“ Ecommerce in China is obviously very developed. But then across different categories the penetration is different. People still want to go to the local store. So if we have live-streaming, that’s a way to actually encourage people to try something they may not have tried in the past. ”
XinYi LIM, Senior Director Corporate Development, PINDUODUO

“Pinduoduo is China’s second-largest e-commerce platform with close to 600m annual active buyers. We crossed the RMB 1 trillion in GMV mark last year”.

The user experience is anchored around an AI-driven recommendation feed, so it’s very casual and suited for discovery. “We also re-invented the team purchase (…) This helps to create a virtuous cycle whereby the more users we have buying together, the more demand gets aggregated for our merchants, who can transform that greater volume into lower costs and hence more savings for our users. At the same time, the more users we have interacting with each other and engaging their network, the more insights we have into what products to recommend and we can provide a better user experience”

” Rather than concentrate the traffic on just a few high-profile KOLs or celebrities we choose to de-centralize our live-streaming and focus it on the merchants and their products “

Watch Pinduoduo strategy: 13”25 → 21”20

As a result of the Covid-19, Pinduoduo ramped up their effort as consumers have also become more receptive to watching live-streaming content. Between February and March 2020, sessions held on PDD have been multiplied by 5.

In response to the crisis, there has been an increase in agricultural livestreams. “ Since February, we have had 35 000 new agricultural live-streaming channels created. ”

2 examples that illustrate creativity and sales in the live-streaming sectors:

• “ For travel we have started doing some live-streaming of tourist attractions around China since late April. Travel is hit pretty hard by the coronavirus and we felt that one way we can both entertain our users and also help encourage sales for travel attractions, would be through a travel livestream.
• “ Another thing we have done is to bring experts onto livestreams to help our users make purchase decisions. A seafood importer, a famous chef, a former badminton champion, who come onto our platform to share their experience in their field. What we have seen on our platform is that having a celebrity livestream is not a sure-fire way of getting an audience or generating engagement, what matters more is the context and whether the information presented is useful to the audience. ”

“The live streaming is a life you are dreaming”
Phil CAO, Franchise Operation Director China West Region, COCA-COLA

Coca-Cola company depends on traditional business model. “ We sell our products to consumers through key consumer (ex: Hypermarkets). E-commerce only accounts for 4-5% of our total revenue. Nevertheless, the world is changing, especially with this Covid-19 crisis”

Night of Sprite’s objective is building connection with young people .

Our streamers told the history of the brand Sprite, showed the connection between the brand and the celebrities, as well as sold products

“Within two hours, we have accumulated 17 millions viewers on 6 platforms, generating 2,2 Millions RMB revenues.” The success is due to 3 reasons :
– The Right Time: “ Obviously, the pandemic accelerates the rising trend of live-streaming ”. “Night of Sprite” date meets the date of the final of a music competition on Hunan satellite TV, during which the Sprite celebrities won. “People came on Sprite Livestream to celebrate”
– The Right Platforms: “ We engaged 6 platforms (Kuaishou, Douyin, Yizhibo, Huajiao, JD.com, Taobao) that are top players on the market ”
– The Right People & Place: Both internal and external streamers are important, “ They are very good at interacting with viewers ”. Internal streamer fits into a daily live-streaming project for such a brand, Indeed “Livestreaming will be a routine job to our business, for some branches of the coca-cola system”

Live-streaming has some characteristics of a sale channel, we sell products and get money. But we believe it is not only a sales channel but a new approach to connect our consumers, customers and employees. ”

Watch The power of livestreaming: 35”15 → 36”10