Inertia and Predicament: Business Growth in 2025, Opportunities That Must Be Seen

In the just-ended 2024, the voices of merchants seem to carry a certain pessimism: The dividend period has ended, business is becoming increasingly difficult, and consumers are becoming more and more difficult to understand... 

But this is more like an "inertial pessimism". As McKinsey summarized in the "2024 Global Business Trends Report": "The market is always full of opportunities. Enterprises that adapt to rapid changes are more likely to capture future increments than those that are stagnant." The challenge for enterprises is not "whether there are opportunities in the market", but "how to deal with these changes and seize opportunities through new ways of thinking". 

In 2025, the opportunity for contrarian growth lies "beyond inertia", in how to challenge the evolutionary opportunity of business logic. 

The Break and Renewal of Growth Logic

The pessimistic sentiment in the market stems from the profound changes in consumer behavior. As the market enters the stock competition stage, consumers' purchasing decisions become complex and fragmented, with a nonlinear characteristic of multiple touchpoints and multiple nodes. Traditional one-way communication and single channels can no longer meet the demand, and the brand reach efficiency has significantly declined. 

At the same time, the "offensive and defensive swap" of market supply and demand has intensified competition. Consumers' demand for "value for money" is becoming more urgent, while the supply side tends to be homogenized. In this environment, it is difficult for brands to break through only by relying on traffic acquisition and low-price strategies. Brands have to re-examine the competition rules and look for new growth opportunities. 

The market environment is uncertain, but confidence still exists. The "Breaking the Deadlock in 2025: New Opportunities Drive New Growth - Annual CMO Marketing Trend Research" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") released by Jumei Engine shows that more than 80% of brand owners are confident in business growth in 2025. Among them, 57.7% of decision-makers still favor the demand for high-quality goods and services, and 52.6% of respondents believe that there are a large number of unmet market segment opportunities in the market. This indicates that there is still a broad space for growth in the market, and the key lies in accurately grasping the trend and responding flexibly. 

Trend means direction, and the direction of business is often established where "people" are. Take Douyin as an example. As a national-level App, it is not only an important platform for information dissemination, but also an important entrance for consumers' daily life and purchasing decisions. The background of the Douyin content platform combined with the construction of e-commerce, life service and other operational capabilities can bring the value of exposure, seeding, and full-link conversion to business, and even spill over to the entire channel to bring growth. 

This means that Douyin is no longer just a "traffic pool", it has developed into an important position for brands to reshape the growth logic. 

New Opportunities Require Abandoning the "Inertia of Success"

There are always brave ones who take the lead. On January 9, the Engine Award of Jumei Engine's "Digital Integrated Marketing and Operation Award" officially released the list of annual winning cases. In the seemingly difficult 2024, there are still many enterprises that have broken through the trend and achieved business growth. 

From the practices of these brands that have broken through in different track fields, three new opportunities that cannot be ignored have gradually emerged: content-driven, brand mentality, and compound operation, which have become the new anchors for the breakthrougher. 

1. Content-driven - The Activation Engine of Real Demand

The value of content is increasingly being recognized in the stock era. More and more brands have realized that content is precisely the bridge to break the barrier between the brand and consumers. 

The "Report" shows that 67.2% of enterprises believe that high-quality content can significantly stimulate consumer demand. Through in-depth exploration of user interests and emotional resonance, brands naturally integrate products into native content, subtly influencing user decisions, and more efficiently forming the "content reach - cognitive influence - consumption conversion" link. 

In early 2023, GAMESIR Insight noticed the gap in the cost-effective gamepad market and launched the industry's first gamepad within 100 yuan, "Venus". Different from the traditional market environment where a good gamepad must be of high price, its product model with high cost performance has created disruptive industry data, with a daily maximum sales of 10,000 units. 

The success of GAMESIR proves the value of content-driven. "The core of high-quality content is the sense of substitution. Through game-related content and interesting content output, it mobilizes users' emotions." The relevant person in charge of GAMESIR said. 

Entering a blank market means there is no reference. The GAMESIR team chose to build a content system from scratch. The content strategy focuses on subverting users' inherent impression of low-price products as "low-quality", and successfully creating the user mentality of "affordable gamepads can also be high-performance". 

After the positive feedback from users caused by the product force spontaneously became a hot topic on Douyin, it keenly realized the value of hot topics for business growth and promptly adjusted the content strategy to "closely follow the hot topics and leverage the momentum". In order to further expand the market, GAMESIR captured the relevant popularity of popular games and successively launched creative activities such as the "Black Mythology Speedrun Contest" and "Theme Gamepad Review". In this process, the two-way interaction between expert reviews and user-generated content enables the brand to convert users' emotional identity into purchasing power through hot content. 

From building a product force content system in the initial stage to detonating user awareness through hot topics, GAMESIR has gradually constructed a complete closed loop of content-driven mentality. This strategy from cognition to conversion and then to repurchase has enabled GAMESIR to accumulate over one million users on the Douyin platform. 

2. Brand Mentality - Consumers' Value Recognition

Among the keywords of market competition in 2024, there must be "involution". The homogeneity and price competition among commodities are becoming increasingly fierce. Consumers are constantly looking for "substitute" products, and merchants are trapped in a vicious circle of low-price strategies. 

This is obviously not a healthy direction for business development. A trend shown in the "Report" is that 71.5% of enterprises believe that brands that can occupy the minds of consumers have stronger competitiveness. Most brands have reached a consensus: Instead of sinking in involution, it is better to jump out and occupy the minds of consumers. Commodities can be easily copied, but brand power cannot be easily imitated or replaced. 

Gofun is a typical example. In the highly homogenized pattern of the goose down jacket market, Gofun faces a severe mental competition: On the one hand, although the "Black Gold" goose down jacket has successfully become popular, consumers "know Black Gold but not Gofun", resulting in more than 1/3 of the core search term traffic in the Douyin ecosystem being intercepted by competing products; on the other hand, the siege of international big brands and traditional old brands also intensifies the competitive pressure. 

How to achieve mental monopoly in such a market environment has become the key that Gofun urgently needs to solve. "When we hope to conduct market research, when consumers are asked about goose down jackets, more than 95% of 100 people can mention Gofun's name first." Gofun CMO Qi Peiwen shared. 

Instead of involution, it is better to strengthen the brand. Gofun focused on its core popular Black Gold series goose down jacket, clearly taking the recognizable design feature "Black Gold" as the keyword to anchor the core selling point mentality of its high-end goose down jacket. Centering on this mentality, Gofun finely dissects the four product value points of craftsmanship, material, price, and style, and integrates them into the content strategy of the full-link marketing to transform them into brand memories that are easily perceived by consumers. 

In addition, Gofun deeply integrates platform resources and continuously strengthens the high-end perception of Gofun's "Black Gold" goose down jacket through cooperation with platform IPs such as "Big Brands Are Coming" and "New Release in China" to achieve strong endorsement and large exposure. 

Through the precise anchoring of differentiated mentality, Gofun has achieved a 20-fold+ increase in the brand word search index, successfully creating the mentality of "Black Gold = Gofun = High-end Down Jacket" in the hearts of consumers, and achieving the flow from a popular product to a mentality. 

3. Compound Operation - New Increment in the Global Vision

In the context of the stock market, a single business model is difficult to meet the growth demand. For example, e-commerce merchants need to find offline selling scenarios, local merchants need to expand online selling scenarios, and lead merchants need to break through the traditional form and private message mode... Obviously, the key for brands to find new increments lies in the integration of different business scenarios, and the transformation in marketing and operation is imperative. 

Facing challenges such as high costs of the original business and intensified traffic competition, Lin's Home Furnishing has demonstrated the strong vitality of the compound operation model through the highly connected "Internet + physical store". 

On the one hand, it is the continuous deep cultivation of the new retail model, positioning for just-needed popular products and highly correlated packages, and comprehensively covering consumer touchpoints through matrix operation. 

On the other hand, it integrates the local life business as an incision to link online and offline operations. Lin's Home Furnishing is the first in the industry to promise to achieve "five samenesses" (same products, same prices, same activities, same rights and interests, same services) online and offline. This is very consistent with the business model of local life, which can break through multiple invisible barriers between different sales channels and truly make the concept of new commercial retail land. 

In addition, the goods listed by Lin's Home Furnishing are not a specific commodity, but large-denomination vouchers in different price ranges. Replacing commodity discounts with large-denomination vouchers, consumers do not need to search through a large number of SKUs, and can freely choose a flexible discount method. And large-denomination vouchers require consumers to verify and write off at the store. Combined with the in-depth experience at the store and the set product model that matches the entire house space, it effectively boosts the customer unit price. 

At the same time, the high customer unit price also feeds back to drive the natural traffic of the online live broadcast room, making the linkage of the entire channel more smooth. Judging from the results, Lin's Home Furnishing's growth performance is very impressive. During the Double 11 period, more than 500+ stores achieved sales of over one million. 

This is sufficient to prove that increments do not only come from "dividends". Starting from a global perspective and maximizing the utilization of resources through compound operations, brands can also find new incremental dividends in the constantly changing market. 

2025, Business Growth Remains Confident

The keyword for 2025 is not "quick success", but "sustainability". 

In 2025, when global economic uncertainty has become the norm, these enterprises that have achieved contrarian growth and breakthroughs in the Douyin ecosystem are proving with facts that breakthrough is not out of reach, but a choice from a profound insight into changes, and a determination to get rid of the inertia of past success. Those enterprises that are brave enough to explore the future are showing strong resilience and vitality through innovation and persistence.