Retail subscriptions & going viral on Tiktok Shop with GNC VP Vivian Chang

Imagine going viral on TikTok and getting millions of free views on your products. Now imagine connecting those views to a purchasable product on TikTok Shop … and selling out in 3 days. That’s exactly what happened with GNC’s VP of e-commerce, Vivian Chang, and it’s just 1 of the things we chatted about in a Growth Masterminds podcast focusing on retail subscriptions.

Hit play to start the convo, and keep scrolling for a few of the highlights:

Retail subscriptions: how not to suck

GNC is a massive retail company. The brand has about 2,300 stores in the U.S. alone, and a presence in over 50 countries globally. Like most retail companies, it explored subscription retail early and now does a significant percentage of its income via subscriptions.

Success in subscription retail is messy though, according to Chang, who also led D2C at Clorox. It’s easy to annoy consumers.

“I think it’s consumers’ continued search for convenience, right, to not have to put in the legwork to go get a product or I already know I like this, so I might as well save a little bit of money,” Chang says. “But I think where it’s messy is … all of us lose track even of how many different streaming services we’re subscribed to and now we’re getting to physical products that are showing up at the house … and so there is a sense of being overwhelmed.”

That’s the danger point for retail subscriptions, clearly, and that’s the dance that retail subscriptions companies need to engage in: how to be helpful without being annoying. How to offer convenience without taking advantage.

You do that by having a great and needed product, but also by offering options, says Chang.

That includes being able to change the frequency of delivery: maybe I don’t use up all the toilet paper in 30 days … maybe I need a new shipment every 45 days. It also includes being able to be flexible: maybe I want a different flavor of energy drink, or a pause when I’m on vacation, or more in a period of heavy usage.

Of course, there are challenges with this:

“I think you have to play that line with consumers of offering convenience without being annoying,” says Chang. “And then make it really easy to adjust, to pause, to swap out flavors and all of those things that can sometimes be complex operationally to execute as a brand.”

Make it special

If the retail subscription is just about you as a retailer getting revenue certainty and customer retention, it’s likely to fail. If it’s super-valuable to your customer, you’ve got a good chance of success.

But sometimes the value is outside the specific product and the convenience of delivery.

Pricing obviously matters, as does quality, says Change, but there are other components:

• Subscribe and get the newest
• Subscribe and get the best
• Subscribe and get exclusive products no-one else can get, or
• Subscribe and get it first

In a way, it can become a club too:

“At Burt’s Bees, we had the loyalty club,” she says. “The really loyal Burt’s Bees lovers could help us vote on what the next new product might be, and they would have exclusive access to it.”

Key channels for retail subscriptions, including TikTok Shop

Affiliate is a big channel. Influencers are a big channel for retail subscription companies as well, and both of those are really good at bringing new people into the brand, which is important for growth.

But it’s not always the big influencers that are the most impactful.

“Actually what I’m seeing to be most efficient is the regular folks who, like you and I, are talking about how they use this product in their everyday life,” Chang says. “And they’re showing the messiness of their home or the chaos of having kids or pets or whatever else it is. And that is what resonates because it’s like … I see that myself in that person, so I’m going to trust their recommendations.”

Other channels Chang uses at GNC include the big social and search platforms with their dynamic product ads, of course.

 

 

One place she’s seen extraordinary success was in a test of TikTok Shop:

“GNC is actively testing on TikTok Shop and we’ve actually seen pretty good success over the last couple months,” she says. “There was a product, a woman’s Stress Vita Pack, like a 30 day supply of all the supplements and pills to take, and it went viral. And we sold out of all of our inventory in 3 days.”

That’s impressive, but what’s perhaps even more impressive is that it drove other actions that might be even more important: bringing people to physical GNC stores, going to Amazon and buying there, and so on.

The best product for TikTok Shop, Chang says, is a starter pack or trial product. The price point typically needs to be lower — $30 or less — and there often needs to be a significant discount.

In other words, as I said in the podcast: it’s the new Groupon.

Interestingly, Facebook and Instagram shopping hasn’t caught on as quickly. My guess is that it’s because they have older audiences who aren’t familiar or comfortable with giving their payment information to Meta. Younger people adapt and change quicker, and they don’t have as much of a concern with handing over their credit car information.

“I think a lot of times now consumers are just used to going from Instagram to a mobile shop for the brand or a Shopify store or something like that, and it feels just as easy, without needing stay within the closed walled garden.

Retail and on-platform commerce: where does it fit?

Which brings up an interesting point: do you embrace the big social and search platforms that want to bring retail on to their own platforms, or do you always try to bring customers to owned platforms where you can capture all the revenue and much more customer data? For GNC, it’s about using those channels as open doors to bigger things down the road.

“It’s like a single product … how is that an acquisition channel to bring someone into the brand?” Chang says. “That’s how we’re thinking about it.”

Which is super smart.

Someone has already created a crowd; you’re jumping into that mix and sharing what you have. You don’t need to create your own crowd. And then, after, it’s about land and expand: how do you take that 1 sale and transition that into a deeper and longer relationship. Which speaks to packaging, messaging, and overall brand storytelling.

Because when you use TikTok Shop, you’re not getting all the customer data you would when someone buys at your own store. You’re essentially getting fulfillment data (if you’re fulfilling the product; you can also use TikTok’s own fulfillment functionality.

But: you can add those buyers to an audience in TikTok and retarget them, similarly to how Facebook and Instagram operate.

“Brands can have pretty interactive Facebook Messenger conversations with consumers, and so it’s almost taking a CRM strategy and replicating it within each of these ecosystems,” Chang says.

So much more in the full conversation …

Check out our full conversation by subscribing to our YouTube channel or adding Growth Masterminds to your list of podcasts on your favorite podcasting platform.

We also discuss:

• 00:00 Introduction to GNC’s Success on TikTok
• 01:32 Black Friday and Consumer Sentiment
• 02:22 Understanding Subscription Retail
• 08:48 Key Growth Levers in Subscription Retail
• 10:53 The Role of Key Channels in Subscription Retail
• 15:14 On-Platform Commerce: TikTok and Beyond
• 23:17 Balancing E-Commerce and Physical Stores
• 27:23 Final Thoughts and Hidden Keys to Success