A comprehensive review of the New Year Goods Festival, what surprises have e-commerce platforms brought to users this year?

The annual New Year Goods Festival is here. In order to penetrate the minds of users and continue to attract consumers, major e-commerce platforms have also begun to introduce new ways of playing. Under the game of multiple parties, who can become the biggest winner? Let's take a look.

After the New Year Goods Festival, major e-commerce platforms have launched intensive promotions. However, when faced with the dazzling preferential policies of major platforms, consumers often don’t know how to choose and can only calculate the best preferential plan over and over again. The result is often that after a lot of efforts, the preferential strength is still not as expected.

Since the development of shopping festivals, the year-after-year fancy discounts have already exhausted consumers and made them complain, and everyone has gradually lowered their expectations for e-commerce platforms. When the platforms realized this problem, they launched new ways of playing and weakened the routines with the greatest sincerity, striving to bring the greatest benefits to consumers.

Since short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou were involved in the New Year Goods Festival war, the "people, goods, and venues" pattern in the traditional e-commerce field has also changed, and the platform operation logic has gradually evolved from "people looking for goods" to "goods looking for people." In order to penetrate the minds of users, major platforms continue to "create festivals" and launch various ways to attract consumers. However, when consumers no longer buy into the layers of coupons, it seems to be a general trend for the platform to return to shopping itself.

During this year's New Year's Festival, can the major platforms win back consumers with genuine discounts? Who will be the biggest winner among multiple parties?

1. When routines can no longer retain users’ sincerity, platforms begin to return to the truth

The earliest wave of materials for the New Year Goods Festival is naturally the short video promotions on major platforms. Tmall released the promotional video "2023 Ideal Life Experience Edition". The video uses the power of the metaverse and creates a cyberpunk shopping space for consumers. It also collaborates with Yi Yang Qianxi to promote the pure enjoyment version of the New Year. The picture of thousands of lights is full of the flavor of the New Year.

In addition, Tmall has also launched the "Tmall 2023 Ideal Living Space" and a series of mini-games. As the spokesperson, Yi Yangqianxi will interact with consumers through the cloud. Taobao's innovative measures are obviously aimed at young groups and keep pace with the times.

Of course, for consumers, Taobao's New Year's Goods Festival this year provides real discounts. For the first time, it cancelled the long-standing discount method and changed it to an official direct discount of 5%-10%, which means that the discount rules that were once full of routines are returning to their original nature. For this reason, Tmall also launched a comic video "Tmall New Year's Goods, One Piece Discount" to let consumers feel the sincerity of the platform more intuitively.

JD.com launched a 16-minute long video promotional film, which revolves around the topic of the relationship between young people and their parents. The images are full of age and establish an emotional connection with consumers. JD.com also soft-implanted advertisements for JD.com Auto Care, JD.com Mobile, JD.com New Department Store, and JD.com Store into the plot, which was interspersed just right without any sense of disobedience.

JD New Year Goods Festival will start on December 26, 2022 and end on January 28, 2023. This period includes five stages: "preheating period, Laba New Year's Eve period, scene period, small New Year's period, and Spring Festival delivery period", providing consumers with a shopping discount of 40 yuan off for purchases over 300 yuan for up to one month, and consumers can also enjoy the benefits of New Year's goods discounts without closing.

In recent years, short video platforms that have shifted from content to e-commerce have also introduced new ways of playing. Douyin has released a series of promotional videos called "New Year Rescue Plan". The video has a unique style and uses sharp contradictions to wrap up strong warmth.

The first episode of the short film is set against the backdrop of a war between a mother and her daughter, which is actually because both sides cannot express their feelings. The plot of the mother and daughter finally reconciling is very immersive. The second episode of the short film tells the story of the warmth brought by strangers. A conflict caused by takeaway food was resolved because the truth was revealed. At the same time, it closely follows the theme of what is the flavor of the New Year? It is the human touch, and advertisements such as Jindian and Baiguowei are also appropriately implanted in it.

Douyin's "New Year's Goods Delivered to Home with New Trends" event started on December 28 and ended on January 7. In terms of shopping gameplay, Douyin launched cross-store discounts, consumer coupons and super value purchases as in previous years. However, Douyin launched the "Search for Free" gameplay for the first time during the New Year's Goods Festival this year. Users only need to search for keywords to have the opportunity to get free products.

In order to catch the attention of consumers, Douyin also set up six major consumption scenarios: "Year of the Rabbit", "National Trend New Year Greetings", "Warmth at Home", "Healing at Home", "Exercise during the New Year", and "Party Check-in", and successfully achieved the transformation from content to sales.

Kuaishou took a different approach, interpreting the significance of New Year's goods from the perspective of merchants, and released a promotional video titled "My New Year's Goods Are Always Open." This video presents the process of merchants making products, distributing logistics, and other links to consumers, reflecting the hardships of merchants running around for the New Year's Goods Festival, and invisibly played a role in promoting the merchants, while also being wrapped in a strong New Year flavor.

Kuaishou also distributed 6.6 billion traffic and 1 billion red envelopes to merchants during the New Year Goods Festival, and launched activities such as "New Year Goods Festival Fan Special", "New Year Goods Festival Top 100 Anchor Ceremony", "Authentic New Year Goods Category Day", and "Commercial Co-construction Bonus Policy", which activated the platform content ecology. It is worth mentioning that Kuaishou launched services such as "Fan-loving New Year Goods Gift Package" and "Buy Expensively Must Compensate" for users this year, allowing users to get real discounts.

After years of development, the New Year Goods Festival has finally returned to its original path. When the routines become more and more inward-looking, more sincerity is the key to retaining consumers on the platform.

2. There are endless new ways to play during the New Year Festival. What development trends do these reflect?

When the e-commerce industry was just emerging, consumers often spent blindly and rushed to buy goods at shopping festivals. They would also stock up on non-essential items to meet the discounts. However, in recent years, due to the influence of the external environment, consumers' wallets have become thinner and they have gradually returned to rational consumption. The New Year Goods Festival has also changed with the change of everyone's consumption habits.

According to a survey conducted by China Youth Daily on the eve of Double 11 in 2022, about 61.9% of consumers will lose interest in shopping due to the platform's coupons. In the past few years, Tmall also launched shopping vouchers such as building buildings and receiving cat coins during shopping nodes such as 618, Double 11, and New Year's Festival, but all these overlapping operations really made consumers miserable.

To this end, Tmall released the "2022 Taobao Tmall "Brief" History" last year. The specific content includes that starting from the 2022 Tmall New Year Festival, the promotion will be adjusted to 8 pm, and the 2023 Tmall New Year Festival will change the cross-store discount to a direct price reduction... Although it is not known whether Tmall's new gameplay can continue, this move is enough to show that Tmall intends to return to the original intention of shopping. As for whether platforms such as JD.com, Douyin, and Kuaishou can follow in Tmall's footsteps, it depends on whether Tmall's GMV performance after simplifying it has reached the expected goal.

From the changes on the merchant side, it can be seen that the support of major platforms for merchants is increasing day by day. On the one hand, this is because the Internet traffic dividend has peaked and the overall growth rate of the industry has slowed down. Some small and medium-sized merchants and emerging merchants are facing corresponding operational and customer acquisition difficulties.

On the other hand, content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have gradually opened up the e-commerce chain and built shopping malls. The rise of e-commerce on short video platforms has also brought great impact to traditional e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Taobao. In order to retain merchants, major platforms have launched new incentive policies. Now, video accounts are about to enter the mini-program e-commerce. I wonder what changes will occur in the subsequent market structure of the e-commerce industry.

In terms of content promotion, e-commerce platforms have also fallen into involution. Take Tmall as an example. In the past, Tmall's promotional videos were only a dozen seconds long, and usually created a family reunion scene at the beginning, and then the style suddenly changed, quickly cutting into the New Year Goods Festival logo, and the implantation process was extremely awkward. When short video platforms that started with content joined the war, the industry's overall promotional videos were also raised to a new level.

From the promotional videos released by major platforms this year, we can see that plot advertising has become the mainstream, and the content has both depth and warmth. These promotional videos also triggered the audience's reflection on topics such as family affection and warmth, and invisibly aroused consumers' shopping desire. It has to be said that the threshold for participating in the New Year Goods Festival is getting higher and higher.

3. Final Thoughts

In essence, compared with other shopping festivals such as Double 11 and 618, the New Year Goods Festival carries the beautiful meaning of family happiness. For this reason, the gameplay of the New Year Goods Festival on major platforms should not only meet consumers' demand for products, but also build down-to-earth consumption scenarios to resonate with consumers.

To sum up, with the changes in the New Year’s Goods Festival, consumers’ shopping and content demands are also constantly changing. Whether e-commerce platforms can capture consumers’ wallets depends on whether the platforms can accurately meet consumers’ needs.

Author: Rain and smoke

Source: Marketing Kanke (ID: yingxiaokanke), a public account of Clour, focusing on new media, social media, platforms, brands, and KOL marketing case analysis