Dongfang Selection: What customers buy is not agricultural products, but "knowledge live broadcast"

The success of Oriental Selection is not only due to its products, but also to its "knowledge live broadcast". Only by understanding clearly what customers need to buy can we achieve greater value.

Drucker often liked to interrogate visiting entrepreneurs with simple questions, one of which was: What do customers buy?

Similar questions include: Who are the customers? Where are the customers? What values ​​do customers value?

It seems like a simple question, but it requires great wisdom and courage to answer it clearly. Obviously, in the Oriental Selection Essay incident, many people did not see through this problem:

What do Oriental Select customers buy?

1. Are customers buying products?

If customers buy agricultural products from Dongfang Zhenxuan, this is definitely a wrong answer. Since other e-commerce platforms have more agricultural products to choose from, why do customers only buy from Dongfang Zhenxuan?

If Oriental Selection is a strictly selected agricultural product of better quality, then JD.com, Tmall, and even NetEase Yanxuan and Hema Fresh are all better than it.

So why do customers choose to buy from Dongfang? What do customers really buy?

Drucker analyzed this problem in this way. In "The Effective Executive", he asked readers, what do Cadillac customers really buy? Is it a means of transportation? Chevrolet can also accomplish this task. What customers really buy is a class label.

We can expand this a little bit. When customers buy off-road vehicles, do they really want to drive in the wild? No, what they really buy is the feeling of wild self. When customers buy Nike sneakers, they don’t necessarily have to play sports on the court. What they buy is the spirit of continuous struggle.

Arc'teryx, the best-selling outdoor equipment brand in 2023, has customers who don't really go hiking outdoors.

What customers really buy is a feeling, and this feeling is often a better self. In the case of Dongfang Selection, what customers really buy is "knowledge live broadcast". To be more specific, customers buy an atmosphere where they can learn knowledge and gain insights while shopping.

The sum of these customer feelings is what we call a brand.

The purpose of an enterprise is to create customers externally with the brand as the core. Customers do not buy the enterprise, let alone the managers within the enterprise.

On the contrary, companies and internal managers need to serve external customers. Companies integrate various resources to create products, reduce transaction costs for customers, and then deliver them to customers in the form of brands.

In the case of Dongfang Selection, the company integrated the upstream agricultural product industry chain, carefully selected some products with better quality, and delivered them to customers through the Dong Yuhui brand. However, the essence of what customers buy is not these agricultural products, but the feeling that the Dong Yuhui brand gives to customers.

This feeling can be summarized in one word: "knowledge live broadcast".

If we use a question from Drucker to inspire us, it is: What does a company run? For Dongfang Zhenxuan, is it running the upstream agricultural product industry chain? It seems so, but it is not in essence. Just like for Nike, it is not running the production chain of sports equipment. It is a kind of sports spirit of continuous struggle. It is essentially an advertising company or marketing company, not a sports equipment manufacturer.

Dongfang Zhenxuan operates in the category of "knowledge live broadcast". Its essence is a content production company, not an agricultural product selector.

2. Managers must adapt to the era of customer sovereignty

The era of customer sovereignty has arrived, but many managers from the old era have not yet seen it.

The purpose of an enterprise is to create customers externally, and there are only costs internally. This is Drucker's insight. The way for an enterprise to create customers is to build a brand. This is the insight of positioning theory. The brand exists in the customer's cognition, not in the internal management of the enterprise, nor in the factory that manufactures the product.

As the CEO of Oriental Selection, Sun Dongxu needs to realize that as a manager, he is responsible for external results. Dong Yuhui has at least two natures, one is an employee of Oriental Selection, and the other is the brand of Oriental Selection.

The CEO only saw Dong Yuhui as an employee, and did not see his essence as a brand. External customers projected a lot of emotions on this brand. When the CEO regarded Dong Yuhui as an employee and commented on him arbitrarily, what customers saw was the CEO's disregard for their own emotions.

As an employee, an annual salary of nearly 10 million is already very high. But as a brand? 10 million is really too little. How much do you think Jay Chou's annual salary should be? How about Messi? How about LeBron James?

It is not an exaggeration to call Dong Yuhui the Messi of knowledge-based products.

Drucker said that only by standing outside the enterprise can we understand the essence of the enterprise. Positioning theory has always emphasized the customer perspective and external thinking.

The CEO's opinion of Dong Yuhui is still within the company: an employee with an annual salary of tens of millions, who is not even a senior executive, actually does not obey management. The employee's fans even point fingers at Dongfang Selection. They really should hold a meeting to criticize him.

The CEO thought that these customers came for the Dongfang Zhenxuan corporate entity, and did not realize that they came for the Dong Yuhui brand entity.

It is not the enterprise that creates customers, but the brand. Enterprises should serve brands. To put it more deeply, enterprises should serve external customers through brands. If you regard Dong Yuhui as an employee, you can smash your phone to show your authority. If you regard Dong Yuhui as a brand, you should serve him.

3. Oriental Selection wants to build multiple brands

This era empowers many ordinary people, and super individuals become new super brands. For enterprises, the way to avoid the risks of super brands is not to suppress them, but to cultivate multiple brands.

Judging from the current situation, Dongfang Zhenxuan has not created a new brand because the company does not have the knowledge to build a brand. Although Dongfang Zhenxuan started out by promoting products through knowledge, they do not know how to expand this category.

There is a section in "General Knowledge of Brand Positioning": Discover a word, occupy a word, and make a word bigger.

This word is the core of the brand. The company's operating activities should be carried out around this word, such as Hanting around "clean", Volvo around "safety", Guazi around "direct sales", BMW around "driving", etc.

How to expand a word? Or how to expand a positioning or a category? One way is to create multiple brands. For example, General Motors has created multiple brands such as Cadillac, Buick, GM and Chevrolet. As mentioned earlier, customers buy identity labels, so General Motors gives customers multiple labels.

The working class drives Chevrolet, management drives General Motors, board members drive Buicks, and the chairman drives Cadillac.

For Dongfangxuan, the new brand he created was not successful. This is because he was always trying to create another Dong Yuhui. In "Brand Positioning General Knowledge", we also gave a method: different is better than better, and create new categories. Another super brand must not be the second Dong Yuhui, but another first.

For example, in the parent company of Nongfu Spring, another phenomenal brand is not the new natural water, but the tea beverage Oriental Leaves infused with source leaves.

If I were to give Dongfangxuan some advice, the first thing would be to create female knowledge anchors and focus on promoting female brands. This is something Dong Yuhui cannot do, but it is also what customers need.

There is a trend in this era: women’s consumption awareness is strong enough, but their gender awareness is not clear. Men’s gender awareness is strong, but their consumption awareness is just beginning.

Female customers need to understand what true independence is. Some classic books and brands created by female entrepreneurs are all suitable areas for Oriental Selection to focus on.

4. A new brand trend

Western philosophers such as Marcuse and Baudrillard believe that symbolic consumption replaces spiritual belief, and advertisers use sophisticated hypnosis to make customers psychologically dependent on brand symbols.

In order to pursue spiritual comfort or prove their social status, they can only spend more time working to create surplus value for capital. Human existence is thus alienated, and people become a link in symbolic consumption.

"Most people spend half their lives trying to maintain a dignity they don't even have." This is how The Long Goodbye satirized the American middle class in the 1960s, and this phenomenon is happening here.

However, we have discovered a new brand trend in China in 2023. Customers no longer pursue ostentatious symbolic consumption, but rather self-pleasing self-healing.

The most popular offline stores in 2023 are all those with spiritual healing effects. For example, they open stores in vegetable markets and open communities, turning stores into something like libraries, art galleries, and churches, where customers can feel relaxed and healed.

Then the goods in the store are not just physical objects, but spiritual objects. The value of the goods is condensed into a symbol, and when customers take the goods to other places, they can still feel the spiritual comfort brought by the goods.

What customers feel in symbolic consumption is not identity anxiety and the comfort of this anxiety, but a sense of ritual returning to real life. In the spiritual world of customers, the brand does not play an unattainable role. It will not make customers feel inferior and then devote their money and time. It is a gentle and equal role.

If the former brand is a scumbag, then the latter brand is a warm man.

Dongfang Zhenxuan and Dong Yuhui provide warm-hearted spiritual comfort, which is a new trend. They never ask customers to reflect on whether they have worked hard or whether their wages have increased, nor do they say "it costs so much, you can buy it or not". The relationship between them and customers is a nurturing one.

The success of Dongfangzhenxuan and Dong Yuhui is the manifestation of this cultural trend. I think there will be many opportunities if we follow this line of thought. Because in almost every industry, there are bad male brands. So when a warm male brand appears in this industry, it can represent the times and subvert those old guys.

In conclusion

The purpose of an enterprise is to create external customers, and the way to create customers is to build a brand. Dong Yuhui is not only an employee of Dongfang Selection, but also the brand of the enterprise. Managers within the enterprise must serve the brand because the brand is the reason for external customers to buy.

Judging from the current situation, Dongfang Zhenxuan does not seem to know why it exists. It seems to think that it is a live streaming company or a company that strictly selects agricultural products (as can be seen from the name). It has not yet realized its nature as a producer of knowledge content.

Li Zehou said that you only truly exist when you explain your existence.

Because when you don’t know the essence of your existence, your behavior will be directionless. For example, if Dongfang Zhenxuan currently considers itself to be a strict agricultural product selection company, its attitude towards Dong Yuhui would be to hide or exclude him, and it would not focus on creating new anchors.

Finally, warm-hearted brands are the new trend. Brands that see this trend and make good use of it will subvert the bad-boy brands in every industry.

Author: Zhang Zhiyu

Source: WeChat public account: "Zhang Zhiyu (ID: zhiyu2307)"