In a few hours, the annual Spring Festival Gala will officially begin. For JD.com, as the exclusive interactive platform for this year's Spring Festival Gala, this is also its most important "battle" at the beginning of 2024.
The core of the JD Spring Festival Gala should start from the current competitive landscape of the e-commerce market. After Pinduoduo ascended to become the king of e-commerce, Alibaba and JD.com had a low morale, and JD.com needed each "battle" to enhance organizational vitality.
A JD Cloud employee told Blue Whale Finance that their department was worried about the workload and direction of the coming year before and after the New Year, and the entire business became busy immediately after the Spring Festival Gala cooperation. It is reported that JD Technology was the hardest hit area for JD's slimming adjustment before the year, and its cloud business sector will be the technical guarantee for cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala.
Overall, whether it is the shift in the overall "low price" competitive strategy or the need to use war to activate team morale, JD.com is in great need of the 2024 Spring Festival Gala.
According to the "JD.com Blackboard News", in the sponsorship of this Spring Festival Gala, JD.com will conduct an interactive lottery with JD App as the main website. From the categories involved in the lottery, it involves the right to use luxury homes, cars, and other properties. The core marketing strategy of this year's JD.com Spring Festival Gala is to "bring home a penny", which is also interpreted by the outside world as a "new acquisition tool", that is, to attract users to place orders through low-priced gimmicks, and then convert them into potential consumers on the platform.
Urgent need to expand the influence of sinking markets
The Spring Festival Gala has already built a link between Chinese people's emotional memories and is also a carrier of commercial brand changes. The most famous case is still the WeChat Spring Festival Gala in 2015, which broke into the hinterland of Alipay with only one move.
A visible fact is that with the enrichment of entertainment activities, the influence of the Spring Festival Gala among young people is declining, and "big companies" are no longer fiercely pursuing the Spring Festival Gala. This year's exclusive interactive platform "Hualuo" on JD.com also lacks the prelude to previous media information bombardment.
However, even so, it can be certain that the cooperation fees for this year's Spring Festival Gala are still very expensive.
According to public information, Tencent's bid for CCTV Spring Festival Gala's new media partner in 2015 was 53 million yuan. Three years later, in 2018, the advertising cost for Taobao Spring Festival Gala had exceeded 300 million yuan (excluding red envelope distribution fees). In 2011, Midea Group won a countdown advertisement for the Spring Festival Gala at a price of 57.2 million yuan. No surprise, the cooperation price with JD.com this time will only be higher than before.
Although prices have skyrocketed, for JD.com, which is undergoing fierce changes, the national status of the Spring Festival Gala makes it irreplaceable in terms of user engagement, public influence, and emotional support. This short-term focus on user traffic is what JD.com needs now.
Since its establishment, JD.com has long established a strong mindset of quality service among users in high-end cities. However, in the past two years, with the changing consumer environment, Pinduoduo has been rapidly seizing the market with low prices, squeezing JD.com's market survival space.
Among the three major price e-commerce platforms, according to the annual data released by the data monitoring agency Yuehu iAPP from April 2022 to June 2023, JD's MAU (monthly active users) was between 460 million and 510 million after Taobao and Pinduoduo. The highest monthly active user count on Taobao, which once confirmed that "DAU is a more important indicator than GMV," was close to 877 million.
An industry insider told Blue Whale Finance that in JD's user source traffic structure, besides the main station and WeChat, another important source is traffic platforms such as Tiktok and Xiaohongshu.
In addition, after Liu Qiangdong's return at the end of 2022 and the strategic shift of "low price as the only fundamental weapon", whether it is to acquire more user groups or emphasize "province" in the dimensions of "more, faster, better, and more", JD.com needs to find more sources of traffic, that is, to reach out to the vast sinking market and expand the influence of the sinking market. One of the best ways to participate in the Spring Festival Gala is through nationwide participation.
Internal attention has been increased to the procurement and sales system
For the cooperation between JD.com and the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, one focus is on how JD.com will have the ability to retain these users after attracting them to the sinking market, so that they can accumulate into long-term platform users.
From this collaboration between JD.com and the Spring Festival Gala, it can be seen that the collaboration with the long and short video platforms and the World Cup is similar. Youku encountered a Waterloo in its collaboration with Russia in the 2018 World Cup. After the competition, there was no other high-quality content to carry the gathered sports fan users, resulting in a rapid decline in traffic.
Based on the consideration of cooperation efficiency, it is reported that JD.com has already given strong preventive measures internally. According to a later report by LatePost, JD.com is facing significantly greater marketing pressure on its Spring Festival Gala project this year than in 2022. Project teams with thousands of people need to directly memorize the two indicators of GMV (transaction volume) and number of transaction users. However, the GMV assessment requirements for 2022 are more relaxed, with a focus on assessing user activity.
It is worth adding that JD.com had previously exclusively named Mango TV's New Year's Eve Gala, which was also seen by the market as a rehearsal for the Spring Festival Gala. Obviously, the interaction with the Spring Festival Gala this time is no longer about military training but practical combat. Therefore, the preparation for this cooperation between the two sides is more thorough, and the effect is naturally more worthy of attention.
In fact, based on a series of internal actions taken by JD.com in recent months, it is also increasing its attention to the procurement and sales system.
Previously, in a multi-party confrontation with Haishi and Li Jiaqi's live broadcast rooms, JD Sales achieved a breakthrough in their own live broadcast room on Double 11, 2023, becoming one of the few highlights of JD's promotion this year.
A JD Technology insider told Blue Whale Finance that after breaking through the circle on Double 11 in 2023, other departments are helping to purchase and sell live streaming rooms. To some extent, JD.com's procurement and sales team was a representative of Liu Qiangdong's statement on the internal network in December that "JD.com will never lie flat." This group subsequently received a wave of salary increases at the end of the year.
On February 5th, JD.com announced that starting from February 1st, 2024, over 20000 frontline customer service employees on JD.com will achieve an average annual salary increase of over 30%.
According to media reports, starting from January 1, 2024, JD.com has significantly increased the annual fixed salary of frontline business personnel such as procurement and sales by nearly 100%. In addition, the market has repeatedly reported that JD.com intends to invite Dong Yuhui to cooperate and boost the influence of JD.com's sales live streaming platform.