In the stock era, celebrities can achieve a win-win situation by building professionalism and brand health cooperation.
Source | Poly beauty
Author | Puyu's accidental shooting, a daily "planting grass", is likely to bring fire to an unknown brand, which is one of the values of celebrities.
Today, influencer marketing is still an indispensable means of promotion for beauty brands, and at the same time, influencers have also become an irreplaceable C-end communication media and mainstream distribution channel.
However, it should be noted that in the cosmetics industry today, although the importance of celebrities is undoubted, it is also a fact that the social media traffic of celebrities is tight. In the evolution of marketing stories, what has happened to the relationship between beauty brands and traffic influencers, and whose hands are the right to speak?
At the 2nd China Cosmetics Opinion Leaders Conference hosted by Jumei, we invited KOLs and brands to carry out a dialogue between the soul of brands and influencers (Season 2), and in this roundtable forum, we hope to promote the content co-creation between KOLs and brands through in-depth exchanges, and create more competitive products.
The dialogue was presided over by Fei Qiwen, the founder of the first phase of the meeting, Liu Bin, vice president of Manting, the brand representative, and the KOL representative, Yehenala Geling, Black Dog Sauce · MO、kenjijoel。
How to balance the information gap when the two sides negotiate asymmetrically?
In the process of cooperation between brands, institutions and celebrities, there are disputes over rights and interests. With the rise of celebrities, brands are facing the problem of erosion of pricing power and discourse power, and how to balance the interests of both parties has become the focus of attention of brands.
Liu Bin believes that the difficulty in the cooperation between brands and influencers lies in balancing the pricing of value and price, as well as the control of profit margins, because there is a gap in information between the two sides, which leads to asymmetry in negotiations.
"The profit margin of the brand must be limited, but when it comes to the profit margin, the influencer and the brand are often unable to reach an agreement. But we can't say that we will expose the cost to you honestly, so there will always be such a lack of information in the industry. ”
"A good trend is that people may have some room for negotiation on price today. But the difficulty is that when everyone is diversified in the industry, in fact, not all of them know the roots, which leads to the asymmetry of information when we negotiate, so there are some difficulties when promoting. Liu Bin added.
Kenjijoel, based on his own experience as a blogger for many years, also agrees with Liu Bin's point of view that brands and influencers should be honest with each other. "Everyone should be honest, and I think this is a very important thing, because even if you don't be honest, the 'people with a heart' will make you honest, but you can't hide it from everyone's eyes. Therefore, if you can deliver valuable things to users, it is enough to win the right benefits for users. ”
In addition, Kenjijoel also expressed his current approach: "I think everyone has their own reason for existence, or a special role, for me personally, it is to convey the concept of the brand clearly, the value can be communicated, to convey some benefits in different price ranges, and I hope to be able to co-create some content with the brand, these are some of the things I am doing." ”
Yehnara Goling, who is also a representative of KOL, although he has not experienced the premium that everyone is talking about, said bluntly about the right to speak: "Every time I talk to PRs, I find that they want to pile up the selling points, efficacy, and proof of the product every time, but I can't verify these things." I would ask him to send the product three months in advance, so that the people around me could try it and see how I felt, and then I would decide whether to take it or not. ”
"Because I represent the fans' requirements for the product, as long as the product is good enough and I have enough confidence to praise it, it will be put in my live broadcast room. I don't want to fight value wars, and as a KOL, I want brands to recognize my abilities and fans to recognize my professionalism, rather than obsessing over price. He explained.
Yehnara Geling's thinking on the right to speak is indeed what brands hope when choosing KOLs, and it also expresses the voices of most brands and KOLs present, and won bursts of applause.
Black Dog Sauce · MO also believes that if you only focus on price and do not pay attention to quality, it should not be what celebrities are pursuing. "Actually, I also hate the price of the roll, because in the end, the price of the roll, the brand side does not get the revenue they want, then they will have distrust of the influencer. Another point is that when all the people are focused on bringing the price down, no one will pursue quality, then the product that the fans get is an unknown, then the fans' trust in the celebrity will decline, and the celebrity will be in a very passive situation. ”
In fact, whether it is Yehnara Goring or Black Dog Sauce · MO, kenjijoel, and the three beauty KOLs all believe that price is not the key factor, but that the product is good enough, and the influencer clearly conveys the concept and value, which should be the goal achieved by both parties. At the same time, influencers and brands should work together openly to establish a benign operating environment and create value together.
Fei Qiwen shared from the perspective of the brand, in his opinion, the three camps are "paying" for celebrities and institutions.
He summarized the following points:
- In the past three or four years, capital has frantically poured into the industry, but it has stopped a year and a half ago. Five years ago, the cutting-edge brands represented by Perfect Diary had a large number of investors' budgets, and their short-term goal was to quickly build brand awareness, and they expanded the market at all costs. This process, for the first time, greatly increased the cost of social media planting and live streaming.
- International brands have a good budget, and they can spend that money as long as they see that the corresponding interaction data can be satisfied.
- The old domestic products in China are the third camp. With the rise of KOLs and e-commerce, a lot of offline traffic will be swept away, so I am also very anxious, so I will take out the money I made offline.
But for nearly a year, all three camps may have been recovering from each other. Next, it will gradually enter a relatively stable stage, with brands retaining certain profits, and high-quality celebrities and institutions can still make a lot of money. And the brand whose product is not good may really go down. At the same time, for celebrities, influencers who do not have high-quality content will not have the right to speak.
In the era of stock, the content is exhausted, how should celebrities be upgraded?
In the era of traffic increment, everyone competes for speed and passion, while in the stock era, the competition is depth. As content creation becomes more dramatic, the camera screen becomes more refined, and under the effect of a unified content creation model and a new recommendation mechanism, homogeneous content seems to make netizens have aesthetic fatigue.
In the face of users' aesthetic fatigue, how do celebrities deal with it?
Kenjijoel said, "Whether it is a change in the platform or a change in form, it is just to show its own advantages and values in different forms, rather than repeatedly changing tracks." I know very well that I am a character who focuses on rational analysis, combing knowledge after doing a lot of research, and disseminating and translating complex sciences. So I didn't think about making some formal or variety changes. ”
"I think there are some new trends in the market every year, do we have to follow these trends? Therefore, for talents, they must think about their own labels and do what they are best at, so as to bring value to users. At the moment, I didn't think about what I would do differently to cater to traffic, but I would try different platforms, different formats, just using my own favorite mode and Xi language. He said.
At the same time, with the disappearance of traffic dividends, the problem of "traffic anxiety" is becoming more and more serious.
For the anxiety of traffic, Black Dog Sauce · MO has a great sense of experience this year, "In the more than two years of doing the beauty sector, I am very happy to keep hundreds of thousands of fans and be myself, but when this year ushered in the explosion of traffic, I fell into anxiety." ”
"Because I found that the more than one million followers don't like to watch my original content and don't like to watch me be myself. But those more than 400,000 fans are waiting for me to be myself. So for us creators, this kind of question bothers me all the time, in fact, I want to find the answer. ”
And in Yehnara Goling's view, if you feel that your content has a bottleneck, there must be a bottleneck, and if you feel that your content has no bottleneck, there must be no bottleneck.
"Regarding creation, I think that if you want to break through the bottleneck, you have to learn to repeat, but this repetition must have a purpose. Whether the content you repeat serves the previous fans, or the current fans, or the future fans, and the points you repeat, can you give your account help, I think this is the content that everyone should think about. He summarized with his own experience of making short videos.
Liu Bin shared two stories from cross-category and cross-industry experience, in order to help celebrities find "answers". The first story is the sense of crisis felt after the release of the super species Chat GPT-4 compared to the human IQ. "We should embrace the future, embrace digitalization and make it our super assistant," he suggests. Although today we can't ask for an assistant who is higher than our own IQ to help us optimize the direction of our content, we can debug a super assistant and use our logic to assist us in content creation. ”
The second story is that Liu Bin solved the problem of reproducibility, efficiency, and mass production of content by discovering that the white label uses a tooled system, and can build billions of scale even if it does not pass grass planting. "I found that the team behind the creation of this tool software is a student from the Department of Software Engineering who graduated from Peking University, and based on the digitization of content, they can reverse the churn, interaction, attention, and conversion ability of users at every frame and node. ”
Liu Bin said with emotion: "I think today is a digital era, we should embrace digital changes, and we can use digital capabilities to find the point of our creative content. ”
In this regard, Kenjijoel has a different opinion, "There are many databases in the world, but making beauty is based on the relationship between people, as well as emotional connection, I think beauty is not a 1+1>2 thing, beauty consumption must be emotional demands are satisfied, this is the value of our current talents." ”
In addition, Liu Bin also put forward the view that brands and talents need to cooperate. "In the future, brands and talents need to create a lot of common and more valuable things. And it can't be said that each of them is independent, standing on the opposite side, and suspicious of each other, in fact, we can cooperate in this system. ”
With the advent of the era of professional verticals, celebrities should build professional competitiveness
In the industry, if KOLs have content-related experience or background, and have an excellent understanding of related products, it will be easy for people to leave "industry expert" labels, so that it is easier to gain the trust of users, and the products will be more convincing and grassy.
Therefore, improving one's professionalism and maintaining business value has become a compulsory course for celebrities.
Kenjijoel, who has a medical background, said: "Because of the doctor's work background, the previous years of experience are actually the accumulation of professionalism, and in the process of contacting the beauty industry, I will also consciously contact industry experts and dermatology experts to learn Xi, such as the skin health new media group established by Jumei, participate in it to be an expert and dermatologist's translator, and be a substitute for consumers in front of experts." ”
Black Dog Sauce · MO said that although it can't be as professional as kenjijoel, it will form its own team and let enough professionals give feedback, at least with a responsible attitude. "Of course, yesterday I also joined the anti-aging science communication research group. I can't say that I'm a makeup blogger and don't learn professional things, it's impossible, these are all things that the blogger himself needs to improve. ”
And Yehnara Geling said with a smile that he has actually been a bit of a "old book". In fact, he likes to use mobile phone memos, and write down the points that come to mind at any time for later use. At the same time, he sighed: "I think that when a blogger creates content, the first thing is to have a strong psychology, the second is to put yourself out appropriately, and the third is to meet with some more advanced occasions, such as today, and talk about what you are interested in." ”
In addition, the cooperation between brands and influencers is also becoming more and more in-depth, and unlike "one-off" partnerships, brands are also beginning to realize the importance of maintaining influencer relationships, building influencer loyalty, and achieving long-term and in-depth cooperation to enhance brand marketing effectiveness.
Fei Qiwen finally concluded, "Whether it is a brand or a celebrity, we are all striving for traffic, and behind it is extreme anxiety. I believe everyone knows that in the whole environment, consumers' spending power is declining. Therefore, I hope that in the future, a healthy and equal cooperation can be formed between brands and talents as soon as possible, and I also hope that a win-win situation for both parties will come as soon as possible. ”
Visual Design: Lele
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Editor in charge: Lucky
——2023 Big Value Industry Annual Conference——
In the rapidly changing 2023 and the intensifying competition, the involution of the big value industry has come to a crossroads of evolution and switching. In this new round of development cycle, it can be said that challenges and opportunities coexist. In this context, what is the path of evolution of China's beauty industry? and how to adapt to the switch of technological outlets and smoothly pass through the complex and changeable industrial cycle? In response to the competition in the new era, on December 22-23, the 11th Jumei Conference hosted by Jumei and named by Shangmei Co., Ltd. - 2023 Evolution and Switch· At the annual meeting of the big value industry, we specially invited upstream and downstream cross-border experts in the industry, dermatology experts and professional beauty KOLs, etc., to conduct in-depth discussions on the technological evolution and power switching in the era of scientific brands.