Before the advent of the Double Twelfth Festival this year, the topic of the cancellation of the Double Twelfth Festival aroused heated discussion among netizens. Many netizens feel that it is time to cancel: "The discount is not strong enough". However, when more netizens learned that the Double Twelfth Festival was just a comeback with a new name, they directly criticized that "change the soup without changing the dressing".
Although the name change storm belongs to the marketing behavior of merchants, the phenomenon behind it, such as the change of consumption concept and the prevalence of consumerism, is still worth thinking deeply.
High open low walk
In the past ten years, the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival has become an important festival for Chinese consumers. On this day, various e-commerce platforms launched various preferential activities to attract consumers to rush to buy. This year Taobao will cancel the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival. Some people think that this is the end of an era. Some consumers are optimistic about this change. Some people think that the false publicity, price war and other problems of the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival have made the festival lose its original significance.
In fact, it is not only the Double Twelfth Movement that opens high and walks low. In recent years, shopping festivals such as 618 and Double Eleven have also yielded little, and disputes have arisen one after another. The grand occasion of "the whole people cutting off their hands" has long gone. It is not difficult to find out from the relevant comments in recent years that the annual shopping festival will be titled as "the coldest". During the National Day holiday in 2023, the peak search volume of relevant keywords dropped by nearly 60% year on year, and the reading and interaction volume of relevant topics on microblog also declined significantly. The hot search time on the National Day holiday was only three hours, a sharp drop of 62.5% compared with three years ago. "JD 618" is also doomed to decline in growth. From 2018 to 2021, its turnover growth rate will remain at about 30%, and by 2022, its growth rate will fall to 10.3%. Sluggish data and declining attention have turned festival making consumption into a chicken rib that is tasteless and useless. The end and transformation are predictable results.
Once upon a time, the shopping festival on the e-commerce platform experienced a brilliant experience, with discounts and discounts as the main attraction, which successfully stimulated consumers' desire to buy. However, the development of social media and the continuous optimization of personalized recommendation technology are making man-made consumerism reach more consumers, further promoting the prosperity of consumption.
The Double 11 Festival is undoubtedly a success. Today's e-commerce consumption festival is cold, largely because consumers can no longer spend time on increasingly complex consumption rules and routines, and return to the simplest price logic, which has become the voice of consumers. This year, many e-commerce platforms returned to the basics and attracted consumers with real prices. Behind this is the transformation of e-commerce industry and the change of consumer mentality.
When consumption becomes a spectacle
Since the slogan of "50% off for the whole party" was issued on November 11, 2009, this festival limited promotional activity belonging to e-commerce platform has gone through more than ten years. During this period, online shopping consumption changed from festival ritual to normalization, reshaping people's consumption mode. Driven by more and more successful cases, festival making consumption, as a means, has flourished everywhere in major e-commerce platforms in China, using different gimmicks to create festivals.
Against the backdrop of younger consumer groups, major platforms and brands are also involved in the festival making wave. For example, KFC's "Crazy Thursday Literature", which goes out of the circle everywhere, and the segment market consumption activities during the Father's Day, Mother's Day and other festivals. More platforms will IP their activities and build them into regular events.
The prevalence of consumerism is the result of multiple factors. With the improvement of living standards, people have more disposable income for consumption. This provides a material basis for consumerism. Businesses stimulate consumers' purchase desire and promote consumerism through advertising, promotion and other marketing means.
The changes in modern lifestyles and the values that modern society attaches importance to pleasure and material pursuit have all contributed to consumerism. With the development of economy and the improvement of people's living standards, consumer culture is also changing. From the initial pragmatism to the current emphasis on quality, experience and personalized consumption, the online shopping festival also reflects the changes of consumer culture.
Festival making consumption can be understood as a media spectacle, which is a special phenomenon created through mass media and can attract people's attention and participation. In the shopping festival, e-commerce enterprises stimulate consumers' purchase desire and trigger consumers' purchase behavior through various marketing means. At the same time, consumers also share shopping experience and exchange shopping experience through social media and other channels, further expanding the influence of the Double 11 Shopping Festival. In the process of forming consumerism spectacle, the media plays an indispensable role in promoting and shaping.
However, in the process of creating wonders, the leaders often create some consumption hotspots, guide consumers to consume excessively, and lead to some irrational consumption behaviors, such as blindly following the trend and over buying. In order to pursue commercial interests, some enterprises use exaggeration, false propaganda and other methods to create new wonders, but do not assume that it will mislead consumers. Basically, the formation of media spectacle cannot be separated from the promotion and dissemination of various media, and click rate and audience rating have become important criteria for evaluating the success of a major spectacle. On this basis, excessive reliance on media spectacle will only lead to imbalance and bias in information dissemination.
Consumerism has never gone away
In fact, the cancellation of the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival does not mean the demise of e-commerce shopping festivals. After the cancellation of the Double Twelfth Festival, the e-commerce platform showed a new signboard of "Good Price Festival" at the same time. Compared with the grand "Double 11", the "Double 12" has always been considered as "tasteless food and a pity to abandon". In order to avoid repeating the mistakes, we have changed our ways and created a new consumption boom in the form of a good price festival. This move actually implies that consumerism has not gone far in the context of shouting "consumption degradation".
On the contrary, this is just a change of consumer culture. With the lowest price of the whole network becoming the "exclusive" price of live streaming goods, people's attitude towards e-commerce shopping festival is becoming more rational, and their enthusiasm for shopping has shifted to various live streaming goods platforms. For businesses, the change of consumers' attitude has led to a flat response to the high cost marketing campaign, even a loss making situation, so they have lost their enthusiasm to participate in the campaign.
It is not difficult to see that with the escalating consumer demand, consumers' expectations for the shopping festival are changing, but that does not mean that they resolutely abandon this activity that has accompanied them for many years. Many people attribute the coldness of the shopping festival to "consumption demotion". In fact, the deeper logic of the so-called "consumption demotion" is that consumption is no longer an important source of happiness, and external evaluation is no longer the only standard to judge the beauty of life. Happiness returning to the essence is more popular, and only the shopping process that can make you happy is the best experience. They no longer spend time on money saving strategies, nor pursue low prices and promotions, but pay more attention to quality and service.
Therefore, e-commerce platforms also need to adapt to this change and provide products and services that are more in line with consumer needs. All major platforms follow the trend to create a festival, resulting in serious homogenization. The pursuit of sales volume and flow has no longer worked. The only way to turn "traffic" into "reserve" is to impress consumers in a more diversified and subdivided way, close to the needs and preferences of the subdivided consumer groups, and constantly improve consumers' shopping experience.
The cancellation of the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival does not necessarily mean that consumers are completely rational. Although some consumers may be more cautious about their shopping behavior and pay more attention to product quality and brand reputation, some consumers may continue to pursue price concessions and consumption incentives. It is undeniable that even though the shopping festival has become weak, festival making can still promote sales with high efficiency for e-commerce players. Domestic shopping festivals such as the Double 11 Festival and 618 Festival automatically remind people of such keywords as discount and rush purchase. They have become Chinese people's own "Black Friday". Even if there is no immediate need, it is not clear how much the discount is. Many people will still order several goods on this day to show their participation.
As a consumer, in the face of the "one look a day" shopping festival, we should treat shopping rationally according to our own actual situation and needs, and avoid excessive consumption and waste. The cancellation of the Double Twelfth Shopping Festival is an opportunity for consumers to reflect on themselves and consider whether their shopping behavior is reasonable and in line with their values and life needs. At the same time, consumers should pay more attention to product quality and brand reputation, and choose shopping methods more rationally.
