The “business challenges” faced by global luxury brands have intensified, becoming a widely recognized issue in recent years.
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.
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.According to industry data, GENZ (born between 1995 and 2009) is expected to contribute 100% of the incremental growth in China’s luxury market. They are undoubtedly the target audience that luxury brands are eager to retain.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. Last year, the entire luxury industry’s marketing share on Douyin increased by 35% year-on-year.
Gen Z come from different cultural circles, have distinct and constantly changing personalities, and socialize and express themselves soberly and authentically. Therefore, only with more refined labels can we better understand them.
In 2024, Ocean Engine Yun Tu offered more than 2.3 million audience profiles. Building on the foundation of targeting core, potential, and interest-based luxury users, it enables precise segmentation of audiences in various scenarios, helping luxury brands swiftly target their ideal customer base and achieve efficient communication and conversion.
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.
GENZ consumers have rapidly changing behavioural habits and preferences, and they demand higher content quality during fragmented time periods. This necessitates luxury brands to engage them with continuously innovative content formats.
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.
From branded content to the social scene, Douyin is constantly innovating.
From the perspective of the brand, Douyin maximizes the efficiency of conventional brand content assets with the help of innovative brand advertising co-creation. The interactive advertising method makes brand content full of vitality and significantly enhances the influence of communication. In addition, Douyin has successfully created an exclusive courtesy node, making it a must-have for luxury brands’ advertising traffic.
Tiffany”more than one screen”
LAMER”polaroid”
At Dior Fashion Week, the “DOU Content Lab (DOU来内容实验室)” segment “DOU Fashion Show (DOU来看秀)” marked its international collaboration debut with the brand by providing live-streaming technical support. It delivered a fashion show experience that consumers could fully immerse themselves in, from the opening of the show to backstage and guest interviews, all from the comfort of their homes. This format showcased and interpreted the inspiration behind the brand’s new season designs in a diverse manner. The panoramic online and offline show format allowed more consumers to experience the allure of fashion up close, enhancing the brand’s global influence.
In practice, the value of content relies on collaboration with the platform’s ecosystem. Douyin’s “DOU Content Lab” enhances content originality, with a dedicated production team familiar with the platform’s users, offering customized on-site content ideas for global luxury events, and leveraging the platform’s IP to maximize brand content value.
GEN Z’s new luxury consumption posture is rewed on Douyin. In March this year, GUCCI and Douyin jointly let “Rosso Ancora” go off the screen, setting off a storm of Italian aesthetic colors. In this iconic global event for luxury brands, Douyin created full-link content marketing for the brand’s offline activities online and offline. In the preheating period, the end resources were connected, and keywords were pre-buried at multiple points before the brand event to promote the first popular color of 2024. Big Day and DOU came to the show to directly hit the event site, and amplified the exposure of the brand event through the first release of exclusive creative content on the entire network. The joint interpretation by celebrities and experts detonated the trend hotspot, successfully making “Ancora Red” a hot search. GUCCI’s experience space created in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Shenzhen, with the help of the Douyin KOL matrix, created a trend across the entire network, transforming the new trend concept into high-quality content.
The content marketing ecosystem for luxury brands is continuously evolving, shifting from a focus on direct visual presentation and sensory impact to a more integrated approach that incorporates social scenarios and enhances the perceived value of luxury goods.
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.
In the face of the demand for more offline scenarios for luxury goods, Douyin has opened up through the CRM membership system, attracted new members for the brand through the online entrance, and introduced more accurate people for the business based on LBS recommendations. In 24 years, the “OPC” matrix has created a new grass-planting model. It is expected to attract offline stores through SA content, provide a one-stop service experience of new product delivery/physical display/reservation service, and complete more accurate “shopping guide” content conversion in the future.
This year, to help brands achieve more efficient omnichannel business growth, Ocean Engine Yun Tu has upgraded its “rational” verification capabilities to encompass the entire marketing ecosystem. It includes comprehensive metrics for brand performance and SPU5A, offering holistic audience analysis and integrating measurement indicators across all content, touchpoints, data, and channels to support strategic marketing decisions.
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.
By leveraging the synergy between online and offline capabilities, along with Ocean Engine Yun Tu’s brand image metrics framework, and integrating brand-specific audience data with efficiency tracking from third-party platforms, luxury brands on Douyin can achieve precise front-end marketing and reduce acquisition costs. They can also validate comprehensive business results across the entire chain, continuously refining marketing strategies and exploring additional omnichannel business opportunities both online and offline.
