In the face of the ridicule of "consumption downgrade", Yi Gongzi justified it like this.
I used to only drink Starbucks, and now I do drink Luckin and Cudi, but please don't laugh at my downgrade — now, when I ask someone to talk to or read a book on my own, I'm still at Starbucks. Only "buy and go" will consume Luckin and Cudi.
When Luckin started his business, he told such a story - to compete with Starbucks differentially. The vast majority of coffee, buy it and leave, then you might as well cut off the cost of rent and decoration, and change the ** of a cup of coffee from more than 30 to more than 10 yuan. In this way, consumers have an additional option to separate coffee from the environment and pay only for coffee.
This is the unmet need for differentiation.
It's similar to use consumption downgrade to summarize Pinduoduo, plus another misuse - you see, those who love to visit Sam's and Ole', People who place orders on Tmall Jingdong all year round now use Pinduoduo. Then, snapping his fingers, he concluded that Pinduoduo's market value surpassed Ali because of consumption downgrade.
The error of this argument is that it assumes that there are only us elites in this world. But the origin of Pinduoduo is precisely to serve that larger China.
Some time ago, "Undercurrent W**es" had an article introducing Pinduoduo investors that was very popular. There is a sentence in it that I have been recalling for a long time, which is the summary of his investment by investor Duan Lanchun:There is no preconception to achieve the greatest possible
I think this is probably the best footnote to the business case of Pinduoduo.
The sinking market was not deliberately omitted from the beginning. The first generation of e-commerce people rushed to the countryside, but unfortunately they lost.
In addition to the low network coverage, "Yu Dongqi Business Notes" summarized the problems of early sinking e-commerce in a recent article reviewing the rise of Pinduoduo. First, there is no house number in rural areas, and it is difficult for express companies to reach them. Second, mobile phones have no entertainment function, and rural people do not buy mobile phones, or do not bring them with them when they work, so express delivery cannot be contacted. Third, online payments are more difficult, and many farmers don't even have bank cards.
It is necessary to slowly develop with the rural infrastructure and mobile phone ecology. In particular, in 2015, WeChat red envelopes appeared at the Spring Festival Gala, which became a turning point, and the conditions for rural e-commerce were greatly improved.
Interestingly, the differentiated needs emerging from the sinking market were incompatible with the already large system of the e-commerce platform at that time, or even completely contradictory. The start-up company Pinduoduo has no historical baggage, but can do it.
The most typical representative is:Shopping cart。Pinduoduo doesn't have a shopping cart, which makes me very unaccustomed. However, from a product point of view, I have been using e-commerce since the PC era, the screen is large, the operation is easy, and the shopping cart is the same as my experience in offline supermarkets such as Carrefour and Tesco. So, the shopping cart came naturally to me.
But rural e-commerce is different, most farmers, have not experienced PC Internet access, and there are no large supermarkets such as Carrefour in their lives, but commissaries, "bring me a pack of cigarettes", and then put the money away, no shopping cart, simple direct buying, but a more friendly design for them.
There is a huge gap between the two worlds, and the elite's first question of Pinduoduo is how it is possible to grow so fast. It's impossible, no one around is using it. Some investment institutions asked employees to ask their relatives in their hometowns if anyone used Pinduoduo, but few people used it, which was far from enough to support Pinduoduo's soaring numbers at that time. In fact, there are very few poor people in the financial industry, and even if the employees come from fourth- and fifth-tier cities, they are often well-to-do. Such an investigation is pointless and misleading.
A well-known investor who is famous for investing in JD.com later summed up why he missed Pinduoduo in this wayWe don't quite understand how the people on the lower lines live
Who is using Pinduoduo has once become a major mystery in the investment circle. There is an organization that sent a 15-way research team to run along the three railway trunk lines non-stop, running a long distance, until Panzhihua, Yan'an and Huizhou to find Pinduoduo users, and finally decided to reposition Pinduoduo. I haven't seen that research report worth a thousand dollars. But recently, after reading some reports about Pinduoduo's journey, I've gradually pieced together a portrait of Pinduoduo's loyal users.
Hu Tao, a young man from the mountains, is a left-behind child in the mountainous areas of Guizhou. My parents work part-time and live with my grandmother. The life of Dashan is to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, go to the back mountain to cut pigweed, harvest corn, and pick soil dung. Walk more than 2 hours on the mountain road to get to school.
Once, Hu Tao ate meat muffins at someone else's house, which was delicious. Say it casually. My grandmother wanted to hurt her grandson, so she went out at five o'clock in the morning and went to the town to buy it, and it took more than 4 hours to go back and forth on the mountain road. More than 30 yuan a catty, Hu Tao was reluctant to eat, every time he carefully took it out, only tasted a small bite, and then carefully wrapped it and put it away.
This helped me to understand concretely what kind of market Pinduoduo opened up in the early days.
Later, Hu Tao got the mobile phone that his mother had eliminated, and he could connect to the Internet and contact Pinduoduo. The first order was a pair of basketball shoes of 120 yuan, which he struggled with for a long time, which was his pocket money for a week. I placed an order, immediately applied for a refund, and then struggled, and placed an order again and bought it.
With my first online shopping experience, I started shopping for my grandmother's clothes online. In the summer, my grandmother usually went to the town to buy summer clothes, which was the town that took more than 4 hours to go back and forth. Hu Tao said that mobile phones can be bought, and there is no need to go so far. My grandmother bought online for the first time in her life for more than 60 years, and she wore a black shirt all the time.
Later, Hu Tao bought books in Pinduoduo and began to understand the world outside the mountains. I checked the timeline, it should be Pinduoduo to do a lot of reading month activities, pull the publishing house to settle in, and then use the old playing platform to subsidize. Now, Hu Tao walked out of the mountains and came out to study. The earliest pair of basketball shoes, I couldn't wear them, I was reluctant to throw them away, washed them and put them away.
After reading these cases, I was very impressed. Standing in the perspective of his own five rings, using Pinduoduo is a consumption downgrade. But in the main battlefield of Pinduoduo, a much larger number of ordinary people are upgrading their consumption through Pinduoduo.
It's not difficult to just reach consumers in lower-tier markets. However, the so-called "unmet differentiated needs" are on the consumer side and the supply side.
On the supply side, Pinduoduo was mainly white-labeled in the early days. The difference lies in,The onboarding process is simpleThe traffic logic is simple。According to LatePost, at that time, merchants needed to go through 6 steps to upload a product, confirming more than 30 specific details, and it usually took 10-20 minutesThere are only 3 major steps in the process of Pinduoduo, and at the end, you can automatically choose a title for the product, and you can put a product on the shelves in about 5 minutes at the earliest.
If you go to the source factory and let them go directly to the e-commerce platform, you will have the best advantage. However, the development of traditional e-commerce has been very complicated around 2015, in addition to the new, engage in the main picture, brush orders, through trains, delete bad reviews, etc., etc., the factory owner does not understand at all, and needs to hire a professional operating company to control the complex traffic distribution mechanism. However, the traffic rules of Pinduoduo are very simple, that is, to compete in the quality and price ratio, so that the source factory can be directly on the platform, and the factory owner only needs to do what he is good at, focus on production, and constantly improve the cost performance. Low flow cost + low operating cost gives you the best advantage.
With such a basic disk, Pinduoduo has upgraded little by little. The turning point of my own experience in Pinduoduo was the cooperation between Pinduoduo and SF Express, and the instant shopping experience came up. To be fair, Pinduoduo has been strengthening the quality control of goods, and continuously optimizing the entire consumption path before, during and after sales. Take the last year, for example, to give a few examples of upgrades. First, the response rate of the store within 5 minutes shall not be less than 70%, and the response rate of the store within 3 minutes shall not be less than 80% Second, Xinjiang and other remote areas will be upgraded to "free shipping areas". Third, the vast majority of categories have been upgraded from supporting 72-hour delivery to supporting 48-hour delivery.
Flip to a Pinduoduo user case reported by **. Xu Yongli, Shangqiu, Henan, works as a hospital surgeon, and her salary has not changed for many years, only more than 2,000 yuan. There are elderly people in the family, including a 15-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son.
Xu Yongli runs a family, with a family budget of 2,000 per month, of which more than 1,000 is spent on Pinduoduo to buy things for the whole family and family purchases. Including, vegetables, fruits, daily necessities. If you want to**, buy soba noodles, oatmeal, and whole wheat bread on Pinduoduo. I like to cook food for children, buy cheese for cakes and desserts, and make powder for jelly. It is popular to wear hole-in-the-hole shoes, and after receiving the coupon, I spent 10 yuan to buy a pair for my daughter. All of this, more than 1,000 yuan per month.
In the early years, Xu Yongli bought a sturdy garbage bag in Pinduoduo, and she was very satisfied, but the disadvantage was that she didn't give enough money every time. So, every time she received the goods, she would count them one by one, whether it was 500 or not. Because of this experience, she has a deeper understanding of the platform's service upgrade. She herself said that now she will take a photo and upload it, and the customer service will contact her in ten minutes. And she also has a soft spot for home pickup.
From the first time she used Pinduoduo in December 2016, to 2023, Xu Yongli has placed more than 1,500 orders.
This is the real sinking market. At this moment, I just walked out of the Will's gym, ready to go to the next Vientiane City to buy a pair of shoes, and I was still struggling with whether to eat a Japanese food or hot pot by the way, but at the same time, there is still a shopping demand that I am completely unfamiliar with, is an all-round mother of Shangqiu, 2000 yuan a month to maintain all the expenses of the old and the young, the pursuit of cost performance. And the latter is far greater than the former in terms of quantity, and it is fair to say that over the years, their shopping has become more and more seriousDecentThis is a consumption upgrade.
When you concretely understand the market that Pinduoduo has been facing for a long time, you will have a better understanding of Pinduoduo's "refund only" turmoil some time ago. At that time, many merchants complained that Pinduoduo's "refund-only" policy was unfair to merchants and too biased towards consumers. Here is a perspective, and that is because Pinduoduo has long served consumers in the sinking marketToo vulnerableFinish.
Imagine that the same consumer and the brand have a dispute. (Of course, in the face of large enterprises, consumers will always be weak), the clothes in the fifth ring still have a bit of energy, such as familiar with business rules, in the regulatory department, the lawyer's circle, there are many friends, so if I suffer a loss, I can use my energy to get a little justice. However, consumers in the sinking market, such as the Dashan teenager and Shangqiu** mother in the report cited in this article, or farmers and the elderly in fourth-tier cities, are very vulnerable to the brand. It is precisely because Pinduoduo has served them for a long time and understands their weaknesses enough that it is reflected in the platform policy and value orientation.
In a word, the rise of Pinduoduo has a broad mass base.
Or back to that sentence, thinking of Pinduoduo, the sentence I feel the most——There is no preconception in order to achieve the greatest possible
Pinduoduo's key steps are all stepping on our deep-rooted prejudices, or rather, "anti-stereotypes".
The initial stereotype was that people in the Fifth Ring Road only started from their own life experience, how could anyone buy those low-priced goods?
Later, Pinduoduo was labeled as "consumption downgrade". And ignore that the value of Pinduoduo lies in the fact that, from another point of view, Pinduoduo has launched a vigorous consumption upgrade on the main battlefield on which it stands.
In addition, we generally feel that even if Pinduoduo grows big in China, the Pinduoduo model cannot happen in the United States, because the United States is the world's largest consumer country, with a GDP of more than $80,000 per capita, and consumers value quality and brand. But Temu has done a good job and has become an important support for Pinduoduo's stock price to rise sharply this year.
In relationships, we often say, don't giveLabeling。Similarly, when it comes to business decisions, stereotypes are the worst enemy. And the latter is like a transparent cover, which limits you, and it is difficult for you to know.
EspeciallyTransformationDuring the period, the current era is characterized by the breaking of the old model and the establishment of a new model. It calls on every participant to rethink, open their horizons, and seek new value growth points. At the end of the year, summarizing 2023 and finding a direction for 2024 is especially emotional. India, Vietnam, and Japan have all been labeled, but those who dare to break stereotypes have gained a lot this year. Similarly, when it comes to China's hard technology, most people firmly feel that the foundation is poor and the system is poor, but those who dare to bow down to the game have also tasted the results.
Breaking stereotypes and focusing on goals is the biggest inspiration that Pinduoduo left me.