Luxury labels are contending with three significant marketing obstacles: discerning the target demographic with precision and understanding their specific demands, engaging consumers in effective communication to foster rapid connections, and evaluating the success of multipronged marketing strategies that encompass both digital and conventional platforms. It’s in the resolution of these hurdles where potential lies. Data from the first six months of 2024 indicates a remarkable 45% increase in luxury goods’ gross merchandise value (GMV) on Douyin, signaling the platform’s ascendancy as an indispensable venue for luxury branding. The key to capitalizing on Douyin’s potential and overcoming these marketing challenges will determine the success of these brands.
To help luxury brands resolving the stalemate, 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.
Douyin, boasting more than 600 million daily active users, hosts a rich variety of creators and a substantial, multi-generational user base with considerable spending power. For luxury labels, the task at hand is to precisely pinpoint high-income, culturally aware, and quality-oriented consumers amidst the vast sea of crowd data, which remains a pivotal challenge in luxury branding currently.
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, Scenario-based segmentation highlights three engaging audience categories: subcultural aficionados, intellectual international students, and adventurous travelers abroad. By blending subcultural influences with mainstream fashion, these groups disrupt norms, driving innovation in the fashion industry’s exploration of gender expression. They come from affluent families, typically have a background in international education, and pursue an elevated lifestyle. Moreover, their avid interest in exploring different cultures during high-end travel escapades often results in the acquisition of luxury goods.
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.
Luxury labels are continuously creating a stir, as styles like Miu Miu girls and intellectual fashion grow in favour on Douyin. Brands like LVMH, GUCCI, and Cartier, which are high-end, are organising offline events such as pop-up exhibitions and establishing online “sub-events” to interact with consumers. When brand content of high calibre is in synergy with a variety of social settings, it becomes more feasible to establish effective brand marketing ecosystems.
This year, Douyin’s innovative “OPUGC” (Occupationally Generated Content (OGC) – Professional Generated Content (PGC) – User Generated Content (UGC) ) interaction model has introduced new opportunities for luxury brands in content marketing. Douyin provides the IP to create unique luxury marketing solutions, enhancing brand value with IP momentum and generating authoritative OGC content. This is then linked with influencers from the fashion, art, culture, and sports sectors, using formats and methods like topic challenges and AICG to produce engaging PGC content. This approach boosts the luxury brand’s exposure, reaches the core audience precisely, and deepens brand recognition. A large number of users, influenced by the OGC and PGC content, spontaneously share authentic UGC content on Douyin, achieving triple coverage of brand influence, reach, and reputation.
Douyin offers distinctive luxury marketing strategies by providing exclusive IP, which fortifies brand equity through IP-driven dynamics and generates authoritative OGC (Official Generated Content). This is coupled with collaborations involving influencers from sectors such as fashion, art, culture, and sports. Utilizing formats including theme challenges and AICG (AI-Generated Content), these influencers craft captivating PGC (Professional Generated Content). Consequently, luxury brands experience enhanced visibility, precise targeting of their core demographic, and intensified brand recognition. Encouraged by the OGC and PGC, numerous users voluntarily share genuine UGC (User Generated Content) on Douyin, leading to a comprehensive spread of brand influence, reach, and recognition. Case in point, the worth of content is amplified through partnership with Douyin’s ecosystem. The platform’s “DOU Content Lab” nurtures content creativity with a specialized team adept at understanding user preferences. This team provides bespoke content solutions for global luxury events and maximizes brand content value using the platform’s IP.
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.
In addition to audience insights and content marketing, the synergy between Douyin e-commerce and Douyin Local Services—both online and offline—has brought new omnichannel business opportunities for luxury brands. Additionally, Ocean Engine offers key scientific tools for verifying omnichannel marketing effectiveness through a holistic approach, helping luxury brands seize new opportunities.
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.
Through utilizing the harmony of online and offline resources, supported by the brand image measurement system provided by Ocean Engine Yun Tu, and by amalgamating brand-oriented audience data with the efficiency monitoring from external platforms, Douyin luxury brands can accomplish targeted front-end marketing with a decrease in customer acquisition expenses. Moreover, they can affirm holistic business performances across the chain, continually optimizing marketing tactics and investigating further omnichannel business potentials both digitally and physically.
