Text: Li Wei
Editor's note
The "small composition" incident, which lasted for more than ten days, has gradually subsided, and the whole process has ups and downs and a happy ending, which is comparable to a cool article.
Dong Yuhui, a "good person", with the assistance of the whole network, "Liansheng**" successfully solved the positioning problem, obtained the greatest benefits, and realized his personal development plan of light live broadcast sales and cultural promotion.
After this "battle", he not only does not have the shortcomings of "cowardly personality and incomprehensible logic" that netizens are worried about, but also is more calm and atmospheric than everyone thinks. He has the ability to mobilize the emotions of the public, and he also has the determination to regulate the hot and cold emotions, as long as he is silent, someone will help him negotiate conditions, as long as he speaks, everyone will understand his difficulty. It is not an exaggeration to say that he is a phenomenal existence of live broadcast e-commerce.
Oriental selection, there is no substantial loss. Although it has experienced twists and turns, it not only retained the cash cow and established the brand in time, but also opened up the "Dong Yuhui Studio" to increase the company's second growth curve of cultural tourism, and also completed the "de-Dong Yuhui" of the Oriental Selection Live Broadcast Room in a bright way.
Professor Li Wei wrote an article "The Water and Boat of Live E-commerce" on December 16 about the whole incident, sharing with you in a timely manner his views on the problems in the business model of live broadcast e-commerce reflected behind the incident, as well as the contradictions between the platform and the anchor in terms of value contribution and benefit distribution.
On the 19th, in the Caixin draft, he updated his views according to the development of the situation and shared it with you.
On the morning of December 16, the live broadcast e-commerce platform Dongfang Selection issued a notice of appointment and dismissal of Sun Dongxu (online name Dongfang Xiaosun) from the position of CEO;That night, the anchor Dong Yuhui and his boss, Yu Minhong, chairman of Oriental Selection, appeared in the live broadcast room together, proving that the two sides had resolved the problem amicably.
On December 18, Oriental Selection issued a notice appointing Dong Yuhui as the cultural assistant to the chairman of New Oriental and the vice president of New Oriental Cultural Tourism Group9%, up more than 25% intraday.
In the evening in the Dongfang Selection Douyin live broadcast room, Dong Yuhui made his comeback debut, and there were 3.8 million people at the same time during the peak hours to watch him chat with Yu Minhong, and the number of fans who had fallen before rebounded rapidly.
Up to now, the number of fans of Dongfang Selection has surpassed that before the small composition incident.
At this point, the "Dong Yuhui Small Composition" incident, which made the whole network boil and also affected the emotions of countless workers, has finally come to an end.
Looking back on the whole incident, whether from the perspective of Dong Yuhui or from the perspective of Yu Minhong and Dongfang Selection, this crisis of public opinion with the help of social ** and driven by huge social emotions can be regarded as a thrilling resolution.
However, the author feels that it is worth further discussion on the problems in the business model of live broadcast e-commerce reflected behind the whole thing, as well as the contradiction between the platform and the anchor in terms of value contribution and benefit distribution.
Water can carry a boat, but it can also capsize a boat. This is especially true in the live e-commerce business.
Whether it is the recent "Dong Yuhui Small Essay" incident, or the "Huaxizi Incident" that happened in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room three months ago, they have really let everyone see the turbulent reefs of the new shopping platform - live broadcast e-commerce, as well as the extraordinary emotional influence of consumers and workers this time.
The slight difference is that the last time was the anchor Li Jiaqi faced the emotions of fans and consumers and had to apologize for his offensive behavior;This time, it was all consumers who were indignant and cared for the anchor Dong Yuhui to ask for justice from the live broadcast platform.
These two things seem to be completely opposite, but in fact they are the same, reflecting the problem that live broadcast e-commerce has an unbearable burden between the platform, the anchor and the fans.
Let's take a look at the "Dong Yuhui Small Composition" incident first
The incident originated from the editor of the official account of "Oriental Selection" (hereinafter referred to as the following), in the content comment area where netizens praised the anchor Dong Yuhui on his platform, he placed a self-question and self-answer reply, announcing that the copy in front of the anchor's camera was created by the team.
As we all know, the live broadcast anchor is a character created by the platform, and it is common sense that there should be a whole operation team behind a super anchor.
When he walked to the stage and said that the copywriter was written by himself, this exposed that there was a problem in the relationship between the platform team and the anchor.
Soon, this small grievance, which was originally hidden by the anchor, gradually became a big emotion of the workers on the whole network.
In just a few days, the parties, the Oriental Selection Platform, the whole network of workers, e-commerce peers, various self-leaders, and celebrities from all walks of life were coerced in.
Why can a few inappropriate messages from behind-the-scenes people ignite the emotions of consumers across the network?This also starts with the super head anchor Dong Yuhui himself.
Back in December 2021, due to the management and rectification of the education and training industry by relevant departments, Dong Yuhui, a New Oriental teacher who was about to lose his job, transformed into an Oriental selection anchor.
On June 8, 2022, a section of his live broadcast with fluent bilingual Chinese and English bilingual and poetic expressions in the live broadcast room suddenly became popular all over the Internet, and a large number of consumers flocked to the live broadcast room of Dongfang Selection to listen to him read and bring goods, and soon he became a phenomenal existence in China's live broadcast e-commerce rivers and lakes.
Dong's popularity directly drove the popularity of the Oriental Selection e-commerce platform all over the Internet, and the share price of New Oriental (later renamed Oriental Selection) also rose from around HK$3 per share in May 2022 to as high as HK$75 in January this year.
Netizens said that he brought New Oriental back to life by himself, and Yu Minhong, the head of the company, also publicly stated that Dong Yuhui was indispensable, and he would not let Yuhui suffer.
The result?'s repeated messages made fans believe that the platform must have wronged him.
Especially when Dong Yuhui himself came out to play a round, saying that he also wrote the copywriting, and the team also supported it, don't talk nonsense, trying to slide through this episode in a humorous way, but continued to output, venting his dissatisfaction from the inside to the fans outside, thinking that he had suffered an Internet explosion.
Fans are the company's customers, and everyone comes to buy and buy because they like the anchors of the platform, but the result represents the official position, not only does not have the ability and consciousness to empathize with consumers, but also blames the blame, which obviously disrespects the behavior of consumers and directly intensifies the contradiction.
From the perspective of workplace power struggle, netizens have analyzed the criticism of bureaucrats in large enterprises, and empathized with the difficulty of breaking through the workplace plight of workers from ordinary backgrounds, believing that Dong Yuhui, who has great credit, will also be encircled and suppressed in the workplace.
Immediately, Dongfang Selection began to lose fans, and Dong Yuhui quietly stopped broadcasting, and the company's stock price followed.
On December 12, the company's CEO Dongfang Xiaosun appeared in the live broadcast room to expose Dong Yuhui's income of more than tens of millions. The implication is that Dong Yuhui has broken away from the ranks of ordinary workers, and there is no need for ordinary netizens to project their grievances as workers on Dong Yuhui's body.
This is another phenomenal anchor Li Jiaqi, who became popular earlier, not long ago.
Let's review the "Huaxizi" incident.
At that time, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room launched a 79 yuan buy one get two free Huaxizi eyebrow pencil, and someone asked, is Huaxizi products too expensive?
As a result, the question was refuted by Li Jiaqi a series of times, and three questions were raised to netizens:
*Expensive?It's your own reason, okay?After so many years, has the salary risen, have you worked seriously?
Before Li Jiaqi became the head anchor, he was a member of the migrant workers, selecting cheap and affordable goods for girls on the whole network, and with his popularity in the live broadcast e-commerce, he is now worth hundreds of millions. This remark revealed that he and the migrant consumers have drifted apart.
After that, consumers expressed ** by taking off their fans, and more workers expressed their emotions through the Internet, and this incident has become a stain on Li Jiaqi's live broadcast career.
As a live broadcast peer, and as the manager of the platform, Dongfang Xiaosun should know the impact of the "Huaxizi Incident" on Li Jiaqi's personality, but he took the initiative to expose the income distance between his anchor and the worker, saying that he was reassuring netizens, but in fact he was suspected of dividing netizens' emotional projection of the anchor.
Fans were utterly disappointed. Netizens presumed that Dongfang Xiaosun, on behalf of the company, was afraid that Dong Yuhui's personal voice was too big, and he engaged in "de-Dong Yuhui".
Although such incidents are common in the live broadcast e-commerce industry, Dong Yuhui's fans do not accept them.
In the hearts of the majority of fans, Dongfang Selection was successful because of him, but he was just an ordinary employee from beginning to end.
The income has skyrocketed, but it has not reached the height that can match Dong Yuhui's contribution to the company, he has always maintained the wisdom of a scholar and the simplicity of a rural person, and has not been proud of his achievements. Such a good-natured person should not be let down.
The emotions of netizens poured into Dongfang Selection like a mudslide, and what further ignited the fire was that in the live broadcast, the Dongfang Xiaosun continued to point the contradiction at netizens, believing that it was those irrational fans who made the simple problem serious.
This voice of the management directly impacted the company's stock price, and on December 13 alone, Oriental Selection fell by nearly 13%, and its market value evaporated by more than 4 billion Hong Kong dollars.
Under the surging public opinion, Chairman Yu Minhong had to admit that there were problems with the company's management and apologize to Dong Yuhui on the 14th. But the social mood has not subsided, and the account is still losing fans.
On December 15, Dongfang Selection's share price once again exceeded 5%, and the fans fell from 31.16 million on December 9 to 28.43 million on the 16th, which means that in just one week, this e-commerce platform has directly lost more than 2.7 million fans.
This is the series of actions mentioned by the Dongfang Selection Board at the beginning of this article: let Dongfang Xiaosun leave class, ask Dong Yuhui to return, and give a clear internal identity confirmation.
That's the whole thing.
Although Dong Yuhui's fans summarize it as a victory for the common people, the author prefers to attribute it to the victory of consumer voting rights.
For the e-commerce platform, whether Dong Yuhui is aggrieved or not, although it is important, but more importantly, the thousands of fans behind him feel aggrieved, and then successfully carried out a ** battle of "fighting and hugging".
Although the platform will say that it will resist the irrational fan circle culture of fans, in the face of collective action triggered by the collective emotions of consumers--- the business model of the e-commerce platform of the fan boycott --- determines that it will inevitably compromise with the demands of consumers.
Live e-commerce, which emerged in China, as a new type of shopping, is characterized by allowing fresh anchors to achieve the purpose of consumers placing orders through online accompaniment.
In the past, whether in the shopping field or on the traditional e-commerce platform, consumers faced with a large number of products and many brands, they would have choice anxiety due to information asymmetry.
Live broadcast e-commerce has joined hands with anchors to provide consumers with emotional value and shopping guide services by relying on the "selection" of products and in-depth research and control of the ** chain, which has achieved great success.
From the perspective of consumers, everyone likes to shop in live e-commerce because anchors provide emotional value and shopping companionship, especially those super head anchors.
However, as far as the live broadcast e-commerce service chain is concerned, in addition to soothing consumer emotions, successful anchors are inseparable from the attention of the team behind them to product selection.
Professional product selection is a key live broadcast strategy to reduce information asymmetry**Chain research and control is the basis for ensuring product qualityThrough the live broadcast of the anchor, including the trial, the trust of consumers is aroused, the product is fully displayed, and the final consumer pays.
These are very valuable, and they are also the key to the explosive growth of live broadcast e-commerce.
However, since its birth, live broadcast e-commerce has faced pressure and troubles, it is overly dependent on anchors, especially those who have a strong ability to attract money, but anchors are non-standard services, with traffic value, but also collapse (Wei Ya tax evasion incident), power struggle, change of course (Simba and Kuaishou tear each other) and other risks.
On the one hand, the platform needs to continue to support the growth and expansion of anchors;On the other hand, I am very jealous of those super head anchors.
Because once the anchor becomes a super head, it becomes a huge traffic reservoir, which brings performance to the platform, but also diverts the traffic of the platform, squeezing the living space of other small and medium-sized businesses and anchors.
And what about the streamers themselves?When they have the ability to influence the emotions of fans on the whole network, they will naturally use it as a bargaining chip in the negotiation game with the platform, such as in the Dong Yuhui small essay incident, Dong Yuhui's silence and disappearance at the key node of the development of the situation gave the platform unlimited pressure.
Even if the anchor and the e-commerce company Qin Se and Ming, the platform also needs to defend against the bottleneck crisis of relying on a single anchor, such as Wei Ya and **live broadcast depth**, after they disappeared due to tax evasion, the performance of **live broadcast also suffered a setback.
The more prominent problem in this Dongfang selection incident is that there is obviously a conflict of interests not only between the anchor and the platform, but also between the anchor and other employees and management.
For example, Dongfang Selection's running to the front of the stage to compete for the credit of the anchor is obviously dissatisfied with the company's internal income distribution model, and for example, Dongfang Xiaosun, who is in the management, took the initiative to break the news of Dong Yuhui's income, which also exposed the problem of "unevenness" between the management and super employees.
Many people don't understand why holding such a good cash cow as Dong Yuhui, the management and employees of Dongfang Selection still don't know how to cherish it
The crux of the problem is that the anchor, as a super employee, stands in a different position with the platform and the ordinary team employees behind the scenes in terms of contribution attribution and benefit distribution.
In the eyes of the outside world, Dongfang Selection is essentially an MCN company, and its core assets are anchors such as Dong Yuhui, so it is reasonable for super head anchors like Dong Yuhui to take more and even hold more shares.
However, Dongfang Selection positions itself as an e-commerce company, and the anchor is an important employee of the company, but it is only a link in the live broadcast e-commerce chain, and it should not be in an absolute dominant position, let alone take so much money.
In traditional enterprises, each employee is unique, but it is also replaceable, as the so-called iron battalion, flowing soldiers. When the company achieves good performance effect, most employees still receive remuneration according to the established employment contract, and the bonus may increase, but the overall proportion of the company's profit is negligible.
However, with the rise of live broadcasting, the value of amateur anchors, their charm and charisma have increased significantly, although they are still at the end of the value chain, they are the concentration point of value creation, and even the fulcrum of the entire value chain.
For anchors, because the platform has his incorruptible tongue, he can make a thousand pounds or two to attract a large amount of realizable traffic to the platform. As an employee's anchor, it is normal to not be able to abide by the previous benefit distribution model between the company and ordinary employees after becoming popular.
For enterprises, the end of the value chain is also the bottleneck of the value chain, when this bottleneck is in the hands of a super employee, the value of the enterprise is on this person, which is quite risky, and the platform is also its inevitable choice.
Dong Yuhui's small essay incident is essentially caused by the difference in the positioning of Dongfang Selection itself and the market on whether Dong Yuhui is an employee or a star.
There is no unified model for live broadcast e-commerce, whether it is an ordinary company or a movie star studio. At present, the live broadcast e-commerce track is still developing wildly, and it is not realistic to expect the industry to solve the income distribution mechanism of anchors and platforms in the short term.
However, judging from the results of the small essay incident, Dong Yuhui's return, in addition to personal feelings, is more mainly related to the fact that Dongfang Selection has realized the root of the problem and has taken the initiative to "rise to the top" to greatly transfer interests and the right to speak.
Among the many speeches on the Internet that are not too big to watch, the author saw a netizen say:
Many people only see Dong Yuhui's economic value and ignore his social value. In a certain sense, Dong Yuhui is not only the anchor of Dongfang Selection, he is also the positive energy of this society!
He empowers the powerless and moves forward the pessimistic. He has given many people who are sad, confused, and hopeless a glimmer of hope and hope. His upbringing has planted a useful seed for many children in their livesIn him, it reflects that a child from an ordinary family can be generous by studying Xi hard work.
I think so. It's just that in this incident, Dong Yuhui, as a social symbol, has the ability to attract consumer fans, but as the situation develops, he also has no ability to manage fans.
That's what makes the anchor profession special. They enjoy the attention and following of consumers, but they also have to carry the social emotions of consumers.
It doesn't matter if this emotion is good for you or in a way that makes you collapse, you can only bear it.
In the Huaxizi incident, consumers will be furious because the anchor they have selected with a sum of money will be outright offensive to the consumer who questioned **.
A consumer who dislikes the expensive 79 yuan product, whether rich or poor, the anchor should be respected. It is a big mistake to treat them as people with consumption deficiencies and to denounce them for not working well.
Workers need to vent their emotions, and anchors must not stand up as targets.
This time, Dong Yuhui encountered the love of the whole network, which shows that it is not easy for consumers to make money, and every ordinary person wants to be treated fairly. Everyone needs to express their demands for fair treatment through Dong Yuhui.
In the whole incident, what is ironic is that at the beginning of the incident, Dong Yuhui himself seemed to accept the reality that his contribution was significantly higher than the company's value distribution, and he was also squeezed by the unfair treatment of the platform and the behind-the-scenes team. But the consumer fans did not accept it, and the whole network forced the company to compromise on his behalf.
After that, he, a good person, under the coercion of fans and netizens, finally successfully solved the positioning problem, obtained the greatest benefits, and realized his personal development plan of light live broadcast sales and heavy cultural promotion.
Oriental selection, there is no substantial loss. Although it has experienced twists and turns, it not only retained the cash cow and established the brand in time, but also opened up the "Dong Yuhui Studio" to increase the company's second growth curve of cultural tourism, and also completed the "de-Dong Yuhuiization" of the Oriental Selection Live Broadcast Room in a bright way.
In the e-commerce industry, the three key roles of consumers, anchors, and e-commerce platforms are mutually wrestling and interdependent. The relationship between them is that of water and boat, which complements each other, and at the same time has irreconcilable risks and hidden dangers.
However, in the final analysis, whether it is a platform or an anchor, the most important thing is to maintain a good relationship with consumers.
The author is associate dean and professor of economics at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business