Data driven high-end marketing, the first dialogue between two luxury e-com

No data, no marketing, is the common adage today. This is so because we are living in an era of big data coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI). November 22, 2018, marked an important day in the history of Shanghai with SPLUSH holding their creative artificial intelligence festival. Under the special arrangement of the organizers, Secoo-one of the world’s greatest luxury e-commerce companies-had the first conversation with the executives of Farfetch.

On his address Mr. Alexis Bonhomme, Business Vice President of Farfetch, talked about the benefits of efficient logistics technology to Farfetch’s customer service and customer experience. Mrs. Nicole Yang, CEO of Secoo EEC (Enabling Eco Cloud), on the other hand focused on sharing the extraordinary performance of high-end users in data convenience.

What is the "high net worth population" in China?

For Secoo, finding the real customers for the luxury e-commerce has always been the biggest pain point. This poses the question, what kind of people are China’s high net worth people?

On her address, Mrs. Yang first used the real consumption behavior of Secoo’s consumers during the first half of 2018 to elaborate what the rich people in China really look like. From this behavior, Secoo has identified that their users are divided into four levels: black card users, diamond card users, silver card users and gold card users. From these stats, black users buy an average of nearly 700 items per year, with an average price of 8,000 RMB per item. Diamond carded on the other hand, buy an average of 54 items per year, with an average price of 7,000 RMB per item. In short, Secoo can authoritatively say real rich people buy luxury goods just the same way ordinary people buy their daily necessities.

However, the latest research data shows high-end consumers in China exists not only in the high-end suburbs or first-tier metropolises, but also in the second, third and fourth-tier cities, which have strong demand for international luxury goods. The rising younger generation may soon change further the tides in the global industry. According to Bain Consulting, joined the Italian luxury goods association Altagamma released the 2017 global luxury industry research report predicted that the current millennials have accounted for about a third of the total number of luxury consumers, and the younger Generation Z.

Through in-depth analysis of real purchase user data, Secoo has partnered with Tencent and Sina Weibo to get accurate data of more dimensions of high-end user behavior preferences without touching consumer privacy.

This year is a special year for Secoo as they interact with Weibo data for the first time. According to this data, high-end consumers are very cold fish. They seem to be kind of motionless group of people in the sense that they do not comment, forward or like. They also have a varied attention ranging from pets, constellation to photography, travel, food, and almost no special preference for a hobby. Interestingly, they don’t pay attention to hot spots and ‘traffic stars’ as people used to think. Instead, Guo Degang, Peng Yuyan, Gao Yuanyuan, and Deng Chao are more popular to them.

Secoo through Tencent’s network data found out that the real luxury consumer groups does not pay attention to financial news and sports news, contrary to what many thought. Instead, drama and variety are their favorite. They also realized that their common APP is multifarious. According to the data, luxury consumers will choose domestic service as their first priority, followed by study abroad and then pet related came last.

With this revelation therefore, it is necessary to weed out any idea of over-reliance on experience in the past, and start from the really effective purchase data to analyze the behavior of the target population (region, age, etc). It is also important to analyze their behavioral preferences in the social and e-commerce platforms, in order to adjust the direction and strategy of marketing.

Platform cooperation to improve the efficiency of reaching the target population

By buying data to push back the media attributes of target brand users, and then finding more potential consumers based on these attributes, will solve the problem of finding and reaching users in high-end marketing.

A great length of data analysis is done on the purchased user data to get more dimensional data of user behavior preferences, for instance, which video platform users prefer to watch what programs and how long the average viewing time is. Therefore, to avoid the misunderstanding caused by big data, it is advisable to choose a more accurate platform or channel for advertising.

As if that’s not enough, with these accurate and effective user data packets in hand, Secoo has launched a project with Tencent, which classifies labels according to category and price range. This campaign also seek to realize the standardization of advertising and marketing promotion, and how to reach high-end groups with high efficiency. This year has also seen Secoo reach a further cooperation with Tencent social advertising, and began to dig into the full scene behavior of high-end users with high consumption ability. Data shows that the rate of interaction based on temple database purchase population data is several times or more than the ordinary rate of interaction.

Finally, Secoo has also partnered with several data companies, through discovering the user ‘buy’ the real behavior of power accurately of targeted high-end brands. This is done mainly through advertising circle of friends, small program fission, Weibo star and KOL transmission such as delivery.