Source / Alphabet (ID: wujicaijing)
What does an influencer boss mean for a company? This question may be able to get some answers from Musk.
Musk has used social media as a position and used his strong appeal to bring widespread attention to his companies, but if he is not careful about this move, he may cross the border and step on the regulatory red line.
According to Tesla's K-10 annual report document disclosed on Monday, on November 16 last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a subpoena to Tesla asking tesla to provide information about the management process involved in fulfilling the 2018 settlement.
In 2018, Musk was charged by the SEC with securities fraud for privately posting Tesla privatization news on social media. One of the requirements, according to the settlement agreement reached that year, is that any future Tweets from Musk be pre-approved by one of Tesla's legal/regulatory compliance officers, containing any information about public companies that could affect their share prices.
The SEC's subpoena to Tesla is related to a plan launched by Musk on social media on November 7 last year to sell 10% of Tesla's stock. Musk also made a special statement at that time to emphasize that no matter what the result is, he will abide by the results of this vote.
At that time, some netizens were worried that Musk's move would once again attract inquiries from the SEC. Sure enough, the SEC's investigation was late.
Musk, as Tesla's CEO, has publicly stated, "I hate advertising, advertising is all deceitful." Under Musk's leadership, Tesla has really not launched any commercials for many years. A 2016 survey showed that Hyundai's high-end model, genesis, averaged $6,821 per vehicle sold, compared to 0 for Tesla.
Tesla, which does not advertise, has surpassed a number of traditional car companies that are good at advertising. In October last year, Tesla's market value exceeded $1 trillion, more than the market capitalization of all auto companies combined. This invisibly makes Musk's rejection of advertising even deeper.
After all, Musk, who has always been intimidating, is Tesla's biggest free advertising spokesperson. With a series of titles such as Silicon Valley Iron Man, Mars Colony Prophet, and the world's richest man, Musk has become a ashes player in the use of media.
This set of marketing routines that direct personal IP traffic to the exposure of the company's products is not unique to Musk. Chen Ou, the first generation of Internet celebrity bosses in China, once endorsed Jumei Premium as CEO. In 2012, the "I am Chen Ou, I speak for myself" Chen Ou ti advertisement attracted the imitation of the whole people and became the hot word of the year.
Xu Xiaoping, an investor who had encouraged Chen Ou to come forward to endorse, said more bluntly: "Entrepreneurs do not have the ability to be Internet celebrities, so don't start a business." ”
Since then, entrepreneurs have worked part-time as corporate spokespeople, personally creating momentum for products, and evolved into a trend. The names of Luo Yonghao, Dong Mingzhu, Lei Jun, Yu Minhong and others appeared in this list. While they use media resources, the media also grabs a steady stream of topics and traffic from these entrepreneurs.
But these outstanding personality of the Internet celebrity bosses, but also become a double-edged sword: the high dependence on the company's boss, so that Jumei Youpin because of Chen Ou's rapid popularity and rapid decline, Tesla has also been repeatedly investigated and punished by the SEC for Musk's high-profile remarks.
For entrepreneurs who are on the road to the Internet celebrity boss, they may wish to refer to the previous lessons of Chen Ou and Musk.
A
On the afternoon of July 7, 2020, Tesla held its annual general meeting of shareholders in Mountain View, California, to vote on seven key proposals, the fourth of which was whether to use paid advertising. Danforth, a Tesla shareholder, asked: "Should Tesla spend at least $50 per vehicle to advertise its products and services?" ”
Danforth has its own reasons, "From the moment Tesla announced in the first quarter of 2019 that it would close its retail stores and start focusing on website sales, advertising became necessary." In his view, Musk has cut many offline stores and advertising channels have been greatly reduced, which is not feasible.
Based on nearly 500,000 car sales that year, this means that Tesla's advertising spending in 2021 will be at least $25 million (about 158 million yuan). According to the "Automotive Industry Marketing Expenditure List", in 2019, the marketing expenses of Mercedes-Benz Automobile were 98.881 billion yuan, and Honda was 106.585 billion yuan.
Tesla shareholders are careful to start the advertising attempt, the cost is not even enough for the traditional head car companies. However, this proposal was strongly opposed by Tesla's board of directors.
Tesla's board of directors believes that advertising is not in the best interests of Tesla's shareholders, nor is it in line with Musk's original intentions. Musk said in an earlier speech that Tesla does not advertise and does not pay endorsement fees, "We want to use this money to make great products." Danforth's proposal was folded in the voting process.
In addition to advertising, Musk is also quite Buddhist about sales. When the Tesla store was criticized for being ineffective, he clapped his hands and applauded, saying: "Tesla is the least good at sales!" ”
What gave Musk the confidence to ignore advertising was the zero-cost marketing method that he has always been good at. Last year, Musk appeared as a host on the NBC comedy variety show "Saturday Night Live", and the number of online live viewers exceeded 300,000 at one point. In the hour-and-a-half-long program, advertisements for Tesla competitors Lucid, Ford, Audi and Volkswagen appeared in turn.
On the show, Musk blew himself up with Esberg syndrome (autism) and explained his behavior of making strange remarks on social media: "Those who think I've offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, rocketed people to Mars, do you think I can be a calm, normal guy?" ”
In addition to the audience shouting "Musk killed crazy", Musk promoted Tesla, SpaceX, Dogecoin and his boring company, and did not spend a penny.
In addition to his identity as an entrepreneur, Musk is also the top Internet celebrity in the Internet world. In an interview with the American magazine 60 Minutes, Musk proudly said: "You use your hairstyle to express your personality, and I, with Twitter." ”
Musk has more than 70 million followers on Twitter, and with the power of social media, his every move on the virtual network will have a huge impact on the real world, not only saving Tesla a huge advertising fee, but also a random Tweet profile modification is powerful: changed to "Bitcoin", within an hour, the price of Bitcoin rose by 18%; changed to "Use Signal", Signal quickly climbed to the first place in mainstream platform downloads. Tesla employees can't help but marvel that Musk is the company's best marketer.
The media used by Musk, in turn, is also using Musk to harvest huge reading traffic. Even Ashley Vance, a biographer who wrote Iron Man in Silicon Valley for Musk, said: "The media hasn't seen such a guy in a long time." ”
As of December 8 last year, Musk has been on 74 Weibo hot searches in a cumulative one-year period.
In 2020, Tesla even directly disbanded the US public relations department team and replaced it with Musk. A tweet has hundreds of thousands of likes, pushing a new car, doing a live broadcast, taking a bear, writing a press release, Musk alone is a team.
With a traffic master like Musk, what other ads does Tesla cast?
B
Not only Musk, but also on the other side of the ocean, there are also many entrepreneurs who are highly tied to the company.
In 2010, after Chen Ou returned to China, he founded Jumei Premium, suffering from no extra funds to ask celebrities to endorse. Xu Xiaoping, an investor in Chen Ou, saw that he had a good image and suggested to him: "Since you have no money, then throw yourself out and give yourself endorsements." Previously, Xu Xiaoping believed that in addition to its products, New Oriental is well known to many people, and it is actually a result of consciously "selling" the company.
In those years, Chen Ou frequently appeared on entertainment programs, such as "Happy Base Camp", "Every Day Upward", "Happy Girl", etc., Chen Ou said: "A program with a rating of two points must not be let go, because it is free." ”
The real out of the loop was in 2012. Chen Ou's one-minute and 40-second advertisement "I Speak for Myself" filmed for Jumei Youpin swept the screen of the network, which had a strong emotional resonance with consumers, and Weibo fans once rose to more than 40 million. At the peak of his popularity, his Weibo can drive sales of tens of millions of yuan to Jumei Premium, and it is not an exaggeration to call Li Jiaqi in 2012.
Entrepreneur Luo Yonghao is also good at "speaking for himself", with the identity labels of the first generation of Internet celebrities, stand-up comedy, and idealistic entrepreneurs, after crossing the mobile phone industry, he shouldered the heavy responsibility of hammer mobile phone marketing with his own strength.
Luo Yonghao himself once admitted to the outside world that in the early days of the establishment of Hammer Technology, because of the lack of money and resources, he had to spend four or five hours a day studying Weibo and studying explosive copywriting. Luo Yonghao, who played Weibo to the fullest, saved a lot of advertising expenses for the popularity of the hammer subsidiary.
In order to create a topic, Luo Yonghao almost rubbed all over the Internet hotspots, even if the hotspots did not come, he could create his own. In 2013, Apple's mobile phone was in the ascendant, in order to create momentum for the hammer mobile phone, Luo Yonghao publicly set up a Flag: "I will work hard, do a good job of the hammer, and in the future, acquire the inevitable decline of Apple, and revive it, which is my unshirkable responsibility for the rest of my life." ”
The hammer mobile phone has unexpectedly received a large number of media reports, and Luo Yonghao has also been successfully promoted to the new traffic password of the media.
Later, Luo Yonghao reproduced this trick in e-cigarettes, social software, and now in the live broadcast of goods, tried and tested. After the meta-universe fire last year, Luo Yonghao was busy posting blogs, saying: "Our next entrepreneurial project is a so-called meta-universe company. Sure enough, there was a wave of discussion on the Internet.
It is worth mentioning that on the evening of January 5, Luo Yonghao was on the hot search for paying off 600 million yuan of debt. Luo Yonghao's process of staging "true return" is inseparable from the ignition of his Internet celebrity image. Although some netizens criticized Luo Yonghao, saying that he was hyped all the time, like a jumping beam clown, there were also many fans who faithfully followed Luo when he changed tracks again and again.
It can be said that Luo Yonghao almost made an excellent footnote to the word Internet celebrity boss.
C
Like asking celebrities to endorse them, taking the road of Internet celebrity entrepreneurs also hides many risks. In the case of a high degree of binding between entrepreneurs and companies, endorsements can be saved for a while, but they cannot be saved for a lifetime. The driving force to support the company's long-term development depends on product strength in the final analysis.
Although Chen Ou has the ability to carry goods comparable to Li Jiaqi, it is still difficult to reverse the rapid decline of Jumei Youpin. In April 2020, Jumei Premium announced its official delisting from the New York Stock Exchange. Chen Ou and his Jumei Premium have been silent together, and they have always expressed their desire to exuberant, and the Weibo that used to share investment dynamics and daily news has also been quiet a lot. In a recent public interview in 2017, Chen Ou said that Jumei's poor performance was due to the rapid macroeconomic changes and the disappearance of the e-commerce track dividend.
However, an industry insider of Jumei Youpin said in an interview with Chinese Entrepreneurs: "We can't blame everything on the big picture, there are certain problems in business management, product business, even including the high profile of Chen Ou in the past, we can't deny it." ”
Luo Yonghao is another typical representative who has no sales onlookers. As the first generation of Internet celebrities, Luo Yonghao, who jumped into the mobile phone field with his own traffic, did help Hammer quickly break the circle in brand marketing, but due to the lack of product strength of the Hammer mobile phone itself, after seven years of hard work, the Hammer mobile phone with serious losses had to sell itself.
As netizens said, "Watching the hammer conference, they are all running to listen to crosstalk, who cares about mobile phones and not mobile phones." Chen Ou and Luo Yonghao, who are too heavy on marketing and light products, have helped the company to eat the dividends of their own traffic watering in the early stage, but when the core products are weak, the overly distinct personal image will begin to overwhelm the company's brand image, and the company is easy to fall into passivity under its out-of-line remarks.
In 2014, after the failure of the hammer mobile phone T1, netizens began to mock Luo Yonghao, saying that he said: what is not working, the mouth cannon is the first.
Frustrated, Luo Yonghao proposed to hand over Weibo to the company to manage and publish it after review. Luo Yonghao later explained in an interview with Tencent Entrepreneurship that because of his unobstructed mouth, he "carried a heavy historical burden" on the company's public relations team.
At this point, Musk and Luo Yonghao face a similar situation.
In August 2018, Musk tweeted that he had been raised to consider taking Tesla private for $420, and the stock price rose by 10%. Two weeks later, Musk announced that Tesla would remain a publicly traded company, and the stock price was frustrated.
In September of the same year, the SEC launched an investigation into Tesla, and the prosecutor accused: "Musk has not discussed any key terms, including price, including price, with any potential funding sources, let alone confirmation." Eventually, Tesla reached a settlement with the SEC, but at the cost of Tesla and Musk fining $20 million each, Musk stepping down as Tesla's chairman, and his Twitter account being regulated.
But the restless Musk does not seem to take the SEC's warning to heart, and even "bar" with the SEC.
In 2020, Musk called the SEC a "committee of short sellers to get rich," and then spoke boldly on social media: "Tesla's stock price is too high" and "I sold almost all of my tangible property." As soon as the rhetoric came out, tesla stock fell from $760 to $716 in less than half an hour, falling below the $700 mark on the day, a drop of more than 11%.
In February 2021, Tesla shares fell 8 percent after rumors that the SEC might launch an investigation into Musk's tweets about Dogecoin (DOGE), and its market value fell by $57 billion overnight.
In response to netizens' questions, Musk also responded stiffly: "I hope they investigate, this will be great!" ”
However, Musk is ultimately luckier than Luo Yonghao, he has a series of powerful products such as Tesla, even if he is unobstructed, it is easy to get the understanding of netizens compared with his achievements. In the Tesla owners circle, there is a saying that is widely circulated, "Tesla's shortcomings are as many as the stars, but the advantages shine like the sun." "That's probably where Musk's big mouth comes from."
When the entrepreneur endorses the company, it determines the beginning of his symbiotic destiny with the company. Although the company has eaten the dividends of the image endorsement of entrepreneurs, the crisis has often been buried.
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