The world's online business Zhang Hangying Wang Shiqi
Li Ziqi told the micro-recitation! The secret entanglement of interests between the two sides was put on the surface with a paper complaint.
According to the investigation, on October 25, Sichuan Ziqi Culture Communication Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ziqi Culture"), of which Li Jiajia (Li Ziqi's real name) is a legal person, took Liu Tongming, a legal person of Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Weinian"), to court.
Like dominoes, the aftermath is sweeping in. On October 27, according to a number of media sources, ByteDance, which has only been investing in Weinian for a few months, has decided to withdraw from Weinian's investment. ByteDance said that the initial investment in micro-ideas was to be optimistic about its owner Huadan Li Ziqi.
People have already captured the signal of discord. Since July, Li Ziqi's videos have been suspended for more than 3 months, and at the same time, he has changed his mysterious normalcy and frequently appeared in interviews with Xinhua News Agency and CCTV to talk about commercial thinking and content creation. Further ahead, Li Ziqi once deleted the reply to "good means of capital" in seconds, and also sent a dynamic "early to report a police". Uneven distribution of equity, contradictions in the ownership of brand rights... For a time, all kinds of speculation were rampant.
Until today, neither Li Ziqi nor Wei Nian has publicly spoken about this undercurrent of "anti-eye", and "Tianxia Net Business" has contacted Wei Nian staff to inquire about the situation, and as of press time, no reply has been received from the other party.
This storm involves a lot.
One side is Li Ziqi, a super internet celebrity with more than 100 million fans on the five major platforms of Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, B station, and Youtube, and the other side is the actual operator of the consumer brand rising star "Li Ziqi", whose sales have exceeded 1 billion in 2020. Originally a benchmark work for content monetization under the Internet celebrity economy, it evolved into the uneasiness of "making wedding clothes for others" in tearing. From mutual achievement to court, the dispute between Li Ziqi and "Li Ziqi" should trigger the industry's thinking about the contradiction and symbiosis between the talent and the brokerage company, between the content value and the commercial realization.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > who exactly belongs to "Plum Ziqi"? </h1>
Ironically, Liu Tongming was sued by his own company. Enterprise investigation shows that Ziqi culture was established by Li Ziqi and Liu Tongming, Li Ziqi himself accounted for 49% of the shares, and WeiNian accounted for 51% of the shares. That is to say, the actual controller of Ziqi culture is Liu Tongming.
Liu Tongming, founder of Wei Nian
The "World Online Business" inquiry found that the number of insured people in Ziqi Culture was 0, and the number of micro-thoughts exceeded 500. Li Ziqi, a "top-notch Internet celebrity" who has attracted hundreds of millions of fans, has only 4 content teams: Li Ziqi, a small assistant and two photographers. The operation team of the "Li Ziqi brand" is a huge team, including product research and development, marketing, Tmall store operations, etc.
Li Ziqi and Wei Nian were originally the story of Maxima and Bole.
In 2016, Li Ziqi made some small fame by shooting ancient style creative videos, and Liu Tongming traveled thousands of miles to her hometown of Mianyang, Sichuan Province, to seek cooperation. According to Wei Nian, at first, Li Ziqi and Wei Nian were contract models, the company was responsible for Weibo promotion, and Li Ziqi concentrated on content creation; in July 2017, the two sides switched to a joint venture company model and began to prepare the Li Ziqi brand and operate together.
Doing branding is also Li Ziqi's own idea. She once said, "So many business outlets, I chose the most difficult one, to be a brand." ”
Judging from public information, several platform accounts where Li Ziqi released videos are currently controlled by themselves, but the actual controller of Ziqi culture is a micro-idea, which makes the ownership of content accounts confusing.
The biggest position of the new consumer brand Li Ziqi is on Tmall, and the registered company of Li Ziqi's Tmall flagship store is Wei Nian. Li Ziqi once said that this is because the registration time of Ziqi culture when opening the store in 2018 was too short and did not meet the requirements.
After searching the China Trademark Network of the Trademark Office of the State Intellectual Property Office, "Tianxia E-Commerce" found that dozens of "Li Ziqi" brands (different industries) that have been registered are all owned by Ziqi Culture, and the "Li Ziqi" brands applied for by Wei Nian Technology and Wei Nian Brand have been rejected, "without legal effect".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="80" > unpredictable</h1>
Industry insiders said that Li Ziqi and Wei Nian were opposed to each other, and they were both defeated. "Li Jiajia underestimated the difficulty and cost of account operation and commodity operation... It is inevitable that Wei Nian will be impacted, even if the account and brand ownership are finally obtained, the brand of Li Ziqi also lacks vitality and has no room for future growth. ”
Indeed it is.
The success of Li Ziqi and Li Ziqi brands is inseparable from the content creator Li Jiajia, and also inseparable from the operation operator Wei Nian.
Li Xiaodao, co-founder of Weinian and head of Li Ziqi's business department, once said that Weinian's positioning of the "Li Ziqi" brand is: "traditional culture is fashionable, and local cuisine is globalized." Within Wei Nian, a complete set of organizations and mechanisms has been formed for the product development of the Li Ziqi brand, including product research and development, supply chain, quality inspection, production, and even marketing and sales operations.
Li Ziqi Tmall flagship store now has more than 6.4 million fans, during the Tmall Double 11 pre-sale period, one snail powder has been booked more than 200,000 pieces, and the monthly sales of another explosive lotus powder have exceeded 40,000 pieces. According to The shareholders of Weinian, the new food brand "Li Ziqi", which launched Tmall in August 2018, has exceeded 1 billion yuan in annual sales in 2020.
The hot sale of Li Ziqi's brand products has transformed Weinian from an MCN institution into a new consumer brand company, and began to invest in factories and open stores offline, gradually building barriers in its own supply chain and channels.
Wei Nian also quickly gained the favor of capital, and has had 7 rounds of financing so far, including Huaying Capital, Chenhai Capital, Huaxing New Economy Fund, Zhongyuan Capital, etc., with a valuation of 5 billion yuan. Just one step away from the capital market. It is worth mentioning that as the largest IP of Weinian, it has attracted a large number of investors to flock to it, and Li Ziqi himself does not hold the shares of Weinian at all.
Li Ziqi, who has long been immersed in pastoral pastoral songs, has also devoted a lot of effort to the brand named after himself. She said that she had slept less than 5 hours a day for nearly 1 month in preparation for the establishment of a brand, and from 2018 to 2019, Li Ziqi would personally deal with product formulations, factory inspections, warehousing logistics, supply chain and other issues, and even the store design, art, detail pages, and gifts of Tmall stores would stare at them.
Today, fans of the Li Ziqi brand call themselves "Qijia" and are closely bound to the Internet celebrity Li Ziqi. Previously, Wei Nian, who was responsible for the Li Ziqi brand, has also emphasized when promoting products that Li Ziqi is the general controller of all products.
But apparently, the two sides are now at odds.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="81" > Li Ziqi defend "Li Ziqi"? </h1>
Li Ziqi, who is quite low-key, recently talked about his heart on CCTV. Next, she wants to do three things, one is about rural revitalization and common prosperity; the other is about the inheritance and dissemination of intangible cultural heritage; and the third is to guide young people not to want to be "Internet celebrities".
When talking about the market value of IP, Li Ziqi said that he did not want it to have too high commercial value in the future, because these things are double-edged swords.
At present, it seems that even if Weinian has a plan to go public, it may have to be temporarily shelved. Li Ziqi, on the other hand, has decided to defend "Li Ziqi".
The previous relationship between influencers, anchors, creators and MCN agencies is worth playing, they rely on each other and play each other. In the early days, the former's reputation was limited, requiring the latter's supply chain, operational capabilities, and resources, but when the personal IP was strong to a certain extent, it itself represented appeal and discourse power.
Perhaps some direction can be seen from similar events in the past.
For example, the phenomenon-level IP "Zhu Once" in 2020 is out of the circle in the style of black humor video, and the golden sentence "The life of a rich person is so simple and boring" boils on the Internet. But in October of that year, Ma Xiaoce, the screenwriter who single-handedly created this IP, left his job and ran away, and the popularity of "Zhu Once" dropped instantly. Even if Zhu Once is the owner of an MCN agency, the original people have money and resources to operate, but they lack core content creation capabilities, and the number of plays has dropped significantly.
The brand hatched from ip, the strength of vitality must be closely related to this IP, one prosperity and one loss. If the contradiction between Li Ziqi and Wei Nian deepens, then fans and consumers will face a choice.