Byte Jump has always adhered to the operational tradition of "making great efforts to achieve miracles". Although there are more victories than defeats online, more cases are needed to verify whether the combination of online and offline can sustain miracles.

During the Qingming Festival holiday, people who went out to dinner began to find that there were more and more QR codes on the restaurant table: not only the merchant's ordering system QR code, but also the merchant official account QR code, Meituan store QR code, and even the previously unusual Douyin QR code.

When customers open Douyin and scan Douyin's QR code, they will jump to the restaurant's sales page. Discount items such as 88 generation 100 coupons and 298 yuan packages will be displayed in this interface. Users only need to complete the payment and can enjoy the discount of the package.

And when customers have completed such a series of operations in Douyin, they can't help thinking of another product:

Meituan.

Customers' mobile phones scan the table QR code, buy coupons, and businesses write off coupons, a process that has been thoroughly played by Meituan, word-of-mouth and other "Thousand Regiment War" winners. Now, Meituan is facing a fierce competitor.

When Douyin and Meituan began to scramble for tables

Four or five QR codes are affixed to a table, which is a common phenomenon in many restaurants.

Compared with Meituan and word-of-mouth, Douyin is a latecomer on the dinner table, but with the marketing potential energy brought by the ability of short video content, as soon as it appeared, it almost cut into Meituan's core position of "stealing home".

ID:ciweigongshe randomly observed several restaurants in Beijing and found that about 1/3 of group-buying customers have chosen to buy discount packages on Douyin.

Compared with Meituan, word-of-mouth and other group-buying platforms, Douyin's group-buying discount package offers a greater discount. In some restaurants in third-tier cities, a barbecue set meal for two can be ordered for as little as 98 yuan on Douyin, while on Meituan, the price for a set meal for two is 198 yuan. Although the proportion of high-end ingredients in the set meal on Meituan is slightly higher, in comparison, the affordable degree of Douyin's group-buying package far exceeds that of Meituan and other platforms.

"at present, we are all posting our own money and handing out coupons. Some catering merchants said they had just arrived, but Douyin did not provide them with subsidies. The relatively low discount package is for them to win word of mouth.

This also makes Douyin's platform competitiveness more sustainable. Compared with the "war of thousands of regiments" at that time, the cash-burning subsidy strategy adopted by many group-buying websites, Douyin appeared to be relatively restrained at this time, focusing on empowering merchants, improving the ability of content recommendation, and "hard costs" such as practical subsidies, which are generally borne by merchants.

Douyin, which has plenty of cash and ammunition but does not burn money, is undoubtedly shaking the core foundation of Meituan.

And the relatively favorable group-buying price is only the first advantage that Douyin gets in this new group-buying contest. Compared with Meituan, the recommendation potential brought by content marketing is the biggest potential energy of Douyin. Now, Douyin is trying to turn this potential energy into a more powerful content marketing ability than simply carrying goods in short videos.

When the user scans the QR code of the merchant coupon, the store details page of the merchant will also be displayed on the phone screen. On this page, we focus on the video content related to this store. If users want to know more about the store, they only need to watch a few Douyin videos on the details page to know what dishes are delicious and what features they play. This is the user path dependence advantage that Douyin gained after winning the short video war.

What makes Meituan even more unmatched is that Douyin also closely combines KOL with the store. Douyin has specially set up a "talent and talent" section on the store details page, where influential online celebrities and talent videos in the store area will be centrally displayed.

Generally speaking, due to the high level of production and cooperation with the store, the video of the store is sold well, which is not only a recommended tool for customers, but also the content facade of the store on Douyin. The original content of these platforms leaves no trace when recommending to potential customers, and the content itself combines with the depth of advertising, from "hard wide" to soft implantation.

Douyin has a stronger media attribute than Kuaishou Technology's social attribute, but for all the reasons it does not claim to be a media platform, it is closer to lifestyle. This concept and content control, so that people's lives closer to the content to be spread on a large scale, the user acceptance of this kind of content is also higher.

It is not that Meituan did not want to occupy users with short video content. According to the Beijing Business Daily, Meituan Takeout opened a short video advertisement section for merchants around June 2019, and users can directly enter the order page after clicking on the merchant short video advertisement.

On the face of it, Douyin and Meituan both adopt the logic of "content getting customers", hoping to complete the recommendation to consumers through short video content, and then achieve a closed loop from recommendation to purchase.

But the starting points of the two are different. Douyin has accumulated considerable short video recommendation ability. what it is doing now is to keep users in Douyin, pursuing to let users complete their purchases within the Douyin system, and realizing a closed loop from recommendation to consumption. Meituan, on the other hand, took the opposite path. For offline industries such as catering, what is more needed is to strengthen online recommendation.

This is not difficult to explain why so many businesses would rather post money to do discounts, but also to log on to Douyin to do promotion.

Douyin not only wants to be standard in the catering industry, but also wants more.

In Douyin, the entire food, drink and entertainment industry has a "Douyin eat, drink and play list", with each city ranking a list of recommendations according to leisure and entertainment, accommodation, food and other categories. The subdivision of the list varies slightly according to the degree of development of the city, which generally includes common areas of local life such as eating, drinking, play and travel.

Behind this series of local lists also means that Douyin's ambition is not limited to the QR code on the dinner table, it is aimed at Meituan's core local life business, as well as Trip.com, the same trip, Flying Pig travel ticket business.

In other words, Douyin will turn every business segment that can be recommended by short videos into an one-stop closed-loop business recommended by Douyin and consumed by Douyin. There has been a comment from the media, ". No matter what kind of business, Douyin, which controls traffic, has the opportunity to fight upstream from the channel side. "now it seems that the effect of Douyin's anti-hit offline is showing.

For merchants, it is not necessary to drain to other platforms through Douyin, which reduces the loss of users caused by repeated redirects, but for Meituan and Trip.com, it poses a huge potential threat.

In addition, from the staffing, it is not difficult to see the ambition of byte jumping in the local life business.

The Byte Jump Commercialization Department has set up a "local direct business center" to expand local life business, and about 10,000 employees will be relocated to the center in January 2021 to explore customers in industries such as life services, cultural tourism and catering, self-media late LatePost reported in December 2020.

The cooperation between local living platforms such as Meituan and Douyin is also decreasing at a rate visible to the naked eye.

In September 2020, Douyin also pushed Meituan's studio to help Meituan sell special airfares, overlord meals, Meituan taxi annual cards and other products, with sales exceeding 10 million yuan. Now, although Meituan's official account is still active on Douyin, there has been no such close cooperation for a long time.

There is an essential difference between local life and short video content. The former pays more attention to the service between people, while the latter pays more attention to the consumption between people and things. Simple consumption is easy to use technology and mechanisms to solve standardization problems, but human-to-human communication requires more energy. Douyin is joining a front-end war that requires the ability to build potential energy and the ability to organize resources.

Today, as Chinese Internet companies are doing more and more heavily, Douyin is the star player in this war.

Can Douyin replicate "work miracles"?

This time, how much impact will Douyin have on Meituan? Can we harvest Meituan's market share of advertising marketing and business services as new media do instead of traditional media?

From the user's point of view, Douyin is really doing things for the convenience of consumers.

In the short video platform, one-hand recommendation, one-hand consumption, on the one hand is to update the user's habits, on the other hand is to comply with the user's habits. In the past, users have become accustomed to Douyin recommendations, then go to offline stores to pull weeds and use coupons to pay on platforms such as Meituan.

Douyin's approach is tantamount to helping consumers "reduce the burden", and the process of pulling weeds becomes smoother. However, it is not easy for consumers to change their perceptions. The Thousand Regiment War of that year has cultivated the habit of group-buying consumption on platforms such as Meituan. Group buying coupons in Douyin still takes a long time to change.

In addition, although Douyin has an excellent record in its march into the dinner table, Kuaishou Technology is also doing something similar. As early as 2019, Kuaishou Technology launched the local life service function; recently, Kuaishou Technology set up a "local life service" button on the home page to provide services such as delicious food and city tourism.

In the process of development, it is not surprising that the two old rivals are becoming more and more alike. Therefore, Douyin will also compete directly with Kuaishou Technology in the field of local life. On the one hand, this kind of local life business comes from the spontaneous needs of users, on the other hand, there is a boost from To B merchants, who need business tools on local life services provided by Douyin or Kuaishou Technology internally. They buy a large number of business orders, so that both can better see how much money is involved in the business.

In particular, it should be pointed out that in 2019, Kuaishou Technology once denied that it was competitive with Meituan and Dianping in local life services, and did not rule out the possibility of cooperation with platforms such as Meituan. For Douyin, if platforms such as Kuaishou Technology and Meituan are allied, it will also hinder its ambitions to expand its local life business.

In addition, offline logic is very different from online logic. This is because the business on the Internet is easy to standardize, while offline, the business that needs to be delivered to consumers face a variety of uncertainties and become difficult to standardize.

Byte beat has always adhered to the operational tradition of "making great efforts to produce miracles". Although there are more victories than failures in online channels, it still needs more cases to verify whether great efforts can continue to produce miracles offline.

Trip.com, who did not shake BAT, is a good example. At that time, in the siege of Tencent, BABA, and Baidu, Inc., Trip.com has not been overthrown, defending the online travel and ticket booking business, which is closely integrated with the offline industry. In the 2020 epidemic, Trip.com also survived this difficult period by means of intensive live broadcast with goods and other means.

In this respect, Meituan's advantage is similar to that of Trip.com, who has accumulated a deep offline moat in his long-term operation.

Douyin is menacing, but compared with Douyin's huge investment in local life for a long time, Douyin's data and business accumulation in this area is still relatively thin. After Meituan also began to pass content defense Douyin, how much fat Douyin can take from Meituan's tiger is still unknown.

However, the group buying and local life track, which has been quiet for a long time, will also be stirred by Douyin.