“It has captivated me and stolen my heart.” For Generation Z, developing a fondness for a high-end label is as simple as tuning into Douyin.
With over 600 million DAU, Douyin has the largest user base, especially the GEN Z generation with strong personal opinions, which is the mainstay of the rapidly growing luxury consumption market, making Douyin a gathering place and birthplace of events with huge traffic. In addition, with its powerful content ecology and online and offline content linkage, Douyin easily captures the attention of young people. A large number of users, especially GEN Z, gather on Douyin, making it an important marketing platform in the exploration of luxury goods. Last year, the entire luxury industry’s marketing share on Douyin increased by 35% year-on-year. It can be seen that more and more brands realize that in the social media marketing track, whoever gets “Douyin” will win the world.
The GEN Z gathered on Douyin are exactly the core competitiveness of future consumption that luxury brands are looking for. Douyin has reached the next level by letting GEN Z “get into” luxury brands in various ways.
From social scene to the branded content, Douyin is constantly innovating.
Douyin boasts a distinctive edge in content production and distribution. Its rich talent ecosystem, representing the platform’s most premium creator resources, offers engaging content that is particularly appealing to the luxury goods sector. According to data, a staggering 86% of Chinese consumers are swayed by these influencers. In recent years, the number of luxury-specific creators exclusive to Douyin has persistently risen, featuring over 30+ SVIP creators of authority across various domains. This has positioned Douyin as a magnet for creators who possess genuine artistic and cultural heritage. The talent matrix of Douyin’s luxury realm spans across familiar realms of fashion, art, culture, unboxing, and travel, extending to more niche interests such as dashing gentlemen, adorable couples, die-hard tech enthusiasts, and makeup enthusiasts. Douyin’s luxury talent matrix effectively narrates brand stories and values in a format that audiences enjoy, engaging with viewers across diverse contexts and showcasing a range of marketing proficiencies.
In the first quarter of 2024, GUCCI collaborated with Douyin to launch the 2024 Spring/Summer colour trend—Ancora Red. GUCCI introduced Ancora Red through official Douyin content and engaged a celebrity network to generate buzz with the hashtag #AncoraRedSpreadingThroughoutTheEntertainmentIndustry. By leveraging influencers from various fields who visited Ancora Red spaces both online and offline, the campaign sparked spontaneous interactions from the public. The #AncoraRedCelebrityCityPhotoShootChallenge continuously generated a wealth of original and derivative content, resulting in a closely integrated online and offline brand trend-setting event.
At Dior Fashion Week, the “DOU Content Lab (DOU来内容实验室)” segment “DOU Fashion Show (DOU来看秀)” marked its international collaboration debut with the brand by providing live-streaming technical support. It delivered a fashion show experience that consumers could fully immerse themselves in, from the opening of the show to backstage and guest interviews, all from the comfort of their homes. This format showcased and interpreted the inspiration behind the brand’s new season designs in a diverse manner. The panoramic online and offline show format allowed more consumers to experience the allure of fashion up close, enhancing the brand’s global influence.
From the perspective of the brand, Douyin maximizes the efficiency of conventional brand content assets with the help of innovative brand advertising co-creation. The interactive advertising method makes brand content full of vitality and significantly enhances the influence of communication. In addition, Douyin has successfully created an exclusive courtesy node, making it a must-have for luxury brands’ advertising traffic. During the holiday season, when users’ attention to new products reaches a peak, it uses large exposure to attract users’ attention and then converts users into brand crowd assets.
On the other hand, as a catalyst for brand marketing, Douyin’s hot spot strategy can provide the ability to predict future hot spots and create trend hot spots through the cooperation of expert content and platform-level voice. 21 billion views of spring and summer #dopamine, 14 billion views of autumn and winter #maillard, and the healing-themed “Spring is #mint mambo”, Douyin is now the birthplace of many GENZ fashion trends.
Douyin platforms captures the fashion-forward Gen Z users actively sharing their styles, reflecting their preferences, and shaping consumer patterns. The platform’s distinctive decentralized content ecosystem enables Gen Z creators on Douyin to unintentionally play a significant role in shaping trending looks. By translating abstract fashion ideas and elements into fresh styles for the upcoming season, combined with experts’ rich and high-caliber original content, Douyin shapes a “trendy style” that appeals to more Gen Zers, prompting them to join in on the trend.
Data shows that the rapid growth of the Douyin Local Services platform has become a new traffic pool for luxury brands, offering fresh audiences, content, and experiences. Furthermore, Douyin’s integration of product links and data has achieved synergy between online and offline business scenarios.
With CRM integration, brands can drive fresh traffic by attracting new offline members through online channels. Seamless integration of the product pipeline allows the brand to achieve a full cycle from user targeting and precise guided interactions to driving store traffic. This creates a comprehensive luxury shopping experience for consumers, offering everything from new product delivery and physical displays to appointment services, while exploring more business opportunities across both online and offline.
The question that luxury brands have always been concerned about is, “How is the effect of my current wave of delivery?”, “What kind of content does my ‘TA’ like?”, rational and emotional marketing result measurement, how to measure the accumulated brand value of marketing actions? Douyin Yun Tu system can consider both short-term and long-term measurement and track long-term brand power.
From a rational perspective, its Campaign cycle tracking capability covers the early, middle and late stages of the marketing plan in terms of time span, and with the 5A and A3 basic models, it provides brands with a mature scientific marketing full-domain measurement system.
From a perceptual perspective, in the short term, we can use search + SOV + NPS (recommendation value to others) to measure brand power, and in a longer period, we can conduct multi-dimensional brand image insights such as voice, association, reputation, preference, etc., and expand to a measurement system for measuring brand image.
With the help of Douyin, luxury brands are exploring unprecedented new fields. In the future, Douyin will play a more important role as a bridge between luxury brands and Gen Z.
