Find resonance in the content. 60,000 brands achieved double-digit business growth during the 618 promotion on Douyin E-commerce.

In the new consumption cycle, growth requires new fulcrums and levers.

Text by Jia Kun

The 618 shopping festival has ended, but the business of merchants doesn't come to a halt.

Enterprises' thirst for growth is endless. However, in the new consumption cycle, ambition must be matched with corresponding capabilities.

During this year's 618 period, I closely observed the dynamics of the e-commerce ecosystem and brand merchants, and a clear signal emerged: growth must be built on new fulcrums and levers.

Today, when consumers shop, they don't just pay for cost - effective products. They start to seek deeper meanings - emotional resonance, identity recognition, and a sense of belonging to a community.

E-commerce has quietly taken on the dual roles of "helping consumers find products with ultimate cost - effectiveness" and "creating consumption meanings for customers".

Consequently, the growth logic is being redefined: from the cut - throat competition for existing orders and GMV to the pursuit of incremental supply such as appealing content, high - quality new products, and exclusive collaborations.

In this process, homogeneous competition is gradually weakening. On the contrary, we are very likely to witness reasonable brand growth and the return of the platform's traffic value.

This seems to indicate that the e - commerce market is breaking free from the shackles of the single "stockpiling promotion" model of the past. It is moving from the previous shopping scenario where consumers simply waited for promotions to stockpile goods to a new stage with increasingly diverse demands. The core propositions have emerged:

How to move from "price correctness" to "value correctness"?

How can brand merchants clearly express their unique advantages?

How to redefine and understand growth?

Therefore, this year's 618 is not only the end of a major promotion but also a "transition" for the value reconstruction of the e - commerce market. The Douyin Mall 618 Good - Stuff Festival is a notable example and a model for this transition. During the event, the sales of 60,000 brands doubled, and 67,000 merchant stores had a turnover of over one million yuan.

The practical results of Douyin E - commerce and many merchants also attempt to verify the answer to this ultimate question - the market will never truly fall into a "zero - sum game". Those overlooked variables are often the super levers to break through the industry ceiling. The secret to the sustainable growth of enterprises lies within them.

01 Break out of traditional thinking. There is still huge room for growth.

In several years of merchant surveys, we found that some merchants' expectations for 618 have changed. This implies that they think it's difficult for major promotions and even e - commerce to bring incremental sales. The reasons are mainly weak demand and fierce competition.

But is this really the case?

Although overall consumer demand is under pressure, contemporary young people still love to spend a little money to make themselves happy. For example, instead of spending dozens of yuan on toys, consumers are more willing to pay for the surprise brought by blind boxes. They can even soothe emotional wounds and express their individuality through the cute or quirky doll images. That's why Pop Mart has seen a boom in sales and a rush of users for each of its products, from MOLLY and PUCKY to the current Labubu.

The clothing industry is highly competitive, but during this year's 618, ONLY collaborated with OPPO to launch the first cross - border new product show, breaking through the ceiling of the clothing sales scenario. They moved the Douyin e - commerce live - streaming room to the seaside, gathering trendy young men and women who love taking photos and dressing up in front of the screen. Models showed summer new products on the natural catwalk of the beach. This kind of real - life outdoor live - streaming and new product show was more attractive to consumers' desire for novelty compared to traditional green - screen live - streaming and the dull listing of product links, driving a 448% explosion in live - streaming sales.

During this year's 618, we especially noticed that these previously unnoticed niche areas have become new forces for e - commerce growth, which is extremely inspiring. For example, the growth of special product categories such as Lingnan lychees, Dragon Boat Festival yellow rice wine, and intangible cultural heritage products exceeded 5 times. The durable consumer goods categories such as mobile phones and digital products had an explosive growth of 111%. More than 79% of the growth in the clothing category came from product card transactions.

This is also the concept that needs to be conveyed to the market in recent years: Instead of being anxious about market saturation and involution in the existing market, and overly focusing on competitors and the external environment, it's better to shift the focus to the value creation of the demand itself. If you shift your perspective from the overall industry, you may suddenly realize that the real opportunities lie in segmented demands and innovative scenarios.

We also observed that in previous e - commerce promotions, merchants' growth methods were relatively simple and direct. Take fast - moving consumer goods as an example. They were used to increasing the "cost - effectiveness" of products by "increasing product specifications + offering significant discounts", and then driving sales volume to boost the sales scale. Since the demand for fast - moving consumer goods is mostly periodic and planned, consumers are often willing to overdraw their future fixed consumption expenditure during 618 to stockpile goods.

However, in this way, merchants often compete for the existing "planned budget" of consumers and ignore the potential consumption motivations that are spontaneous, suddenly awakened, or stimulated outside of the planned demand. During this year's Douyin E - commerce 618 Good - Stuff Festival, we found that using new products, new product portfolios, and new experiences to ignite consumers' unspoken potential shopping needs is an excellent opportunity to create growth.

Recently, the popularity of the "Su Chao" (Jiangsu Provincial Urban Football League) was an extremely "unexpected" consumption boom during 618. Douyin users joked about "calling Nange", making the Nantong team, which won three consecutive games, the focus of the topic.

As the long - term sponsor of the Nantong team and youth football training, the slipper manufacturer Kedi Yuan seized the opportunity. First, they presented the behind - the - scenes stories of the Su Chao and the Nantong team's training in vivid short videos, allowing more fans to understand in - depth and at the same time transferring the good feelings and recognition of the winning Nantong team to Kedi Yuan.

Then, Kedi Yuan quickly developed new slippers and jerseys with the "calling Nange" decoration and put them on the shelves in Douyin E - commerce in a timely manner. When fans were touched by the real and moving stories of the Su Chao, the timely display of related peripheral products gave consumers the opportunity to express their feelings of winning and support by placing orders. High - quality short - video content attracted a large amount of attention and positive emotions. Through the "watch - then - search" function to direct traffic to the live - streaming room and the store, the fans' support for the Nantong team reached a climax, making the store's sales explode in June.

This shows that in today's era of abundant product supply, consumers are willing to spend extra - budget money on products that are more topical, content - rich, and capable of arousing empathy. At this moment, Kedi Yuan slippers have become souvenirs to celebrate the Nantong team's victory and participate in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the game.

Besides capturing consumers' segmented and potential needs, future merchant growth also comes from emotional consumption.

Consumers rarely explicitly say what they want, but their wallets speak louder. While some merchants complain about slow growth and weak consumption, jellycat celebrated the birthday of the Barcelona Bear on Douyin 618 and invited the star Song Yuqi to dance to celebrate. They never directly promoted the products, but the exclusive products supplied directly to Douyin E - commerce had a GMV of over one million yuan on the first day of the super - brand day...

During 618, Midea Air - conditioner collaborated with Wall's Cornetto to form a cross - border CP. They built a panda - themed "Cute Machine Special Agent Team" live - streaming room set, launched interesting challenges, and introduced the selling points of new products in a game - like way. The attractive and easy - to - understand content hit the users' hearts, and Midea's average daily store - live - streaming GMV increased by more than 155%.

This series of "counter - intuitive" consumption phenomena give us enough reasons to believe that when making shopping decisions, post - 90s and post - 00s consumers don't just pay for the functional value of products. Instead, they are increasingly willing to pay for "value recognition". Brand merchants need to pay more attention to value expression, life perception, and emotional connection. For example, Labubu breaks the traditional image of perfect and cute dolls. Its naughty and weird characteristics directly hit the aesthetics of young people and echo their inner desires of "not having to please others" and "accepting oneself".

02 Products are also content. Good content is the longest lever to撬动 brand growth

In recent years, we have asked many merchants the same question: "What does e - commerce promotion really mean to merchants?"

In the past, in the eyes of merchants, e - commerce represented incremental channels, and promotions represented performance growth. As long as they did e - commerce and promotions, growth was easy to achieve. However, during this year's visits, our biggest impression was that merchants' perceptions have changed significantly, and the role of e - commerce has also shifted - from a sales channel to a source of uncovering demand. From a different perspective, promotions have become an excellent opportunity for merchants to verify demand intensively.

Therefore, merchants who still have growth potential today haven't found new traffic and sales channels. Instead, they have clarified the real needs of users and done e - commerce in the right way. Their experiences prove that the so - called "right" way is to use content to drive growth.

Half a month before the Dragon Boat Festival, Douyin E - commerce set up a "content stage", that is, it launched the Douyin Mall 618 Dragon Boat Festival Market. It live - streamed dragon boat races and Yingge Dance folk activities on the platform and created second - creation short videos, creating a festival atmosphere of "celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival online" for users. At the same time, it invited merchants and influencers to start live - streaming, set up booths, and visit the market to create growth opportunities.

During the event, Wufangzhai intensively released video content such as the production process of Jiaxing zongzi and the unboxing of festival gift boxes. It also sponsored dragon boat races offline, successfully awakening consumers' potential need of "eating zongzi during festivals". At the same time, it invited the inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of zongzi - making skills to enter the live - streaming room. This not only endorsed the authentic taste of Wufangzhai but also allowed fans to recall Chinese traditional culture and understand the connotation of the Dragon Boat Festival folk customs, successfully leaving the label of "choose Wufangzhai for zongzi" in users' minds. During the event, many Wufangzhai gift boxes were sold well, and the turnover of some single products exceeded one million yuan, exceeding the sales target.

In the above case, content is not only a carrier for merchants to respond to users' needs but also a tool to lock in users' minds and consumption budgets in advance. Even if users' pain points are unclear, scene - based content is the best demand indicator. Through content, merchants can stimulate demand, lock in budgets, and growth will come naturally.

It's not just Wufangzhai. Due to the stronger creative content attributes and incubation capabilities of Douyin E - commerce, it naturally has the relative advantage of "occupying consumers' wallets". During 618, a large number of merchants leveraged their strong content capabilities to drive sales explosions. The live - streaming turnover of 236 brands exceeded 100 million yuan, and the turnover of more than 530,000 e - commerce creators doubled year - on - year.

These data undoubtedly prove that for brand merchants to achieve substantial performance growth, "good content" is the most effective growth lever. Choosing a business platform like Douyin E - commerce, which is more content - friendly, is hitting the strategic fulcrum of growth.

Compared with the basic product information introduction, high - quality content on Douyin E - commerce can always convey additional, valuable, and perceptible information to users, or create a more aesthetic and comfortable audio - visual experience.

On Douyin, there is a treasure shop called "Amazing Craftsmen". It specializes in intangible cultural heritage products, from the cute Pixiu refrigerator magnets from Xun County, Henan, to the delicate white porcelain incense burners from Dehua, Fujian. Almost all of them are ingenious combinations of traditional intangible cultural heritage skills and modern daily life. During 618, the average daily GMV of this shop increased by more than 6 times compared with the previous period.

For the past 10 years, "Amazing Craftsmen" has been shooting four - season documentaries, recording more than 300 kinds of traditional intangible cultural heritage handicrafts. In order to integrate intangible cultural heritage into users' daily lives, the "Amazing Craftsmen" team started e - commerce live - streaming on Douyin in 2021. While selling products, they understand the handicraft process of each intangible cultural heritage product and the life stories of each inheritor. Users can clearly understand the cultural connotations behind each product, and good content drives good sales.

Moreover, these products look like delicate artworks in the museum on camera. After the pre - documentary marketing, merchants don't even need to explain the craftsmanship and materials of the ornaments in detail. The absolute audio - visual impact can arouse consumers' pursuit and yearning for beautiful things and a better life, making consumers willingly pay for aesthetics and support the intangible cultural heritage craftsmanship.

On Douyin E - commerce, successful brands and products are not just cold trademarks and products. They are full of soul and personality. The content extended from these warm - hearted brands and products is also more stylish and value - oriented.

The new - generation clothing brand Linghe is an example. As the founder, Teacher AISHU Shu is like the soul of the Linghe brand. Her personal style and preferences have largely contributed to the brand's uniqueness. Her preference for oriental aesthetics and adherence to environmentalism have become important characteristics of the brand's personality.

In addition, Teacher Shu shares the daily life of clothing designers, dressing experiences and skills, and even life insights on her personal account, which has greatly narrowed the psychological distance between the brand and customers. This unique change makes the shopping process of consumers no longer a mechanical "select - order - receive" process. Instead, it's like having a conversation with a friend. Every order is an interaction and communication with the brand owner.

During the 618 new product launch of Linghe, not only did they create a visual feast for the brand's new product launch in the innovative form of an "Oriental Aesthetics Intangible Cultural Heritage Show", but they also invited the Douyin influencer Ye Keke to take fans to watch the show online. As a representative of women in their 30s, Ye Keke's accurate insights, sharp comments, and matching suggestions for Linghe's new products accurately hit the aesthetics and preferences of the target customers of the same age group. The live - streaming conversion efficiency was significantly improved, and the GMV of the 6 - hour live - streaming reached 23 million yuan.

In addition, good products also have their own content attributes and are also popular among Douyin users. Nike's limited - edition sneakers and YSL's new - launch lipsticks, these trendy and influential products and brands naturally attract higher user attention. Each of their classic products creates topics and content.

This is also an important inspiration from the brand merchants on Douyin E - commerce during this 618: Content has become the new moat for brands and even the longest lever for brand growth. Here, brand building is no longer just a simple accumulation of sales volume. It requires continuous content creation to accumulate users and precipitate brand assets.

When merchants understand the necessity of content, the value and meaning of content are no longer just marketing tools but strategic weapons to drive conversion and build a leading edge. Just like the appearance of good content on Douyin E - commerce, it breaks the boundary between "brand advertising" and "performance advertising", making it have both promotional and transactional attributes.

What makes merchants even more excited is that Douyin E - commerce is gradually integrating the e - commerce traffic pool and the advertising traffic pool. This is of great significance for merchants' advertising investment. The repeated recommendations on the platform will be greatly reduced, which can not only improve the effectiveness of advertising itself, boost ROI, but also maximize the expansion of the target audience, drive overall traffic, and generally break through the traffic ceiling for merchants.

03 The purpose of growth is "survival of the fittest". Muscular players will eventually stay on the stage

Since a few years ago, we have found that more and more brand merchants have become extremely low - key during major promotions.

The reason is not that their promotion results are poor. Instead, they have deeply understood a truth - besides "living well", "living long" is equally important. Merchants have abandoned the habitual thinking of "blindly pursuing vanity indicators such as short - term data and sales scale" and instead focused on building their own "muscle" strength and returning to long - term, high - quality growth.

When the business focus shifts from "winner takes all" to "survival of the fittest", growth doesn't need to be spectacular during promotions. Instead, it's more important to do meticulous work in daily operations. On Douyin E - commerce, as the longest lever to drive growth, the continuous operation of content in daily life is the most worthy area to explore.

The beauty industry is a "beauty - competition" arena. However, it's pale to explain beauty only with words. Some merchants repeatedly explain the product features during live - streaming, which easily makes consumers feel bored. As one of the featured store - live - streaming series "Beautiful Glory" created by Douyin E - commerce, the well - known makeup brand MAC's first attempt at a real - person competitive live - streaming during 618 was a great success.

In this event, MAC invited 4 celebrity makeup artists and 16 brand professional makeup artists to enter the store's live - streaming room for a live makeup competition, which was very different from the traditional voice - over - dominated store - live - streaming style in the industry.

First, by creating marketing gimmicks such as "celebrity - exclusive makeup artists", MAC successfully targeted the precise makeup - loving audience. By requiring the makeup artists to recreate the makeup looks of classic movie characters, they also broadened the audience to include general entertainment and female audiences. Second, the rules such as the round - robin system and 30 - minute quick makeup changes added a sense of excitement and extended the users' viewing time. Throughout the competition, the makeup artists used MAC's full - line products, allowing users to be subtly influenced by the brand while watching the PK.

This real - person competitive and variety - show - style store - live - streaming really caught the audience's attention among countless sales - oriented and promotion - oriented live - streaming rooms. Coincidentally, this year, Douyin E - commerce has strongly tilted the e - commerce traffic towards brand store - live - streaming, which gave MAC's marketing event a great boost. The maximum number of online users in the live - streaming room broke the record, and the natural traffic increased by more than 26 times.

In addition, while doing the store - live - streaming, MAC also cooperated with 36 popular Douyin makeup - changing videos for real - time dissemination, trying its best to create momentum for the event, expand the dissemination scope, attract customers to enter the live - streaming room and the store, and repeatedly reach the precise customer group through different touchpoints, ultimately leading to transactions.

This move precisely hit another support direction of Douyin E - commerce. After the platform integrated the content pool traffic and the e - commerce pool traffic, Douyin E - commerce also provided separate traffic incentives for high - quality e - commerce short - video content this year. This means that short - videos of brands like MAC can not only obtain traffic from the platform's content pool like other content creations but also have a stronger competitive advantage in the content traffic distribution pool.

With the innovation of store - live - streaming content, the focus on short - video content creation, and the multiple supports from the platform, MAC's competitive store - live - streaming ended perfectly - the total exposure of the event exceeded 180 million times, and the GMV increased by 775%.

Of course, consumers' shopping needs are becoming increasingly diverse and are not limited to a single content scenario. A shelf - based scenario with high conversion rate, high repurchase rate, and high carrying capacity is naturally also a necessary ability for long - term - oriented merchants.

We observed that while jellycat celebrated the birthday of the Barcelona Bear, it also participated in the Douyin Mall Super Brand Day marketing event, planned and launched a series of exclusive products on Douyin, including the Barcelona Bear birthday gift box, peanut penguins, and beige sweet bunnies. With the launch of exclusive products and the support of the platform's marketing resources, jellycat was able to successfully achieve a single - day GMV of one million yuan.

In the past few years, Douyin E - commerce has been improving the infrastructure construction of the shelf - based scenario, including launching the commission - free policy for product cards and enriching the mall gameplay (such as value - for - money purchases, low - price flash sales, and brand trials). As the one - stop shopping ecosystem of "browsing - searching - buying" matures, the GMV proportion of the Douyin E - commerce shelf - based scenario has exceeded 40%, gradually taking on the important task of merchants' growth. During 618, the GMV of the Douyin Mall increased by 77% year - on - year, the search GMV increased by 56% year - on - year, and the proportion of the shelf - based scenario business reached as high as 45%.

Obviously, building a muscular brand enterprise is not just about one - dimensional pursuit of GMV growth. It requires the coordinated evolution of product power, content power, and price power. Becoming a "well - rounded player" and achieving diversified growth is the ultimate direction for merchants' development.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, wrote in his book "The Practice of Management" that "The only purpose of an enterprise is to create customers." In his view, the essence of growth is to create customer value, rather than simply pursuing scale expansion.

In the current context, merchants can gradually find the fulcrums and advantages to respond to and meet users' needs on Douyin E - commerce and achieve sustainable growth.

Allowing merchants at different development stages and with different business characteristics to find their own growth methods is a sign of the maturity of an e - commerce platform ecosystem. During the 2025 Douyin Mall 618 Good - Stuff Festival, we not only witnessed that growth has become a practical underlying logic but also that it has been given more dimensions of meaning and value.

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This article is from the WeChat official account "Yibang Power". Author: Jia Kun. Republished with permission from Qiantang.