the focus of the industry. Recently, Meituan’s self-made short drama "I Changed My Fate in My Diary" launched on the Douyin platform has triggered the market to rethink the relationship between the two platforms. This article analyzes the business logic behind the launch of Meituan's short drama, and explores whether there is room for cooperation between the two platforms in the field of local life services, as well as their respective competitive strategies.

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If there is anything more surprising than watching a suspense movie commentary in three minutes, it is probably seeing Meituan using a homemade short drama to advertise its own "magic coupons" on Douyin.

On August 7, Meituan's original short play "I Changed My Fate in My Diary" was launched on Douyin, Video Account and other platforms. Different from the short plays about overbearing bosses and revenge that often have hundreds of episodes, this short play was announced to be "finally concluded" after only 5 episodes. The only highlight was that the comedian Wang Tianfang, who was known as the "substitute version of Huang Bo", was invited to play the leading role.

In recent years, as Douyin's business has continued to expand into local life areas such as food delivery and group buying, Meituan and Douyin are often compared together. Therefore, in the eyes of the outside world, Meituan and Douyin will eventually fight in the local life market.

However, a short play that was obviously an advertisement for Meituan's own platform was actually able to be released on the Douyin platform, which inevitably makes people think: Is it Douyin's negligence that allowed Meituan to "take advantage of the situation"? Or are the two major platforms shaking hands and making peace?

1. Meituan short drama gradually enters the play

If we look back, we will find that Meituan started testing the short video business as early as August 2022. At that time, Meituan borrowed the online earning model of Douyin Express and distributed red envelopes to users according to the viewing time and number of videos. In addition, Meituan also tried the "second floor" function. When users enter the "takeaway" module, they can enter the short video interface by pulling down the page.

While Meituan continues to experiment with short video content, the content market itself is also undergoing new iterations.

Since the end of 2023, the continued popularity of short dramas has allowed Meituan to see a new content outlet. Public reports show that as of March 6, 2024, a total of 8 high-quality short dramas on Douyin during the Spring Festival have been viewed over 100 million times, and the number of views of "Big New Year" has exceeded 800 million, and the number of views of related topics has exceeded 4.4 billion.

So in March this year, Meituan revised the short video column and added a theater channel. In April, the theater channel added selected short drama content. Currently, on the Meituan APP, the "theater" channel has been changed to "short drama", and all the short dramas on the channel can be watched for free.

Meituan continues to invest in short dramas, largely because it has seen the growth of traffic from short dramas and the feasibility of empowering existing businesses through content strategies. And judging from the existing short drama content on the Meituan APP, Meituan's short drama content is more connected to the platform through direct purchase or content cooperation.

In essence, this is more like creating a new "small theater" inside the Meituan APP. When users use Meituan on a daily basis, they will continue to watch if they are interested in the content or want to accumulate red envelopes.

Compared with the common short video content ecosystem composed of platforms, users and rich account content, the video account of Meituan’s "Short Drama" channel does not have a high presence, and the content display logic is more focused on calling on series of short dramas of different themes to guide users to watch the entire series.

The characteristic of this content scenario is that it can quickly transfer users from consumption scenarios to interest scenarios, forming long-term retention. In the user retention stage, product information can be recommended to users through plug-in product cards or screen push to stimulate purchases.

Last August, when Meituan sponsored the Kuaishou short drama "Wife's Character", it tried to push product information in the content scenario. At that time, in addition to the regular exposure of the brand, when watching this short drama, the audience could also click on the Meituan group purchase link mounted on the edge of the screen to buy Meituan packages. In the end, the number of views of this popular short drama reached 490 million, which also helped Meituan verify the possibility of completing purchase conversion in the short drama scenario.

In fact, from the cooperation with Kuaishou, we can see that there is no direct competitive relationship between Meituan and the content platform.

As one of the main platforms for local life services, Meituan has solved the deterministic needs of users in consumption scenarios such as takeout and group buying. Content platforms such as Kuaishou, on the other hand, complete the conversion by satisfying users' content consumption needs and then leveraging the value of traffic.

Let’s go back to Meituan’s self-produced short drama “I Changed My Destiny in My Diary”.

Although the short play is indeed an advertisement for Meituan’s “magic coupons” in terms of content, it is reasonable for Meituan to release brand-related content through its official Douyin account without any external jump link. Although from the outside, there may be competition between the platforms, Douyin has no reason to restrict the content platform.

It is worth mentioning that there are many short video accounts on the Douyin platform that are promoting Meituan takeaway coupons, and users can directly jump to WeChat after clicking on the advertising link and be imported into the official accounts of Meituan-related companies.

Compared with posting "advertisements" on the official account of the Douyin platform, this kind of outward "competition" is more obvious. But its existence also means that Douyin's feelings about platform competition may not be as strong as people think.

2. Will there be an eventual battle between TikTok and Meituan?

Regarding the competitive relationship between Meituan and Douyin, the outside world generally believes that it started in 2020 when Douyin started to develop local life group buying business.

In March of that year, Douyin launched "Douyin Group Buying", providing online ordering, group buying and takeaway services; in July, Douyin opened hotel reservation and ticket booking functions to achieve a closed-loop transaction; in September, Douyin launched the "Heart-beating Restaurant List" event to discover the most popular restaurants through live video broadcasts; by December, Douyin established a "Local Direct Business Center" dedicated to expanding local life services. Since 2021, Douyin Local Life has begun to increase the promotion of group buying business, by providing free online access, 0 commission for group buying packages and traffic support to merchants in key cities to attract merchants to settle in.

From the perspective at that time, the rapid development of Douyin's local life business seemed to be aimed at Meituan, but in terms of business development model and business form, the most similar to Douyin's local life business was Dianping.

Dianping.com, which was launched in 2003, is the earliest third-party consumer review website in China. Its user-centric review system created the most successful UGC content ecosystem when food delivery was not yet popular.

However, after Meituan and Dianping merged in 2015, the content value of Dianping was difficult to effectively transform through the market. At the same time, the food delivery business brought clear rapid growth. Therefore, in the subsequent development of "Meituan Dianping", Dianping's presence was gradually weakened.

Compared with Dianping, which was active in the era of pictures and texts, Douyin's attempt at local life business is based on video. However, due to the rise of live broadcasting and short videos, Douyin faces a completely different new market when developing local life business.

The "China Internet Audio-Visual Development Research Report (2024)" shows that as of December 2023, the scale of Internet audio-visual users in my country will reach 1.074 billion, with a utilization rate of 98.3%. The gap between China and instant messaging, which ranks second, will further widen. Its position as the "largest Internet application" will become more solid. Short video applications have the highest user stickiness, with an average daily usage time of 151 minutes per person.

As the proportion of time spent on short video applications continues to increase, consumption scenarios and consumption decision-making paths are changing: before 2020, white-collar workers in the CBD might open a food delivery app during their lunch break and decide what to eat for lunch; but today, white-collar workers may watch a live broadcast the night before, or watch a short video on the subway or in the elevator in the morning, and order food delivery coupons in advance, and decide what to order before lunch break.

This kind of local life service wrapped in the logic of interest-based e-commerce is more "tempting" to consumers, but for local life service platforms that are similar to "sedentary merchants", whose general usage scenario is to provide specific solutions to users after they have clear consumption needs, "video content + local life services" is also more threatening.

In fact, it is precisely because Meituan has seen that user behavior habits are quietly changing that it has been constantly trying to develop content, from live broadcasts, short videos to short dramas, so that now Meituan, with live broadcasts on the left hand and short dramas and short videos on the right hand, is becoming more and more like Douyin. The launch of Meituan short dramas on Douyin essentially reflects the value of Douyin's content attributes to the local life market.

But this also raises a new question: When Meituan becomes more and more like Douyin, can it defeat Douyin? From Douyin's perspective, the question becomes: Can "video content + local life services" replace Meituan?

3. Misaligned competition or head-on competition?

At the first quarter 2023 earnings call, Meituan founder Wang Xing responded to analysts' question about "how do you view the current market competition in the two industries of food delivery and in-store consumption?" by saying, "Other competitors, including other existing platforms or newly entered short video platforms, do not have the strength to challenge us. At present, short video platforms are limited to group meal delivery services involving third parties, and this model has limited impact on Meituan."

Wang Xing's confidence comes from Meituan's own army of riders and the food delivery merchants accumulated over more than a decade. But local life is not just about food delivery.

The essence of local life is to go deep into various scenarios of daily life consumption and meet consumers' deterministic needs for "daily chemicals, fresh food and medicine" through high-quality fulfillment services. Meituan's advantage lies in fulfillment, and when content gradually grabs traffic, the determined demand may be discovered in advance and cause loss. This is what Meituan is worried about, and it is also what Douyin is best at.

In January this year, at the "Platform Governance Open Day" event held by Douyin Life Service, data shared by the relevant person in charge of Douyin Life Service showed that in 2023, the number of new influencers in life service content will exceed 400,000 per month, and the number of live broadcasts and short video submissions will increase by 175% and 160% respectively compared with the previous year; in terms of in-store fulfillment, the number of orders placed by consumers on the platform and actually delivered to stores in 2023 increased by 179% year-on-year.

Frankly speaking, food delivery business and in-store business are not the same market. Therefore, Meituan and Douyin have always been in a misaligned competition relationship due to their different business focuses. However, Douyin's various attempts in the local life field have forced Meituan to be vigilant.

In August 2022, Douyin and Ele.me jointly announced a partnership. Earlier this year, the media reported that Douyin would acquire 70% of Ele.me's shares for US$7.5 billion. At that time, many industry insiders believed that once the acquisition was completed, Douyin would officially enter Meituan's territory and the two sides would declare a head-on war. Although the relevant news was quickly refuted, Meituan did not ignore this signal.

Not long ago, Kuaishou and Meituan announced a comprehensive upgrade of their strategic cooperation. In the next three years, the scope of cooperation between Kuaishou and Meituan will be expanded to "100 cities and 10,000 stores" across the country. The purpose of this cooperation is obviously that Meituan wants to use Kuaishou's traffic to consolidate its local life position, and Kuaishou, which has always emphasized commercialization goals, can also improve its monetization capabilities with the help of Meituan.

According to Kuaishou's official data, in June this year, Meituan merchants' sales (GMV) on Kuaishou increased by more than 38 times, and the number of orders increased by more than 10 times year-on-year. Since the beginning of this year, the monthly order conversion rate of Meituan products in Kuaishou's live broadcast room has increased by 5% month-on-month. It should be pointed out that these sets of data look particularly impressive, but due to the lack of specific sales as a comparison, there is still a lack of a more direct feeling of the operating conditions of Meituan merchants on the Kuaishou platform.

In the past, when discussing the competition between Meituan and Douyin, people often overlooked one issue: from the beginning, when selling group purchase coupons in the live broadcast room and launching takeaway services, Douyin used the platform traffic to provide merchants with transaction opportunities. In the fresh food category, Douyin also introduced large platforms and merchants such as Yonghui, Wumart, and PuPu.

Therefore, Douyin is actually based on traffic scenario thinking, and wants to occupy the traffic ecological niche of life content and consumption entrance, and become a "commercial center" that provides local life services. By connecting to various merchants to provide high-quality services, users can develop habits from content consumption to life consumption.

Meituan, based on business thinking, strengthens the content impression by increasing the content of short dramas and external platform placements, and expands the content traffic pool beyond the tool attributes.

The ultimate goal of both is to aggregate user traffic and control user demand, but the paths are different, and at this stage users have not yet made a "choice between the two habits", so Douyin and Meituan have not yet reached the stage of head-on confrontation.

More importantly, the entire consumer market is currently facing the problem of a peak in demand growth. Platforms and merchants are using price to exchange for order volume. Such a market environment is unlikely to allow more close combat between platforms. Therefore, avoiding unnecessary internal competition and using limited resources to establish advantages as much as possible are the actual reasons for Meituan's short dramas to be launched on Douyin, which is also the "accidental tacit understanding" between Douyin and Meituan.

Author | Cheng Yu This article is written by the operator author [Jingzhe Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Jingzhe Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in Operation Party, and reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.