Dozens of plastic turtles were sold in the live broadcast room, and even the Olympic champion was harvested.

As the live broadcast economy and blind box culture become increasingly popular, a new interactive consumption model, the "Turtle Blind Box", has quickly become popular among young consumers. This blind box game with a resin turtle as the carrier has attracted a large number of netizens to participate with its unique matching gameplay and live broadcast interactive experience, and even Olympic champions have joined in. This article deeply explores the consumer psychology and market logic behind this phenomenon.

Friends, if I pulled out a My Little Pony card, how many of you would have guessed that it could be sold for nearly $150,000 on the secondary market?

Not to mention you, ever since the blind box economy became popular in various live broadcast rooms in the past two years, the situation has been developing in a direction that I, the bad reviewer, can't understand.

Just recently, when I was staying up late to watch videos, I don’t know which circle the algorithm dad has put me in, and he kept recommending me some live broadcast rooms where people open blind boxes.

It’s this colorful resin turtle that you can disassemble in the live broadcast room for only 20 yuan, and it will be shipped to your home free of charge.

You guys may ask, at least you can get the IP by disassembling the card, but what’s the use of these resin turtles?

At first, I couldn't figure it out, but after watching in several live broadcast rooms, I was completely controlled by this bunch of colorful turtles.

The most basic way to play the game of unpacking turtles is to order the cheapest one for a dozen or twenty yuan, which allows you to unpack 8 packages. Each package contains turtles of different colors, and the probability of unpacking each color is the same. When placing an order, you can also choose one of the colors as the wishing color.

Then, the host will place the opened turtles on the nine-square grid in front of him one by one. If a turtle of your wish color is opened in the middle, he will open another pack immediately. When the nine-square grid is full, he will check if there are pairs of turtles of the same color on it. If there are pairs, he will open more packs.

If you are lucky, you may get three in a row (three of the same color in a line), a clear table (all touched), or a family portrait (one of every color), and you will be able to remove more turtles.

In this case, it's three hits and three consecutive hits, and the table is cleared.

If you want to get as many turtles as possible at the time of settlement, you have to hope to encounter the situations mentioned above. Correspondingly, the probability of bumps, triples and clearing the table also depends on opening more packages to take a chance.

In a word, the more you dismantle, the more turtles can be matched, and the more you will get in the end.

However, according to the observation of the bad reviewer, if you open 8 packages, you usually only get about 20 turtles home, and if you open more than 10 packages and get 40-70 turtles, you are considered lucky.

If you are not satisfied with simple bumps and want to get three in a row or clear the table, you have to spend more money and place an order for princess demolition or rich woman demolition.

Some live broadcast rooms will also come up with some new rules like copying orders (for a group of people who have placed the same copy order within a certain period of time, the live broadcast room will only split one of the orders. If that order is finally settled with 50 pieces, the other orders will also have 50 turtles delivered to their homes), or changing the nine-square grid to a disc, but the gameplay of the match-up is basically the same.

Anyway, after watching it for the whole afternoon, all I could think about was “Congratulations to Baozi for winning the pink lottery, plus one more pack,” “One touch of the cyan lottery plus one more pack,” “Three touches plus three packs,” “A three in a row plus five packs, Baozi is so lucky.”... I was so addicted to it.

Moreover, this kind of gameplay is more popular than we imagined. People can be seen posting photos of armies of turtles everywhere.

Even Quan Hongchan posted a video showing her pile of turtles. Because of this, she was affectionately called "AAA Colored Turtles Wholesale Sister Hong" by netizens.

As for how big the traffic of the Olympic champion is, let's put it this way, the live broadcast room she often visited became popular and opened a second store. According to the data of Chan Mama, in about a week, their second store broadcast a total of 9 shows, and the accumulated sales of live broadcasts have reached 250,000-500,000.

All kinds of trendy toy live broadcast rooms, big and small, rushed in, almost all of them were dismantling turtles. I randomly searched for several other less famous ones, and most of them had sales of 5,000+, but 1,000+ is a relatively common sales level.

Even offline, the virus has been transmitted from person to person.

Now when I stream my short videos, I can not only see various turtle matches, but also see machines for selling turtle blind bag packaging, and factories that produce turtles 24 hours a day.

The person who gave the bad review specifically asked a turtle wholesaler, and was told that some models of turtles were out of stock and were not available even if one wanted to buy them. The order queue had been set for 10 days later.

But let's talk about something practical. If you really want to know what the use of this thing is, there is actually none, and the cost is very low.

A wholesale manufacturer on 1688 sells small sizes for 0.16 yuan and large sizes for less than 60 cents. I asked several anchors in the live broadcast room and they said that the turtles they usually disassemble are about 4.8cm long and 3.5cm wide, which roughly corresponds to the medium and large sizes.

Let's assume that each turtle costs 0.7 yuan. The cost of 20 turtles is only 14 yuan, so the anchor's profit margin is still very high.

This is obviously a business that gives money to the anchor, and the turtle will probably be covered in dust after it is bought home. Not only that, in the second-hand market, it is rare to see individual sellers selling colored turtles at high prices like selling small cards.

There are only a few of them, and you can get them by paying the postage.

After all, there is an essential difference between turtle duel and what we usually call dismantling small cards.

Just talking about history, the first baseball star card was born in the 1960s and 1970s. Up to now, there are all kinds of star cards, player cards and cartoon cards.

There will also be specialized rating agencies that rate the quality and rarity of cards, such as the old-fashioned agency PSA abroad, and there is also an ancient coin rating agency called Baocui in China, which has also started to provide card rating services in recent years.

In addition, small cards will also have a corresponding audience circle, and some people will pay for a certain IP or a certain star. There are also many people who spend tens of millions on a card.

LeBron James's basketball card sold for about 16 million RMB

In short, from production, grading to trading, Xiaoka has formed a relatively complete industrial chain. On the other hand, the focus of the turtle match is not on finding any rare models, at best it is just a probability game.

The reason why there are a steady stream of people pouring into the live broadcast room and participating in the game is that the logic behind their consumption is actually very simple, it can be summed up in four words: just have fun.

In the relatively closed space of the live broadcast room, the gameplay of blind box + matching is the same as that of the gambling table. Everyone's attention is focused on the nine-square grid in front of the anchor.

Although you don't know what color turtle you will get in the next second, you might get three in a row, or you might clear the table. The whole process is exciting.

Moreover, the host would yell at you from time to time, "It's so lucky, I won again." The emotional value was immediately given.

The reason why turtle matching is attractive is not what is sold, but the core lies in the gameplay of matching and some new rules extended in the live broadcast room, which allows consumers to spend a certain amount of money to gain uncertainty, greatly satisfying their pleasure.

Even if you just look at it and don’t place an order, it’s easy to get addicted. To put it bluntly, this is a kind of emotional value consumption.

This model of emotional value consumption can be copied directly.

In addition to turtle matching, many similar live broadcast rooms have now emerged, such as paper towel matching, stationery matching, hand cream matching, and even underpants matching and cat canned food matching. Basically, everything can be matched.

Just stick the color or specific label on the product, you don’t even need to put it in a blind box bag, and you can find the pair later.

Although they look like inexpensive gadgets, the principle is the same, just for fun. And compared to turtles, tissues and hand cream are much more practical.

I also went to a brand’s official flagship store and saw their anchor holding a lottery for fans using a matching method.

In other words, the matchmaking has formed a new consumption model. I think that for some relatively cheap daily consumables, this model will gradually become a means for many white-label merchants to sell goods.

A while ago on TikTok, some live broadcast rooms selling teacups pretended to perform the opening of a kiln on site and "tearfully sold off" the defective products in the warehouse, which deceived many foreigners.

Now that the new trend of matching is popular, consumers are more motivated to spend money.

However, this model inevitably has some gambling characteristics.

It doesn't matter if it encounters a few turtles, but once it forms a relatively mature consumption model and integrates more deeply with the market, the platform's reviewers will be busy.

Images and information sources: Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Xianyu, 1688. Some images are from the Internet.

Written by: Xixi Editor: Jiang Jiang & Noodles This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Bad Comments], WeChat public account: [Bad Comments X.PIN], original/authorized to be published in Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.