Pets have no shortage of traffic

Pets are content, consumption, and racetrack.

Pets are becoming more and more important to Internet companies.

In June, the Baidu App launched the "Private Pet Doctor" service, which is the first phase of Baidu's solution after launching its pet service field. This service provides a pet medical consultation platform online, offline private doctors and free in-store physical examinations. .

In May, JD Pets held a 2021 strategic upgrade conference. Liu Lu, general manager of the pet business of JD Retail Group, said that it will launch a number of service upgrade measures around "raising pets with peace of mind". In the coming year, JD Pet will incubate more than 50 first-tier new brands and help more new brands and businesses achieve greater development. Subsequently, Jingdong launched its own new pet brand Jingmeng.

In April, Ji Yun, general manager of Tmall’s FMCG division, said that Tmall’s pets will be upgraded to a first-class industry and will focus on the pet track. It will use the resources and investment in the construction of beauty makeup that year to develop the pet industry in the next three years. Become the second Tmall beauty and serve Chinese pet consumers.

Platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Station B, and Xiaohongshu have also launched their pet business. For example, Kuaishou held a pet creators conference in April this year.

Due to the accelerated aging of the domestic population and the increase in the number of empty-nest youths, the number of pets kept in my country has increased rapidly. According to the data from the White Paper on China's Pet Industry in 2019, the number of pet dogs and cats in China's cities and towns in 2019 was 99.15 million.

According to data, 37.1% of respondents regard pets as their friends, and more than 40% regard pets as relatives. This emotional demand also makes pets gradually become a traffic maker for content-based platforms.

Turn on platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and b-station, and you can see all kinds of cute pet videos everywhere. Platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu will inevitably become a gathering place for cats and dogs.

More and more bloggers have become Internet celebrities by publishing humorous stories about popular science, comedy, and pet anthropomorphism on the platform. Douyin's cute pet blogger "Talking Liuerdou" mainly publishes interesting stories about family life between himself and cats, "a family of three", and has a lot of fans with funny and humorous short video styles. It is already 40 million+ short video blogs. the Lord. The pet blogger "Huahua and Sanmao" became popular at station B in 2017 with documentary content. Currently, he has 3.256 million fans on station B and 4.258 million on Douyin.

Pets also have a strong shopping power, and there is still a saying on the Internet that "men's spending power is not as good as dogs". Data show that in 2019, the per capita annual consumption of a single pet dog reached 6,082 yuan, and the per capita annual consumption of a single pet cat reached 4755 yuan.

During the 618 periods, Xiaoyue, a post-90s cat slave, only bought a pair of shoes for herself, but gave her cat owners a lot of cat food, snacks and clothes, and also updated pet supplies, spending a total of nearly 10,000 yuan. "Others’ children have it, and my baby also has it." In addition to the necessary items such as cat sticks, cat scratching nests and cat crawling frames, the smart shit shoveling toilet and automatic feeder were also combined and paid for by her in the shopping cart. She bought the new toys from Douyin Kuaishou, trying to give the cat owners the best life. At the same time, wearing parent-child outfits with pets and buying birthday cakes for pets have become an indispensable sense of ceremony in her life.

The “consumption demand for high-quality pets” represented by Aria is rising rapidly. On the day of 618, the number of users of pet products on JD.com increased by 189% in the first hour. Among them, smart products, raw meat, imported cat food cans, and strengthened immune health care Several categories have multiple levels of growth.

In addition, emerging businesses such as pet milk tea, pet cakes, pet Hanfu, pet bathing machines, etc. indicate that the young people’s “Krypton-style pet raising” model can no longer stop. The "White Paper on China's Pet Consumption Trends in 2021" shows that the market size of my country's pet industry last year was close to 300 billion yuan, and the industry will continue to maintain steady growth in the next three years. The compound growth rate is expected to reach 14.2%, and the market size will reach 445.6 billion by 2023. yuan. A more optimistic estimate is that by 2023, China's pet economic market will approach 600 billion yuan.

The pet market is growing rapidly, and the financing frequency of related startups is also increasing year by year. According to the company's data, there are 1.1035 million active/surviving companies with the keyword "pet" in my country. From the perspective of investment and financing, since 2011, a total of 358 investment and financing cases have occurred in my country's pet race track, with an amount exceeding 11 billion yuan.

Yu Liyan, Investment Director of Shared Capital, told Ran Caijing, “The pet industry is currently only in its infancy in China. There are many subdivided fields. We are more optimistic about the basic and high-frequency consumption fields related to pets, such as food and supplies. It can meet the rigid demand for pets, and there is also an industry development opportunity for domestic products to quickly replace imports. For pet medical care, well-known investment institutions have entered the market in advance, but we believe that the current consumption frequency in this field is not high enough. The challenge may be even greater."

Tara, the founder of Jiusheng Pet, also believes that the industry faces many difficulties. “The pet industry seems to have a market scale of 100 billion yuan, but there are many sub-fields including pet food, clothing, housing, transportation, and medical care. The business model of the field is different. Few pet companies can span multiple fields at the same time. Compared with other industries, it is not difficult if you just want to do a good business and earn millions, but if you want to develop on a large scale, It's very difficult, and it's even more difficult to incubate a new brand."

Compared with startups, Internet giants have much greater advantages in terms of entry time, traffic, and volume. For example, JD has been in the pet industry for more than ten years; on Baidu, hundreds of thousands of users search everyday Issues related to pet medical care; In 2020, Tmall pets will have 31 brands exceeding 100 million yuan, 14 flagship stores of brands exceeding 100 million yuan, and two membership clubs with more than one million yuan.

However, the public has higher requirements for large companies, such as insufficient pet medical and pet insurance-related services, as well as profiteering practices such as blind pet boxes, which require large companies to come up with better solutions.

Pets are content

Cute pets are a source of traffic, and this recognition has long been there.

Advertising master David Ogilvy once proposed the "3B principle" of beauty—beauty, beast—animal, baby—child. Advertising using this as a means of expression conforms to the nature of human beings who care about their own lives and is the easiest to win consumers. Attention and liking. The event of "Starbucks Cat Claw Cup Being Robbed" in 2019 is a manifestation of the commercial value of the cute pet symbol.

In 2012, before the short video appeared, on Reddit, the largest diving forum in North America, the popularity of "Grumpy Cats" created a commercial miracle belonging to pets. In the first two years of its popularity, "Grumpy Cat" brought more than $100 million in income to its owner Tabatha Bundesen. Then the cute pets on Instagram gradually began to become a common economic phenomenon.

Earlier, both the animation of "Cat and Mouse" and the game "Talking Tom Cat" were very popular.

Nowadays, the rise of short videos and live broadcasts has made cute pets an indispensable part of the traffic economy.

According to the "Research Report on "Pet Economy" under the 2020 Cute Pet Content Ecology" released by Crawley, from January to October 2020, the average fan growth rate of head cute pet KOLs was 4.6% higher than that of head KOLs. , Pet accounts show a stronger fan-absorbing effect than ordinary accounts.

At the Kuaishou Pet Creators Conference in April this year, Zhao Wenqian, the director of Kuaishou Animals and Pet Verticals, pointed out that in each vertical category, celebrities, pet animals and small theaters constitute the top three rankings of high-quality content, and they often form " "Top Hot" hotspots. He disclosed multiple sets of data at the meeting: In 2020, Kuaishou Pets released a total of 797,000 videos and 265,000 live broadcasts, and one animal pet content was born in Kuaishou every 3.5 seconds. At the same time, the platform is constantly increasing its support for the pet industry. It is reported that based on the existing content ecology, Kuaishou Pets will open up resources, promote content incubation, IP-based heads, and the combination of planting grass with goods, and accurately supporting and improving user monetization capabilities.

"Cloud attracting pets" is a way for post-90s white-collar Yu Fei to relieve work pressure and release loneliness. Yufei is known as Peipiao. She is under pressure at work and is too busy to make friends. She will inevitably feel lonely when she is alone. She wants to have a cat to accompany her, but she is worried that she will be too busy to take care of her. Until she discovered that more and more pet videos appeared on Douyin, some pets eat and broadcast to earn rations, some make funny videos, and there are documentary pet videos.

"Peeing is a cat" is one of Yufei's favorite Douyin pet videos. "Peeing is a Chinese idyllic cat. It is very interesting for the blogger to fight with this cat in their daily wits. In addition, the blogger especially likes it. Matching emoticons in the video, through editing and text to make everyday pictures very funny. Every day before going to bed, I will use Douyin or Weibo, every time I see these fluffy cuties, I have a kind of'cured' The feeling of fatigue and stress of the day has disappeared."

In recent years, a lot of pictures and short videos of pet content have appeared on platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, and Station B. The cute little cuties have attracted a large number of followers, especially Xiaofei who has no time to take care of pets. Young people who can only "cloud suck cats" and "cloud raise dogs".

Sansan was also a member of the "cloud sucking cat" until 2018, she raised a beautiful short, named "Yakult". Before raising a pet, she had been "sucking cats" on Weibo, but the focus was not on pet bloggers, but the author "Fourteen Ques." "Because he raises cats himself, he often updates his cute pet's daily life on Weibo. He is one of the people I have ever seen who loves cats most. For the health of cats and cats, he insists on raw meat feeding for a long time. Raw meat feeding is good for cuteness. Pets have good intestines and stomachs, but they have high requirements for shoveling. From selecting meat ratios and matching meals to disinfection and sterilization, every step must be done to ensure the health of pets."

Since raising "Yakult", Sansan has also considered this feeding method, but because of the busy work and no time, Sansan can only choose cat food. In order to find safe and reliable cat food for "Yakult", Sansan is shaking. Yin, Kuaishou, Station B, and Xiaohongshu have followed a large number of pet science accounts, and joined the Douban pet group, and finally found domestically produced food. "Some of these bloggers are veterinarians, some are practitioners, or they have kept pets for many years. Their videos are relatively hard-core popular science knowledge. They are not the kind of bloggers who raise cats, dogs and dogs in order to bring goods. , My trust will be higher."

Because of raising Corgi, Wang Miao pays special attention to related videos. Recently, the Kuaishou account he is following, "Zubi Xiao Becky", in addition to two cute short-legged Corgis, a new member has been added. The blogger even gave a cat as a birthday gift to the Corgi father and son. But this happens to coincide with Wang Miao's "cat and dog" configuration.

A video of a blogger deliberately biting Corgi’s toy in revenge on Corgi made Wang Miao laugh. He also picked up Corgi’s toy on the ground as he watched his slippers also bitten by Corgi. Unable to lower his mouth, he had to grab Corgi and slapped him wildly.

According to data from iiMedia Consulting, 20.70% of Chinese pet owners consider pets as children, and 12.78% believe that pets are their relatives, and 21.59% think pets are their friends, more than half of the total. The interviewees projected their pets' emotional value beyond their pets. PwC also mentioned the distribution of pet owners in China in a report: 88% are women, 50% are post-80s and post-90s; 57% have a college degree or above; 50% are singles.

Regarding this phenomenon, Sun Wei, a brand marketing researcher at Tsinghua University and chairman of Kuaixia Technology, analyzes that with the advancement of urbanization in my country, the number of people living alone has increased. They need emotional sustenance, and pets have a cute and cute appearance. Young people match their aesthetic tastes. With the upgrading of consumption, the purpose of keeping pets is shifting from satisfying functional needs to spiritual needs. Pour money and energy into pets to obtain direct emotional feedback.

Pets are consumption

Keeping pets is a very expensive thing. Wang Miao said frankly that he was working for the "masters" and would contribute a quarter of his monthly salary. "The monthly fixed expenses for cat food, dog food, and bathing and grooming are nearly 2,000 yuan. If you get sick and go to the pet hospital, you may be wrong." Wang Miao's monthly living expenses are less than 3,000 yuan. During the 618 and Double 11 promotion periods, he would chop and stock up the "masters".

Sansan has very strict requirements for the quality of cat food. “In the beginning, I was fed Ling Cai Luhua produced by Natura in the United States. Later, the production of this cat food was discontinued, and Bailey, Ocean Heart and Aikena were successively replaced. Most of the cat shovel officers raised cats as children. If you eat frugally, you have to buy good cat food for your cat. Although imported cat food is expensive, it’s better than going to the hospital if it’s eaten."

It is the shit shoveling officers like Sansan and Wang Miao that have propped up the prosperity of the pet economy. They may be reluctant to spend 50 yuan to go to the barbershop for a haircut, but spend a lot of money on the food, clothing, housing and transportation of the "pet owners".

With the huge market, coupled with platform support, MCN agencies have also made efforts on the pet track. "Star Pet Show" is an MCN company that focuses on the vertical field of pets. Only on the Douyin platform, there are more than 900 KOCs and KOLs signed to cooperate, mainly KOLs and KOCs with 100-200w fans below the waist. The total number of fans is about 58 million.

Chen Rong, the founder of "Star Pet Show", pointed out that most brand companies in the pet industry do not have mature online marketing teams or branding departments. As a result, online publicity lacks a complete publicity strategy and execution plan, and does not even understand how to integrate new media publicity strategies into the overall company strategy.

"Now many brand owners have found us that we want us to promote the Douyin Xiaohongshu, and if we have a budget, we dare to invest. When we made specific plans, we found that the brand foundation of the product was too thin. For example, the official account is not yet available, and the Douyin account is too thin. No, there is no Xiaohongshuhao, not even the main picture video. Our suggestion is to make up for these weak links first, and then promote, otherwise, the traffic will not be able to fully catch it."

But even for the new domestic pet brands with great brand awareness, the marketing road is not easy. Tara pointed out that the brand building of pet brands is different from consumer brands for human use, and rapid mass production is almost impossible. "The marketing triad of the rise of new consumer brands that went viral in the circle of friends before is a bit exaggerated, but as long as the method is followed, the new brand will still be a little loud." The so-called triad is to find KOC for evaluation at Xiaohong Bookstore first, and then to know. Hupu Q&A, and finally find Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and Douyin's waist anchor store channel.

But for pet brands, finding head anchors to bring goods simply doesn’t work. Tara said, “Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya almost rarely accept pet brands. First of all, the trust of users is low. For users, they are neither Pet raising is not an expert in this area; secondly, the after-sales risk and cost of pet products are relatively high.