Live streaming e-commerce is becoming branded
What is the biggest business value in streamers?
Can a single session easily exceed 100 million, or become the largest source of traffic in the live broadcast room, or can it support the operation of the entire MCN enterprise by itself?
In this logic, the anchor grasps the initiative to negotiate with the brand by occupying the high traffic area, and then uses low prices to attract consumers, repeatedly expanding his traffic pool.
But this is more about the attractiveness of the price than the value of the streamer itself.
The real value of the anchor is that after Li Jiaqi's return, he only needs to say "All girls, I'm back", and the shopping desire of 60 million consumers has also returned; After Wei Ya, Sydney and others were banned on the whole network, there are still many fans who miss them.
In fact, this is the personal influence of the anchor, a force that can pass through the Internet, trigger emotional changes in users or drive users to produce certain behaviors.
In other words, the constant ties and connections between anchors and fans have become the personal IP assets of anchors.
However, the life cycle of each anchor is limited, as the saying goes, "an ironclad platform, a flowing Internet celebrity", generally speaking, the life cycle of an anchor will not exceed seven years.
Converting short-term traffic into long-term value can maximize the power of IP.
The anchor using personal IP to incubate his own brand is completing this transformation process. More importantly, the gross profit space of the brand is much greater than the commission for bringing goods in the live broadcast room.
Big anchors are well aware of this truth and embarked on the road of branding early.
When Luo Yonghao was still bringing goods to pay off debts in the live broadcast room, he once said: "In the future, live broadcast will operate well, or become a new brand super incubator." ”
Under the influence of this philosophy, Make a Friend tried to invest in new consumer brands such as "Reload" and "What Horse".
Weiya and Simba personally went into battle and hatched their own brands.
For example, Weiya's clothing brand "VIYANIYA" and makeup brand "Four Seasons Diary", etc., later co-created "Sharp Taste Pie" with Nicholas Tse.
Simba is the one who is most like a product manager.
Last year, Simba, as a product manager, released his own brand HOLAX and three new lifestyle technology products - FOLY high-speed hair dryer, Benjiao anti-wrinkle essence, and Wushuang whale shoes. Among them, Simba may be deeply involved in the research and development of various aspects of the product.
In addition, Simba also has self-operated brands such as "Cotton Code".
In fact, not only the head anchors, but also the upstream and downstream industry chains have felt the change in wind direction and want to further become the tide on the outlet.
As an MCN institution related to the fate of anchors, the deep involvement of MCN is indispensable in the process of incubating brands with their own labels.
In addition, MCN agencies themselves are also trying to operate brands completely independently.
Make a friend CEO believes that MCN incubates its own brand is very necessary, and this must be done before the Douyin dividend disappears.
The late entry of Oriental Selection confirmed the path of taking the brand from the beginning. From self-operated brands to self-operated platforms, the moat of Oriental selection comes from the accurate grasp of industry trends.
From anchors and MCNs, the wind of live streaming e-commerce branding naturally blows to the platform and merchants.
Relying on traffic and content advantages, Douyin and Kuaishou began to frantically build brands, launching "Douyin brand" and "fast brand" respectively.
The rapid rise of live streaming e-commerce has also driven the rapid growth of shaky brands and fast brands.
On the Douyin and Kuaishou platforms, industrial belt merchants have poured into the live broadcast room to quickly incubate their own brands in the form of source factories through cost-effective products. In this process, the platform and the merchant achieve a win-win situation.
The moment of branding the whole industry of live streaming e-commerce has arrived.
Industry shifts, weakens people, emphasizes brands and channels
Behind the comprehensive branding of live streaming e-commerce, the industry is at a critical moment of transformation.
After a year of rectification and adjustment, all practitioners have a consensus that the era of barbaric development of the industry has passed.
The growth rate has slowed down, laws and regulations have gradually improved, professional demand has increased, and the internal order of live streaming e-commerce has been formed, and individual heads are no longer needed to drive.
In this context, live streaming agencies and platforms are no longer satisfied with simple influencer incubation and live streaming, and try to integrate influencer assets with brands and channels in order to obtain more monetization opportunities.
The greater benefit of integrating influencer assets with brands and channels is that it reduces the uncertainty brought by anchors as people.
Weakening anchors, emphasizing brands, and then building a brand matrix to form a strong channel has become the main direction of live broadcast agency transformation.
The acceleration effect of live streaming e-commerce on brands is proven. For example, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room has always given people the image of a domestic brand incubator.
The person in charge of the US ONE once said, "Every time there is a big promotion, many excellent domestic brands will come out of the Jiaqi live broadcast room, and it has become a phenomenal and normal thing for users to recognize, understand, buy and use new domestic products in the live broadcast room."
Previously, beauty brands such as Perfect Diary, Hua Xizi, and Winona were deeply bound to Li Jiaqi, and their presence in consumers and the market became stronger and stronger.
Boosted by traffic, Perfect Diary completed its listing in 3 years, and Hua Xizi created a 3 billion revenue myth in 3 years.
Therefore, the phrase "live streaming e-commerce will become a brand incubator in the next stage" is not completely unfounded.
Based on the advantages of traffic IP, supply channels, product sales, etc., MCN's brand incubation will not start from 0, which lowers the threshold for entry.
The super-headed anchors went behind the scenes, and self-built brands were pushed to the front of the stage. But these brands have the shadow of big anchors everywhere. The big anchors withdrew, but continued to expand their capital territory in the form of brand incubation.
However, brands that rely on online marketing to become popular, if they only rely on the traffic in the live broadcast room to hang a life, they will not grow into big trees after all.
The perfect diary with infinite scenery in the past fell off the altar, and Hua Xizi was also trying to tear off the Internet celebrity label...
With the blessing of live broadcast room traffic, selling products is just a false prosperity. When you really start branding, you will find that it is much harder than you think.
IP branding is a challenge
In the live broadcast industry, there are many examples of whether it is to start from 0 or do IP brand incubation. But there are very few brands that can get their hands on them.
(Source: Chop Pepper Entertainment Investment)
Even live streaming agencies with rich incubation experience are no exception.
Worry-free Media, which has many head anchors such as Liu Genghong, Guangdong couple, Yu and Mao Maojie, incubates "human IP", "content IP" and "commodity IP" at the same time.
But not only the brands independently incubated by worry-free media such as "Tiangong Qu" are tepid, but with the silence of Liu Genghong, the brands transformed by its IP seem to be completely muted.
Essentially, this is because live streaming and branding are completely different things.
Accustomed to the thinking of traffic to develop the brand, it is easy to be countered in various fields of product power such as packaging, patterning, and quality.
Under the frequent problems, it is not difficult to understand that it is judged by consumers to be "cutting leeks" in disguise.
Compared with start-up brands with many shortcomings, consumers obviously trust anchors more.
In a short period of time, we don't need to pinch the anchors in a cold sweat. Li Jiaqi's comeback has not been reduced, and new traffic such as Crazy Little Yang Ge still eats the biggest dividend.
What's more, there are still many difficulties in IP branding.
First of all, branding is a competition of comprehensive capabilities such as product research and development, operation marketing, packaging design, etc., which most live broadcast agencies are not good at.
Secondly, IP branding is limited by the audience of influencers, showing obvious single-channel characteristics, which is inconsistent with the original intention of the brand's network-wide implementation.
On the whole, the full branding of live streaming e-commerce still has a long way to go.
Author | Moonfall