Editor’s lead: Nowadays, more and more people keep pets, and various offline pet services are also developing in full swing. However, online pet apps are all outstanding. Why is this? Is online pet demand a false demand? In this paper, the author selected Boqi Pet and Chongming two apps, both of which focus on shopping malls and social interaction, and made an analysis and comparison. Let’s take a look.

When the material foundation reaches the corresponding level, the spiritual needs become particularly prominent. In a modern society with relatively perfect materials, people often need spiritual comfort in different ways. It is worth noting that more and more urban residents choose to keep pets as their spiritual sustenance.
The number of urban residents keeping pets exceeds 100 million, and pet services such as offline pet shops and pet hospitals are developing in full swing, but online pet apps have been developing for a long time. After years of failed online pet apps, many people and even investors think that "pet apps, especially pet social apps, are false demands".
Is this really the case? I hope this analysis of competing products can provide readers with some thinking reference.


According to the analysis and prediction of Ai Media’s White Paper on Pet Industry Consumption in China, the scale of pet industry in China will reach 348.8 billion yuan in 2021. In recent years, the scale of pet industry will continue to expand, and it is expected to reach 445.6 billion yuan in 2023. The scale of pet industry is expanding rapidly, and the market development prospect is improving.
In the pet industry, pet food accounts for 40%, followed by pet medical treatment, aquarium exotic pets, pet service, pet supplies and pet trading. Pet basic services occupy an absolute position in the industry, and the deep-seated consumer demand of pet owners has not yet matured. The forms of pet service are becoming more and more abundant. With the upgrading of residents’ consumption and the change of pet concept and pet role, the pet service industry will grow steadily.

According to Ai Media data, in 2021, the age distribution of pet owners is between 85 and 95, and the age level is younger. There are more female owners than male owners, reaching 61%; The academic background is mainly undergraduate, which can reach 74%; Most pet owners are married with children, reaching 61%.

According to the data of Ai Media, in the investigation of pet-keeping motives, 90% of pet owners keep pets for emotional motives such as adding interest, decompressing and relieving loneliness. Heavy work constantly squeezes the lives of modern people, and pets can bring more happiness to people and help modern people to relieve stress and loneliness.
Most of the pets are friends and family members with companionship function, and 20% of pet owners regard their pets as children, and cultivate love through similar parenting relationships.
From the above, it can be further concluded that pet owners are mainly young people with high education and spending power. They generally keep pets for emotional motives and can give them care to some extent.


It can be concluded from the above data that at present, the pet industry is still dominated by entities, and the development trend of online main business is homogeneous, leaning too much towards shopping malls. Pet app is still in the exploration stage, and its functions are mainly limited to: drying (sharing status), purchasing (consulting pet diseases, pet breeding experience, etc.), buying (purchasing pet products), and shopping (O2O, online diversion to offline).
Generally speaking, the pet APP market is a relatively blank market, and an APP with quality and connotation that can satisfy pet lovers in all aspects has not yet come out.
According to the current development status of the pet industry and the development trend of content socialization, this paper selects Boqi Pet and Chongming, both of which focus on shopping malls and socialization, to analyze and try to explore the current living conditions of pet apps.




In the function of the mall, the construction of Boqi Pet Mall is more perfect, covering all aspects of pet goods, and at the same time, adding interest to the mall through various activities; However, Chong Ming is slightly inferior, with key functions but not enough interest and classification science.
To a certain extent, this is due to the different positioning of the two. Chong Ming started in the community and spent more energy on community construction. The mall is currently in its infancy; The primary goal of Boqi pet is to build a shopping mall, which is qualitatively different from the rationality of functional partition and the beauty of page design.

The community construction of Chong Ming is based on the possible problems of pet owners at all stages, but the classification is too detailed and does not have a certain general classification. Boqi pets pay attention to the construction of classification, and add dynamic recommendations based on five major sections. Although it has generalization and beauty, there is no qualitative breakthrough in functional construction.
At present, the biggest problems of the two are: low willingness of users to participate in the community, low intensity of interaction, and users’ dependence on their pet community is far lower than other social media.
Boqi pet:

Pet Ming:


1) Boqi pet


Advantages:
- Interest recommendation, know user preferences in advance, and make targeted recommendations.
- You can skip directly without choosing a pet.
Disadvantages:
- The location permission query does not set the Disagreement option.
- Mobile phone number must be bound.
- There are many kinds of pets, but they are incomplete
2) Chong Ming


Advantages:
- The registration page is soft and friendly.
- There are fewer registration processes.
- Multichannel login
Disadvantages:
- High entry threshold, only for people with cats or dogs.
Boqi pet operation mode:Open the channel between private domain and public domain, public domain customers are oriented to private domain, and attach importance to high-value users in private domain; Multi-channel combination of innovation, reaching different types of users, so that the efficiency of innovation is the highest; Three-step operation:
- Savage growth stage: all users are indiscriminately drained to the private domain traffic pool, and the number of users increases sharply.
- Classified operation stage: classified and layered operation according to user tags.
- Strategic operation stage: At present, we use all resources, combine public domain and private domain to run business, and pay attention to the opening of the whole platform and the management of users’ whole life cycle.
Chong Ming operation mode:Focus on community advantages, export community content through multiple channels, and attract users with independent brands as the core.
Summary:Boqi Pet and Pet Ming operate in two different ways. Boqi Pet adopts the strategy of giving priority to private domain traffic, converting users to private domain through various public domain channels, and operating the brand in all directions. Boqi Pet APP is only a part of its private domain.
Recently, Chong Ming’s operation focused on expanding its own brand and strengthening the construction and promotion of its own brand. However, in reality, the operation began to gradually withdraw from the social platform. Take Chong Ming’s recent Weibo as an example, the time was fixed on November 18, 2021.
Boqi pet:Ensure the largest traffic entrance and integrate all available resources. There are Tmall, JD.COM, Tik Tok, bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Douban, Zhihu, Weibo and other entrances online; There are shops and exhibitions exposed offline; In addition, there are advertisements in the circle of friends.
Pet Ming:Multi-channel social media put in content, major application markets went online, and launched their own pet products brand of the same name "Chong Ming".
Summary:Boqi pets improve their exposure through high coverage and high frequency promotion mode. However, the promotion of pet Ming is weak, and there are many ways to promote it, but the form and frequency of promotion are far less than that of Boqi pet.
The promotion of both on social platforms is based on cute animals (that is, community content), but there is no breakthrough construction in the APP community, and the traffic attracted is also lost in a short period of time.
Both Boqi Pet and Chong Ming are profitable by selling goods in shopping malls, which are too single and lack of interest, and the replacement rate by large shopping platforms is high.


According to Ai Media Consulting, there are three typical business models of Internet pet service: pet e-commerce model, pet community model and pet online to offline.
At present, different enterprises adopt different modes, some adopt a single mode, and some adopt a mixed mode (adopting two or more modes, such as e-commerce+community, community +O2O, etc.). In addition, it also includes pet medical treatment (mainly online consultation, taking JD Health Pet Hospital as an example), intelligent hardware, pet consultation platform and pet store management system.
As far as the current Internet pet service is concerned, pet e-commerce has an absolute advantage, with large-scale online shopping platform and old pet e-commerce brand "Boqi Pet" as the main force in the industry. According to relevant data, the market share of the top five domestic brands is less than 20%, and the platform brand effect is even greater.
In the composite mode, all platforms have adopted the mode of e-commerce+community+medical care. No matter what the initial development is, in the construction process, the development direction is biased towards e-commerce, and the pet shopping market of the immature non-large online shopping platform is further divided.
In the market competition, the competitors of a single e-commerce development platform are far from their own homogeneous platforms, but those online shopping malls (Tmall, JD.COM, etc.) that have already occupied an absolute position in the shopping market.
On April 14th, 2022, Boqi Pet (BQ.US) received a letter from NYSE on April 5th, informing the company that its total market value and shareholders’ equity were lower than the compliance standards of NYSE. It is not known whether the platform economy developed by the single and independent pet mall can continue its previous glory, but the author believes that the difficulties faced by the relatively single pet mall development model will only become more and more severe.
In the process of searching the information of pet socialization, I found some interesting views on pet socialization.

Pet socialization = pseudo-demand?

In the public information arrangement of Tencent.com in 2019, we can see that after 2012, the online platform focusing on pet socialization, after experiencing the entrepreneurial fever and investment fever, the overall living situation is not optimistic.
So, is pet socialization really a false demand?
I don’t think so. On the contrary, it should be the core of a pet internet service construction, but there is no effective construction experience in the market at present.
1) community access is strict, and effective interactive crowds are isolated.
In the process of understanding these social apps containing pets, the author found that community designers set strict access to the community. Take the community of Boqi Pet and Weibo, a pet blogger in Weibo, for example, this featured recommendation of Boqi Pet has only won 16 likes, while the blog post of the pet blogger published just four hours ago can get 6000+ likes.
What the community needs after all is interaction. Without interaction, the community can only be a stagnant pool. How can we talk about further development? In the construction of pet socialization, the entry threshold is generally too high, but in reality, it is often some "cloud pet parents" who interact with dynamic publishers.
In the first step of entering the community, this group of people with great power is isolated. To a certain extent, it not only reduces users, but also weakens the enthusiasm of pet users for dynamic output. The demand for the platform by pet owners is naturally much lower than that of other social platforms.
2) The community construction is homogeneous, and the platform community is highly replaceable.
From the following survey data, it can be seen that in 2021, users interested in pets in China showed great concern about pet topics, but the attention channels were concentrated in comprehensive social apps such as Tik Tok in Weibo.
Modern social interaction needs to be unique. Zhihu is famous for its knowledge-based social interaction, and Douban is famous for its group social interaction. What kind of attitude should pet social interaction take in the public view?
The author believes that "pet socialization" should be redefined. The definition of pet socialization given by most pet community apps on the market is: pet socialization refers to the socialization of pet owners with other pet owners by posting dynamic and private messages. Social ways are single and boring.
According to relevant reports, the behavioral motivation of pet owners to share the news is often to get attention and evaluation, and they have certain exclusive psychology. It is often the pet lovers who can give their pets the most initiative.
Therefore, the concept of pet socialization needs to be redefined by relevant practitioners.
The author believes that pet socialization needs to be discussed through three questions, that is, who socializes? Socialize with who? How to socialize? Pet socialization includes four subjects, namely, pets, pet owners, other pet owners and pet lovers. Social behavior needs to be further explored based on these four aspects.
Can pets socialize with pets, and can pets socialize with other pet owners? How do pet owners socialize? How do pets connect with pet lovers? In the social process, what form can’t be achieved by external social functions and is irreplaceable?
When there is a real platform to clarify the relationship between them and build channels between them through appropriate forms, it will naturally usher in the prosperity of pet socialization.
At present, the online pet service market is still in the primary stage, with scattered industries and low industry concentration, and lacks a lasting one-stop pet service platform. Resources are scattered on various platforms, and it is necessary to run step by step to meet the needs of pets. Pet owners are miserable.
The author believes that online pet service is still a blue ocean at present, and whoever occupies a place in the pet social ecosystem first can become the leader of online pet service first.
Note: All the above are the opinions of new learners. If there are any mistakes, please correct them.
This article was originally published by @noora. Everyone is a product manager. It is forbidden to reprint without permission.
The title map comes from Unsplash and is based on CC0 protocol.