Text/Meng Qian
A mask puts the dispute between the anchor, the brand and the platform that is already an undercurrent on the table.
L'Oréal Paris claimed that a mask was pre-sold among the head anchors as the largest force of the year, and the result was more than 100 yuan more expensive than the brand's self-broadcast room, which caused public anger.
L'Oréal customer service said that Li Jiaqi said that the low price is not counted" "Should L'Oréal refund the price difference"... L'Oréal, an international brand with a history of 100 years, fell into a crisis of public opinion, went on a hot search for three days, and the total reading volume was several billion, which provoked Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya to openly call the two head anchors.
The incident has been fermented for a few days, complaints, disputes, apologies, solutions and other plots have been staged in turn, ostensibly a game and contest between brands and anchors, but the ecological dilemma of live streaming with goods has gradually emerged. Can the anchor and the brand cooperate happily and continue to live broadcast the feast with goods? The core question is, who has the final say on the "lowest price", is it sustainable for live streaming?
The storm caused by the "lowest price"
On the evening of October 20, the double 11 pre-sale started, Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, the two "kings of goods" banged gongs and drums to open the pre-sale, the data shows that the sales of Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room finally reached 10.653 billion yuan that night, and the sales of Wei Ya live room reached 8.252 billion yuan, and the two sold a total of about 18.9 billion yuan.
That night, the brand that appeared in the live broadcast room became the focus of 500 million viewers, and Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya listed 17 and 15 products of L'Oréal Paris respectively. The disputed ampoule mask sold hundreds of thousands of good sales. At that time, the price of the live broadcast room was 429 yuan and 50 pieces, and after various discounts were superimposed, it reached about 368 yuan.
However, after the end of the pre-sale period, L'Oréal Paris's official flagship store issued tens of thousands of 999 minus 200 store coupons in early November, plus various platform offers, etc., the lowest price of this product in its self-broadcast room was 257.7 yuan.
In L'Oréal's early Weibo promotion, it was claimed that Li Jiaqi's pre-sale was the biggest effort of the year, but the expression was deleted on the day of Double 11.
A group of consumers squatted and fought for speed, thinking that they had bought the lowest price in The live broadcast room of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, but they saw that the difference between the shipment price and the official hand was more than one hundred, and they were instantly dumbfounded.
As a result, consumers spontaneously jointly complained, and on the black cat complaint platform, the number of collective complaints of "L'Oréal Paris false publicity, issuing a large number of coupons after paying the deposit, deceiving consumers, and not treating the difference equally" has reached 38153.
Some consumers inquired about this matter in the L'Oréal flagship store, and the customer service responded: "Li Jiaqi said that low price is low price, Li Jiaqi is also a worker, and then the discount is also decided by the official event planner." ”
Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya could not sit still, on the evening of the 17th, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya both issued a statement to suspend all cooperation with L'Oréal before the matter was properly resolved, and asked L'Oréal to give a solution, limited to 24 hours.
L'Oréal issued a statement in the early morning of the 18th, publicly apologizing to consumers, and said that the promotion mechanism was too cumbersome and complex to bring trouble to consumers, and the solution given that night was 200 yuan for consumers who had shopped for 999 yuan without threshold vouchers, and two coupons for consumers less than 999 yuan were 499-100.
As soon as the solution came out, it caused strong dissatisfaction among consumers: "Consumers are not treated equally, and they want to continue to cut leeks by issuing coupons, and they are strongly required to refund the price difference!" Xijiang, the founder of Xijiang New Retail Research Institute, analyzed that there must be a mistake in this incident, and there is no doubt that the brand has to bear responsibility.
The Zhejiang Provincial Consumer Protection Commission said that it will continue to pay attention to the incident, and advised operators not to always want to use cumbersome promotional rules to add "blockage" to consumers, and to incarnate "Sherlock Holmes" and "calculator" to find the most preferential way to place orders. Enterprises that make consumers "tired" and "cold" will eventually no longer be chosen and trusted.
Zhang Xiongwei, a lawyer at Beijing Weiheng (Hangzhou) Law Firm and director of the Consumer Rights Protection and Anti-Unfair Competition Practice, believes that L'Oréal Paris's behavior is suspected of false publicity, price gouging and unfair competition. He explained that he claimed to lock in the "maximum strength of the year" in the live broadcast room, and finally failed to fulfill the price commitment, suspected of deceiving and misleading consumers with false or misleading commercial publicity, and also suspected of unfair competition.
Blackmailing consumers to make brands?
L'Oréal Paris belongs to the L'Oréal Group, which has well-known brands such as Helena, Armani and Lancôme. According to the financial report data, e-commerce channels are becoming increasingly important to L'Oréal Group, and in the first three quarters of 2021, e-commerce channel sales increased by 29.7% year-on-year, accounting for 26.6% of total sales.
L'Oréal and the head anchor binding time has been a long time, as early as 2016, Li Jiaqi stood out through L'Oréal and its company Behind the United States one cooperation of the Internet celebrity incubation project, relevant data show that Every year Li Jiaqi for L'Oréal live broadcast 100 times, the past two years L'Oréal Group has been working closely with Li Jiaqi, covering all kinds of makeup and skin care products, giving a relatively large discount.
Third-party data show that during the Double 11 period, L'Oréal Paris took a total of 57 pieces of goods in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast, with sales of 1.3872 million and total sales of 497 million. According to the Tmall Double 11 war report, L'Oréal Paris has a turnover of more than 2 billion yuan. This ampoule mask is the only beauty blockbuster with sales of more than 500 million yuan. In contrast to the data, the importance of the head anchor to the brand is self-evident.
Since the beginning of this year, Tmall has vigorously supported brand self-broadcasting, during the double 11 period, Taobao Live has more than 100,000 brands for self-broadcasting, 43 brands have a turnover of more than 100 million yuan in self-broadcasting, and the proportion of brands and merchants in Taobao Live broadcasting has reached 70%.
During the important promotion, the traffic hits, and the brand naturally wants to retain. Third-party data show that the live broadcast data of the double 11 L'Oréal self-operated flagship store has increased significantly, in the past month, the average number of viewers per game reached 4.4 million, the average sales per game was close to 80,000, and the average sales per game was close to 30 million, while the average number of views per game in the previous six months was only a few hundred thousand, and the sales and sales were also ten times less.
Under the situation that traffic and sales have changed, the game between the brand side and the channel side is also even more turbulent.
In the price of 257.7 yuan obtained by netizens, four red envelopes need to be used, one is a store coupon, one is a cross-store full reduction coupon, in addition to a beauty surprise shopping coupon, as well as consumers through the activity to receive meow sugar red packets, these red envelopes are indispensable. Behind the red packets may be hidden the open struggle between the brand, the platform and the head anchor.
Wang Gao, a marketing professor at China Europe International Business School, said that live broadcasting has increasingly become a form that brands can't get around, and the platform is currently vigorously supporting brand self-broadcasting, and many brands are also building their own live broadcast channels. But the biggest problem facing brands in the self-broadcast room is where the traffic comes from. "The low price can be sold by anyone, but who will buy it is a problem, so the brand needs to pay for the traffic of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya."
During the double 11 period, Li Jiaqi publicly shouted that if the brand wants long-term cooperation, it must fix the lowest price of the pre-sale. Wang Gao analyzed that the general brand and the head anchor will sign the relevant agreement, and there is an insurance period of one month to three months. During the Double 11 period, due to the complexity of the promotion mechanism, the brand may not have figured out the price after the discount of each channel. "The source of the contradiction is that the brand wants too much, and the two groups of people who sell goods in the flagship store and cooperate with Li Jiaqi do not cooperate well and mess up."
Xijiang said that L'Oréal is a big brand, not a weak one, and apologized for compensation mainly because its own logo misled consumers. As an emerging Internet celebrity channel, Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and other head anchors have the characteristics of strong explosive power, high single sales, and suitable for promotion. At the same time, the consumer population radiated is younger, and it is the user that L'Oréal and other big brands want, so they will not sit idly by.
Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya were praised by many netizens in this incident and reacted quickly and domineeringly: if the brand does not compensate, it will make compensation at the bottom.
Wang Gao believes that for the head anchor, the last thing to offend and the last thing to lose is the consumer, who promises the lowest price, and must do the lowest price, otherwise it will cause the loss of customers. He explained that Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya are sandwiched between consumers and brands, and it is inevitable to make a gesture of favoring consumers and play games through their own strength. Assuming that the brand does not compensate, it can still be excused in the future.
This does not indicate that Li Jiaqi is coercing the brand. This matter is a bigger test for L'Oréal. The huge consumer base behind Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya is enough for them to blackmail consumers to make the brand, if L'Oréal does not take responsibility this time, can they afford the consequences of non-cooperation. Wang Gao said that L'Oréal must consider this layer: under the huge traffic, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya are already the spokespersons of consumers. The information in the live broadcast room is too transparent, the fermentation is too fast, compared with the offline channel, the reference effect is stronger, and the price difference is more likely to trigger public opinion events.
The lowest price is not sustainable
According to public data, as of June 2021, the scale of online live broadcasting users in China reached 638 million, an increase of 75.39 million year-on-year, accounting for 63.1% of the total netizens. Among them, the scale of e-commerce live broadcast users was 384 million, an increase of 75.24 million year-on-year, accounting for 38.0% of the total netizens, and the growth rate was rapid. Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's fans have achieved a leap from 0 to 100 million in just a few years.
"In recent years, consumer psychology and behavior have changed, consumers are increasingly difficult to stay on a page to flip through the goods, and everyone pours into the live broadcast room to watch the live. Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya came into being, initially cultivated by the tilt of platform traffic, and the brand is a strong supporter. Wang Gao believes that concentrating traffic in the head anchor at the lowest price, resulting in the ecology of live streaming with goods is deformed. At present, brands and platforms are difficult to ride the tiger.
Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's current position in the live e-commerce market has not yet been shaken by a third person, in the past Double 11 period, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya ranked in the top two, Li Jiaqi sales of 21.7 billion, Wei Ya sales of 19.9 billion, in the third place Sydney sales of only 4.5 billion.
"If there are 10 Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, there will be more choices for brands." Wang Gao pointed out that at present, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya can be said to be the strongest commercial bodies in China, and the scale of live broadcasting, sales and traffic brought by the two cannot be copied, and brand owners have no choice. Therefore, the lowest price is definitely the head anchor has a greater impact, and the conditions they put forward are difficult for the brand side to refuse. "Double 11 For many brands, sales may be the most important. Brands may become winners if they cooperate with the head anchor, and if they do not cooperate, they may become losers, but if everyone cooperates, they are all losers, and this situation of prisoner's dilemma is currently difficult to break. ”
Xi Jiang believes that in the live broadcast room of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, consumers are loyal to low prices, and if there is no low price, consumers may go away. But such an outcome is still a combination of brands and platforms.
Previously, the relevant departments banned the use of the lowest price and other languages in publicity, but without the lowest price, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's live broadcast room was still deeply loved by consumers. Beauty and skin care consumers are particularly strong, and many products are still the largest in the whole network after being given away.
"At present, consumers in Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's live broadcast room will preset the lowest price, and everyone's cognitive inertia towards them is very strong." When people find out that they are not buying the lowest price, they will be very angry. Wang Gao analyzed the group sentiment reflected in this incident through the reference effect.
"There's a way for brands to circumvent this situation, and it wouldn't have happened without low-priced high-profile publicity." Wang Gao gave suggestions to the brand side. He said that on the one hand, brands should reduce their dependence on head anchors and build their own live broadcast channels, on the other hand, they should adjust their mentality and do not expect astronomical sales to appear in a live broadcast. "If companies don't want the lowest price, they can have more options." He added, "Blindly low prices can only reduce their brand value, not sustainable, and we should pay more attention to product and brand building." ”
Xijiang said that in the future, brands should balance the relationship between selling goods and carrying goods, which means the balance between their own channels, systems and external talents. The scene of live streaming with goods needs to be defined by the brand, and the anchor is mainly a channel for clearing the goods, and cannot become a daily sales channel.