if Douyin is a Chinese counterpart to TikTok, Kuaishou is undoubtedly the Chinese archenemy of TikTok and Douyin. Listed in Hong Kong in February, Kuaishou is the first Chinese short video platform to go public in the past decade. Backed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, Kuaishou is maturing as a national short video platform, but has also expanded globally.
In June, Kuaishou said that its global monthly active users 1 billion reached. Even if this makes Kuaishou China’s second largest sharing platform for short videos, it stands out from the intense competition with its down-to-earth content, which is shared by Chinese from all walks of life.
As JingDaily reported, 1.1 billion users in China are expected to be spending by 2025 more than two hours a day on video apps. Given the growing commercial potential, it is no coincidence that the founders of Kuaishou and Bytedance (the owners of TikTok and Douyin) both resigned from their CEO positions this year. The next phase is more about a new competitive scene for video and mobile commerce in the 5G age for both companies.
Tarun Mathur, APAC general manager at Mediaocean, believes that “there will be more competition than ever with China’s e-commerce giants and a host of other platforms. Live broadcast rooms are growing in popularity, with coupons offered and for sale to consumers encouraged by products “. seen on Taobao, Douyin and Kuaishou “.
Jerman Zhang, Chief Commerce Officer of GroupM Commerce China, notes that “Kuaishou and Douyin have recently built their own e-commerce platform and have integrated the brand, content, traffic and performance with GMV”. [gross merchandise value, ie sales]”Both sites’ e-commerce platforms cover a wide range of product categories, from home appliances to fashion,” Zhang points out, and many of those brands – especially those in fashion, beauty, and groceries – are eager to embrace these new platforms Zhang pointed out that the difference between Kuaishou and Douyin is that Kuaishou is a trust-based e-commerce platform between the network community, while Douyin’s business of advertising and marketing is geared towards user interests.
2021 CNY Kuaishou campaign for the year of the ox with 2.1 billion RMB from Hongbao and Chinese stars
Kuaishou has planned many campaigns in the past with the support of celebrities and by sending out red bags (Hongbao) as an incentive during the Chinese New Year. In 2021, Kuaishou gained both trust and user interest through exclusive sports content. The platform announced a strategic partnership with China Media Group, China’s only national sports video provider. The new step makes Kuaishou the first short video and live streaming platform to be the world’s official broadcaster for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
With increased competition and Kuaishou’s new moves in 2021, Campaign China spoke to marketers about their assessment of Kuaishou’s competitiveness, as well as its future benefits and challenges.
Zod Fang
General Manager and Head of GroupM Knowledge
GroupM China
Kuaishou plays a very special role in the e-commerce sector, which differs from other players. Its nature is geographically lower and more based on acquaintance, which, compared to other platforms, deserves more trust in many communities. Plus, streamers on Kuaishou aren’t that polarized. On other platforms, the winning streamers handle almost all of the traffic, while on Kuaishou, the traffic between streamers is more balanced due to its traffic allocation mechanism.
As Kuaishou longs for a larger GMV, his approach will be to take full advantage of his high level of trust in his communities.
Hence, Kuaishou needs more community-based content to build and maintain its various communities. Kuaishou, for example, fakes its sports content to feed more sports-related communities. It also features some long videos for building relative communities.
As a major platform for short videos, Kuaishou needs to watch out for the growth of the overall category. The saturation of short videos may require Kuaishou to find more segments of content in order to attract users to compete with Douyin. Kuaishou is working hard to promote content production and improve its commercialization efficiency, which will be key to its future success.
Since Kuaishou is very different from its competitors, it must drive commercialization with its own functions rather than directly copying from others. For example, since Kuaishou’s communities operate with a higher level of trust, its live streaming ecommerce offerings should target more trust-based or categories with longer decision chains.
As Kuaishou has gotten bigger, the way its users see things has changed a bit. More and more users expect more exquisite and longer content. Therefore, Kuaishou invited many top stars from OTV platforms to his platform and started producing his own programs. One example was the talk show with Li Dan, a Chinese talk show host and stand-up comedian, and his company. Fresh was one of the brands that took advantage of this through integrated digital marketing. For example, the pre-campaign teasers attracted traffic on both Weibo and Kuaishou; there were product placements on the talk show and the Kuaishou app had opening displays and social reinforcement. The result? Fresh reached 46 million live viewers in one hour, 10 times trending topics and 1 million live interactions with more than 800 million video views in two weeks.
Richard Zou
Half director
Isobar China, Dentsu
After two major e-commerce shopping seasons in 2021, in our collaboration with Kuaishou we discovered that the proportion of consumers in tier 2 markets is very high. Due to the saturation of e-commerce sales in tier 1 markets, many international / domestic tier 1 brands are starting to align their strategy in the so-called “sink markets”. The arrangement of consumer resources for second and third tier markets has become Kuaishou’s greatest asset in the e-commerce battlefield.
This year’s 11/11 e-commerce terminal sales ended up with the two e-commerce giants Tmall and JD. At the same time, the accumulation of consumer goods and the cultivation of interest is a “snowball” process. From the contribution of e-commerce traffic in this year’s 11.11. Kuaishou’s contribution to interest-based assets is still quite significant in the e-commerce sector.
Kuaishou is a platform that can convert short video interest into user traffic. Kuaishou’s main competitor in the overall market will continue to be Douyin. However, with Kuaishou expanding in many areas such as sports video and e-commerce, Douyin isn’t its only competitor; many other short video platforms like Xigua (Watermelon video) and Huoshan (Vulkan), both owned by ByteDance, are also rising quietly.
Rufio Zhu
Vice President of the Media
Mailman Group, an Endeavor China company
Kuaishou’s standout campaign of the year was presented during the Chinese New Year celebrations to celebrate the largest festival in China. The platform launched a unique creative symbol that intertwined the traditional Chinese character for the ox (牛) and the symbol for “power” (力). The campaign included a daily gamified challenge with a ‘Hongbao’ incentive structure based on the CNY tradition. They were able to engage their brand sponsors and advertisers to bring certain digital products to market during the campaign period.
Last year, Kuaishou launched high profile accounts at Chelsea, Cristiano Ronaldo and the Olympics. For Tokyo 2020, Kuaishou took the bold step of sub-licensing CCTV’s fast-live broadcast rights, meaning they had access to all of the highlights of the Olympics. They produced a behind the scenes show called “Welcome the Champions” live from their Tokyo studio to get in direct contact with the Chinese heroes of the Tokyo Games. They marketed the shows through digital sponsorship with local brands. We expect a lot more for the Beijing Games as this is just the beginning of Kuaishou’s efforts to distribute sports content.
In China’s incredibly competitive e-commerce market, where Kuaishou and Douyin have the advantage, there is already a very dedicated, recurring user base that is there to consume content and be inspired. This is vastly different from Alibaba’s Taobao platform, which would have a shorter consumer journey driven primarily by the purpose of a purchase rather than content consumption. Kuaishou and Douyin represent a new generation of e-commerce where content consumption drives product purchases and users often convert without intent to buy. Douyin is nowhere near its only competitor, largely because everyone is a competitor in this highly competitive market, but each is at a different stage in their evolution to “live commerce” and faces their own unique challenges.
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