According to the author's continuous observation of this company, the problem of Dongfang selection is by no means Sun Dongxu's personal problem.
On the evening of November 18, Dongfang selection anchor Dong Yuhui held a special live broadcast in Shijiazhuang. Figure Oriental IC
Wen Hu Miao
Edited by Yu Le
One day in June 2022, the author had a conversation with Sun Dongxu, CEO of Oriental Selection, in the office of Dongfang Selection in Zhongguancun, Beijing. At that time, Dongfang Selection had just become popular, the number of fans was soaring rapidly, and the whole team was in a state of panic and excitement.
At that time, he was very humble and had no doubts about the change of identity of CEO to salesperson. In the process of dialogue, he suddenly picked up a blueberry puree selected by Dongfang Selection, and talked about the product endlessly, with excitement and confidence between words.
A year and a half later, on December 16, Dongfang Selection issued a notice to remove Sun Dongxu from the position of executive director and CEO of Dongfang Selection, and Chairman Yu Minhong concurrently served as the CEO of Dongfang Selection.
The reason for the incident is that not long ago, under the warm-up of Dong Yuhui's "trip to Jilin", Dongfang Selection put a comment at the top of the live broadcast room, saying that "the copywriting used for the opening or transition is jointly completed by the anchor, the copywriting team, the shooting team, and the editing team".
Dong Yuhui then said in the live broadcast that "Hu's reply caused many friends to feel uncomfortable", but it triggered further rebuttals. published a small essay saying that he was very aggrieved and couldn't bear it, so he didn't reply, and explained that "Jilin copywriting was created independently by copywriting partners, and the anchor only changed 5 words".
So far, the "small composition incident" has further escalated, and many fans have lost their fans and transferred to the Gaotu live broadcast room. Many of the fans' behaviors have been accused of "fan circle culture", which has once again aroused their rebellious mentality. Then, although Sun Dongxu and Yu Minhong both apologized, the situation was still difficult to end.
In the "Small Composition Incident", Sun Dongxu's image is undoubtedly negative, he is suspected of dropping his mobile phone in the live broadcast, and took the initiative to announce Dong Yuhui's income, and some of the tone is like a leader speaking to employees during a meeting, which has aroused the disgust of the audience.
Compared with Sun Dongxu that the author saw at that time, it was completely two states.
Nowadays, the outside world likes to blame the contradictions shown by Dongfang Selection on the internal struggle - the struggle between Dong Yuhui and Sun Dongxu. The masses are also happy to see the logic of "the top management is dismissed, and the grassroots employees revitalize the rivers and mountains". So far, this is exactly what happened.
However, according to the author's continuous observation of this company for a year and a half, the problem of Dongfang's selection is by no means Sun Dongxu's personal problem.
Oriental selection is popular, who does it depend on?
Both inside and outside the industry often attribute the popularity of Dongfang Selection to Dong Yuhui. However, in the first difficult half a year, Sun Dongxu acted as the "spiritual pillar" of the team many times. Dong Yuhui once said that he was not suitable for the change from teacher to salesperson, and he also thought about leaving, but he chose to stay under the guidance of Sun Dongxu and went to the end.
However, in today's "small composition turmoil", Sun Dongxu became the one who left.
In that conversation with the author a year and a half ago, Sun Dongxu talked about the judgment on the reasons for the popularity of Oriental Selection, he said: "Without New Oriental's 28 years of brand precipitation and serving tens of millions of customers, Oriental Selection would not have been as popular as it was this time." ”
However, a year and a half later, the big anchor Dong Yuhui's personal influence on Dongfang Selection far exceeded Sun Dongxu's expectations. There is a mismatch in the judgment of the value of the company and employees, which is the root cause of the so-called "contradiction between Sun Dongxu and Dong Yuhui".
In the world of live streaming, and even in the entire MCN (multi-channel network) field, the relationship between the platform and anchors and Internet celebrities has always been very delicate. On the one hand, the biggest value of MCN is big anchors and big Internet celebrities, and a big anchor may create 90% of the company's revenue. On the other hand, the company is divided into management and ordinary employees, and no matter how valuable the anchor is, it may only be an employee. In this model, the company is not only deeply dependent on big anchors and big Internet celebrities, but also worried that employees will not listen to the command and the anchors will carry resources to change jobs after they become bigger.
This kind of thing has happened many times in the industry when the Internet celebrity and MCN company break up, the most typical ones are Weinian and Li Ziqi. Li Ziqi was unable to update the content for a long time, and Weinian investors represented by ByteDance also chose to withdraw their capital. It's a "lose-lose" standoff.
In the industry, several large MCN companies are deeply involved in their anchors, such as Li Jiaqi is a shareholder of Meione; Brother Xiao Yang himself is the founder of Three Sheep; Simba is also the founder of Xinxuan; Luo Yonghao and "Make a Friend" are not simply the relationship between the anchor and the platform, but the "spiritual leader" who makes friends.
Compared with these "peers", Dongfang Selection is embarrassing. As a live streaming company transformed from New Oriental, Dongfang Selection has a normal corporate organizational structure and is still a listed company. And Dong Yuhui is the biggest "asset" of Dongfang Selection, but at the same time, his identity is an ordinary employee.
As the largest "asset" of Dongfang Selection, Dong Yuhui has more than 18 million fans on Douyin, 5 million more than Yu Minhong's fans. Dongfang selection needs to be bound to Dong Yuhui:
In April 2023, Dongfang Selection issued an announcement to award a total of 3,045 to the company's 154 employees90,000 share awards. Both inside and outside the industry believe that Dong Yuhui must be in the list of ** incentives, but the specific number of shares will be distributed is not indicated in the announcement.
Yu Minhong also openly "painted a big pie". He said in a live broadcast: "New Oriental is a company that is almost all public, so I don't have the problem of the second generation." However, for example, for talents like Dong Yuhui, whether it is possible in the future can still be considered. ”
Dong Yuhui sat on the side, smiling and not saying a word.
But from the perspective of enterprise management, Dong Yuhui is an employee, not the management of Yu Minhong and Sun Dongxu, or Luo Yonghao is a "corporate symbol" in another sense.
Why did some operators launch a "small composition incident" and openly contradict Dong Yuhui? Because in the identity of "employees", they and Dong Yuhui are equal, and the efforts made by the team together finally turned into a single person's charm. Operations believe this is unfair. Moreover, Dong Yuhui was still on the same starting line as other ordinary employees until a year and a half ago.
In the stage of shared suffering, the bloody struggle will smooth out many psychological imbalances. When Dongfang Selection first became popular, the author observed that the work status of the whole team was "desperate": the anchor team rotated continuously, and the selection team would receive hundreds of merchants seeking cooperation every day, no matter what type of work they participated in the evaluation process. The express hotel near Zhongguancun has also become a permanent residence apartment for Dongfang selection employees.
However, in the stage of co-prosperity, this imbalance will be infinitely magnified. In the April option dividend event, the remaining 151 employees were jointly distributed 2,53590,000 share awards, worth about 7HK$3.5 billion. The author also communicated with Dongfang Selection insiders on this matter, and the other party revealed that most of the ordinary employees who have worked together are not in the list of awards.
Do not suffer from few, but suffer from unevenness.
This cannot simply be understood as the jealousy of Dong Yuhui by other staff, but Dongfang Selection did not handle Dong Yuhui's two identities as an employee and an "asset" at the same time in the management of the company.
Loss of empathy
In that conversation a year and a half ago, another topic that Sun Dongxu and the author talked about was the view of "emotional consumption", he said: "I don't want to consume emotions with everyone, but everyone has found some emotional resonance here, and that's not our purpose." ”
A year and a half later, in the small essay crisis, what we saw was that Dongfang Selection gradually lost its ability to grasp public sentiment, and constantly used inappropriate words and deeds to escalate the situation.
According to normal corporate logic, a company's deep dependence on "employees" is itself unreasonable. On December 15th, Dongfang Selection said that the recent outbreak of ** has exposed the conflict between Dongfang Selection's two models of Internet celebrity model and product route, "Sticking to the product route is undoubtedly the best choice for Dongfang Selection to respond to questions." Such a statement is actually a secret poke to show that the company will gradually eliminate Dong Yuhui's personal influence on Dongfang Selection.
However, this step taken by Dongfang Selection has touched the "emotions" of many people.
The popularity of Dongfang Selection is itself a success in harvesting the emotional value of consumers. At that time, Dongfang Selection was forced to transform after the education and training industry was unsustainable, with a color of "sadness". This has given many people spiritual strength in a difficult social environment.
Dong Yuhui has played an important role in this process. He is the one who successfully put on a cultural shirt for the live broadcast of selling goods, and he is also the one who makes literature and art compatible with selling goods at the same time - he successfully led Chi Zijian's "The Right Bank of the Ergun River", and he talked about "Alive", which made Yu Hua, the "king of mouth cannons", also very admired.
He is also an empathetic anchor. In a live broadcast, Dong Yuhui was questioned by netizens about the high price of agricultural products. To this, he responded: "The grain is cheap and hurts the peasants. It hit the emotional point of many people at once and dissipated the doubts. In another live broadcast, in the face of a shampoo priced at 399 yuan, he took the initiative to question the brand from the perspective of ordinary consumers. These behaviors undoubtedly put him in the same position as consumers and gained the trust of more people.
This person himself is a "collective" of Dongfang selection in terms of emotional value. This may also be the reason why Luo Yonghao couldn't help but say many times that "Dong Yuhui's value is underestimated" during the live broadcast.
When the public sentiment was already biased towards Dong Yuhui and sympathized with Dong Yuhui, Dongfang Selection made another big mistake: blaming all the public's emotions on the "fan circle culture". This is undoubtedly an arrogant statement, which has brought consumers' antagonism to a high point, and also negated the "foundation" of the rise of Oriental Selection in the past.
The number of fans in the Dongfang Selection live broadcast room began to decline continuously, and the number of fans increased from 3108 on the 12th60,000 fell to 28.47 million at 4 pm on the 16th, down more than 2.5 million in four days.
In fact, Dongfang Selection's loss of "empathy" with fans and the public did not start now.
In June 2023, which coincides with the year when Dongfang Selection has become popular, the author wants to make an in-depth observation of Dongfang Selection to see what changes have taken place in their team appearance, corporate culture, business model, business direction, etc. in a year, so I got in touch with the team again.
A year ago, Dongfang Selection opened interviews with Dong Yuhui and Sun Dongxu, and was willing to accept questioning conversations. A year later, they turned down **'s request for an interview. It is understood that it also holds internal meetings from time to time, and it is strictly forbidden for employees to communicate privately with **. The author offered to visit his company, but was again denied. The information provided by the company on a daily basis is limited to the good news of "how much GMV (turnover) of a special event reaches".
Enterprises that have received the most attention often fall into the dilemma of saying too much and making more mistakes. However, in the past 30 years, New Oriental has encountered many crises, and Yu Minhong has not refused to talk and communicate with the outside world. Most of the people who come out of New Oriental also have the characteristics of daring to speak out.
Now, Dongfang Selection has only been popular for a year and a half, and he is no longer willing to communicate with **. That may speak for itself.