Luxury Chinese Market Has Changed. Young People Under 30 Contribute 42% Of Their Consumption.

Insight into China's luxury digital consumer market in 2018

In 2018, China's luxury consumption market still grew strongly, and its growth rate remained at 6%. The annual market sales exceeded 110 billion euros, accounting for 33% of the global market. BCG predicts that by 2025, China's personal luxury consumption will maintain a compound growth rate of 5-6%, breaking 160 billion euros by 2025, and contributing 41% of the world's luxury goods market.

In high-end luxury goods (true-luxury), garments, jewellery and bags are the three largest sales categories, each contributing about 60-70 billion euros in retail sales. From the perspective of penetration, consumers in the past 12 months have bought up 61% of the luxury garments, leading all other categories.

The trend of the younger generation of luxury consumers in China will continue. Luxury consumers under the age of 30 account for 48% of the survey, and they contribute 42% of the total consumption. The proportion of consumers under 35 will be as high as 78%, and the contribution of retail sales will reach 74%. It can be said that whoever wins the hearts of young consumers will win the Chinese market.

Judging from the category, young consumers have a strong purchasing power in clothing, accessories and shoes, and more than 50% of young consumers purchase related products last year. Jewelry and bags are more favored by mature consumers.

Geographically speaking, big cities are still the base of luxury consumption, and 70% of the sales are from 50 urban consumers with more than two lines. Among them, four cities in northern Guangzhou and Shenzhen accounted for 26%. Cities below three cities also contribute 35%, but consumption is highly dispersed in over 2000 cities. In addition, compared with high speed cities, consumers in low level cities have a big gap in clothing, jewelry and bags.

Luxury brands have to innovate in the layout of channel marketing, and they need to think carefully about product strategy.

Social media and other digital media represented by KOL, brand account and social advertising are still the most important channels for brand drainage. Nearly half of consumers are concerned about brand dynamics through these channels.

It is worth noting that, compared with the previous survey, the impact of social interaction and salesperson interaction represented by friends circle is obviously enhanced. Some offline innovative marketing activities (such as brand exhibitions, walking shows, creative outdoor advertisements, etc.) have also increased the attractiveness of consumers.

Further analysis of social channels revealed that the "discovery" and "research" links, including friends circle advertising, friends sharing, small programs and WeChat public number WeChat ecosystem, were the most frequently used social channels for consumers, accounting for 52% and 43% respectively. Followed by micro-blog and Xiao Hong Shu. The ability of short video platform to stimulate luxury consumption is not outstanding.

Traditional social channels are mainly based on information release, and consumers' social circles are less differentiated. Today, the trend of consumers' social circles is diversified, and social scenes are becoming more and more fragmented and personalized.

According to the survey, more than 70% of young people under 30 are susceptible to different types of KOL. Over the past year, all kinds of KOL have also had a new mode of operation.

First of all, fashion bloggers began to operate their own e-commerce platform through small programs, that is, "content providers". Some KOL even began to penetrate into the creative link of the fashion industry chain, and launched joint limited money with the brand; while stars and supermodels and other traditional stars picked up the populace set up to attract consumers' attention with more affinity and more reference and reference significance; net red KOL was taking the star route, attacking on multiple platforms, attracting consumers by making different forms of content, and consumers after 90 and 00 were their loyal fans.

In the foreign market, the social topics of celebrities and net red are relatively simple, which is nothing more than fashion, daily life and travel. In the Chinese market, the topic category of KOL is highly fragmented. Fitness, food, entertainment gossip, constellation, mother and baby can become the carrier of marketing content.

In form, the virtual ecosystem of digital ecosystems has gradually risen to create idols and immersive virtual experiences. The former allows consumers to directly participate in the creation of programs such as creation 101 and traffic idols. Fans and idols have deeper emotional links, and are more willing to consume for idols. The virtual idols derived from games and games can help consumers get richer immersive digital experience with the help of technology.

The unique Chinese market also develops a unique consumption habit. Not only does shopping path have a high degree of digitalization, and more than 80% of consumers choose online research and offline purchase when they buy luxury goods, which is 30% higher than the global average and 20% higher than that of the previous year. It is worth noting that even when overseas consumption occurs, consumers are greatly influenced by online contacts before buying.

In depth analysis of offline channels, we find that shopping centers are still the main channel under the domestic line, and the new flash store has a direct effect on sales.

With the trend of online and offline convergence becoming more and more obvious, consumers have more and more requirements for offline experience. More than 30% of consumers expressed the expectation that the brand could improve the offline consumption experience by means of smart try out, VR/AR experience, intelligent interactive screen, self-service merchandise browsing and self-service ordering.

According to the survey results, online sales accounted for about 12% of luxury goods sales, and there was no significant change compared with last year. It is worth mentioning that along with the popularization of small programs and the enhancement of brand public number operation, sales channels of brand self operated online are gradually rising, and 1/3 of the total online business has become a new channel for rapid growth in the past year.

Digital ecology reshaping China's luxury marketing

In order to adapt to the above trends, we have observed that in order to adapt to the trend of Chinese consumers' youth and digitization in the past year, luxury brands have continued to increase their digital marketing investment in China, especially the promotion of direct interaction with consumers through social media and platforms, and even the expansion of online consumption channels.

From the perspective of digital media, digital media are richer and visualized from content to form, and the importance of search and purchase function of vertical e-commerce and e-commerce platform is enhanced; the investment of brand official website is stable, and more investment is added to WeChat terminals, small programs and public numbers.

On the other hand, the impact of traditional channel investment continues to shift, and the activities of flash shop and PR line have become few growth points. Over the past year, luxury brands are more willing to invest in large-scale activities, attracting consumers' eyeballs while promoting brand spirit. The flash store has low input costs, but it can attract more customers and turn them into sales. Other traditional offline marketing inputs have been reduced or unchanged.

With the rise of digital marketing costs, how to improve marketing efficiency has become a top priority for all brands. Data driven, social networking and full channel interaction will become a required course for all major brands.

Data insight driving: Based on big data analysis of the characteristics and needs of consumer groups, and business data insight into driving marketing decisions. The first step in data driven driving is to establish and get through the consumer interaction between the online and offline cross channels and cross channels, and make overall management of the consumer groups' processes (from discovery, purchase to sale). In view of the unique buying habits of Chinese consumers, luxury brands also need to integrate overseas and domestic consumption data of Chinese luxury consumers to better manage CRM.

The second step is real-time advertising monitoring. For example, when conducting marketing campaigns, we will use material testing to adjust the marketing strategies of different channels in real time and optimize the allocation of resources.

Finally, it quantifies the effect and optimizes and adjusts the marketing budget allocation of different consumer contacts according to real-time delivery.

Social interaction: to achieve effective social impact, brands need to go hand in hand in four aspects: accuracy of target audience, accuracy of cooperative media, extension of contacts, and content creation.

Full channel interaction: consumers' contacts are increasingly complex and fragmented. Luxury brands need to combine all channels to provide consumers with more targeted and more complete brand experience. Especially the challenges such as insufficient contact differentiation, inconsistent image, online and offline separation and so on. Brands need to try different strategies.

It is no easy task to achieve the above points. Brand needs to build three internal capabilities in the long run to achieve digital spanformation.

First, unified data integration and analysis capabilities. Enterprises need to integrate data resources of various business departments, build integrated data platforms, and make decisions based on data driven.

Second, more flexible organization and working style. Reshaping the work style and culture of agile iteration, and achieving the goal of "Symphony Orchestra" cross sectoral digital spanformation.

Third, the empowerment of cutting-edge IT tools. To create the IT infrastructure in the digital age and integrate various innovative IT technologies to enhance customer experience and enterprise operation efficiency.

The future is coming. Facing the age of young consumers and highly social media, past experience is out of date. Complacency of success will only be a burden to the enterprise. Only those pioneers who are willing to iterate trial and error and believe in data rather than empirical intuition can break through in China's luxury market with great potential.