FEATURES CONSUMPTION
Center of Alibaba’s Taotian Group, which includes Taobao and Tmall, emphasized the growing importance consumers attach to emotional aspects.
Younger consumers in particular are willing to pay for experiences that bring them joy, as evidenced by this year’s Double 11. Trends in dopamine consumption, exemplified by categories such as e-sports, cycling and skiing, are shaping consumer behavior.
The “silver economy” (markets that meet senior citizens’ needs) and “he economy” (markets targeting male consumption) were two more buzzwords of this year’s Double 11. On Taobao, the transaction volume for senior products increased by 2.6 times compared to last year. Additionally, within the first 10 minutes of JD.com launching its campaign, transaction volume for the electric wheelchair category experienced a tenfold surge compared to the same period last year, while the hearing aid category witnessed a fivefold increase.
This year, JD.com launched its Double 11 campaign on October 23 (the ninth day of the ninth month on the Chinese lunar calendar), which marks a traditional Chinese festival for senior citizens known as the Double Ninth Festival. The platform also initiated a campaign featuring age-friendly products such as accessible smart toilets and palm recognition smart door locks.
“Campaigns targeting seniors on platforms like JD.com are becoming more systematic, and the products more diverse,” said Chen Waner, from AgeClub, an industrial platform focusing on business information in the elderly industry for JD.com.
According to Tmall, this year’s top three items for male consumers are road bicycles, e-sports products and windbreakers, consumption of which increased by 305, 114 and 90 percent year on year, respectively.
Remarkably, the growth rates of the top three items for male consumers have, for the first time, surpassed the top three items for pet dogs. This has become a humorous observation among netizens, challenging the stereotypical notion that men need less than pets.
The male consumer market has emerged as a new frontier for consumption. Against the backdrop of a rising middle class, intensified mobile Internet integration, an upgrade in personalized demands, and the year-over-year rise in the proportion of single male adults, the he economy is expected to experience long-term and sustainable growth, Fu Yifu, a senior analyst at the Suning Institute of Finance, said in a recent report.
A future outlook
Over the years, Double 11 has become a reliable indicator of consumer spending trends. Understanding these trends is critical to transforming and improving Double 11, as well as identifying new growth drivers for consumption.
So what kind of Double 11 do consumers want? Yang believed that “clean, simple, sincere and gimmick-free” should be the essence of Double 11. Hong said what consumers need is a more rational and personalized shopping spree. “Double 11 needs to transform and upgrade, focusing on providing high-quality products and services to meet consumers’ personalized needs and create a more intelligent and convenient shopping experience,” Hong said, adding that new growth drivers for consumption in the future could be content e-commerce, or the process of publishing, promoting and distributing content to drive sales, and social media e-commerce.
Accounting firm PwC China’s most recent domestic consumption survey showed that with the continuous development of e-commerce platforms, the demands of both consumers and brands have become more diversified.
For brands, Double 11 is no longer just about meeting sales targets. As business models evolve, the effectiveness of simple methods such as discount promotions to drive sales is gradually diminishing. For consumers, consumption needs are shifting from satisfying basic needs to a higher-dimensional, personalized consumption upgrade.
At this new juncture of upgrading and transformation, Double 11 must achieve more breakthroughs to begin the journey from quantitative to qualitative change. BR