The Little Red Book Lost On The Road Of Business Transformation

The Xiaohong book, which has been established for nearly 7 years, can be said to be the star company in the "grass planting" community before the end of this year's event. The number of users is over 300 million, and the monthly number of users is 100 million.

But with the continuous expansion of business development in recent years, the quality of Xiaohong's book has obviously declined. The behavior of content generation and quantity ranking has been increasing frequently. The contents of false advertisements, grey products and illegal products have appeared in large quantities. This puts forward higher requirements for the operation, auditing and recommendation mechanism of the platform. It is obvious that the operation capacity of the little red book has not kept pace with the growth. That is why it led to the downfall of the little red book in July this year.

Although many changes have been made in Xiaohong's book after the return, there are still many problems in the content quality. This requires that Xiao Hong Book continue to readjust in its future growth and development.

　　 Prominent commercial barriers

It is the biggest difference between Xiaohong book and other electronic business platforms.

The community may be the most ancient product form of the Chinese Internet. Whether it is the Tianya, post bar in the PC era or the knowledge and quick hands of the mobile Internet era, the content and form of the community are changing from time to time.

Especially in the era of mobile Internet, because of the chain of payment and logistics services, community products are no longer confined to the fetters of content, but rather integrate user value, content production and business realisation into a business ecosystem.

In October 2013, the founding group of Xiao Hong wrote 8 national and regional shopping strategies, and launched its first product. Users can download offline reading and share communication besides online browsing.

The Raiders provided information on commodity prices, rebates, discounts and business descriptions of different countries and regions with relatively high cost performance.

This app has been downloaded in the Apple App store for hundreds of thousands of months in just three months. This shows that it is in line with the consumer demand of users, and this has laid the foundation for the online shopping of Xiaohong book.

But this strategy, similar to the introduction of reference books, presents a dry information guidance to users. It is static and emotional, which results in not only low user frequency but also low user stickiness.

To this end, in December of the same year, Xiao Hong published a shopping sharing community called "Hongkong shopping guide". This version is different from the previous one, which uses the form of user sharing shopping experience. At the same time, the application also has the functions of commentary, collection, praise and retrieval. The prototype of the community shows that the user stickiness is improved while the distance between the platform and the users is narrowed.

Although the content of the community at this time is relatively small, push is also released in the form of theme after editing and finishing. However, due to the time and location of the launch, the first batch of users was quickly accumulated, and the user volume exceeded ten thousand in the half month online.

Later, Xiao Hong officially changed its name to "Xiaohong book shopping notes". It also extended the shopping destination from Hongkong to 8 countries and regions, including Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia.

In this series of operations, Xiaohong book has gradually improved the building of shopping communities.

Later, in order to enhance social interaction and encourage users to share more shopping experience, Xiao Hong not only added the tab and regional tab, but also added filters, stickers, homemade expression packs and so on.

Although the early red book focuses mainly on product content creation, there is not much marketing content. But in March 2014, the little red book that went online for just over three months completed the accumulation of 0 to 100 thousand seed users, and got millions of dollars in A investment in the same month.

At that time, some people called Xiaohong book for the sea version.

Today, Xiao Hong has already covered all aspects of consumption experience and lifestyle, and has built up its own commercial barriers by relying on the community. This is also impossible for other platforms to duplicate.

By the end of July this year, its platform user volume exceeded 300 million, and MAU exceeded 100 million. The community produced 300 million exposures, including images, short videos and other forms, 70% of which came from user production.

　　 Single user group is obvious defect.

A user group from a platform can not only spy on its current situation, but also predict its future. According to the analysis of data from the Analysys, it is found that the users of Xiao Hong book are single in terms of sex, age and geographical distribution.

In terms of gender distribution, women account for the overwhelming majority. According to statistics, male users account for only 12.7% of the total users.

At the beginning of the small red book community, most of the users were women. They shared shopping experience with each other, which led to their activities in the latter stage of operation and marketing.

On the age distribution, the users of Xiao Hong Shu 70% are 90, of whom 24 are below 40%, while 24-30 years old account for about 30%. On the distribution of consumption capacity, the users of the small red book account for a large proportion of the medium and medium high consumers, but in recent years, the proportion of low and low consumers continues to accelerate due to the overall subsidence of the mobile Internet enterprises.

In recent years, Xiao Hong's advertisement in variety shows and the entry of celebrities have attracted many low consumption and younger students.

From the distribution of provinces, the users of Xiaohong books are mostly concentrated in the economically developed coastal provinces, with the largest number of users in Guangdong province. Compared with the two or three line cities, the number of small red books in the first tier cities is the largest, accounting for 40.94%.

So it can be concluded that the main user group of Xiao Hong is a young woman living in a big city.

From the perspective of traditional business to modern Internet commerce, the social attributes of women make them more consumptive. Therefore, it is advisable for Xiaohong to locate users in women.

However, in recent years, the development of Xiaohong book has obviously not only satisfied the development of the group of young women in big cities.

Therefore, if Xiao Hong book does not adjust its operation strategy and create more diverse user groups to meet its development requirements, such words as stagnation, recession and decline may be its future development.

　　 Electricity supplier liquidity bottlenecks

For content platforms, liquidity has always been a topic that can not be bypassed.

In the past, Xiao Hong was always in an awkward position. As a way of life sharing the community, Xiao Hong had a strong ability to grow grass. The aggregation of female users made it a place of content for beauty and fashion.

But for a long time, most of the users of red books used to plant grass in Xiao Hong's books and weeds on other electronic business platforms. Xiaohong has become a word of mouth community, but it can not form a closed loop of direct realisation under traffic and content. So Xiao Hong began to set foot in the electricity supplier and started self employment.

In August 2014, with the policy draught, Xiao Hong began to test the water electricity supplier with the "spike kill" mode, selling the best word of mouth products in the community, and solved the problem of "seeing but not buying".

At the very beginning, Xiao Hong's book was sold directly in the form of direct sales in order to protect the commodities sold, and it was called "welfare agency".

Under the meticulous operation of the little red book, the welfare agency GMV rose at a rate of more than 70% per month, and the welfare agency gradually changed from the sub module of Search tab to a single tab at the bottom.

According to the data released by Xiao Hong book at that time, the sales volume of Xiaohong book reached more than 200 million yuan in the 5 months after starting the electricity supplier mode.

As a platform, the strategy of Xiao Hong's book is to establish a closed loop service for users, brands, MCN agencies and their own business. In fact, the arrival of e-commerce business has brought many infamy to Xiao Hong's book.

Fully self operated Xiaohong book is difficult to provide enough complete electricity supplier service system, the supply chain system is incomplete, resulting in the problem of counterfeit goods, the logistics system has not been established, resulting in slow delivery, slow delivery, and poor after-sales experience has become the object of the small red book business is "trough point".

In the small red book because of the internal business system is not perfect in bogus muddy mud, in the external competitiveness also showed the trend of decline.

According to Analysys International released the fourth quarter of last year, cross-border import retail electricity supplier market share data show that Xiaohong ranked 3.7% in the sixth place, far behind Tmall international, NetEase koala, Jingdong global purchase giants.

In contrast to the independent cross-border import and export business, Xiao Hong ranked second in the 11.1% share, but far below the 70% share, the top ranked NetEase koala.

And from the first quarter of last year (4.3%) to the fourth quarter (3.7%), Xiao Hong's share of cross-border electricity supplier market has been declining. Although the decline in market share does not necessarily represent a decline in the volume of small red book transactions, the continued decline in share is enough to explain the decline in competitiveness of the small red book.

According to Analysys data in 2018, cross border retail electricity market competition has formed a head effect. Tmall international ranked first, NetEase koala sea purchased two, Jingdong global purchase third, and this pattern tends to be stable. The remaining market share of the cross-border e-commerce platform, such as Wei pin international, Xiaohong book, Su Ninghai outsourcing, Feng Hai Hai and so on, is less than 10%, and the phenomenon of food sharing is fierce.

Therefore, in the current cross-border retail electricity supplier market, traffic and scale are increasingly concentrated on the giants.

In 2017, the sales volume of Xiaohong book was 6 billion 500 million yuan, and planned for 12 billion yuan in 2018, but some media reported that its sales in the first half of 2018 were flat or even lower than that in 2017.

In addition, according to the report released by Aurora data, in September this year, the overall market penetration of e-commerce platform ranked fifth in the 8% of the top fifth, the top four were Taobao, spelling, Jingdong and Tmall.

Among them, Taobao's market penetration is 60.3%, its market penetration is 42.7%, and the penetration rate of Jingdong is 28.7%, which is much higher than that of Xiao Hong.

From the number of active users, as of the end of September 2019, the number of active users in Xiaohong Book month was 72 million 880 thousand, Taobao was 653 million, Jingdong was 250 million, and the number of users was 403 million, tremble was 482 million, and fast hand was 338 million.

Therefore, under such circumstances, the business of the small red book can only be narrower and narrower.

Success or failure of e-commerce live

In November 28th, on the opening day of the little red book creators in Beijing, in addition to upgrading the previous brand cooperation platform and good things recommendation platform, Xiao Hong also announced that it will launch the creators' centre and interactive live platform for the service of the little red book.

The advent of interactive live platform means that Xiao Hong's book will save the future straw in the live broadcast of the electricity supplier.

It is noteworthy that, as the head of KOL, which is the carrier of many electronic business platforms, is the most important factor in the current live broadcast business, but little red book has not relied on the KOL that the platform has grown up.

According to data released by QuestMobile, on the double eleven day of this year, Li Jiaqi ranked first in Taobao's live hosts' TOP15 list, while Wei Ya ranked second, while the heat of any two people was higher than that of the remaining 13 anchors. From the perspective of cargo carrying capacity, the head effect is also highlighted.

In addition to the head KOL, in the supply chain, the ability to choose products, and so on, it also determines how far the road of live broadcast of Xiao Hong book is difficult to go, and in these respects, Xiao Hong book does not have a competitive advantage and faces great pressure.

In addition to facing a lot of strong opponents, the slow growth of the electricity supplier environment also makes the prospect of the live broadcast of Xiao Hong book less optimistic. Data show that the scale of mobile e-commerce users in 2019 is expected to reach 713 million, which means that the size of the electricity supplier users will soon reach the ceiling of Internet users.

In addition, some analysts believe that the live broadcast of electronic commerce is a very strong form of cash content. How to harmoniously share notes with the small red book and the more relaxed and static content of the community is also a matter of concern.

The contents of Xiao Hong's book are mainly graphic and short videos. After the live broadcasting business is launched, it will inevitably lead to a decrease in the flow of graphics and short video content. This reduction may be more than enough for the little red who relies on the community.

At present, the live broadcast of electronic commerce is being seen by more and more electronic business platforms as an important way to open up new entries and attract traffic. As a result, competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and traffic and scale will also be concentrated to the giants. The chance of small players will be smaller and smaller. So whether the future live broadcast can become a life-saving straw in the content of Xiaohong book is still unknown.