In this Tmall Double Eleven, different from the discounted purchase of physical goods, the brand’s digital collections are sold in the form of lottery buys and gifts, and they have unknowingly displayed the future of life in front of consumers.
Imagine that when you buy a favorite physical product online, an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) based on blockchain technology also comes under your name. This digital asset is not a JPG format graphic file, but is based on blockchain technology, has a surreal design concept, and is a unique digital artwork that really exists in the cyber world.
From ordinary consumers to collectors of digital collections, it’s that simple.
This online monetization method has become the focus of many super brands in this double eleven. The head brand and Tmall jointly designed the brand’s unique digital collection, allowing the NFT concept that originally existed in the niche circle to enter the lives of ordinary consumers in a more intuitive way.
On the one hand, there are attractive discounts on various Wang Fried products, and on the other hand, “digital collections” are successively unveiled in a conceptual art gallery. The super brand has opened a new brand value exploration. For e-commerce platforms, after selling countless physical goods for more than a decade, a new commercial outlet for digital collections may be coming.
On Tmall, from buying a product to buying a digital product
Online shopping may usher in another revolution.
From the move of physical goods to online sales, to the reconstruction of online shopping scenes with live broadcast of goods, e-commerce platforms have entered the era of “goods looking for people” from the stage of “people looking for goods”. Although consumers will still be driven by price-oriented factors, their influence as consumer values is gradually declining. In the era of rational consumption, ultra-low prices are certainly eye-catching, but for generation Z consumers, consumption has become a behavior of multiple factors. The reasonableness of prices and the adaptability of lifestyles are lacking. Nothing.
These changes from the consumer side have caused brands to start thinking about how to empower their products with values that are more in line with the lifestyles of young consumers. Preferential prices are certainly one aspect, but does the plasticity of physical goods really stop at the moment they are sold to consumers?
The answer is of course no.
Especially in an era where augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are superimposed on blockchain technology, a physical product can also have its digital value. In the movie “Number One Player” released in 2018, this digital space scene based on virtual reality technology was presented to the public, sending a message: virtual reality is very likely to become the main mode of human life in the future. The role it can play is much more than just entertainment.
Imagine that today, ten years later, human beings can live in the real world and the “meta universe” space at the same time. Any physical commodity purchased in the real world can have its corresponding digital entity generated in the “meta universe” space. But unlike the wear and tear in the real world, digital products can permanently retain their original design elements. Because of the infinite space of the Internet world, there is no need to leave in the “meta universe” world. Any digital collection that you already own can be preserved forever.
This cyber lifestyle seems far away, but in fact, in this Double Eleven Tmall Digital Collection Museum, eight super brands have digitally redesigned their physical products and used digital collections. It has the first collision with consumers’ lives.
In the meta-universe world of the Tmall platform, the top brands occupying all aspects of food, clothing, housing and transportation are performing their own duties. The digital collection of Wuliangye is composed of golden and silver particles, shining like a flowing galaxy. BURBERRY is transformed into a “Bobo Deer”. When interacting with the super-realistic digital person AYAYI, part of the body will liquefy into metal. Mr. Keyan’s Bones rides on a flying carpet made of liquid metal, while moody is transformed into a starry sky flower blooming in the ice field of the meta-universe. The aliens that geeks love are like veterans in the meta-universe world, and can control the liquid metal to build the most distinctive emblem of aliens. The head brand of daily chemicals, Procter & Gamble, has been transformed into a backpack with an angular design made of liquid metal. The representative of the natural skin care industry has moved the pure nature in the real world into this digital universe. As a means of transportation, Xiaopeng Automobile has become the wings of adventurers in the meta-universe.
Every brand is familiar to consumers, but they are essentially different from physical products in the meta universe, both in terms of design and function. The products of these brands are digitized on the basis of the blockchain, and then the digital “entity” is presented through the superposition of augmented reality and virtual reality.
Consumers still only buy a physical product, but the value of the digital collections they obtain in the digital world is much higher than that of a physical product itself.
Real-time data shows that more than 20,000 people have participated in the lottery for the limited digital collections of aliens, and the number of users who participated in the lottery for the limited digital collections of Procter & Gamble and Nature Hall has exceeded 30,000.
Judging from the comprehensive evaluation of Tmall’s Super Brand Day, this Double Eleven’s Meta Universe Museum allows users to have digital collections of top brands while enhancing their consumption scenarios and decision-making time. In the not-too-distant future, “brands can hold press conferences, exhibitions, and even open stores in this pavilion. This allows brands and platforms to explore a new type of cooperation model. It was originally a single-touch consumption. The group will be infinitely enlarged in the meta-universe, and it will also bring more increments.”
The future style of life of the Z generation
As the Internet generation, Generation Z has become the main consumer of the moment. In this consumer group, fun, novel, interesting, and post-modern may all become the driving force of its consumption. A report by Kantar, a professional market research company, shows that social interaction, self-shaping, and pleasure of oneself are the three major motives that constitute the consumption of Generation Z. Their consumption concepts often pursue innovation and individuality, and have a strong dependence on a sense of science and technology.
It is not difficult to see that in the construction of the consumer civilization of Generation Z, technological progress occupies a very important position and has become a cultural feature shared by this generation of consumers. In such a cultural environment, they have a high degree of acceptance of the post-modern commercial elements of meta-universe and digital collections, and they are happy to explore them.
Steve Hoffman summarized the possible life scenarios of people in the “meta universe” era in the book “Motive Force”: When the boundary between reality and virtual world is getting blurred, human beings are likely to live in a multiple mixture in the future. In the world, and seamlessly switch between the physical real world, augmented reality and virtual reality. Furthermore, human beings use their brains to control and switch their own space and dimensions, which will also become one of the mainstreams in the meta-universe era.
Although we are still in the early stages of virtual reality, for Gen Z, the combination of virtual and reality may be the future world they live in. In such an era, the consumption scene will inevitably need to be more diversified, and the brand must also start a step earlier to occupy its own territory in this future consumption scene.
In the face of the very individual consumption concepts and behaviors of Generation Z, e-commerce platforms are also facing challenges. Imagine that when mainstream consumers are in a world that can constantly shuttle between the real world and virtual reality, what kind of platform can sell physical goods that can not only meet real needs, but also virtual digital goods that can attract consumers?
This is also a problem that Tmall wants to try to solve in this double eleven. In addition to launching the Yuan Universe Art Exhibition, giving away the goods of Yuan Universe to consumers who purchase physical goods for collection, Tmall and the head brand have also launched a digital virtual musical instrument based on the artistic design, which combines the brand’s artistic value with The potential of design is in front of consumers.
In this pavilion full of classical atmosphere, Helena Black Bandage Cream is a spiral oboe, the scissors door of Xiaopeng Motors P7 is a piano with holographic music score and electric drive, and GUERLIAN Restorative Honey Essence is transparent and has golden liquid flowing inside. The bassoon, IKEA is a transparent glass tube-shaped horn with superconducting light waves, the natural hall ice muscle water is a digital virtual cello flowing with glacier water, Li Ning is a bass drum with both trendy and sporty, and Coca-Cola is a timpani shaped like a lunar register , BOBBI BROWN is a digital virtual trumpet with silver plating on the whole body, while the Xiaomi MIX FOLD mobile phone is a harp with a floating folding screen. The Xiaomi brand said, “The MIX series is a representative model of the high-end brand of Xiaomi mobile phones. It is the pioneer and innovation leader of full-screen mobile phones. The achievements of the three world-class museum collections. It conveys the brand image of exploring the unknown and high-end technology, and is committed to creating value for the backbone of the society driven by innovation. This time it is presented in the form of digital collections, which is well delivered to consumers Out of its brand core of exploration and technology.”
The star products of these top brands have occupied the top sales list on the Tmall platform all the year round, and countless consumers can be reached. By transforming star products into digital collections in the meta universe, consumers can be exposed to this brand new lifestyle for the first time during the purchase process, and through multi-scene superimposed interactions, this lifestyle full of futuristic technology can be fully integrated. Understanding of location.
In addition, the understanding of the artistic value and appreciation of digital collections through consumer interaction, as well as strong discounts, has lowered the threshold of users’ perception of this seemingly empty consumption method. Cost-effectiveness does not conflict with the multi-value empowerment of the brand, and digital collections with a sense of design can also enter the lives of the younger generation of consumers.
From the perspective of Tmall Super Brand Day, Meta Universe allows the already relatively stubborn e-commerce field and merchants who are struggling with brand marketing empowerment to find new development space.
Let the digital collection “out of the circle”
Due to the application of blockchain technology, if you want to understand digital collections, the first thing you need to understand is the concept of NFT. Since the beginning of this year, NFT is very hot, but NFT is not too out of the circle.
Five years ago, an Ethereum cloud cat raising game called CryptoKitties became popular. This kind of encrypted game based on blockchain technology allows the “cats” owned by players to be marked with their own unique attributes and characteristics, which cannot be copied or divided. The higher the rarity, the higher the value. At its highest value, CryptoKitties’ daily turnover was in the millions of dollars. This is the first time that mysterious blockchain technology has entered the lives of ordinary people, and it is also the first stop where blockchain technology is generally accepted by generation Z users.
But soon, the NFT heat brought by this game returned to the once niche circle. From a vertical point of view, NFTs with game attributes have higher requirements for game playability, currency value and transaction speed, so the popularity quickly dropped after the emergence of a similar game. At the beginning of this year, the NFT collection game NBA Top Shot jointly launched by CryptoKitties team Dapper Labs and the NBA relied on the NBA’s own fan base to once again pull NFT products out of the circle. At the beginning of the year, the classic slam dunk digital collection card of the famous Los Angeles Lakers star Le Bron James sold for a high price of 208,000 US dollars.
Outside of the game circle, NFT also began to expand in the art field with its unrepeatable uniqueness. The most famous is the digital artwork “Everyday-the First 5000 Days” which went to Christie’s auction house and sold for US$69 million.
Whether it is the game circle or the art circle, they are still some distance away from the lives of ordinary people. For ordinary users, raising cats and collecting art in the Ethereum cloud are not indispensable necessities in life. The hot and cold attention of NFT also proves that it is currently facing a major pain point: there seems to be an imbalance between commercial value and collection value, entry barriers are too high, and the cost of the education market is too high. In a relatively cautious domestic market environment, how to make NFT enter the cognition of ordinary consumers in a more gentle and natural way requires joint exploration in multiple fields.
Judging from the research on Tmall Super Brand Day, these pain points exist at the moment, and both platforms and brands need to work hard to solve them. Tmall and the leading brand launched the digital collection on Double Eleven, launching the meta-universe art exhibition and digital virtual musical instruments, displaying physical goods and digital collections in the same space to consumers, and at the same time in the “one-yuan lottery” and “buy entities” With the help of the low-threshold gameplay of “commodity gift digital collection”, the general consumer’s understanding of the value of blockchain technology and NFT art has been opened up.
Because of the collocation with the multi-element consumption scene, users can “true” access to digital collections through page introduction and interaction while purchasing physical goods, and understand the principles and uniqueness of its design, as well as its artistic value. The blessing of platform technology allows the relatively incomprehensible post-modern design concept to be presented to users three-dimensionally, making the design of online shopping indistinguishable from real shopping. When users can truly “touch” digital collections, it will also help this digital collection that may dominate the future business model to truly go out of the circle.
Business motivation for creativity and technology blessing
The imagination space of digital collection is huge, and the creative space it possesses is also huge. Whether it is from a commercial point of view or artistic value, the cooperation between e-commerce platforms and super brands on digital collections is only the first step in the exploration. More commercial radiation capabilities, artistic creation capabilities, and extension of consumption scenarios will take a long time. Time to explore.
As Hoffman said, if we will live in a world where multiple modes coexist in the future, then seamless switching between the real world and virtual reality is also inevitable. When virtual reality also becomes a kind of reality, people will inevitably spend a lot of time and energy to build a virtual world, making it a customized scene with personal attributes and characteristics. Highlighting individuality in virtual reality is actually not much different from the current real environment. Personal tastes and choices in brand, collection, design, consumption style, etc. can also be displayed in virtual reality.
Business opportunities are also contained in such personalized customization.
For brands and platforms, the sooner they seize business opportunities, the sooner they can seize more opportunities in the future business battlefield. Exploration cannot be accomplished overnight, but it can be explored slowly and practiced step by step.
Tmall Super Brand Day believes that the development of digital collections has been quickly put on the agenda, but the overall test is the platform’s technical capabilities in AR and VR. If you want to present the open world of Metaverse to consumers based on the actual experience, the existing technological experience is far from enough, and it needs to be deeply explored. Secondly, the brand’s empowerment of value out of the digital collection also requires multi-party cooperation and strong linkage. Currently, Tmall, as a platform tool, provides assistance to super brands in terms of ecology, technology, design, and high-quality user precipitation. It aims to break the situation of single-handedness and make digital collections truly out of the circle.
The last sentence is replaced by the following one with a subject: “In the future, more and more products with meta-universe form will appear. When the qualitative change occurs, the final form of the meta-universe must be a result of everyone’s participation and progress. “Tmall Super Brand Day added.