Research On Marketing Strategy Under Social E-commerce Business Model

The advent of the "new consumption" and "new retailing" era has quietly transformed the traditional e-commerce industry.The traditional e-commerce industry has to transform and upgrade for new growth paths whether due to the increasingly fierce competition or the soaring customer acquisition costs.The emergence of Wechat commerce in 2013 and the listing of Pinduoduo in 2018 have witnessed the rise of the social e-commerce model with obvious advantages in customer acquisition efficiency,purchase conversion efficiency and customer experience.Take Pinduoduo as an example.Since it was founded in 2015,it has gained 100 million users in only one year,successfully became listed in three years and the market value even surpassed JD.com in 2019,once becoming the second-largest company in China's e-commerce industry.Even in the e-commerce industry's maturity period,Pinduoduo still has an impressive performance.In addition,the Pinduoduo Model is increasingly valued by industry leaders such as Taobao and JD.The model may be an important development direction of e-commerce in the future.As the latest practice in the field of e-commerce,the social e-commerce is a novel model in terms of the innovative marketing strategy,which may shed light not only to the traditional e-commerce companies,but also to the mass marketing theory and practice in the "new consumption" background.In an attempt to explore the innovative marketing strategies of social e-commerce,I selected Pinduoduo as a case to explore Pinduoduo's marketing strategy innovation from the value creation perspective,basing on theories of business model and relationship marketing.The components of this paper come as follows.I first introduce the development background of e-commerce business industry and review the literature at home and abroad.The foundation is laid for the later discussion from the dual perspectives of practice and theory.Secondly,the value creation logic of Pinduoduo is analyzed from the theoretical perspective of the business model,including the definition of value proposition,the value creation and transmission mechanism,and the value acquisition mechanism.Thirdly,4R theory is introduced to demonstrate Pinduoduo's marketing innovations of association strategy,reaction strategy,relationship strategy and return strategy.This research has important theoretical and practical significance.On the theoreticallevel,this study,introducing the practice of Pinduoduo's marketing innovation,expands the boundary of the existing relationship marketing theory from the perspectives of value co-creation and generalized customer relationships.It is argued that relationship marketing should not be confined to the framework of traditional consumer relationships.The marketing tools need to be reexamined in a broader context.On the practical level,the companies should focus on marketing opportunities beyond consumer relationships and reshaping marketing strategies with decentralized design.