Thinking health products are targeting parents again

Since the popularization of anti-fraud knowledge, scams such as health care products and investments have gradually disappeared among the middle-aged and elderly groups. However, a new round of scams has moved to the Internet and is more difficult to detect. How do these online health care products and investment project scams deceive the elderly step by step? The author of this article analyzes this and shares it with you.

During working hours, the congestion of buses, subways, and even elevators is already a headache for workers who have to work on time. At this time, a large number of middle-aged and elderly people have quietly set out, taking public transportation to embark on a journey to collect eggs, washbasins, and washing powder.

In the past, this phenomenon was common and was the most annoying for children. Parents who were only interested in making a few bucks could not stand the "emotional, well-reasoned, and sincere" lectures, and either bought health products worth thousands or invested their savings in vague and abstract projects.

However, these problems seem to have eased in recent years.

Firstly, the persistent admonitions from social media and relatives and friends have made middle-aged and elderly friends realize some scams. Secondly, the popularity of the Internet and smart phones has changed the living habits of the elderly. When they focus on cutting down trees and planting fruit trees, they may not think about the eggs. Furthermore, more importantly, because of the need to wear masks, parents are reluctant to go out and gather frequently for safety reasons. As a result, the number of health products and investment bureaus hiding in office buildings has been decreasing.

However, while physical health products have retreated, mental health products have quietly lurked around us. Recently, there have been many live training courses that teach you how to make money by live streaming. They are continuing the thinking of middle-aged and elderly health products and investment bureaus and targeting parents.

1. Is it a trap?

If it is professional training, it cannot be called a trap.

1. Knowledge is worth paying for

After all, in an era when live streaming is so popular, there are definitely many surrounding industries that have emerged around it.

• There are paid items for video editing software and filters, which can make videos more colorful and portraits slimmer and more beautiful;
• Advanced photography equipment, sound cards, and fill lights can improve the sound and image quality of live broadcasts.
• Hot-plot sales scripts are written by professional practitioners;
• Professional economic companies provide packaging and resource contacts for internet celebrities.

These surrounding industries, just like the jeans that met the workers' needs for dirt-resistant and wear-resistant clothing during the American Gold Rush era, have driven the prosperity of the live streaming industry.

The targeted short video and live broadcast training courses, which teach anchors how to plan accounts, perform sales performances, design content and other details, are also worth paying for.

If this is true, it might be an opportunity for retired parents who still have the passion to work hard to learn from them, as it could be an opportunity to fill their time and create value.

However, some people are targeting parents and using watered-down knowledge to make up for the shortcomings.

2. How much water does the knowledge contain?

Some live training courses clearly define their target user group as middle-aged and elderly people.

What they teach is often of little value.

For example, how to download video editing software such as Silhouette, and how to use each function in the software. Just how to crop the video ratio, from opening the software, to loading the material, to finding the cropping function, to selecting the size, starting cropping, confirming, saving, and then to the subsequent demonstration, following, and checking the homework. Just one small function can take a whole class.

Or, after a few basic lessons on video size cropping, proportion cropping, and length cropping, they begin to impart skills to help parents direct their account operations towards cropping hits – simply cropping popular videos that are already popular online and moving them to their own accounts.

In general, the courses they teach are often extremely entry-level functional operations in terms of operation; in terms of ideas, they are also the basic black hat methods that have become rampant and are becoming increasingly difficult to win traffic as recommendation algorithms have gradually improved.

These contents are of no value to ordinary young netizens. Firstly, everyone knows about them to some extent. Secondly, even if you don’t understand and want to learn, you can easily find many free courses on the Internet that explain them in more depth and better.

However, selling such courses, even at a high price of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, is difficult to define as fraud.

Just like the health care products and direct sales products for the elderly that were hated by their children in the past, as long as the products themselves are qualified and compliant, and the sales form does not exceed the legal boundaries, even if the children believe that there is an element of fraud, it will not be a problem from a legal perspective.

Moreover, in the field of knowledge payment, whether the value of a product is consistent with its price has always been a difficult issue to define.

The content of these live training courses may be worthless to young people who are familiar with the Internet. But for parents who are not familiar with the Internet, it is valuable knowledge. Some of these parents may even start their own live broadcasts after completing the courses, and eventually become Internet celebrities through their own personal charm, subsequent learning, or using the basic methods they teach. It is also difficult to say what kind of leverage this course, which is generally not very valuable, has played in the process.

Just like it is useless for us to look at 1+1=2 now, but for children, it is an indispensable process.

However, the starting point of some of these courses is not pure. From the very beginning, they are precisely aimed at parents.

2. Targeted attacks on parents?

1. Live streaming is now the most profitable

In recent years, based on the upgrade of Internet speed and mobile phones, short video and live broadcast software have appeared in every mobile phone due to the combined effect of their own advantages and the promotion of manufacturers.

Either recommended by friends or downloaded and browsed for a few dollars, parents eventually learned how to watch and even became addicted.

We first realized from YY Live that live streaming can make a lot of money, but this fact has only been deeply felt by parents in recent years.

Especially during this period when people are afraid to go out because of wearing masks, they have devoted a lot of time to online entertainment, which has accelerated the transformation of entertainment channels.

When they are in the process of investing and indulging in videos and live broadcasts, the stimulation of this industry to them will be infinitely magnified. Unlike us old netizens, our preference and cognition for live broadcasts are continuously declining. It's like when I first ate a hamburger as a child, I thought it was the most delicious food in the world. But after eating more, I just think it's ordinary.

Especially in recent years, there have been more and more hot events about the income from live broadcasts and videos, such as a certain internet celebrity earning hundreds of millions from a live broadcast and a certain anchor buying a building of a technology company. While parents are optimistic about the live broadcast industry, they have once again realized that live broadcasts and videos are very profitable.

This lays the foundation for the benefits of live training.

2. We just want to make money

After parents gradually understood videos and live broadcasts, they found that the way of making money through videos and live broadcasts was very much in line with their own needs.

1) Career transition and continuation

When parents are approaching retirement or have just retired, they will hope to find new ways to earn income after retirement, so as to provide more care for their children and maintain their own quality of life.

Therefore, during the course of explaining these training courses designed for parents, they will emphasize again and again that "we just want to make money, we want to make money for our children", and will constantly display money-making cases of successful students, which will not only increase the sense of trust, but also allow parents to continue to focus on the concept of "making money through live streaming".

2) Relatively free time

Short videos and live broadcasts can be made at any time and as much as you want. The freedom in this is another factor that attracts parents to invest in it.

Whether they are still working or retired and taking care of their grandchildren, parents have a lot of free time, but this free time is not stable. In addition, after a lifetime of busy work, they are unwilling to punch in and out every day. Therefore, the identity of a freelance creator is very attractive to them.

When you have free time, you can make videos or do live broadcasts to make money. If you have other things to do, you can take a break for a while and come back to it later.

3) Emotional needs

In addition to practical interests, parents' emotional needs also play a driving role.

On the one hand, parents can find a career to invest their time and energy in after retirement, making their lives more fulfilling and valuable.

On the other hand, parents can also keep up with the times through such creative experiences and avoid becoming isolated "loser".

Therefore, the idea of ​​making money by making videos and live broadcasts lingered in the minds of parents.

3. Low threshold for course production

With urgent needs as a basis, these training courses also have the convenience of being easily designed.

Nowadays, parents are addicted to live broadcasts and videos, but in the final analysis, their exposure to the Internet industry is not deep enough, and they only know about short video creation, live broadcast monetization and other concepts. Therefore, only the most basic courses need to be written to make them feel that they have gained something.

How to use video editing software, which platforms can broadcast videos, what time period is better for live broadcasts, what are hot videos, these concepts are nothing new to veteran netizens, but to parents who have rarely heard of these concepts, they are fresh, profound, and professional.

Therefore, operators who provide live training for parents do not need to polish the course products seriously, but only need to focus on mobilizing emotions and focusing on revenue. As for the course content, just find a related book and read it.

On the basis that the quality of the products themselves is difficult to guarantee, a careful observation of the payment path of these training courses will reveal that their overall thinking is almost identical to the previous offline health care products and investment project models for the middle-aged and elderly.

3. How to get parents to pay

1. Means of dissemination

How can we accurately reach this group of parents?

In addition to making targeted videos and reaching parents directly with the help of increasingly smart push mechanisms, the most reliable means is to use parents' interpersonal channels to spread the information among their peers, just like selling health products and investment projects for the middle-aged and elderly in the past.

• Being at the age of parents, we have many friends of the same age and the target audience is precise.
• Parents are more connected to their peers than we are to our peers.

As they grow older, their experiences grow, their hormone levels stabilize, and their personalities become more calm and easy-going. With more free time, they can and are willing to communicate with more people of their age, even if it's just daily greetings.

Live training courses can be spread through their daily communication.

How to make money by making videos is a good topic of conversation among parents and their peers. It can not only arouse the interest of more people and lead to long discussions, but also make parents enthusiastically share and win social currency.

During the process of parents’ sharing, the concealment of the purpose of these live training courses themselves also played an important role.

2. Traffic diversion methods

The free live training courses were not originally offered for the sake of love or knowledge sharing, but were charged at an appropriate time. When we were observing from the sidelines, we understood this clearly.

But the parents who are in the situation may not notice it. Or, in order to gain some small advantage, they pretend not to notice it.

Just like the people who go to get free eggs, they also know that there is no such thing as pie in the sky, and the company that gives away eggs must eventually sell its products. But everyone thinks they are smart and will take advantage of it, so they use their spare time to listen to health lectures in exchange for free eggs.

However, it turns out that not everyone can remain rational all the time. In the process of listening to "health lectures" day after day, some people will change from coping to agreeing, and finally consume and buy products.

The free courses in the early stage of live training are like free eggs. While providing some value, it can keep parents interested and active, creating opportunities for subsequent payment. It can also allow parents to use this course as social currency, share it with friends around them, and gain their recognition and gratitude.

3. Transformation methods

As parents and their peers continue to pay attention and gradually deepen their interest in making videos and live broadcasts, the transformation of live training courses will also begin.

The first step is to switch from public classes to private classes.

This model is no different from the success training and career training in the past. The public class is responsible for mobilizing interest, and when the audience is interested and reaches the key link, suspense is deliberately set up to sell private lessons and make people pay for it.

The second is to sell peripheral products related to live broadcasts and videos.

If you want to do live streaming, courses alone are not enough. The stabilizers, sound cards, background walls, advanced editing software, etc. that may be used all have low price transparency and huge profit margins.

When parents plan to join the live broadcast industry, it is understandable that they impulse buy a whole set of products, regardless of whether it can be successful or how far they can go.

There will also be follow-up benefits later.

If among the users who purchase the training courses, there happens to be a small chance that one of them becomes an internet celebrity of varying sizes, then with the help of survivor bias, the training provider will naturally gain their trust.

On this basis, whether engaging in the business of an agency or providing live private services, it is a long-term source of profit.

IV. Change and Invariance

When offline health care products and investment projects are gradually moving away from parents, online health care products and investment projects are emerging in a trendy way.

The reason why they are called mental health products is that these live training courses, like health products, are designed to target anxiety and desire.

The reason why it is similar to an investment project is that when people are only thinking about future gains, they will ignore the risks and invest money at the moment.

They all target people's instinct to seek profit and avoid harm.

The form is changing, but the essence remains the same. These traps targeting human nature will continue to multiply and exist along with human society.