How to Improve the Brand Equity of the Beauty Industry Through Effective E-Commerce Live Streaming Strategies: A Case Study of Douyin Live Broadcasting in China

Introduction

Affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, offline activities have been restricted, and China's small and medium-sized enterprises have been hit a lot, especially in the beauty and consumer goods industry, which relies on consumers' offline purchases to generate profits. The backlog of inventory poses challenges to the development of enterprises. Live streaming, also known as live streaming e-commerce, has become an important means for Chinese companies to survive and seek stability. E-commerce live broadcast is a new model based on the network platform, in which one or more anchors transmit product information to the audience to promote e-commerce sales. E-commerce is the foundation, and live broadcast is a tool. E-commerce uses live broadcast to obtain customer traffic, thereby Achieve the goal of increasing sales (Luo, 2020). In the face of weak consumption under the epidemic, in April 2022, the General Office of the State Council issued an opinion on further releasing consumption potential and promoting the continuous recovery of consumption, proposing to adapt to the needs of normalized epidemic prevention and control, promote new consumption, and accelerate the organic integration of online and offline consumption, expand and upgrade information consumption(National Development and Reform Commission, 2022, April 26).

According to the 49th “Statistical Report on the Development of Internet Networks in China”, as of December 2021, the number of online live broadcast users in my country reached 703 million, an increase of 86.52 million compared with December 2020, accounting for 68.2% of the total netizens, of which e-commerce live broadcasts The number of users ranked first, reaching 464 million, an increase of 75.79 million compared with December 2020, accounting for 44.9% of the total netizens.

Figure 1.

Webcast User Scale and Utilization Ratio (2017.12 - 2021.12)

Source: National Bureau of Statistics

From the data in the figure 1, we can see that although the epidemic has greatly reduced offline consumption, the use and consumption of online platforms have not been significantly affected. From 2020 to 2021, both the user scale and usage rate of webcasting will show a continuous upward trend. This shows that in order to further expand the audience, Chinese companies used the form of live webcasting to expand their brand influence.

In general, 2017-2020 is a period of great development of Chinese brand e-commerce live broadcasts. During this period, the new users of live broadcast are mainly post-95s and post-00s. They tend to be more demanding of interest, interactivity, and content value. Therefore, in the live broadcast products, the Guochao brand is the new bright spot. According to Baidu's “2021 Guochao Search Big Data Report”, the attention of the Guochao brand has increased by 528% in the past ten years, and its core paying users are “post-90s” and “Post-00” accounts for 74.4% of all its users. Among them, the national trendy beauty brands such as Perfect Diary and Huaxizi are very popular among consumers in the generation Z. Generation Z refers to people born between 1995 and 2009, also known as the Internet generation and Internet generation, which collectively refers to a generation greatly influenced by technological products such as the Internet, instant messaging, SMS, MP3, smartphones and tablet computers. According to 2018 data from the National Bureau of Statistics, Generation Z accounts for about 19% of my country's total population, and this group contributes 40% of the overall consumption. Their brand choices are more diverse, and niche is their favorite word. They are keen to post their tastes on social media. Their spending on electronic equipment, training and learning, makeup and toiletries far exceeds other categories.