The crisis caused by a box of mooncakes, is the end of “influencer sales” coming?

In the live-streaming e-commerce boom, the sales ability of top anchors has always been the focus of attention of brands and consumers. However, a series of recent controversial incidents surrounding top anchors have not only triggered widespread discussion on the live-streaming sales model, but also made people begin to question the sustainability of "expert sales".

This is a melee and a farce.

Recently, Simba and Crazy Xiao Yangge started a crazy fight.

At first, the two sides fought over the same type of hairy crabs, regarding the price control. One side attacked the other side for not having quality inspections on the products, not having after-sales service after sales, and not giving compensation after accidents.

It then evolved into a legal incident, involving the crazy Xiao Yangge who was suspected of causing the female internet celebrity Momo to be sent to jail.

Finally, the competition among the top internet celebrities reached its climax before the Mid-Autumn Festival. A Hong Kong mooncake called "Meicheng" was confirmed to be false advertising, which aroused the whole society's dissatisfaction with the chaos in e-commerce live streaming and the collapse of trust in the top influencers to bring goods.

Simba was banned from broadcasting, Xiao Yangge was investigated and punished, and there were no winners among the participants.

When it comes to live shopping, should you go to the expert’s live broadcast room or the official flagship store?

01 When influencers promote products, trust collapses?

Recently, Simba, the top anchor of Kuaishou, once again became a hot topic for publicly challenging other anchors. The person involved was the top anchor of Douyin, Crazy Xiao Yangge. The two top anchors treated Weibo as a battlefield, exposing each other's dirty laundry.

Soon, the incident snowballed. Crazy Xiao Yangge lost more than 600,000 followers in a week, while Simba gained 430,000 followers...

If the previous part was just a fight between experts, with more implications of hype and competition for traffic, then when a "famous" mooncake in Hong Kong was confirmed to be a "IQ tax", it would be difficult for Brother Yang to clear himself from the matter.

Netizens posted the origin information of a "Hong Kong Meicheng Mooncake" in the live broadcast room of Crazy Brother Xiao Yang. Brother Xiao Yang claimed in the live broadcast room that this mooncake is a high-end brand from Hong Kong, but the origin of the product was shown in Guangzhou and Foshan. The mooncake was suspected of false advertising.

Afterwards, Crazy Little Yang was greeted with an even bigger setback. This "Hong Kong Meicheng brand" mooncake frequently appeared on hot searches, causing a lot of controversy. Many agents and netizens stood up to criticize Crazy Little Yang, saying that Meicheng mooncakes have no stores in Hong Kong.

On the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau of Hefei High-tech Zone issued a situation report, saying that it has filed a case to investigate Three Sheep Network Technology Co., Ltd. for suspected "misleading consumers" during live broadcasts.

What is certain is that no matter what the results of the investigation are, the frequent series of negative events involving Crazy Brother Yang is eroding consumers' trust in him.

Crazy Little Brother Yang is in dire straits here, and Simba is not having a good time over there either. Although Simba has always been on the "righteous" side in this battle and beat up the "evil" Crazy Little Brother Yang, he has not been able to reverse his reputation, and the "sugar water bird's nest" incident has been brought up again.

On September 11, Simba’s account was banned for unknown reasons.

What was even more unexpected was that Dong Yuhui, who always had a good image, was suddenly involved.

On September 18, some netizens revealed that the Macau Puji mooncakes sold in the "Traveling with Hui" live broadcast room were also suspected of having quality problems. The mooncakes were supervised by "Macau Puji Food Co., Ltd." and produced by "Zhuhai Puji Food Co., Ltd." in Zhuhai, Guangdong. According to Qichacha data, "Macau Puji Food Co., Ltd." applied for "dormant activities" on May 31, 2024, which also means that the company can no longer operate, which makes people start to worry about the quality assurance of the mooncakes.

Simba, Xiao Yangge, Dong Yuhui...the three most well-known live-streaming hosts in the e-commerce live-streaming industry are all caught in a crisis of trust.

02 Sharp decline in talent data

Data shows that from July to August this year, mooncakes on Douyin e-commerce have sold 300 million yuan, among which Meichengli Black Truffle Lava Custard Mooncake is a hot-selling model. In addition to Crazy Brother Yang who sold 50 million in the past 30 days, many top anchors also brought this mooncake, including Three Sheep Mouth Brothers, Zeng Zhiwei, Xinxuan Zhao Mengche, Make Friends vertical live broadcast room, etc.

This has caused a new round of trust crisis among consumers in e-commerce anchors. Netizens have begun to complain about the low threshold for becoming an internet celebrity and jokingly said that "live streaming with goods has become a high-risk industry", which to a certain extent once again eroded consumers' trust in the live streaming with goods industry.

For live streaming e-commerce, a major factor supporting consumers' purchases is trust in the anchor. People in the industry often say that the most important thing about an IP that sells goods is trust and emotional value.

As chaos continues to emerge, consumers' trust in live streaming by influencers has been shattered.

Since the beginning of this year, the sales of the live broadcast rooms of the top anchors have dropped significantly. The total sales of the entire network during the 618 shopping festival this year was 742.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of nearly 7% compared with 2023. The sales of several super talents, such as the Guangdong couple, Qi'er, Pan Yurun, Xiao Bingchuan and Luo Wangyu, during the first live broadcast during the 618 shopping festival decreased by more than 70% year-on-year.

Crazy Xiao Yang Ge, a top anchor, ranked 24th, 15th and 13th respectively in the Douyin live broadcast experts in June, July and August. That is to say, Crazy Xiao Yang Ge has not been in the top 10 for three consecutive months.

There were signs of a decline in Xiao Yangge's popularity as early as last year. In the Douyin live-streaming influencer sales list in November 2023, Crazy Xiao Yangge ranked only 15th, and by December he had further dropped to 20th place.

Consumers are becoming more rational in their shopping and are starting to consider all aspects and compare prices instead of just listening to the anchors’ one-sided opinions. This means that the top anchors, such as Crazy Little Yangge and Simba, who used low prices to attract consumers to place orders, no longer have an advantage.

Simba's behavior of attacking Xiao Yangge might have been caused by "traffic anxiety", but no one expected that it would snowball and affect consumers' overall trust in live streaming e-commerce.

In such a big mood, no one can stay out of it.

03 Experts or brands broadcasting on their own?

There has always been a saying in the live streaming industry, "Tik Tok is permanent, but the top influencers come and go", which expresses the view that influencers "are not important from beginning to end" and are just "tools" used by platforms and merchants.

In the early days of the development of the live streaming e-commerce industry, influencers who brought their own traffic were undoubtedly "hot commodities". However, as the development of platform e-commerce got on track, the importance of influencers seemed to be slowly weakening.

For the platform, the influencer sales model is uncertain.

First, influencers mostly rely on traffic to make their fortunes, and they don’t know as much about products as merchants do, so they are more likely to fail due to issues such as product quality or publicity.

Second, the ceiling of the influencer sales model is limited. The monetization method of earning placement fees and commissions from merchants will eventually weaken as merchants focus on self-broadcasting and reduce their advertising budgets.

Du Pengyuan, a former Douyin employee, once said in an interview with the media: "With the establishment of user minds and the rapid expansion of the number of Douyin stores, the importance of merchants' self-broadcasting has become increasingly prominent. Internally, it has been found that merchants' self-broadcasting is more valuable to the platform, because the money that merchants pay to influencers should essentially be the money that merchants pay to the platform."

Perhaps what he wanted to express was: "Influencers make a fortune, while merchants suffer losses", which is not the situation the platform wants to see.

Instead of supporting influencers to grow bigger and stronger, it is better to set up its own mall. Since realizing this, Douyin’s goal has become “to expand across the board and build a mall”, upgrading Douyin’s e-commerce from a simple “people looking for goods” scenario to “goods looking for people”.

In recent years, Douyin has actively invited brands to join and provided a variety of services and support to brand merchants, including entry procedures, marketing strategies, agency operation selection, service provider rating system, etc.

Douyin E-commerce launched the "Brand Service Provider 2024 Q2 Rating Mechanism" and organized activities such as "Big Brand Surprise Day" and "Douyin Super Product Day", guiding people to complete corresponding big-brand tasks to obtain benefits, and used the gimmick of "zero threshold, high surprise", which helped the brand attract new customers and promoted the expansion of its business territory and the growth of business sales.

For merchants, the influencer sales model is unsustainable.

In fact, there are still many businesses that prefer to use influencers to sell their products, such as Blue Moon, which has also invited top influencers such as the Guangdong couple and Zhu Xiaohan to cooperate in special live broadcasts.

However, according to media reports, the sales of the special live broadcasts that Blue Moon cooperated with the Guangdong couple ranged from 75 million to 120 million yuan, but the investment costs were estimated to be around 40 million yuan, with paid traffic accounting for as high as 69%, far exceeding the industry average. Blue Moon's way of spending a lot of money on live broadcasts regardless of losses is called "spending money to make a fuss."

The high slot fees and commissions of live streaming by influencers have made some businesses realize that "more sales" does not mean "smaller profits" and that relying on influencers to bring goods is not sustainable. Therefore, many businesses have started their own live streaming with the support of Douyin e-commerce. Basically, every well-known brand has a Douyin account. Although the traffic is not as good as that of live streaming by influencers, it has reduced the demand for influencers to a certain extent.

Data shows that in 2023, the proportion of brand store live broadcasts was 51.8%, exceeding the proportion of expert live broadcasts for the first time.

During this year's "618", dozens of stores on a certain e-commerce platform had a turnover of over 100 million yuan in live broadcast rooms, and the number of store live broadcast orders was several times that of the same period last year. On the one hand, the traffic of live broadcasts by celebrities has peaked, and on the other hand, the self-broadcasting of brands is growing rapidly. There is not much time left for "crazy Xiao Yang brothers".

Several top anchors who once dominated the charts have either disappeared, their popularity has declined, or they have stopped broadcasting due to public opinion crises. All of these have revealed a message: the ecological structure of live e-commerce is quietly changing. Perhaps the platform no longer needs "crazy little Yang brothers"? The rise of mid-level anchors and new live broadcasters, the strengthening of platform autonomy, and the coexistence of MCN anchors and brand-owned broadcasts may become the norm in the future.

So now let me ask you this: When shopping through live streaming, do you choose products promoted by influencers or go to the official flagship store?