The “sinking road” of big-name beauty brands: plot accounts + routine live broadcasts = sales growth

Nowadays, more and more live broadcasting styles are being criticized by the audience. What is wrong with their style? This article will analyze the factors that affect the decline of big-name beauty brands. Let's learn about it together!

The story of YSL and Xiao Yangge’s apprentice in the live broadcast room is still going on.

Due to his exaggerated sales style, Xiao Yangge's apprentice "Red Light Huang" was captured by consumers when he was selling YSL leather cushions with his long hair loose and his funny expressions, which became "condemnation evidence" on the brand's major official social channels. A large number of original brand audiences questioned that this way of selling goods was detrimental to the style. Later, the anchor apologized and replied "I am too low". Just yesterday, another apprentice of Xiao Yangge supported Xiao Huang in the live broadcast, saying "She has her own way of selling goods, I don't care whether it is high-end or not", which once again triggered a new round of controversy.

To a certain extent, users on Weibo, Xiaohongshu and other platforms questioning brands' self-depreciation, and the large number of voices on Douyin supporting different styles of selling products by anchors, represent the "user stratification" of the current beauty industry: on one hand, there are existing consumers in traditional e-commerce channels who have a strong awareness of high-end beauty brands after years of operation in China; on the other hand, there are incremental users who have emerged on interest-based e-commerce platforms such as Douyin and have new content consumption preferences.

More than one international high-end beauty brand told Douyin that the user base on Douyin is completely new. "It's not that the original Tmall and offline users came here, but completely new users." This new group has a sense of beauty brands such as YSL through different channels, and also has a completely different measurement dimension for "brand marketing."

In fact, unlike the impression in the past that advertising films must be high-end, the promotional methods are mainly high-end, and only celebrities and fashion icons are sought for cooperation, the marketing of big brands on Douyin is much more down-to-earth. Funny celebrities promote products, emotional short dramas are embedded, and the Dabo routine of "Don't pay 1988, just 398, the anchor himself will pay 500,000 to give everyone benefits" is quite skillful for L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, Guerlain, and Dior cosmetics.

When the outdoor screens on the Bund in Shanghai play elegant women of different ages holding products, confident and beautiful advertising blockbusters, the big beauty brands in the short video world are the "evidence of love" for scumbags, the "gift" for licking dogs to pursue goddesses, and the queen's must-have for changing clothes with one click to open the "workplace buff". Those high-end brands who live in the world of beautiful women have long been accustomed to using new short videos and live broadcast narratives to exchange millions of likes and intuitive purchase conversions, and gain a new user base.

Such a split is enough to answer the traditional users' questions: Why choose this way of cooperation?

There is nothing else to it but growth.

1. From beauty experts to earthy "plots", why do beauty brands change

Brand Blue V accounts are the last stand for big brands to maintain their style when using Douyin . Previously, the head of Lancome's e-commerce business made it clear in an interview with Liu Run that "high-quality materials should be used to convey the brand's sense of luxury and quality" and "at least 70% of short videos should focus on products and brands."

After reviewing the accounts of many major beauty brands, Douyin also found that when operating their official Douyin accounts, major brands mostly use advertising blockbuster slices, vertical screen materials of endorsement artists, product evaluation theme content, offline event highlights and other materials, which are not much different from other channels. In addition to a higher update frequency, some brand accounts with rich operation experience will also carry out targeted theme design. For example, the official Douyin accounts of L'Oreal, Guerlain, and Estee Lauder all plan sub-columns for brand stories, product introductions, effective skin care, endorsement-related content, etc. Compared with a large number of domestic beauty brands, they have higher requirements for content quality.

But when it comes to working with influencers, unlike what everyone imagines as "beauty verticals" and "fashion influencers", the most popular promotional materials and advertising blockbusters of major beauty brands are basically co-created content with drama and comedy influencers .

According to Youmi Cloud data, in the past three months, the content with the highest number of likes among L'Oreal-related materials was the workplace jokes of comedy celebrity Wang Qiye, the dormitory life jokes of campus celebrity Ding Dingmao, and the campus drama of drama celebrity Wang Haohao. The likes reached more than 900,000. Similarly, the most popular material for Estee Lauder is emotional chicken soup drama, and the most popular advertisement for Guerlain is hotel service scenario jokes. These materials are almost all comedy or emotional content with strong plots, and the placement of many products is also exaggerated.

The manager who was instantly "elevated" after using La Roche-Posay Repair Cream and left in a second, the "L'Oreal Morning C and Evening A" given to the secret crush by the handsome desk mate as a gift, the Lancome air cushion that saved the anxious girlfriend "two casual taps and instantly changed the skin"... In the expert's plot, there will be no comprehensive close-ups of the product appearance and exquisite instructions for use. Instead, the products will become props in the plot, with a concise explanation of 15 seconds that does not affect the content.

"Basically, we started to adopt this approach after a period of exploration, and it will probably be widely used after 2021," Qiuqiu, who works in the marketing department of an international brand, told Doujiao. Like other brands, she tacitly used "local" instead of "sinking" to try to explain this change to Doujiao.

"What brands are trying to attract from Douyin's user pool are 300-400 million users outside of the existing 200 million users. Compared with advertising blockbusters and beauty influencers, they are more interested in fresh and interesting content with plots, and their conversion efficiency is higher, so we will choose this type of influencers when we cooperate with external parties."

Behind this cooperation is the fact that international brands’ understanding of “marketing science” has been changed by TikTok’s powerful data system.

"When we were working with vertical beauty influencers before, we were still pursuing CTR, including paying great attention to the quality of the main visual when placing ads. Because we want to achieve high click-through rates. The audience of vertical influencers is the beauty crowd, and high-end advertising attracts people to interact. In traditional concepts, only clicks are strong interactions, while drama content is pure exposure, weak interaction, and a very low conversion rate. However, based on the backend data of Douyin, Yuntu and Qianchuan can very intuitively present the conversion efficiency of these drama content. We gradually realized that pure exposure is also very powerful, and can directly lead traffic to the live broadcast room and shelves to complete the purchase. Then we will naturally choose drama influencers with greater exposure, and the quality of the material is not so important at this time." Qiuqiu said.

It is this change in perception that has driven more and more big brands that have tasted success to try to be more in line with the viewing habits of Douyin users. Take Guerlain as an example. During the Spring Festival this year, Guerlain did not launch a large number of beauty accounts, but for the first time tried to promote its New Year gift boxes by inserting jokes of comedy celebrity Li Zongheng. However, this attempt brought 1.528 million likes, which also means hundreds of millions of exposures.

According to Guerlain, after reviewing the results, the number of high-quality assets brought to the brand by this attempt is ten times that of ordinary beauty influencers. Therefore, in the subsequent major nodes and new product promotions, Guerlain also began to use a large number of drama influencers with strong exposure capabilities.

Along with the increasingly “local” content, there are also live broadcasting methods that are in line with consumer habits. Take this Double Eleven as an example. In the Douyin live broadcast of Jia Nailiang’s L’Oreal, which had a GMV of nearly 100 million, there were also a lot of “routine words”: “Brother Liang! You have already posted 500,000! You can’t post more!” “Everyone, watch out, don’t go to 2039, now we have reduced it to 398! There are only the last 8,000 sets!”

"Each anchor has his or her own style. On Douyin, we will respect their styles when choosing cooperating anchors. After all, the goods sold in the end are real." Qiuqiu explained, "But we can also understand the outbreak of public opinion this time. YSL may have taken a big step when choosing anchors. After all, it only started live streaming on Douyin before 618 this year, so it may still lack experience."

This seems to be the root of the YSL controversy. But to some extent, although the styles and words of celebrity anchors including Jia Nailiang and Huang Yi and expert anchors such as Duoyu and Maomaojie and Guangdong couple when selling big-name cosmetics are not as exaggerated as those of Xiao Yangge and Huang Live Room of Hongludeng, their gameplay targeting specific groups and sufficiently sinking models also lead to straightforward promotions and order reminders, which are all "big-name survival guides" that meet the preferences of new users.

After all, the live broadcast room is the final link for high-end brands to complete the sales. For users who grew up on Douyin, the style and Li Jiaqi's detailed ingredient explanations are far less important than straightforward price discounts, strong emotional connections with fans, and a foundation of trust.

Even in the self-streaming rooms that brands are vigorously developing, there is an increasingly clear trend of urging sales. Take Lancôme as an example. In a previous interview, its e-commerce director said that the brand's Douyin self-streaming room should "talk about 60% of the products, 30% of the brands and members, and 10% of the mechanisms and activities". However, when entering the live broadcast room at the current Double Eleven node, almost all of the content seen is about mechanisms and activities.

"In actual operation, user conversion and sales are the driving forces of the live broadcast room content." Qiuqiu sighed.

2. Poor purchasing power, pure selling? Big beauty brands dispel misunderstandings about Douyin

Are these new users only worth harvesting once for the brand? Will long-term operation of the Douyin platform cause damage to the brand's existing tone?

In response to these doubts, the interviewees also gave clear answers.

First, contrary to the existing perception in the industry, many big brands have told us that the average order value on Douyin is higher than on other e-commerce platforms . "The price of our flagship products on Douyin live broadcast is about 30% higher than on other platforms," ​​said Qiuqiu. Guerlain also said in an interview that the average order value of Douyin's top 5 products is around 2,000 yuan, which is about 600 yuan higher than on other platforms.

Doujiao found on Feigua that among the top 20 best-selling products in the beauty category of Douyin in the past month, there are Estee Lauder's skin care set worth 2,965 yuan, Sulwhasoo's Douyin exclusive customized gift box worth more than 1,000 yuan, Clarins' eye and facial set worth 2,810 yuan, etc. There are also expensive combination sets with unit prices of more than 1,000 yuan.

On the one hand, this is related to Douyin's traffic distribution mechanism. At present, Douyin's live streaming room push adopts the "GMP" model, that is, the higher the GMV of the live streaming room, the easier it is to get traffic recommendations. In this way, the sales period of expensive product packages that are more likely to generate sales will obtain more natural traffic subsidies.

This is also closely related to the consumption habits of new Douyin users. "Douyin consumers are more entertaining and prefer to have a set of products with a lot of things, so many cross-category and cross-product sales combinations on Douyin will sell well, many of which are combinations we have never thought of before. So we will set up different mechanisms for different combinations, and users will find it very interesting. This will also increase the average order value." Qiuqiu said.

Doujiao found that in order to give users more freshness, a large number of international beauty brands prefer to promote new products and classic product renewal gift boxes here, and even launch exclusive Douyin customized and limited editions . SK2's Christmas limited edition magic water, L'Oreal's high-end line of LuxeTrance, and Guerlain's Restoration Honey gift box set are all typical examples of re-promotion on Douyin.

At the same time, not only is it limited to single-time sales and major promotional sales, Douyin's wide population coverage and powerful data capabilities are also reshaping many of the marketing habits of these foreign brands. Qiu Qiu described this as "opening the door to a new world."

“On the one hand, consumer labels allow us to clearly see the content that users are passionate about, many of which we have not thought of before. For example, our users like comedies such as talk shows very much.” Qiuqiu said. According to her, the reason why some luxury goods and well-known coffee brands have collaborated in recent years is also related to the fact that Shemei’s Douyin data analysis team “saw that users like food and new coffee content.”

These strong data-based user guidance has forced a large number of international brand teams to conduct more cutting-edge research on user consumption preferences and brand operation effectiveness, and even affected the arrangement of marketing events on the brand communication side.

On the other hand, Douyin's more intuitive data analysis system and newly emerging powerful channels have also promoted the integrated marketing level of big brands. In the past, the marketing teams of international big brands were relatively independent. Even for the promotion of a new product, different teams such as media placement, influencer cooperation, and account operation had independent budgets, KPIs, and assessment standards. "At that time, integration was to simply add up the expenses on Douyin to see if it matched the platform revenue."

But now, according to Qiuqiu, the brand's Douyin e-commerce team will calculate the overall budget according to the overall expected goals, and then allocate specific operating proportions, and clarify and optimize the entire process in the final review process . "For international brands, this kind of flexible KPI adjustment, cross-departmental integrated budget allocation, and data-based guidance is very rare." Qiuqiu said with emotion.

In addition to attracting new customers, such cognitive correction and marketing concept penetration are also the most profound perception of Douyin by international brands. "Many of our users still have the consumption habit of offline counters because they have familiar shopping guides, but when we promote a product on Douyin, there will be many users who take screenshots and content to offline consultation. This perception is very clear." Qiuqiu said.

More than one brand told Douyin that rather than an e-commerce platform, "it is more like a media." Whether it is content seeding or new product marketing, it has strong spillover value, spreading to offline channels that major beauty brands also value.

"Since it is a media, there are naturally good and bad sides. We enjoy new users, but we will also need to deal with new public opinion crises and brand value building issues." Qiuqiu said frankly. In her opinion, the controversy over the tone of YSL's live broadcast room is also a risk and public opinion crisis that every international beauty brand will face when remaking Douyin.

"But we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater," she concluded. At a time when the market is recovering slowly and traditional traffic has peaked, sales are king, which is also the law of the jungle that international brands that are used to a life of luxury must abide by.

Author: Guo Jian, WeChat public account: Spicy