Clare Louise Amid this pressure, luxury brands face three major marketing challenges: How can they accurately identify the target audience and gain precise insights into their needs? How to effectively communicate with consumers and initiate connections quickly? How can they assess the effectiveness of online and offline omnichannel marketing? Opportunities are often present after challenges. In the first half of 2024, the GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) of luxury goods on Douyin surged by over 45%, highlighting Douyin’s emergence as a crucial business platform for luxury brands. However, success will depend on whether brands can leverage Douyin’s opportunities and effectively address these challenges.Ocean Engine hosted the “Spark Creativity, Endless Exploration—2024 Douyin Luxury Industry Summit” on August 20th.The summit showcased Douyin’s comprehensive solutions for luxury brands, covering aspects from precise audience targeting and scientific content production to full-chain brand metrics. These solutions are designed to help luxury brands connect with emerging consumer needs, capture new marketing trends, and accelerate the enhancement of omnichannel experiences.
Helping Brands Precisely Identify Their Ideal Audience
With over 600 million DAU, Douyin has the largest user base, especially the GEN Z generation with strong personal opinions, which is the mainstay of the rapidly growing luxury consumption market, making Douyin a gathering place and birthplace of events with huge traffic. In addition, with its powerful content ecology and online and offline content linkage, Douyin easily captures the attention of young people. A large number of users, especially GEN Z, gather on Douyin, making it an important marketing platform in the exploration of luxury goods.
The challenge for luxury brands is to accurately identify target audiences with high economic status, cultural sophistication, and demand for quality from the vast amount of crowd data. This is one of the foremost issues in luxury marketing today.
Douyin’s super-detailed tag insight system includes more than 2.3 million refined tags such as crowd/product/content/touchpoint/industry dimensions. Through more scientific tagging logic and more refined crowd circle anchoring, brands can find the consumer groups they want. For example, through content insights, Douyin successfully customized communication strategies for brands in different circles such as subculture fashion crowd/high-knowledge overseas students/overseas tourists, allowing brands to communicate with target audiences more effectively and improve communication efficiency.
For example, in scenario-based segmentation, three refined audience groups gaining significant attention are subcultural enthusiasts, highly educated international students, and overseas travellers. These groups combine subcultures with mainstream styles to challenge conventions and play a key role in advancing freedom and diversity in fashion’s gender expression. They hail from economically advantaged backgrounds, often with international education, and seek a high-quality lifestyle. Additionally, their passion for overseas travel and curiosity about new cultures frequently lead them to make luxury purchases during their upscale travel experiences.
After finding GEN Z, how to break the ice with them?
Douyin is the premier platform for diverse content formats, including trending events, popular content, micro-series, short dramas, interactive creativity, and more. It also offers advanced technological tools to bridge the gap with consumers, such as precise facial recognition, upgraded AR/VR, and accurate tactile simulations. This allows brands to effectively engage and nurture their target audience, facilitating rapid connection and retention.
Content is more deeply rooted in people’s hearts on Douyin
Douyin has unique advantages in content creation and dissemination. First of all, Douyin’s talent ecology, as the platform’s most high-quality creator resources, provides high-stickiness content for the luxury goods industry. Data shows that 86% of consumers in China are influenced by talents. The number of talents in the luxury circle unique to Douyin has continued to grow in recent years, with more than 30+ SVIP authoritative creators in different fields, making Douyin a gathering place for creators with real artistic and cultural heritage. From the familiar fashion/art/culture/unboxing/travel and other circle talents to the more segmented exquisite boy/sweet cp/hardcore technology/makeup imitation talents, users follow the travel blogger @幻想家姜时一’s travel and exploration of the world and feel the perpetual spirit of Rolex. Douyin’s luxury circle talent matrix speaks for brand stories and values in a form that users love to watch, communicates with people in different scenarios, and demonstrates diverse marketing capabilities.
In the first quarter of 2024, GUCCI collaborated with Douyin to launch the 2024 Spring/Summer colour trend—Ancora Red. GUCCI introduced Ancora Red through official Douyin content and engaged a celebrity network to generate buzz with the hashtag #AncoraRedSpreadingThroughoutTheEntertainmentIndustry. By leveraging influencers from various fields who visited Ancora Red spaces both online and offline, the campaign sparked spontaneous interactions from the public. The #AncoraRedCelebrityCityPhotoShootChallenge continuously generated a wealth of original and derivative content, resulting in a closely integrated online and offline brand trend-setting event.
As the annual highlight of luxury brands, the four major international fashion weeks have also become the core focus of users in the industry on Douyin. “Paris Fashion Week” and “Milan Fashion Week” have been hot search topics for 23 years. On Douyin, there is a content creation team with integrated resources covering the world, which produces creative content directly on the scene, so that users can visit the fashion week without leaving home. Powerful show ecological product capabilities, the fashion show ecological environment created for brands and users, search area, Feedlive customized component functions…Douyin provides brands with full-link cooperation opportunities for show live broadcasts. For example, “DOU fashion show” with DIOR 2024 Fall/Winter Ready-to-Wear created a new Douyin show-watching mode, and the topic page has exceeded 47 million. It is foreseeable that Douyin will become a normalized show in the future and become one of the reserved programs of Fashion Week.
By redefining their brand content and transforming social contexts, luxury labels are crafting and reconstructing their marketing landscapes.
The current Douyin live broadcast room, from Lancome and Armani’s 1.0 makeup show to share trend content, to HUGO’s 2.0 outfit show, with performances + interviews + shows with catwalk stars, to Ralph Lauren’s 3.0 variety show combined with the “class flavor” hot spot, multi-scene live broadcast rooms with topics and catwalks have brought Ralph Lauren a +306% GMV explosion.The live broadcast room is no longer just a single “321 link”. After the continuous optimization and development of the live broadcast format and content, new business scenarios are constantly being created.
Data shows that the rapid growth of the Douyin Local Services platform has become a new traffic pool for luxury brands, offering fresh audiences, content, and experiences. Furthermore, Douyin’s integration of product links and data has achieved synergy between online and offline business scenarios.
With CRM integration, brands can drive fresh traffic by attracting new offline members through online channels. Seamless integration of the product pipeline allows the brand to achieve a full cycle from user targeting and precise guided interactions to driving store traffic. This creates a comprehensive luxury shopping experience for consumers, offering everything from new product delivery and physical displays to appointment services, while exploring more business opportunities across both online and offline.
The question that luxury brands have always been concerned about is, “How is the effect of my current wave of delivery?”, “What kind of content does my ‘TA’ like?”, rational and emotional marketing result measurement, how to measure the accumulated brand value of marketing actions? Douyin Yuntu system can take into account both short-term and long-term measurement and track long-term brand power.
From a rational perspective, its Campaign cycle tracking capability covers the early, middle and late stages of the marketing plan in terms of time span, and with the 5A and A3 basic models, it provides brands with a mature scientific marketing full-domain measurement system.
From a perceptual perspective, in the short term, we can use search + SOV + NPS (recommendation value to others) to measure brand power, and in a longer period of time, we can conduct multi-dimensional brand image insights such as voice, association, reputation, preference, etc., and expand to a measurement system for measuring brand image.
In the future, with the help of Douyin, there are still new possibilities for luxury goods to connect more closely with GEN Z consumers and gain business growth.
