Can it work if top anchors collectively enter the market and build their own brands?

Building their own brand has become a common choice for top anchors. Exploring and building their own brand seems to be the only way for every top anchor to transform. However, brand development is a long road, and whether they can continue to do it in the long run remains to be considered. I recommend this to my friends on the Internet.

After Li Jiaqi announced his entry into the market, building their own brand became a common choice for top anchors.

From Simba, Viya, Xiao Yangge, Oriental Selection to Li Jiaqi, the reasons why top anchors choose to build their own brands have similarities and differences.

Compared with live streaming, building one's own brand is undoubtedly a more complicated business. Can they make it work? What enlightenment does it bring to the industry?

1. Meiwan Select flagship store is launched

"Today I would like to introduce a store to you, our Tmall store - Meiwanxuanxuan."

During the 618 promotion, the Meiwan Youxuan flagship store was officially launched, and Li Jiaqi promoted it in the live broadcast room. The products in the store were also sold through the flagship store in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room.

Currently, the Meiwan Youxuan flagship store only sells seven products, including laundry beads, silicone quilts, and latex mats. Except for garbage bags and face towels, the prices of other products are all over 100 yuan, and the average customer spending is not low. The best-selling product in the store is the laundry beads recommended by Li Jiaqi in the live broadcast room. The price is 109.9 yuan, and more than 3,000 orders have been sold.

Each product of Meiwan Youxuan is not only marked with the LOGO, but also the name of the cooperating brand. The product titles will contain words such as "Mei ONE Youxuan×Xiaochao" and "Mei ONE Youxuan×Kakama". The overall operating model is more inclined to "co-branded" sales with factories rather than its own brand.

When asked why he established his own brand, Li Jiaqi said : "China now has a very strong supply chain capability. Many international brands that everyone is familiar with are made in China and come from Chinese factories. These factories can be said to be the 'heroes' behind many brands. We hope to bring all these high-quality products hidden behind them to the Meiwanxuan Tmall flagship store and bring them to everyone."

This move also means that Meiwan Youxuan is taking the route of cooperating with domestic factory suppliers.

Meiwan once revealed to the media that Meiwan Optimization is Meiwan applying its years of practical experience to the product creation process, matching better production capacity with merchants, and deeply participating in supply chain cooperation. This also shows that this model of direct connection with factories is more conducive to giving full play to the advantages of Meiwan and Li Jiaqi.

Xinbochang discovered that the recommendation page of Meiwanyouxuan’s flagship store reads: "Mei ONE Youxuan" adheres to the principles of "rigorous, responsible, and honest" to provide all girls with a variety of high-quality, cost-effective selected products and high-quality services to create a refined and practical lifestyle.

The relevant person in charge of Meiwanxuan also said: "Currently, the products are mainly in the lifestyle category, and the expansion of future categories is still in the planning stage."

2. Top streamers build their own brands

In fact, compared with other top anchors, Li Jiaqi and Meiwan entered the market relatively late.

In the past few years, top anchors such as Simba, Wei Ya, Xiao Yangge and Dongfang Zhenxuan have all started to develop their own brands. And exploring and building their own brands seems to have become a necessary path for every top anchor to transform.

In terms of self-operated brands, Simba was the first to do so.

As early as 2018, Simba proposed the self-operated brand plan of "Xin Youzhi's Strict Selection", and began to implement it in the same year, launching the first self-operated daily necessities brand "Cotton Code". In 2021, Simba once again proposed the "Xinzao Plan" to speed up the construction of self-operated brands.

Simba has now launched more than 20 self-operated brands, covering multiple categories such as beauty, daily necessities, food, clothing, etc., such as the beauty and skin care brand "Benzhi" and the healthy food brand "Jianfeng Foodie".

Simba's own brand layout is not limited to online, but now offline stores are also included in the development plan. According to media reports, Mian Mi Ma is expected to enter many chain convenience stores and large supermarkets, and Jian Feng Shi Ke will also open offline stores this year.

Wei Ya followed closely. In 2021, Qianxun, the company behind Wei Ya, cooperated with Nicholas Tse to jointly launch its own brand "Feng Wei Pai". When Feng Wei Pai was first established, it was only sold in the live broadcast room, and then it was listed on major e-commerce platforms. Now it has expanded offline channels, and consumers can buy it directly in large supermarkets such as Hema Fresh and RT-Mart.

Brother Xiao Yang only established his own brand "Xiao Yang Zhenxuan" in 2023. Currently, the best-selling product in the store is a garbage bag priced at 9.9 yuan, which has sold 14.854 million pieces.

Among many top-stream anchors, Oriental Selection is the one that truly focuses on its own brand, and it allocates most of its resources to its own products to help their development.

After launching its first self-operated brand product in 2022, Dongfang Zhenxuan has been continuously developing and developing, and has launched more than 100 products so far. It is not difficult to find that among the products on the shelves of Dongfang Zhenxuan's official live broadcast room, self-operated products account for a large number. Dongfang Zhenxuan even set up a new account "Dongfang Zhenxuan Self-operated Products" to promote self-operated products.

In addition to platforms such as Douyin, Oriental Selection also has an independent APP.

In June this year, Oriental Selection held a self-operated product launch conference in Beijing, revealing to the outside world for the first time the performance growth of its self-operated products. In the second half of fiscal year 2024 (December 2023 to May 2024), the GMV of Oriental Selection's self-operated products exceeded 3.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 108% and a month-on-month increase of 74%.

3. Can you operate your own brand well?

“Live streaming cannot last for decades, but brands have a life cycle and can last a long time.”

When asked why they wanted to transform into their own brand, this was the answer given by Du Gang, CEO of Three Sheep Group, and it is also the clear answer in the minds of many top anchors.

Nowadays, top anchors are constantly competing with each other, introducing various subsidies and bidding mechanisms, hoping to attract consumers through low-price strategies.

However, after the rise of store live streaming, brands have become increasingly powerful and their dependence on top-tier anchors has been greatly reduced. De-heading is no longer a trend but an ongoing process, and the so-called lowest price advantage no longer exists.

By building your own brand and establishing a supply chain, you can reduce many intermediate links and thus increase profit margins.

Another point is that having your own brand allows you to better control product quality.

Top anchors such as Oriental Selection, Simba, and Xiao Yangge have all been involved in food safety controversies. If they have their own products and have stronger control over them, they will undoubtedly be able to reduce such risks.

Top streamers obviously have more advantages when it comes to running their own brands.

They are natural signs and traffic codes. Their huge fan base sets the tone for their brand consumer groups. By leveraging their own influence and appeal, they can convert this "traffic" into "retention", turning personal traffic into a brand traffic pool, solving the brand's marketing and channel problems, and ensuring the brand's basic sales.

Moreover, with so many years of sales experience, they have a good understanding of consumer preferences and can have more ideas and creativity in product development and cooperation. Transforming into a self-operated brand can not only increase revenue, but also enhance its own brand image and improve competitiveness.

However, the road for top streamers to build their own brands is not always smooth, and they also face numerous challenges during the process.

There are basically two ways for top streamers to build their own brands: one is to conduct independent research and development and quality control management from the source of the supply chain; the other is to find familiar brands or factories to cooperate with and put their own names on the products of white-label merchants.

The self-owned brands of most top-stream anchors are of the second model. Although the team will be deeply involved in the entire process of the product, it is more like a private label in nature, and this model will also bring some new problems.

Last year, a variety of popular products in Xiao Yang Zhenxuan store, including toast bread, shachima, sauerkraut rice noodles and snail noodles, were accused of "exploding", and the suppliers of these products were ordered by the Market Supervision Bureau to rectify the situation.

Not only that, Oriental Selection’s own food has also experienced “explosion” incidents many times, among which products such as prune juice and South American white shrimp have caused controversy on the Internet.

Super brands are rushing towards their own brands, but whether they can successfully break through may still be a long way to go.

Author: Field sister

Source: WeChat official account: "New Broadcasting Field (ID: New_bc)"