Text | Xin Entropy, written by | Bai Qian and Li Lili, edited by | Yuemi
Overnight, the attitude of Douyin users towards star anchor Zhang Ting has changed by one hundred and eighty degrees.
According to Xinjiao data, on December 28, Zhang Ting just completed a live broadcast with 5 million sales; in the comment area of the work, fans affectionately called Zhang Ting "Sister Ting". After the MLM incident was exposed, users began to focus on how to refund the goods.
On December 23, in response to the verification letter of Li Xu's anti-transmission and anti-deception team, the reply of the Shijiazhuang Yuhua District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau showed that The operator of the daily chemical brand "TST Court Secret" was suspected of using the Network to engage in pyramid schemes. Since June 5 this year, the Shijiazhuang Yuhua District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau has filed an investigation into Shanghai Darway Trading Co., Ltd.
The secret of TST Court is the brand founded by the celebrity couple Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang in Taiwan, and entered the mainland region in 2013, and the products include creams, repair creams, masks, moisturizers, serums, micron water and so on.
On the TST Court's secret official website, "New Entropy" found that the TST Court secretly quoted the official public account "Green Qingpu" data of Shanghai Qingpu District, showing that with a tax payment of 2.1 billion yuan, the Shanghai Dalway Company operated by Zhang Ting entered the list of the top 100 outstanding enterprises in Qingpu District in 2018. In the same year, TST Court secretly entered the list of China's top 20 micro-businesses.
On December 29, in response to the outside world's pyramid schemes, the official Weibo account of Ting Secret issued a response saying that the company has always operated legally, and everything is normal at present, and it will actively cooperate with the relevant departments.
In fact, since entering the mainland market, TST Secret has always faced a polarized public opinion environment. On the one hand, the brand has adopted a high-profile marketing strategy, and stars such as Lin Chiling, Zhao Wei, Liu Tao, Xu Zheng, Zhang Xinyu and other celebrities have spoken out for the TST court secret brand platform; on the other hand, consumer complaints about TST court secret skin care allergies and bad faces have occurred repeatedly, and related products have been denounced as "IQ tax". This time, it fell into the MLM controversy, which once again dragged the brand into the quagmire of public doubt.
01 The Degenerate "Micro-Business Empire"
In the TST Court Secret Official APP, the content released by the TST Secret Official Account shows that agents joining the TST Court Secret brand do not need to invest, do not need to hoard goods, have no risk of loss, and can achieve "multiple salary increases a year", "making money while taking care of the family", "playing all over the world" and so on.
Judging from the other contents of the TST Court Secret Official APP Forum, there is no shortage of agents xiti new cars, 4 years to earn 100,000 and other chicken blood content. In addition, Lin Ruiyang has repeatedly used his identity as a public figure as a TST court secret brand platform, and in the TST court secret agent group, Lin Ruiyang is called "Big Brother Lin".
It is worth noting that in the weChat business practical training course of the TST Ting Secret Community, the Ting Secret brand emphasizes that agents operate 5-10 mobile phones per person, and obtain customers through various channels such as WeChat Circle of Friends, WeChat Group, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, kuaishou, etc., and collectively refer to customers as "newcomers".
One of the micro-business practical strategies wrote: "Use the gift package to guide the new person to open the card and download the APP, and as long as the new person comes to you, the fish will be hooked." Another strategy to the newcomer to the captain to bring a detailed combing: "In August in various channels to recruit eight or ninety new people, and finally these newcomers made 50,000 performance, calculate it, 50,000 performance plus the new policy rewards of the big brother (Lin Ruiyang), the income is almost 7,000, everyone thinks about it, what job is there now, let you earn seven or eight thousand a month? ”
Among them, "guiding newcomers to open cards" not only represents the membership card in the general sense, but also represents the blue card agent and red card agent secretly set up by the TST court. Official information shows that TST members enjoy gift packages, vouchers, discounts, rebates and other benefits, for consumers, members enjoy the use of skin care products provided by exclusive customer service; for "newcomers" who aspire to become agents, members enjoy product training, micro-business training, product information and other help training.
According to the disclosure of Li Xu's anti-deception team, TST agents are divided into two types: blue card and red card, of which red card members have the qualification to open cards, and blue cards need to accumulate a certain team performance upgrade. According to the performance level of the red card agent, the TST court secretly offers different degrees of rebate ratios.
To this end, TST's agents generally develop downlines by setting up new companies and seek larger-scale hoarding, so as to obtain more preferential prices for their subordinate agents and consumers.
In addition to the sales network that emphasizes "pulling people's heads", TST's secret products have also been repeatedly questioned by the market. A TST court secret consumer told "New Entropy" that his use of TST court secret frozen age honey caused severe facial ulceration, and gradually improved after switching to other brands.
Official publicity shows that the secret core technology of TST Ting is the active yeast extracted from fresh milk, which produces vitality by infiltrating live yeast molecules into the skin at high osmotic pressure, activating the skin surface and skin, and replenishing water molecules and nutrients. A beauty brand practitioner told "New Entropy" that the concept of live yeast secretly emphasized by the TST court is essentially an IQ tax. The addition of live flora to cosmetics can cause microbial infections, which is the core cause of bad face caused by TST Court secret products.
Knowing that the last beauty purchaser said that the cost of TST products is extremely low, and the pictures posted show that the Tmall flagship store sells 298 yuan of live yeast masks, and the price is 14 yuan. Although the veracity of this statement is not verified, there are many problems with TST products. It is worth noting that some TST products use foreign language packaging to mislead consumers, and their bottles are written in English, Spanish and other fake overseas products, but the spelling error is full of errors. As the first ingredient of a mask "water", Spanish is aqua, but is written as aqu, the instructions are also various grammatical errors continuously.
02 Micro-business "cross-border" MLM, where is the boundary?
WeChat has one of the biggest characteristics, the product is the circle of acquaintance consumption diffusion.
The sales of its products are mainly based on personal trust, so behaviors such as "family recommendation", "prize forwarding", and "hierarchical agent" have become the default play of micro-business for many years. Now the TST that has survived for up to eight years is suspected of pyramid schemes, which also makes Xiao Tong, who is a part-time micro-business on a sideline, feel pressured, he said to "New Entropy" that he is also doing hierarchical agents, and gives the agent symbolic rebates, at present, what he wants to find out most is that in the end, the TST is played excessively, or there are new changes in the micro-business environment? How should the boundaries of the acts involving micro-businesses suspected of pyramid schemes be defined?
In this regard, Qin Ming, director of the Commercial Criminal Department of Beijing Jingshi (Zhengzhou) Law Firm, told "Xin Entropy" that according to the provisions of China's "Regulations on the Prohibition of Pyramid Schemes", pyramid scheme activities refer to the behavior of organizers or operators to develop personnel, by calculating and paying remuneration based on the number of personnel directly or indirectly developed by the developed personnel or sales performance, or requiring the developed personnel to pay a certain fee as a condition to obtain the qualification to join, disrupting economic order and affecting social stability. Its distinctive features are the payment of "entry fees", "head pulling" and "team remuneration".
As for whether Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang are suspected of committing crimes and whether they will be punished, lawyer Qin Ming explained that in conjunction with the "Provisions of the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security on the Standards for Filing and Prosecuting Criminal Cases Under the Jurisdiction of Public Security Organs", if there are more than 30 people suspected of organizing or leading pyramid scheme activities and the level is above three levels, the organizers and leaders should be criminally prosecuted. Judging from the disclosure of relevant information at present, the Ting secret brand of Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang has a 7-level agency system, and there are many participants. Therefore, from a hierarchical point of view, it meets the formal requirements for the crime of organizing and leading pyramid schemes. However, whether to transfer it to the public security organs should also await further investigation results.
According to the official website of TST, compared with the drawbacks of ordinary micro-business hoarding pressure and large investment, TST's agency model is more attractive, first of all, "zero" cost input, no need to hoard goods. An article on the TST WeChat public account shows that TST adopts a multi-layer differential commission reward model, and the higher the level, the more rewards there are. In the case of red card agents, their salaries are composed of individual sales commissions and differential commissions. Specifically, the individual sales commission of the red card agent is divided into 7 levels, ranging from 15% to 32% according to the level of the level, while the level is divided according to the team performance.
In addition, the red card agent has a difference of 2%-17%, a 4%-6% self-media bonus, and a 4.5% management bonus for the team owner after becoming the founder. According to the life newspaper, a self-proclaimed chairman of TST Million Company Liu said that the TST agent adopts a commission rebate system, and the company will directly remit the commission of the previous month to the agent's bank account on the 15th of each month. 15% of the sales of the new agent is a performance commission, that is, a sales commission of 100 yuan and 15 pieces.
What we really need to define is whether the sales behavior is compliant, the essence of sales is to get paid by selling products or providing formal services, without actual goods or malicious exaggeration of the value of goods, and it is very likely that illegal profits in the form of "pulling people's heads" and collecting membership fees are likely to be pyramid schemes.
It is worth noting that China is also actively exploring and continuously strengthening the management of e-commerce such as micro-business and direct sales. At the beginning of this year, the "E-commerce Law of the People's Republic of China" (hereinafter referred to as the "E-commerce Law") was officially implemented, as the first comprehensive law in the field of e-commerce in China, the law lists micro-businessmen, purchasing agents and other practitioners as e-commerce operators and is included in supervision, stipulating that micro-businesses and other forms of online sales must have a business license; they must pay taxes according to law; when sending advertisements to consumers, they should comply with the relevant provisions of the "Advertising Law of the People's Republic of China".
The implementation of the E-commerce Law points directly to the weakness of e-commerce models such as micro-business, and has a certain normative effect on purchasing agents, micro-businesses and e-commerce practitioners. However, since the relevant legal rules have not yet been introduced, there are still many problems for e-commerce and micro-business practitioners to clarify and strengthen supervision.
03 Past stars, can only cut leeks?
At the beginning of this year, the passage at the turn of Pan Ga swept the screen across the network, and the actors Pan Changjiang and Xie Mengwei, who were loved by the audience in the past, became low-quality OEM wine anchors, which was lamentable, and the collapse of the micro-business empire of Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang once again exposed the commercialization problem of the past stars - why do more and more past stars choose to endorse inferior products and turn into the sickle of harvesting leeks?
The commercial value of entertainment stars is embarrassing, or one of the reasons.
If we put aside the natural person attributes of entertainment stars and simply examine their commercial value, entertainment stars are more the embodiment of traffic elements in the business world. If the representative works of the stars are just red and the traffic value is high, they can receive cooperation invitations from more head brands, and once the stars have passed, the value of traffic shrinks, they face the fate of being eliminated by the head capital, and the direction of cooperation is closer to the long-tail capital.
In the "breakup" incident between Wahaha and the spokesperson Wang Lihong, Zong Fuli, the daughter of Wahaha founder Zong Qinghou, did not hesitate to point out Wang Lihong's shortcomings: "He is old, has aesthetic fatigue, and looks at a spokesperson all day long, from youth to middle age, from middle age to old age, do you think it is funny?" ”
In fact, not only in the field of entertainment stars, but also in the cultural and sports industry with short careers, most of them have similar characteristics. Sports stars and e-sports stars have had to face a sharp decline in income levels and a sharp decline in the commercialization path after retiring.
Returning to the pyramid scheme incident of Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang, it can be found that the emergence of social media and content platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo has provided opportunities for the commercial value of past stars to "continue their lives".
On June 10, 2020, Zhang Ting opened the first live broadcast with goods on Douyin. According to the official war report, the total amount of a single transaction of Zhang Ting's live broadcast with goods debut reached 256 million, the cumulative number of viewers exceeded 19 million, the order volume was 1.1598 million, the peak number of online users was 498,000, the harvest sound wave exceeded 2.681 million, and the number of payers exceeded 158,000. It has refreshed the previous records of all stars and celebrities such as Luo Yonghao and Chen He.
Among them, the products of its own brand TST have achieved sales of more than 100 million. The first and second places were the TST Apple Skin Mask with 84.4802 million sales, and the Live Yeast Neonatal Mask and Water Emulsion with 24.045 million sales, respectively.
Behind the successful transformation from "micro-business godmother" to "vibrato with goods", TST national agents have endured too much pressure that should not be borne. According to the new list, the traffic in Zhang Ting's live broadcast room is mostly private domain traffic, and two days before the live broadcast, the TST agent promoted and forwarded it in the circle of friends. Customers place orders on WeChat, and WeChat merchants snap up in the live broadcast room, which brings super high sales in the live broadcast room.
But this style of play is neither fresh nor long-lasting, "full of merit in a battle" hoarding method overdrafted the sales potential of agents, followed by more than a year Zhang Ting continued to play live, but the results were mediocre, and never created the sales myth of the debut.
It is worth affirming that live broadcasts, short videos and other products have delayed the fading of the value of celebrity traffic, undertaking the function of this part of the "sunset traffic" monetization channel, but it is also necessary to see that the inferior products and inferior business models behind some stars are running wild with mobile Internet products as the stage. In addition to educating consumers, content platforms and social media also need to take responsibility and proactively screen to ensure that tragedies do not happen again.