The consumption in county towns takes the center stage during the Spring Festival, and it's the "really great" moment for the brand Pinduoduo.

This Spring Festival, the county-level market once again took the "center stage", and the booming county-level consumption made it to the front page of People's Daily.

SK-II Facial Treatment Essence for skin care, several-thousand-yuan down jackets as new clothes, cherries, durians and other expensive fruits becoming the main characters of the "fruit plate", imported seafood on the dining table. Sam's products, which are favored by the middle class in first-tier cities, also frequently appear in the consumption lists of many young people in small towns. During this Spring Festival holiday, the county-level market can be described as having a prosperous supply and demand, with diverse and colorful consumption.

Young people in small towns are consuming, while young people in cities are being frugal. This is the real situation that is unfolding in the county areas. Recently, the "2024 Consumption Insight Report on Young People in Small Towns" released by QuestMobile (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") pointed out that thanks to the steady improvement of the county economy, the "young people in small towns" are coming to the forefront and becoming the backbone of the county-level consumption upgrade.

According to the report, young people in small towns are the main consumer group in non-first and second-tier markets, with a monthly active user scale of 307 million, accounting for nearly half of the market. The proportion of those with an online consumption capacity of more than 1,000 yuan is 80.4%, showing a stronger consumption capacity and a higher consumption willingness.

The "Report" pointed out that the comprehensive e-commerce platform is the main consumption channel for young people in small towns. As of September 2024, among the billion-level comprehensive e-commerce platforms, the active penetration tendency of young people in small towns towards the Pinduoduo APP ranked first. When it comes to why they choose Pinduoduo, more than 80% of young people in small towns mentioned that Pinduoduo's rich user reviews, detailed product introductions and other service configurations help them improve the efficiency and experience of purchasing decisions without any prompts.

The new e-commerce platform like Pinduoduo plays a crucial supporting role in the process of the upward transition of the material consumption of urban residents, and is also becoming a shortcut for brands to quickly reach young people in small towns.

01

Pinduoduo Captures County-level Aristocratic Women and Returning Young People

Gao Yiyi, born in 1996, is a young person from a small town in the eastern part of Henan Province. After graduating from Tianjin Normal University, she worked as an education and training teacher in Beijing for more than a year, and then passed the teacher recruitment examination of a key primary school in her hometown.

In the few years after returning to her hometown, she witnessed the rapid development of the county economy and the consumption upgrade of the people living there.

Gao Yiyi remembers that in the first month of working in her hometown, someone sent a group-buying link of Pinduoduo in the high school classmate group. It was an air fryer of a well-known brand, with a much lower price than the market price, and it happened that she was planning to buy one.

Gao Yiyi is not new to Pinduoduo. During her university years and working in Beijing, she often bought agricultural products, flowers, and small commodities such as earrings, hairpins, tissues, and tableware on it, with each purchase costing only a dozen or twenty yuan. But before this, she had never bought home appliances on Pinduoduo, and she was full of doubts about whether the products with such a low price were reliable.

With doubts, she went to consult the classmate who shared the link, and only then did she learn that almost everyone around her regarded Pinduoduo as their first choice for shopping. They had tried it countless times, and the "Hundred Billion Subsidy" is not only affordable but also has an official guarantee of genuine products.

This surprised Gao Yiyi greatly. In her impression, Pinduoduo brings together China's rich industrial chain and is widely popular in non-first-tier markets. However, she did not know that since the platform launched the "Hundred Billion Subsidy" in 2019, it has continuously attracted domestic and foreign brands to accelerate their entry, including mobile phones, home appliances, digital products, beauty products, mother and baby products, men's and women's clothing, sports, outdoor products, jewelry, accessories, home furnishings, pets, personal care, luggage, watches, fast-moving consumer goods, and overseas shopping, etc.

Under the strong recommendation of her classmates, Gao Yiyi bought that air fryer, and since then, she has been unable to stop and embarked on a path from "doubt" to "really good".

From the Apple phone to celebrate the one-year anniversary of "landing" a stable job, the La Mer as a birthday gift for herself, to the gold jewelry for the engagement, to the home appliances and sweeping robot in the wedding room, all were purchased on Pinduoduo.

In the Spring Festival of 2023, Gao Yiyi became a mother. She started the "buy, buy, buy" mode for her baby on Pinduoduo. Several-hundred-yuan cans of Beingmate milk powder, hundred-yuan Balabala children's clothing, several-ten-yuan rice cereal, and birthday decorations for the first birthday... The long order list is like an album full of memories, recording the child's growth trajectory.

Unlike Gao Yiyi, a young person who "escaped from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" and returned to her hometown, Liu Lin, born in 1992, is a young person who has always stayed in her hometown. After graduating from high school in 2010, she went to a vocational high school to learn beauty for three years. After saving some money from work, she opened a beauty salon in the county and became a small business owner herself.

In recent years, with the trend of "pleasing oneself" consumption spreading to the county, Liu Lin's business is booming. In a popular term, she is a genuine "county-level aristocratic woman".

Although she has money, Liu Lin is not a "leisurely" person. She needs to take care of the store and often appears in some live broadcasts. Many of her usual consumptions need to be completed through online shopping. As a heavy user of Pinduoduo, she spent nearly one hundred thousand yuan on it in the past year, including a tens of thousands of yuan refrigerator, a several-thousand-yuan mattress, and Coach bags and Huawei phones for her mother-in-law and mother.

The vigorous vitality of county-level consumption has driven a large number of enterprises to penetrate into cities below the third tier, and chain brands such as Starbucks, KFC, and Heytea, which could only be seen in high-tier cities before, are gradually emerging in the county.

However, many brands are still in the exploratory stage of a single store, and the expansion requires time. Even out of caution, some brands are still observing, and the sporadic store coverage is limited.

The "Report" pointed out that the information for the brand consumption decisions of the young people in small towns mainly comes from e-commerce platforms. They have a prominent preference for comprehensive e-commerce apps, with Pinduoduo being the most favored. In terms of usage duration, the "Report" data shows that the average monthly usage duration of young people in small towns on Pinduoduo ranks first, about 323.5 minutes.

Why is Pinduoduo so sticky? This can be seen from Gao Yiyi and Liu Lin.

As online consumption gradually integrates into life and the disposable income of young people in small towns increases, they show a strong consumption capacity and a very high consumption willingness, but this does not mean blind consumption.

The "Report" also gives the answer: Quality and safety factors are the most concerned factors for young people in small towns when making online brand consumption decisions. Specifically, the influencing factors of the quality, price and safety of brand products account for more than 50%.

This is the same as the answers obtained from Gao Yiyi and Liu Lin above. They both pursue the consumption upgrade concept of "buying good things but not expensive", and Pinduoduo perfectly fits this concept.

02

The Transition from Consumption Upgrade 1.0 to 2.0

What is a young person in a small town?

In a broad sense, it refers to the young group living in third-tier and below cities, counties, and towns. According to public data, there are a total of 288 third-tier and below cities and 1,335 counties in China.

For a long time in the past, affected by China's existing urban-rural dual social structure, the young group active in these places failed to enter the public's vision, and their group characteristics and consumption characteristics were rarely concerned. They were like unnamed people hidden, and most appeared in film and television dramas and literary works.

This group was officially seen by the public until 2015. The movie "Monster Hunt" became the box office champion of the year with a box office revenue of nearly 2.5 billion yuan, and it was also the first domestic film in China to achieve a box office of more than 2 billion yuan. Among them, more than 40% of the box office was contributed by the young group in the third, fourth and fifth-tier cities.

They showed amazing consumption capacity and successively created box office miracles such as "Ex-Files 3" and "Wolf Warrior 2". Later, during the Spring Festival in 2018, the box office in third-tier and below cities accounted for 54.7% of the total box office in the country, and the number of viewers accounted for 55.4%, reaching the highest peak in the past ten years at that time.

As a unique phenomenon in the development of Chinese films, the young people in small towns emerged and got a name with a public cultural communication effect - young people in small towns.

In fact, in addition to showing initial influence in the film industry in 2015, the young people in small towns have been rebuilding the future e-commerce order.

This year, when the competition focus of major e-commerce platforms was mostly concentrated in first and second-tier cities, Pinduoduo keenly captured the potential of the "outside the Fifth Ring Road" market, turned its attention to the vast group of young people in small towns, provided a rich variety of goods, and opened the door to Consumption Upgrade 1.0 for them with the innovative social group-buying model of "more affordability and more fun".

At that time, the main theme of consumption upgrade was mainly focused on brands, high prices, and high-tier cities. On the contrary, Pinduoduo was regarded as a reverse push against the consumption upgrade trend and was even labeled as a consumption downgrade.

In the face of the ridicule from the outside world, Pinduoduo later responded to the consumption upgrade with the widely circulated definition: Consumption upgrade is not to let people in Shanghai live the life of people in Paris, but to let people in Anqing, Anhui have kitchen paper to use and good fruits to eat.

And this sentence: Regarding consumption downgrade, especially in material consumption, no one will actively consume at a lower level. Everyone is like "If I don't have a flush toilet, I want to have a flush toilet".

The elites living in first-tier cities with kitchen paper and flush toilets may not understand this kind of consumption upgrade. But Zhang Di, a young person in a small town who used these things for the first time, really enjoyed the similar convenience of life as people in the city.

To this day, Zhang Di still remembers vividly the first commodity he bought on Pinduoduo - a box of dental floss with a price of less than two yuan, which made him know that there is a product more useful than a toothpick in the world.

Through Pinduoduo, Zhang Di bought Xinjiang's small white apricots, Menglian's avocados, and Hainan's jackfruits for his 70-year-old grandfather. Those are things that his grandfather has never tasted before. He often talks about his grandson's filial piety and laments that "life is not lived in vain".

The popularization of the mobile Internet has enabled the general public to have the same information acquisition ability as in first-tier cities, flattening the folded world. However, in terms of the rich supply of goods, the gap between fourth and fifth-tier cities and Beijing and Shanghai is still very large. The emergence of Pinduoduo improves the cost performance of goods through factory C2M direct sales, provides ordinary people with affordable upgraded daily necessities, fills the gap in the material world, and enriches the needs of spiritual consumption.

When young people in small towns completed the Consumption Upgrade 1.0 version on Pinduoduo, the biggest feature of the new e-commerce, "inclusiveness", was also concretized.

In 2018, Pinduoduo was listed on Nasdaq, taking 2 years and 11 months, setting a new record for the fastest listing of Chinese Internet companies.

All this happened when it seemed that the domestic e-commerce pattern had been set and the history book had been written. It was the result of countless young people in small towns voting with their hands through practical actions.

In June of the following year, Pinduoduo launched the "Hundred Billion Subsidy" and stated that the "Hundred Billion Subsidy" is not just a slogan, and every penny spent is worth it. Next, Pinduoduo's "Hundred Billion Subsidy" made its debut on Double 11, selling 400,000 iPhone 11s and 1,000 domestic cars, and the daily active users of the "Hundred Billion Subsidy" entrance exceeded 100 million.

The outside world regards this move as an important strategy for Pinduoduo to enter the "inside the Fifth Ring Road" from the "outside the Fifth Ring Road". Young person Zhang Di in a small town does not understand the operating rules of the business world, but he knows that the brand means better quality and higher safety.

With the advancement of the "Hundred Billion Subsidy", the number of brand products has increased. Zhang Di bought Adidas shoes and Bananain underwear on Pinduoduo... From the initial white-label products to meet the living needs of "being able to use", to now enjoying the quality life of brand products through the Hundred Billion Subsidy, Zhang Di has achieved the advancement from Consumption Upgrade 1.0 to 2.0 on Pinduoduo.

The "Report" pointed out that the brand commodity consumption of young people in small towns is becoming more frequent. More than 90% of consumers have a brand commodity consumption frequency of 1-2 times per month or more; compared with 2023, 43.1% of consumers have an increased frequency. In addition, the proportion of white-label consumers among young people in small towns is 16.5%, gradually upgrading to brand consumption. The new brand demand is mainly purchased through comprehensive e-commerce channels, and the proportion of increased brand commodity purchase frequency in the next year has significantly increased.

The changes in lifestyle and the enhancement of brand awareness have become the main reasons for the increase in the brand consumption frequency of young people in small towns; for white-label consumers, in addition to the changes in their own lifestyle, platform and brand preferential activities play an important role in promoting their increase in brand consumption frequency.

In September last year, Pinduoduo launched the "New Quality Merchant Support Program", investing 10 billion resource packages to provide the whole-link support of products, marketing, operation and supply chain for new quality merchants and new quality brands with product, technology and innovation capabilities.