THE APP FOCUSED ONLY ON PRODUCT REVIEWS
West 5th Street(西五街) is a social community that focuses on sharing beauty and fashion product reviews. So far, it has accumulated more than 6 million young users, mostly young women. Together with eight other young platforms (such as Bilibili, IQIYI and Netease Cloud Music), West 5th Street ranked as 2020’s “Best Innovative Entertainment” app in China. Its target audience and users are post-90s and post-00s consumers. For this group of young consumers, information about beauty product offers, the reputation of new products, and trendy new product launches that other people are using are the focus, which helps consumers experience new products and follow trends at low cost. As for the West 5th Street app, the primary function is to invite ordinary consumers and KOCs to test beauty products for free and share their product usage reviews with text, pictures and video notes.
Providing Brands With Product Seeding Opportunities
The new generation of consumers are more dependent on social media and tend to reach purchase decisions through “product seeding" behaviour. With a platform culture built around the idea that "everyone is a reviewer", West 5th Street builds a strong social relationship community and product review content with a strong sense of authenticity. In West 5th Street, the content produced by creators comes from real review comments, and users can explore these to influence their purchase decisions by sharing reviewers.
Brands can showcase products on West 5th Street, and choose reviewers who are more suitable for them to in line with the creators' style, and run through the seeding scene with a large-scale “trial”.
In addition, the link with social media platforms like Weibo and Douyin allows West 5th Street to have the dual abilities of content aggregation and brand traffic conversion. This can help brands to push their traffic reach and sales conversions, and close the loop of their marketing chain.
Free product trial recruitment / KOC product review content / Interest group category
West 5th Street VS. RED
West 5th Street and RED are both brand/product seeding platforms. However, the core difference between West 5th Street and RED is "trial + sharing". On West 5th Street, everything can be tried and tested – food, fashion, clothes, beauty products and fashion accessories are all available to try for free and to share.
When young people share their daily lives, they’re telling the world what kind of person they are. By watching others share, they’re actually exploring other versions of themselves. Therefore, sharing behaviour that attracts young people must be welcoming. The app’s "trial" feature is a breakthrough, encouraging more young people to create truly valuable content, to do real sharing, and to output only the content that people love. This helps young West 5th Street users find products suitable for themselves and their own lives, while watching other people's trials, and influencing others through their own trials.
More importantly, West 5th Street brings people together into a small community through the same preferences, and within the community, members being among other likeminded people. The app also invites KOLs from various categories to provide original content for the platform on a long-term basis, which increases the stickiness of the platform and users while adding different types of engaging content.
Localized livestreams offer further opportunities by being able to be much more specific in terms of local culture, activities, weather and more..
