Delivering takeout to its “old friends”, is Kuaishou going to “fight to the death” with Douyin and Meituan?

This article deeply analyzes the explosive growth of beauty products during the Douyin 618 promotion, explores the secrets of success behind live streaming e-commerce and the unique advantages of the Douyin platform, and provides valuable perspectives and insights for understanding new e-commerce trends and brand growth strategies.

E-commerce has entered a new era. The growth of mobile Internet has peaked, and the overall market is weak. The main dimensions of the competition among platforms are price and service, such as canceling pre-sales and updating refund-only services.

As one of the most important sectors of e-commerce, beauty and cosmetics are also experiencing these changes. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the cumulative total retail sales of cosmetics from January to April this year was 135.7 billion yuan, a new high compared to 129.9 billion yuan in the same period of 2023, but the growth rate of 2.1% slowed down from 9.3% in the same period last year.

But TikTok is an exception.

Last year, many brands such as Hanshun and Fenghua found new growth on Douyin. For example, Hanshun’s revenue on Douyin in 2023 soared 374% year-on-year.

Take the data from this year's 618 promotion as an example. The top 10 brands in Douyin's overall sales volume all exceeded 100 million yuan, and the sales volume of domestic beauty products increased by 53% year-on-year. As of June 3, among the top 20 brands with the highest sales growth in the Douyin e-commerce beauty industry, domestic beauty brands occupied 12 seats, and their GMV all achieved a significant year-on-year increase.

Observing the channel evolution of beauty products, a major e-commerce category, can help us better understand what changes are taking place in the current e-commerce environment, where the opportunities are, and how Douyin did it?

01 Brands find new opportunities on Douyin

The explosion of beauty and personal care products on Douyin is not a sudden event.

We extend the observation dimension. From January to October 2023, the number of people who purchased Douyin cosmetics increased by 44.7% year-on-year, and the monthly per capita consumption increased by 23.4% year-on-year. Similar data was not released this year, but there is a data that can be checked. As of the first quarter of this year, the overall GMV of Douyin e-commerce beauty products exceeded 48.6 billion, with a year-on-year growth rate of more than 42%.

This shows that more and more people are starting to buy beauty and personal care products on Douyin.

Another fact that can be mutually confirmed is that Douyin users are also becoming more fond of content related to beauty and personal care products. Since 2023, the number of short videos played on Douyin's cosmetics industry has been rising in a wave-like manner. From January to October, the average monthly number of short videos played on the Douyin platform in the beauty industry exceeded 40 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14.3%.

It should be noted that beauty and personal care content is more vertical than entertainment and other content. Whether it is text or video content, its dissemination is more limited to specific groups of people. The growth in the playback data of beauty short videos also means that the platform users are gradually increasing their interest in beauty content. On this basis, Douyin's beauty content is forming a trend of both supply and demand growth: from January to October last year, the number of Douyin makeup influencers and corporate accounts increased, with makeup influencers increasing by 1.1 times and corporate accounts increasing by 1.9 times compared with the same period last year.

In other words, the foundation for the circle-breaking effect is being built here.

Compared with these macro data, the actual growth of specific brands may be more intuitive. Take Hansu as an example. In the first quarter of this year, Hansu's GMV on major e-commerce platforms was 2.186 billion, of which 2.007 billion was on the Douyin platform alone. Last year, Hansu's GMV on Douyin was 3.34 billion.

It should be emphasized that this data is not based on last year's low value. In fact, after entering Douyin last year, Hansu started to soar all the way. In 2023, Hansu's GMV on Douyin increased by 374% year-on-year. This phenomenon is not only happening to Hansu, but also domestic and foreign brands including L'Oreal and Huaxizi have achieved good growth on Douyin.

This is probably why Rihanna, the queen of pop and global star, chose to collaborate with TikTok to promote the activities of her beauty brand FENTY BEAUTY.

Everyone can only walk, so why can we run freely by changing the platform?

02 Deterministic growth brought by TikTok

The essence of e-commerce is the improvement of efficiency. It breaks the limitations of time and space in past transactions. On the platform, merchants theoretically have unlimited shelves, and consumers can buy goods from all over the country anytime and anywhere.

What e-commerce needs to solve is decision-making efficiency. Especially in the field of beauty and cosmetics, consumers' demands are becoming more diversified and refined, and they are concerned about how to choose the products they need.

From another perspective, the problem that brands face is how to efficiently connect with consumers, which involves two parts: traffic generation and conversion. Solving this problem will ensure the certainty of growth.

As short videos become the most mainstream form of entertainment, Douyin has brought a new solution to this problem.

Entering a new traffic era driven by short videos and live broadcasts, content itself is the traffic entrance, and this happens to be what Douyin, as a content platform, is good at. For example, the micro-short dramas we are familiar with. The turning point for Hansu to restart growth on Douyin was the promotion method of micro-short dramas. Last year, Hansu cooperated with Douyin expert Jiang Shiqi on 5 micro-short dramas, with a total cost of less than 50 million, but the number of views reached 5 billion. The red waist suit promoted by Hansu also broke through the circle after the cooperation, and the brand's self-broadcast GMV exceeded 100 million that month.

Another case occurred during the 618 event this year. Not long ago, Rihanna appeared on Douyin and invited many Douyin influencers such as @深夜徐老师 to participate. The related video ranked 11th on Douyin's overall ranking and 2nd on the entertainment ranking. During the event, Rihanna's live broadcast had a total of more than 38 million viewers, and the number of new customers in the store increased by more than 1,400% month-on-month. FENTY BEAUTY BY RIHANNA also achieved a month-on-month increase of more than 800% in new members.

At the conversion level, Douyin's advantage lies in the data capabilities of its massive cloud map.

PMPM, a new domestic beauty brand, said, "The decision-making cycle of Douyin users from planting grass to placing orders is very fast, 4 to 14 days." With the help of the precise user data labels brought by the huge cloud map, PMPM is able to create different content in a relatively three-dimensional way to match people with different labels: from selling grass-roots content to brand content, and then to professional content.

For example, in the FENTY BEAUTY event, Douyin took advantage of the founder Rihanna's own traffic and planned activities such as following the pancake chef to make Shandong pancakes, while formulating different marketing strategies according to different stages.

During the preheating period, Douyin began to cooperate with influencers whose fan profiles highly overlapped, promoting products such as the Super Bowl makeup artifact Hidden Honey Pressed Powder and the popular color Fenty Glow, a lip glaze, to reach consumers with potential consumption intentions. Then, during the outbreak period, it used the celebrity effect and linkage with super anchors to further expand the scope of influence. Finally, a large number of hot accounts re-edited and promoted the live broadcast highlights to further stimulate the purchasing desire of potential consumers.

This precision brings about efficient conversion. During the event, the FENTY BEAUTY brand search-guided GMV increased by more than 6,200% month-on-month.

In addition, Douyin's live broadcast ecosystem also provides a guarantee for the stable growth of the brand.

Douyin's live e-commerce has accumulated a wealth of talent resources. During the 618 event, celebrity talent Jia Nailiang achieved a 284% year-on-year growth in GMV in a single live broadcast of Douyin's International Big Brand Beauty Carnival. The live broadcaster Huamei, who is a professional makeup artist, also achieved a nearly 5-fold year-on-year growth in GMV in a single live broadcast of beauty products.

At the same time, brand self-broadcasting has gradually matured. PMPM co-founder Guo Wenci said that brand self-broadcasting is the basic plate of PMPM in Douyin e-commerce. High-frequency and long-term regular broadcasting has contributed more than tens of millions of additional growth to PMPM.

Now, Douyin is gradually becoming an important choice for brands to achieve big promotions and ensure daily stable growth.

03 A new path for online beauty products

For most consumers, they may be familiar with international first-line brands such as L'Oreal and Shiseido, and they may also pay attention to domestic brands such as Hansu and Proya. So, what about DALTON?

Let me start with a surprising conclusion: during this year’s 618 shopping festival, DALTON sold better than some big domestic and foreign brands in some live streaming rooms. And this is only the second year that this German skincare brand has entered China.

Normally, it takes a very long time for a new brand to grow. This is because in addition to the quality of the product itself, the brand also needs time to establish a relationship with consumers, accumulate trust through word-of-mouth effects, and thus establish brand awareness. Whether it is use or understanding, the threshold for beauty and personal care products is even higher, and the cost of establishment will be higher.

This also determines that whether it is transactions or product promotion, brands have more urgent requirements for efficiency. Especially for the beauty industry, the demand for content is naturally higher.

The significance of Douyin lies in that, through short video content and live broadcasts, consumers' search, cognition, understanding and sales of brands are integrated into one platform.

First of all, based on precise promotion and content construction, the cycle of establishing the trust mechanism has been greatly shortened, and the circle of communication is also expanding.

For example, during this 618 event, it was not just the top platform or vertical influencers who promoted beauty products. More and more influencers in other fields began to try to promote beauty products and personal care products. The rural influencer Mai Xiaodeng promoted beauty products during the 618 event, and the transaction volume exceeded 10 million.

Secondly, after the launch of Douyin Mall, the content scenes of short videos and live broadcasts within the Douyin ecosystem have basically been coordinated and interconnected with Douyin Mall, search, stores and other shelf scenes.

It has become a replicable strategy for brands to achieve stable sales growth through self-broadcasting and promote new products through large-scale promotions.

There are already countless cases proving that consumption is not limited to those within or outside the Fifth Ring Road. In the fiercely competitive beauty industry, Douyin and the logic it brings may become a new path for brands to seek development.