Kuaishou: TikTok’s Chinese nemesis

Zod Fang
General manager and head of GroupM Knowledge
GroupM China

Kuaishou takes a very unique role in the ecommerce field, which differs from other players. Its nature is geographically lower-tiered and more acquaintance-based, which earns stronger trust from lots of communities, compared with other platforms. Plus, streamers on Kuaishou are not that polarised. On other platforms the winning streamers take almost all the traffic, whilst on Kuaishou, under its traffic-allocation mechanism, traffic between streamers is more balanced.

As Kuaishou is longing for a bigger GMV, its approach will be to fully utilise its nature of high trust within its communities.

Therefore, Kuaishou needs more community-based content to build and maintain its various communities. For example, Kuaishou is forging its sports content to nourish more sports-related communities. It is also introducing some long videos to build relative communities.

As a key platform for short videos, Kuaishou needs to pay attention to the growth of the entire category. The saturation of short-form video may require Kuaishou to find more content segments to acquire users so as to compete with Douyin. Kuaishou is working hard at fostering content production, improving its efficiency in commercialisation, which will be key to its success in future.

Since Kuaishou is very different from its competitors, it needs to forge commercialisation with its own features instead of copying directly from others. For example, as Kuaishou’s communities operate at higher trust, its live streaming ecommerce offerings should therefore fit for more trust-based or categories with longer decision chains. 

As Kuaishou has grown bigger, its users’ viewing behaviours have changed a little bit. More and more users are expecting more exquisite and longer content. Therefore, Kuaishou invited many top stars from OTV platforms into its platform and began producing its own programs. One example was the talk show with Li Dan, a Chinese talk show host and standup comedian, and his company. Fresh was one of the brands that leveraged this by integrated digital marketing. For example, pre-campaign teasers attracted traffic on both Weibo and Kuaishou; there were product placements in the talk show and the Kuaishou app had opening-screen ads and social amplification. The result? Fresh achieved 46 million live viewers, 10 times trending topics and 1 million live interactions in an hour, with more than 800 million video views in two weeks.  

Rufio Zhu
VP of media
Mailman Group, an Endeavor China company

Kuaishou’s standout campaign of the year was delivered during Chinese New Year to celebrate the biggest festival in China. The platform launched a unique creative character that intertwined the Chinese traditional character for the ox (牛), as well as the character for 'power' (力). The campaign incorporated a daily gamified challenge with a ‘hongbao’ incentive structure built around CNY tradition. They were able to plug in their brand sponsors and advertisers to launch specific digital products during the campaign period.

In the past year, Kuaishou launched high-profile accounts with Chelsea, Cristiano Ronaldo, and the Olympics. For Tokyo 2020, Kuaishou made the bold move of sub-licensing the near-live broadcasting rights from CCTV, meaning they had access to all highlights from the Olympic Games. They produced a behind-the-scenes show called “Welcome the Champions”, live from their studio in Tokyo to directly engage with the Chinese heroes of the Tokyo Games. They commercialized the shows through digital sponsorships with local brands. We are expecting much more to come for the Beijing Games, as this is just the start of Kuaishou’s push to embrace sports content.

In China’s incredibly competitive ecommerce market, where Kuaishou and Douyin have the advantage is that they already have a highly engaged, returning user base who are there to consume content and be inspired. This differs significantly from Alibaba’s Taobao platform which would have a shorter consumer journey, driven largely by the purpose of making a purchase rather than consuming content. Kuaishou and Douyin represent a new generation of ecommerce, where content consumption drives product purchase, often converting users with no intent to buy. Douyin is by no means their only competitor, largely because in this fierce market, everyone is a competitor, however, each is in a different stage of their evolution towards ‘live commerce’ and faces their own unique challenges.