What is the significance of Meituan Live?

This article analyzes the logic behind Meituan’s launch of food delivery live streaming, pointing out that the focus is not on the live streaming format, but on rebuilding the direct connection between users and products. Recommended for those who are interested in Meituan’s food delivery.

Hello everyone, today we will continue to talk about local life based on the last article.

It is said that in the face of Douyin's fierce attack on the local life market, Meituan thought hard and came up with a good idea, which is to go online for live streaming and sell goods.

I have said long ago that short videos and live broadcasts will become a basic functional component, embedded in the content display of major platforms. Meituan may have felt that live broadcasts had nothing to do with them before, but now facing the power of TikTok, it has launched the live broadcast function.

The food delivery live streaming section is now placed on the homepage entrance of Meituan Food Delivery. The young ladies eat and sell goods in the live broadcast room. Meituan named this section "Super Popular".

Of course, for users, it doesn’t really matter whether or not live streaming is selling goods. After all, Meituan Takeout is a tool product for users. They open the APP only to solve the current ordering needs, rather than to sit there and watch the ladies eat. Besides, live streaming of eating takeout is not interesting, and I can’t watch it.

Therefore, Meituan’s live streaming of food delivery is not based on traffic logic, nor is it used to kill time. Instead, it is used to save time and improve the efficiency of users’ consumption decision-making.

According to Meituan's idea, when you don't know what to eat, you shouldn't wander around in the APP. The longer you wander around, the harder it is to place an order. You may even switch between different APPs for comparison. This kind of user time is not of much value to Meituan. It is better for you to come to the takeaway live broadcast room and just order a cheap one.

Therefore, on the Meituan food delivery live broadcast landing page, the products displayed at the top are usually large chain brands, rather than weird fly restaurants such as "Lao Liu Guanchang". This is because the brand trust built by large brands in the past can make users feel more confident when placing orders.

You can think of it this way: Meituan's food delivery live broadcast area is equivalent to Meituan opening up a special discount area for food delivery, similar to Taobao's "Juhuasuan", which brings together many special discount SKUs for platform recommendation and sales. The form of live broadcasting with goods, which has been analyzed by some media, is, in my opinion, a relatively minor part of this matter.

The "Super Popular" live broadcast area of ​​Meituan Takeout should actually be called the "Special Price Area", so that we can see its true significance to Meituan.

01

Meituan Waimai has always made platform recommendations based on the store’s logic. Even if users actively search for products, the results will be included in the store.

For example, if you want to eat hot dry noodles for lunch, the results of your search on Meituan Takeout will not directly show you delicious hot dry noodles products, but will recommend stores that sell hot dry noodles. You first choose a store and then choose the hot dry noodles you want to eat.

Of course, there are many reasons behind this search display logic. For example, the delivery fee and delivery time are related to the store location, and the taste of the takeout is also related to the store’s chef, ingredients, and preparation methods. Therefore, the user’s experience of specific takeout products is obviously related to the store as a whole.

Therefore, on Meituan Takeout, store ratings are very important, while the positive and negative reviews of specific products are only displayed within the store and are actually not particularly important for consumer decisions.

However, this evaluation system saves effort for the platform, but is not really friendly to users.

Take me for example, I found that there is a Hunanese restaurant that I like very much, but only a few specific dishes are delicious. When they cook other dishes, I feel that they are very unpalatable. And the Hunanese restaurant's taste of some dishes and some unpalatable dishes is a conclusion I have summarized after ordering takeout many times and repeatedly failing.

In other words, in the field of takeout catering, a store's good reviews cannot guarantee that every dish it makes is delicious. In order to expand its revenue, the store itself actually has the urge to constantly make dishes it is not good at. At this time, if you blindly believe in the store's ratings, you are likely to make a mistake.

Of course, there are also opposite examples. For example, I found that many stores have some treasure dishes worth exploring. For example, in a Beijing restaurant, I accidentally discovered that their light salads are quite good, but according to the normal platform recommendation logic, few people would order salads as a staple food in a Beijing restaurant.

Let me give you a specific example. In Beijing, I think the barbecue skewers at Nanchengxiang are pretty good, both in terms of quality and price. But if you want to eat barbecue skewers, whether it is search or store algorithm recommendation, Meituan will only give priority to barbecue restaurants such as Wangjing Xiaoyao.

Because in the store rating logic of Meituan Takeaway, Nanchengxiang is not a barbecue restaurant, it is a store that sells staple foods for three meals a day, so even if your barbecue is of good quality and cheap, it will be of no use.

Under this platform mechanism, the matching efficiency between good products and user needs is obviously reduced. If Douyin had not come to Meituan to challenge it this time, Meituan would probably have turned a blind eye to this problem for a long time.

In fact, which restaurant’s dishes are delicious and which are not can be reflected in the recommendations on Dianping.com, so Meituan actually has the corresponding data for a long time, but Meituan has never straightened out the logic of platform recommendations, causing many people to worry when ordering new takeaway products.

You can’t eat the same takeaway every day, so trying new products is a normal behavior for takeaway users. But it is not a small probability event that a takeaway product fails, and I believe many people have experienced it. The reason behind this is actually that there is a problem in the taste match between the product and the user, and platforms like Meituan should do better in this regard.

02

The significance of "Super Popular" to Meituan Takeout does not lie in the fact that it is doing live streaming to sell goods, but in the fact that it has built a scenario that directly connects users and products. Store reviews have become less important here, and big single products and hot-selling products have become more important.

In the past, in Meituan’s food delivery business, I think users’ pursuit of cost-effectiveness has never been taken seriously.

As we all know, cost performance is always the core factor that affects most people's consumption. In the past, you didn't know how to find a good and cheap takeaway product. Merchants have spent a lot of effort to design store discount rules. You may need to spend 4 yuan to buy a bottle of Nongfu Spring to get enough store discount and enjoy the maximum discount.

This kind of competition between merchants and users appears in users' daily takeaway decisions. This is not like the Double 11 event that only happens once a year. It would be a waste of brain cells to do math problems like this every day when ordering takeaways.

"Shen Qiangshou" is similar to "Juhuasuan". The platform communicates with merchants to select cost-effective products, allowing users to select discounted takeaway products more simply and directly, which is very valuable for users. Merchants can also use the special coupons in "Shen Qiangshou" to bring user traffic back to the store, thereby driving sales of other takeaway SKUs.

In my opinion, Meituan's live broadcast room is more suitable for new product recommendations. On the one hand, it is easier to show the value of new products through live broadcasting. On the other hand, everyone is actually very busy. They start ordering lunch takeaways before they get off work at 10:30 in the morning. They are unlikely to stare at the live broadcast room girl's recommendation, otherwise the boss will deduct wages if he sees it.

Therefore, the live broadcasting scene is not completely integrated with the tool attributes of Meituan Takeaway. Live broadcasting focuses on impulsive and passive consumption, while takeaway ordering is planned and active consumption.

Even if you don’t know what takeout to eat for lunch, you may not be impressed by the takeout recommended in the live broadcast room, and it is obviously unlikely that you will spend a lot of time in the takeout live broadcast room.

From this perspective, the significance of Meituan Waimai’s live streaming has been overestimated by the industry.

Author: Zhou Zai'an

WeChat public account: Spread gymnastics