Liu Qiangdong personally brought the goods, but he did not bring the goods in person.
At 6:18 p.m. on April 16th, the AI digital person of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge" made his debut in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Home Appliances and Jingdong Supermarket, opening Liu Qiangdong's "live broadcast debut".
In the live broadcast, Liu Qiangdong's AI stand-in wore a suit and a shirt without a tie, appearing in a virtual background, and the items sold were displayed on the table as a virtual flat image.
When you open the live broadcast room at first glance and see this picture, you are likely to think that this is the real Liu Qiangdong himself is live broadcasting. In particular, the tone of his voice is very similar to what Liu Qiangdong shows in various public videos.
But this is a long-term live broadcast, but if you watch it for a long time, you will find the weirdness of this AI stand-in:
For the sake of realism, Dongge's fingers will swing repeatedly, but sometimes they will rub back and forth strangely, like a digital human version of a computer bug, and the hem of the suit is also designed to swing by itself, but more often than not, it will fan back and forth like a butterfly wing on a piece of paper.
And Dong Ge's expression does change constantly, but the amplitude is not large, and there seems to be little cooperation between it and his mouth in what he says, and he often leaks a weird smile. I tried to turn the sound off, and you couldn't tell if he was shouting an important slogan like "link up" or reading the product's features.
As for the familiar display of goods in live streaming, the anchor directly uses it, and responds to comments in real time, it is even more non-existent.
The only moment that seems to be interactive is also strange, AI Dongge made a gesture of turning his head to look at his phone when he was showing a product, and said in his mouth, "I saw the comment, I replied to you". Just like the obvious transition phantom of the product transition in this live broadcast, it is obviously prepared in advance rather than AI responding in real time.
From the viewer's point of view, this is more like a repetitive playback of a screen slice.
However, Liu Qiangdong asked AI Brother Dong to instruct everyone to fry steak in a tone of talking about a 100 million business, recommend milk to everyone, sell big color TVs, and push coupons, obviously not to achieve the same effect as live broadcasts.
According to public reports, the live broadcast of Dongge made Jingdong home appliances reach 12.75 million views, and Jingdong Supermarket sales reached 11.28 million. The preferential resources given by Jingdong in this live broadcast are enough to attract the audience to snap up, as for AI Dongge, it doesn't matter if it's true or fake when he says he loves to drink Telunsu milk.
Compared with the live broadcast of Lei Jun, Yu Minhong, Dong Mingzhu and other founders, Liu Qiangdong seems to care more about the result - attracting the largest wave of traffic to make a start, and not paying much attention to the advantages of the live broadcast itself.
It's very Dongge.
In fact, since last year, in JD.com's business, the frequency of Liu Qiangdong's appearances has become frequent. "Low price" is the strategy of Liu Qiangdong last year and personally deployed and implemented the whole year, aiming to reverse the current predicament encountered by JD.com's e-commerce. The degree of perseverance is very similar to the shadow when Dongge personally drove the express car of Jingdong Logistics to deliver the express.
And today's "personally" live broadcast is another mobilization of JD.com's founder-level strategy.
On April 10th, JD.com launched a creator incentive plan, trying to attract creators with the taste of money to update regularly, basic guarantee + traffic sharing + list rewards, and resources to the top.
Behind it is still the "traffic paradox"
In addition to the gimmick of Dongge Live, if you look back at the recent situation of this company, you can find that the content transformation and low-price strategy behind these are closely related, and behind them all point to JD.com's current "traffic dilemma".
The traffic dilemma is the curse of almost every e-commerce platform, essentially because e-commerce is a traffic consumption field, not a manufacturing field.
The "traffic grassland strategy" is still prevalent in the Taobao ecosystem, and buying traffic off-site used to be Taobao's way to solve this problem, but it is obvious that now it is buying less and less, and it has also begun to gradually transform to content and open up show live broadcasts to cultivate on-site traffic from 2022. Pinduoduo was born in the social scene and infinite fission in WeChat, whether it is a group or a knife, the madness of traffic in the early stage has accumulated the potential energy of the later outbreak.
The reason why Douyin e-commerce can take off rapidly is directly related to the characteristics of its platform, which is "one body and two sides".
In contrast, JD.com before 2023 was low-key, and the "high-quality e-commerce" strategy determined by JD.com under the leadership of Xu Lei at that time was to continuously increase the unit price and repurchase rate of users on the premise of ensuring that the traffic market remains unchanged to bring higher GMV.
Times have changed, and the changes of the times have made rational consumption and return to low prices the main argument of the e-commerce platform, which also forced Jingdong to make up for the previous lessons.
According to the "2023 Double 11 Insight Report" released by Questmobile, a third-party organization, during the Double 11 period, JD.com's daily active users lagged significantly behind Taobao and Pinduoduo.
After being late for a long time, JD.com finally started to do live broadcasts as well.
In the station, content in the form of live broadcast and short video is the core breakthrough that JD currently chooses. Starting in 2023, JD.com has a series of layouts in terms of live broadcasting. Now the live broadcast room subsidy is 1 billion cash, and the purpose is mainly divided into two, the first is the cash subsidy, involving more than 20 creative talents in more than 20 fields such as digital 3C, home appliances, mother and child, pets, etc.
The second purpose is to "poach people". Jingdong unexpectedly became popular because of "shouting Li Jiaqi" before Double 11, but after the popularity subsided, Jingdong understood that it still needed a big anchor to "support the field", so it poached Dong Yuhui several times, and failed several times, so he gave up.
What needs to be affirmed is that JD.com's thinking is right. Historical experience tells us that big anchors always go out of the circle before the platform, and even big anchors go out of the circle with the platform's live broadcast. Then after giving up the introduction of external talents, the most capable of bringing its own traffic in the Jingdong system is Dongge.
Liu Qiangdong, who really solved the problem
But, why did you choose to let an AI dongge appear in the first live broadcast?
This is actually related to JD.com's different positioning of content strategy.
Based on the above analysis of the current pattern of big anchors and the historical legacy of JD.com, in fact, JD.com's content-based talk is ultimately tied to the low-price strategy. In other words, the two are actually entangled: with low prices, you can attract traffic through price power, but without traffic, merchants are unwilling to make profits, and there is no low price.
What JD wants to break is this "chicken and egg or egg" cycle.
In 2023, after JD.com re-established its determination to do low prices, it is constantly trying to break through.
Unlike Taobao, which is a B2B2C platform, JD.com is mainly self-operated, which is better than quality control and shorter than price, and does not have strong integration capabilities like the platform model in terms of traffic. Therefore, as a large distributor of the brand, the most direct way for Jingdong to sell low prices is to find a brand.
But if you want brands to willingly give low prices, in the context of weak overall consumption, it is best to bring sales, followed by exposure.
As a result, JD.com has built three axes in the past year to break the high-quality label established in the past.
First, it is to use low prices as a ruler for traffic distribution, and reverse the brands in the 1P supply chain to exchange low prices for traffic.
In the past, under the self-operated model, JD.com's business logic was that the purchasing and sales personnel connected with the brand, purchased and warehoused, and the procurement and sales adjusted the overall traffic allocation according to the profit and inventory turnover, and the self-operated products with higher profits and higher sales often occupied the first few pages of user search results.
At the beginning of last year, Liu Qiangdong made it clear that low prices were the first priority at an internal meeting, and the goal of integrating all employees was integrated. also released cruel words to brands, threatening that in April 2023, self-operated brands will not be given preferential treatment, and "as long as the price is cheap, third-party platform merchants can also get traffic".
Supporting 3P did not make 1P have a sense of crisis, and some brands proposed: "The market traffic is too small, we can't exchange price for volume, it's better not to reduce the price, and do a good job of repurchase." ”
After the failure of the strategy of establishing a competition mechanism, JD.com adopted a more direct approach: fully launched tens of billions of subsidies to attract traffic at low prices and guide the first batch of merchants to participate in the event.
At the beginning of the year, Jingdong first launched a subsidy channel of 10 billion yuan, and exempted merchants from pit fees. It is understood that the deduction point of POP merchants selected for the "10 billion subsidy" channel will be automatically reduced to 0.6% (in the past, the deduction point for different categories was 3%-8%), and some goods will also have official subsidies from JD.com, and the amount of payment received by merchants is the bidding price plus official subsidies.
However, judging from the financial reports of Jingdong in recent quarters, there is no gap in cost because of tens of billions of subsidies, and some merchants feedback: "Most of them are to let the participating brands make their own profits, and the procurement and marketing will persuade that as long as the low price is given, the sales volume will definitely be able to grow." ”
The third is to attract traffic through content. The procurement and sales live broadcast room is the real originality of JD.com. These procurement and sales who are good at dealing with brand merchants, since they want low prices from brands, they must personally go out to solve the concerns of brands and win traffic for low prices.
On the one hand, this AI Dongge seems to be a helpless move. But from JD.com's point of view, this is a game-breaking move in a series of actions based on its own positioning and advantages. JD.com's purpose is never to turn Liu Qiangdong into that big anchor, but to let Liu Qiangdong's AI stand-in show JD.com's traffic capabilities first. And it also leaves an imaginary opening for the live broadcast of digital people:
You can see from the comments that the realism of this digital person is enough for people to compare him with Liu Qiangdong's real person, which is already a breakthrough. Next, if this AI Dongge continues to broadcast live, on the one hand, for the unique low price, people will still have shopping behavior, on the other hand, with the progress of AI technology, AI Dongge "smarter" may also be a long-term gimmick, which is actually the same as the two key points that a real anchor can contribute - low prices on the whole network and hot topics of traffic topics.
This may be the best effect that AI digital human anchors can get back under the current technical capabilities. And more importantly than these, whether it is a stand-in or a real person, Liu Qiangdong has changed from a top-level designer when formulating a low-price strategy to the one who really reaches the front line of business.
In the past 20 years, Liu Qiangdong, who is on the front line, has created the "impossible" twice. The first time was when Jingdong was just starting out, in the face of the "verdict" of Ma Yun, the first boss of China's e-commerce, to engage in e-commerce, B2C could never be done, and the death sentence was directly given to Jingdong's self-operation;
Now Liu Qiangdong has completed the impossible twice, and the difficulty of solving the current traffic dilemma of JD is no less difficult than any of the above challenges. The live broadcast can use an AI stand-in, but to solve this challenge, Dong Ge must be on it himself.