At OMR Festival in Hamburg this week, TikTok is bringing to life its new global positioning, Watch it. Love it. Want it., which reflects how discovery, connection and action happen together on the platform.
People come to TikTok to discover what’s new, engage with what they love, and take part in what matters to them. Businesses everywhere, from independent creators to global companies, are tapping into that journey to drive real results. At this week’s OMR Festival, TikTok is bringing this to life in Europe through its new global TikTok for Business positioning: Watch it. Love it. Want it.
The positioning captures what happens on TikTok every day. People come to be entertained and to discover what’s new. When something catches their attention, they don’t just scroll past, they watch. When they connect with it, they share it, talk about it, and make it their own. And when they love it, they act on it.
The mid funnel on TikTok is where watching becomes wanting
TikTok proves that bringing discovery, consideration and action together in one place can help brands overcome the “messy mid-funnel” and drive real returns.
Brands selling online face mounting challenges, as consumers look for new ways to navigate overwhelming choice and economic uncertainty. In 2024, Accenture reported that 71% of consumers think purchase decisions are taking the same amount of time or longer than before, and 74% have abandoned baskets in the past three months.
As consumer habits shift towards more deliberate, considered purchase behaviours, the research suggests the so-called ‘mid-funnel’, or consideration phase, has become a critical pressure point for brands looking to drive growth.
While marketers have typically seen the mid-funnel as a place where the buying journey slows down, new research from Ipsos, polling 9000 people across 12 markets, found that TikTok has the potential to accelerate it. TikTok is ranked the most influential platform during consideration, with users showing 29% higher emotional engagement and 40% stronger brand recall than non-users. Among daily users, 93% say they would use TikTok as a research platform prior to purchase.
Exposure to advertising also plays a measurable role in consideration, with 68% of users saying advertising on TikTok prompted them to buy immediately.
Where attention turns into action
In the past, advertisers often had to piece together different platforms to build awareness and then drive sales. On TikTok, those moments are connected. One of the ways this is playing out on TikTok is through TikTok Shop, a community-powered marketplace that allows people to discover and buy products without leaving the app. TikTok Shop is already home to over 100,000 sellers* across the EU, who are reaching new customers and converting sales every day.
Within a year, TikTok Shop has established itself in new markets in Europe as a key growth driver for sellers of all sizes. To mark the first anniversary of TikTok Shop in Germany, new data from NielsenIQ’s Online Panel has shown that one in seven German shoppers have already used it to buy something at least once. The research also pointed to broad appeal across age groups, with Gen X and Gen Z leading the way: 33% of Gen X, 29% of millennials and 33% of Gen Z have bought something on TikTok Shop.
The UK shows TikTok Shop’s potential in a more established market. In the UK, where TikTok Shop has been operating for the past five years, almost a third (31%) of British online shoppers now buy on the platform. Millennials are leading this trend, with 34% making purchases on TikTok Shop, alongside a third (33%) of Gen Z, and 26% of Gen X.
Across both markets, fashion leads as the top-performing category, followed by beauty, home appliances and tech. Best-selling products reflect demand spanning a range of categories, from viral beauty must-haves such as Wonderskin’s lip stain and P Louise lip kits in the UK, to wet-dry vacuum cleaners, freeze dried strawberries and teeth whitening products emerging as customer favourites in Germany.
In the UK, TikTok Shop recently revealed 60% year on year growth for the beauty category in 2025, becoming the fourth largest beauty retailer in the country.
‘Watch it. Love it. Want it.’ captures what brands are already seeing on TikTok: the distance between attention and action is getting shorter. The research shows that TikTok is the most influential platform for closing that gap. We can see this in the growth of our direct commerce solutions like TikTok Shop, which has already established a strong foothold in the UK and is showing signs of rapid growth in Germany. For brands, the opportunity is not just to be seen, but to show up in ways that people want to watch and to build real connections with consumers. In doing so, they can drive measurable growth.
– Thomas Wlazik, GM Europe and Israel, TikTok Global Business Solutions
Brands across Europe are using TikTok Shop to reach new audiences and reignite personal connections with customers. In February, PepsiCo launched Pepsi Zero Cream Soda in two flavours on TikTok Shop ahead of its supermarket listing. The campaign reached over 30 million users in Germany, with over 150 creators participating and more than 40,000 visits to TikTok Shop as a result.
