Written by/Wei Yining
Editor/You Yong
Little Red Book, which has been plagued by false advertising and filters, has begun to counterfeit again.
On January 5, Xiaohongshu officially issued a public announcement banning a number of brands suspected of illegal marketing, including 21 consumer goods brands, 16 medical beauty institutions and 3 medical beauty supply brands. Banned brands will not be able to display ads on search pages.
This is the second time that Xiaohongshu has released a banned list, and as early as December 16, 29 consumer brands were banned, including well-known cosmetics brands such as Nivea, Dove, and Half Mu Huatian. Two weeks later, the fire burned on the heads of aesthetic institutions.
In the past, Xiaohongshu's official "crackdown on counterfeiting" was mainly aimed at users suspected of publishing false advertisements. But this time, Xiaohongshu broke the ground and re-handedly cooperated with the "Qinglang" action to ban a number of well-known brands in batches, covering the entire upstream and downstream of the "ghostwriting" gray production.
Little Red Book, besieged by false information
In the past three years, Xiaohongshu, a UGC (user-generated content) platform that focuses on life sharing, has risen rapidly. By the end of 2020, The total number of users of Xiaohongshu exceeded 300 million, and the number of active users was 138 million, of which women accounted for 90.41%.
In 2013, when Xiaohongshu was established, it had explored the fields of haitao information sharing and cross-border e-commerce, but by 2017, cross-border e-commerce was gradually declining, and Xiaohongshu realized the industry ceiling, began to focus on content, combined user sharing content with e-commerce, created a life service guide for young female consumers, and obtained advertising shares.
Xiaohongshu content field involves fashion wear, makeup skin care, entertainment, food, medical beauty, mother and baby, etc., with the prominence of the content field, a large number of merchants poured into Xiaohongshu to put advertisements, coupled with the star stationing, Xiaohongshu began to form a "content + e-commerce" model, standing out in many Internet platforms.
However, Xiaohongshu still lacks a perfect e-commerce system, it is difficult to compete with Taobao and Jingdong, and the positioning of users on Xiaohongshu is still a "grass planting" platform that provides consumer evaluation, and it is more inclined to read strategies on Xiaohongshu and then go to Taobao and Jingdong to buy. The Xiaohongshu e-commerce business accounts for only 20% of revenue, and most of the revenue is still supported by advertising.
As major brands use Xiaohongshu as an important advertising channel, Xiaohongshu began to rely on advertising to make profits, and the commercial component of the platform became more and more heavy. Merchants take a variety of false marketing methods, the boundary between advertising and real use experience is becoming more and more blurred, coupled with the fact that Xiaohongshu users are mainly women, too many filters are used when taking photos, and users have repeatedly found that the strategy is inconsistent with the actual consumer experience, resulting in a decline in the credibility of the platform.
After the 2021 National Day holiday, the Little Red Book "Filter Attractions" incident rushed to the hot search. A netizen swiped the "pink beach" on the little red book that others punched, and after rushing to the scene, he found that the beach was actually earthy brown. On October 18, People's Daily commented that "don't let the filter filter out word of mouth and credibility."
Compared with the filter attractions published by individual users, for Xiaohongshu, the deeper hidden worry lies in the false advertising of merchants. Earlier, on December 23, 2019, CCTV's "Chaowen Tianxia" criticized Xiaohongshu by name for illegal brushing comments, brushing likes and other violations, and pointed out that there was a black industrial chain behind it.
To this day, false marketing "gray and black production" still exists, brands can recruit recommended talents or even some "vegetarians" with only a few hundred fans through external intermediaries or platforms, and carry out paid content production on platforms such as Xiaohongshu by giving away physical goods or services, providing commissions, etc.
On the UGC platform, the content produced by ordinary people is more credible, coupled with the accurate algorithm recommendation of Xiaohongshu, once the user searches for a certain product or service, a large number of usage experience and evaluation information are then recommended to the user's mobile phone, affecting the user's consumption decision.
Whether in the face of recommenders or celebrities, users often feel unable to distinguish between advertising and normal evaluation experiences, and it is easy to impulsively shop under the stimulation of the atmosphere of the comment area. A netizen said that she once paid attention to the beauty big V on the Little Red Book, frequently recommended various color lipsticks, some users in the comment area after discussion, out of herd mentality, did not personally go to the counter to test the color on the order to buy, see others say that it is not appropriate, and express regret.
Cosmetics need to personally test whether it is appropriate, and once the quality of medical beauty is not up to standard, it is more likely to cause health risks to consumers, the nature of these goods and services, coupled with the existence of Xiaohongshu's paid praise chaos, so that Xiaohongshu's reputation declines, and it is frequently named by regulatory authorities and official media, and it is removed from the app store.
The fire of rectification is on brand owners
On the Little Red Book, there is a clear industrial chain for ghostwriting and distribution: the brand side contacts the platform masters or ordinary users who are active on the Little Red Book through the MCN institution and the order receiving platform, does a good job of copywriting, and sends it to the recruited Little Red Book users.
At first, the copy provided by the brand side is highly homogeneous, although this kind of information affects the user experience, it is easy to identify, and the platform side is also easy to rectify by deleting posts, banning numbers, etc., but only processing terminal information is tantamount to holding a salary to fight a fire: the "gold lord" behind it is still continuously conveying benefits and producing paid promotion content.
The means of the brand side have also been continuously upgraded with the platform to fight counterfeiting, from the beginning directly covering the design copy, repeatedly sending, upgrading to providing pictures and even free gifts, so that users who receive promotion tasks can write their own copy, shoot videos or pictures, which is more difficult to identify.
To this end, Xiaohongshu launched the "Woodpecker Plan", determined to self-examination and self-correction, through algorithms and manual double review for carpet inspection, covering all notes of the whole site, finding out the notes suspected of false promotion, and cutting off and deleting the flow.
The first round of remediation after the promotion of the "Woodpecker Project" ended on October 23, 2020, and the Xiaohongshu Ecological Governance Department cut off 7,383 accounts and punished 213,000 problem notes.
At the same time, the Little Red Book stipulates that only the account that becomes a brand partner can publish promotional advertising information, and if it does not become a brand partner or report, the publication of such notes will receive a reminder of violations, and even a penalty of limiting and banning the number.
According to user feedback, Xiaohongshu's review of illegal promotion is becoming increasingly strict, mainly through the judgment of user behavior and keywords to identify illegal promotion.
Violations that will be caught by the algorithm include publishing a large number of "planting grass" ads immediately after new users register, switching multiple accounts on the same mobile phone, suspected of diverting traffic to other apps or website stores in notes and comments, and leaving other platform contact information in personal profiles or private messages. Once the account is suspended due to these behaviors, the user can neither apply for unblocking nor cancel the account, but can only be discarded.
After the launch of "Operation Woodpecker", Xiaohongshu basically determined the list of illegal marketing brands by analyzing the advertisements shared by illegal users, so in December and January 2021, Xiaohongshu banned the above-mentioned well-known beauty and skin care brands, medical beauty brands, and consumer goods brands respectively.
However, from the perspective of the development of Xiaohongshu itself, in addition to rectifying false information and false advertising, it still faces several key problems: there is a bottleneck in traffic, although the total number of users is large, but the active users are less than half of the total users, lower than other platforms such as Douyin, Weibo, kuaishou; the users are mainly women, lack of male users; the recommended content of "planting grass" is challenged by established e-commerce companies such as Ali and JD.com, and ali and JD.com's ability in warehousing and logistics is much higher than that of Xiaohongshu.
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.