How did Xinba develop his strong personal brand and maintain such loyal followers, even after the scandal?

The Xinba Livestream Scandal – A Quick Backstory

In case you haven’t heard of the scandal. Last fall we talked about Xinba’s ambition to earn 8 billion RMB during the Double 11 shopping festival in 2020, and he made it! 

But not long after, he was caught selling fake products. There were rumors saying he might be sentenced to 15 years in prison. But in the end, he was fined 900k RMB and he and his team were suspended from livestreaming for up to 60 days. 

And this is no small incident. Trust is everything when it comes to ecommerce live streaming. If Xinba lost the trust of his followers, that could be the end of his livestream career. It could also affect Kuaishou. According to a ranking of top e-commerce live streamers in China published by Jinri Wanghong (今日网红), Xinba and his team took up 4 of the TOP10 positions.

But he seems to have maintained his followers’ loyalty. How did he do it? 

His Down-to-Earth Image

Xinba has crafted his image since the beginning. He is the spokesperson of farmers and everything he does is for the public, for the ordinary people. Though in reality, Xinba has fancy cars and mansions and he has huge property, he doesn’t position himself as a wealthy person standing above the public. That would alienate his followers and make him unapproachable.

Xinba will do everything to please his followers. For example, we mentioned he was once involved in a scandal where he yelled at a security guard and hotel workers in public because he felt they mistreated his followers.

During his livestream, Xinba also makes sure his followers get the lowest price and best deal on the Internet. He stopped his collaborations with HONOR (荣耀), a domestic mobile phone brand, and asked his teams to do the same thing, simply because the brand wouldn’t allow him to give away earphones for free. Xinba even asked all of his followers who had purchased the phone from his livestream to return the product.

Other examples

A down-to-earth image is really important if you want to reach the masses. There is another example of KOLs in the auto industry. There are two well-known Douyin accounts, one is HuGe Shuoche (虎哥说车) and the other is HouGe Shuoche (猴哥说车). 

Huge is a forerunner in the industry and he tended to introduce cars in a very formal way. Houge is a late-comer, but within 6 months he surpassed Huge because he had a video series where he provides suggestions for followers who want to buy a car. This kind of content is more relatable to followers and it generates more interactions with them as well. Spotting this, at the beginning of 2021, Huge launched a new series giving car advice to followers.

Even in the entertainment industry, you often find celebrities who begin their careers as an ordinary person but after they became famous, their popularity decreased. This is because their image changed and they became less relatable. 

The Ultimate Objective For Content

When many people first start creating content, they often focus a lot on the content and not on how to get it to spread. To get it to spread, your content must resonate with the audience, either make them happy, sad, or angry, etc.

Xinba expands the reach his content by his personal image. In public, he is a loving husband who cares for his wife so much. He is a strict boss for his teams or apprentices. He is also a caring KOL and spokesperson for his followers. All of these characters attach charm to Xinba and that’s why his followers are so loyal to him. 

Xinba is also very popular among many mothers from lower tier cities as he often gives the lowest price on the Internet. There are funny sayings about this, such as “I don’t worry about my wife not coming back home but she watching Xinba’s livestream” or “I earn money for my wife and my wife earn money for Xinba”.

Xinba Created His Own Holiday

We have big shopping festivals every year such as 618 and Double 11. Well, at some point, KOLs are commodities as well and they need big days to promote themselves. For Xinba, his big day every year falls on August 18 (818). In Chinese, the pronunciation of this date is similar to “Xinba”.

On August 18, 2019, Xinba held a concert for his followers in the National Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. This is the huge stadium where the opening ceremony of 2008 Summer Olympics was held. To hold a concert here, you have to go through lots of processes and the price to rent the place for a day is around 3.6 million RMB. But a concert usually needs more than one day as you have to decorate it.

Second, to please followers and create buzz for the concert, Xinba invited many top celebrities in China, including Jackie Chan (成龙), G.E.M (邓紫棋) and Wang Leehom (王力宏). 

This is the scale not many companies are able to create. This location and number of celebrities could rival the 11.11 Gala that Alibaba holds! 

For his comeback in March, Xinba promoted the livestream on many social media platforms and on huge LED screens across 9 major cities. For Xinba’s loyal followers, this concert or seeing him on LED screens would make them proud to see their “friend” or their idol that they support becoming well-known. 

And for someone who had never heard of Xinba before, hearing about the event or seeing the ads would leave impressions in their minds. If they happen to search for Xinba and watch his livestream, they may become one of his followers.

Copy-and-Paste Followers Are Loyal

What does copy-and-paste followers mean? They are people who follow multiple accounts from the same person across different platforms. For example, they follow the influencer or celebrity on Weibo, Xiaohongshu, WeChat official account, etc. For the influencer, this is great because they will have many ways to reach this follower, which is useful as it is increasingly harder to get traffic these days. 

To boost this effect, Xinba leads his fans to follow other accounts from his team and family. 

How does Xinba introduce or guide traffic for his team?

It’s by dashang (打赏). In the livestream industry, besides selling products, dashang or giving virtual gifts is one of the important ways to monetize. On most live streaming platforms, there is a ranking board for each influencer showing who contributed the most gifts in this livestream. 

Back when he was first starting out, Xinba actually gave a lot of gifts to other streamers. This way, viewers began to notice him on these ranking boards, and then would come to watch his livestream. 

So now, his team members are doing the same thing to grow their fan bases. You will often find that the Top 10 on the contribution ranking board are his team members. If other people keep sending gifts aggressively, Xinba will ask the person to stop. If they don’t, he will actually kick the person out of the livestream. That’s how much he wants his family and team to appear on that ranking board. 

He did this on his comeback livestream on March 27. He had over 5 million viewers, so even if he can just funnel a small amount of those viewers to other accounts it would help them. 

Other than this, Xinba also officially introduces his team members in his livestream. He once introduced his team member Lu (鹿) and in just one minute she gained nearly 400K followers.  

Xinba is a controversial person and that’s what gains him buzz. But one thing we have to admit is that he is very good at personal branding and marketing himself.

Read more:

辛巴4天涨粉1500万，你学不会

Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Aims to Earn 8 Billion RMB During This Year’s 11.11

Top Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Caught Selling Fake Products

Top Live Streamer Xinba’s Massive Scandal Barely Affected Kuaishou’s IPO

The post Xinba Makes a Comeback: Gains 15M Followers in His First Livestream Since the Scandal appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

And if Xinba and team are some of the top ranked e-commerce live streamers in China, why isn’t Kuaishou worried about losing them? 

Kuaishou Revenue Streams

One of Kuaishou’s core monetization methods is live streaming. It first found great success with entertainment live streaming, earning money from virtual gifts that users send to streamers. It also developed e-commerce live streaming, earning money from sales on the platform.  

The second type of monetization is advertisements and the last one is games. According to a game report (2020年移动游戏用户短视频行为调查研究报告), 82.5% of mobile game players in China overlap with short video app users.

In the first three quarters of 2020, Kuaishou’s revenue reached 40.7 billion RMB, among which livestreaming contributed 25.3 billion RMB (a combination of both virtual gifting and e-commerce revenue). The app’s revenue keeps growing from 8.3 billion RMB in 2017, to 20.3 billion in 2018 and in 2019, it reached 39.1 billion.

In the first 11 months of 2020, 333 billion RMB worth of goods were sold through live streams on Kuaishou, not far behind market leader Alibaba’s 500 billion. 

Kuaishou Focused on Growing Advertising Business

Despite the overall growth, Kuaishou is decreasing the percentage of revenue coming from live streaming, instead focusing more on growing advertising. From 2017 to September 2020, The percentage of revenue from livestreaming went from 95.3% (2017), 91.7% (2018), 84.1% (2019) to 62.2% (2020).

Kuaishou’s booming ecommerce business has benefited from users’ high engagement with the platform. Kuaishou’s daily active users spend 85 minutes on it every day and open the app more than 10 times a day. Its users’ activiteness ranks NO.1 among Chinese socializing video platforms.

Xinba and His Team Members are 4 of the Top 10 Live Streamers in China

Xinba is Kuaishou’s top live streamer. In 2019, Xinba himself achieved 13.3 billion RMB in sales from livestreams. Xinba also manages an MCN which has created several other top live streamers on Kuaishou. In 2019 Kuaishou’s GMV was 59.6 billion RMB, so it is fair to say Xinba and his team contributed nearly a quarter of Kuaishou’s GMV. 

And their success continued in 2020. According to a ranking of top e-commerce live streamers in China published by Jinri Wanghong (今日网红), Xinba and his team took up 4 of the TOP10 positions.

In 2020, Xinba’s wife Chu Ruixue (初瑞雪) was estimated to generate 1.5-2.5 billion RMB in sales, 蛋蛋小盆友 an estimated 3-4 billion, 鹿 and estimated 2-2.5 billion, and 爱美食的猫妹妹 an estimated 1-1.5 billion RMB.  

Xinba Has a Deteriorating Relationship with Kuaishou 

Yet while the situation appears rosy from the outside, Xinba’s relationship with Kuaishou changed in 2020. According to an employee at Kuaishou, the company isn’t worried about Xinba leaving the platform. They think what Xinba and his family contribute for the company is limited, and Xinba is full of risk, often putting the company in negative situations (referring to his scandals). 

Why this change in attitude? 

First, Xinba failed to keep up with Kuaishou’s rapid growth. Xinba became lazy after earning the title as the top live streamer on Kuaishou and decreased the frequency of his livestreams. In the third quarter of 2019, Xinba had 20 livestreams each month, and in the same quarter of 2020, Xinba only had 4 livestreams each month. 

You can contrast this with Taobao Live’s top streamers Viya and Austin Li who live stream nearly every day. 

And not only the frequency has changed, but also the length of his appearance on the livestreams decreased 49%. Xinba only shows up randomly on his apprentice’s livestreams and only big shopping festivals can motivate him to have one.

And the frequency of streams from his team members has dropped as well. At the moment, Xinba’s MCN has 10 live streamers and the total amount of livestream that they had from January to June in 2020 were around 120, while during this half year, Kuaishou had over 30M livestreams. The total GMV generated from these 10 live streamers was around 6.5 billion RMB, which only took up 6% of Kuaishou’s overall GMV during the same period. He is becoming less and less valuable to the platform. 

Xinba’s Poor Attitude is a Risk

The second reason Kuashou wants to distance itself from Xinba is his attitude and temper. Xinba has acted rudely in public on multiple occasions. 

In October 2020, Xinba held a concert to thank his loyal followers. The concert invited many top celebrities including Kris Wu (吴亦凡) and Deng Ziqi (邓紫棋). Xinba flared up because he felt a security guard mistreated his followers. Then he badly scolded the person and the hotel’s workers in public.

The same month, one of his live streamers 时大漂亮 sold fake bird’s nest on her livestream. At first, Xinba publicly scolded some WeChat Official Accounts who were spreading the news, claiming they were making it up. The turning point came on November 19, when a KOL Wang Hai (王海), who focuses on finding fake products, published a Weibo post saying Xinba’s bird’s nest was indeed sugar water. On November 27, after the truth came out, Xinba apologized to consumers while crying on a livestream.

The government took the case to court. They banned Xinba and 时大漂亮’s Kuaishou accounts for 60 days and fined Xinba and his team. This incident impacted his followers’ trust in him and his team. We predict they will likely see a large dip in livestreaming sales once they are able to resume. 

Who Will Be Kuaishou’s Next Big Streamer? 

Based on their declining performance and the recent scandal, it is likely that Xinba’s team will continue to lose their influence on Kuaishou. So who will rise to take their place? That is something we will be keeping an eye on! 

Read more: 刚刚，快手上市暴涨193%，前社区产品负责人告诉你什么是短视频第一股

The post Top Live Streamer Xinba’s Massive Scandal Barely Affected Kuaishou’s IPO appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

As a result of the incident, Xinba’s commerce company was fined 900k RMB ($139K USD) and the fake bird’s nest company was fined 2 million RMB ($310 USD). On top of that, Xinba and the live streamer on his team responsible for selling the fake product, @时大漂亮, are forbidden from live streaming until February 21, and other members of his team are forbidden until January 7.

New Regulations

Recently the several Chinese government departments have announced new measures to better regulate the booming live streaming industry. 

The State Administration for Market Regulation (国家市场监督管理总局) made it clear that live streamers are not allowed to share fake news, deceive and mislead viewers, and they should be honest with their livestream performance, including the amount of viewers, likes and the ROI. 

The National Radio and Television Administration published an announcement on November 23 that it would regulate virtual gifts behaviours especially from minors. 

To sum up, at the moment there are four key changes that affect the commerce live streaming industry:

1) Monitoring for Fake News and Fake Stats

The government will use a combination of human and AI monitoring to pay closer attention to live streams with high viewership, high sales, lots of virtual gifts, and a history of  product quality issues. 

With stricter monitoring in place, viewers may find out that for some live streamers, the average number of viewers will decrease from several thousand to several hundred as they eliminate bots. 

2) The government will pay extra attention to top live streamers

Several top live streamers dominate and drive much of the commerce live streaming industry and as such brands must pay exorbitant amounts to work with them. But they are willing to because many brands felt like working with top streamers was safer and more trustworthy. 

The recent Xinba scandal not only affected the trusting relationship between him and his viewers, it had a negative effect on the entire industry, causing viewers and brands to question the reliability of other top streamers. 

As such, the monitoring of those streamers will be even more intense. As a potential side effect, brands shouldn’t be surprised if streamers want a longer period to review your products prior to agreeing to work with you, or they ask for more information to verify your product’s quality and safety. 

3) Certain celebrities will be barred from streaming

Inviting celebrities to participate in a live stream is a very popular way to drive traffic to the stream, however, moving forward, the government will restrict celebrities that are deemed to have done bad things in the past from appearing on live streams. 

For example, actress Fan Bingbing (范冰冰) who has been on the government’s bad side since her tax evasion scandal, and actress Li Xiaolu (李小璐) who got a lot of bad press for cheating on her husband. 

This could be an issue for brands that work with Fan. Earlier this year luxury beauty brand Guerlain announced that Fan was its newest global ambassador. Beauty brands are some of the biggest users of ecommerce live streaming.

However the regulations are unclear as to whether her image can still appear in the live stream, and only she herself is banned from attending, or if showing her image is banned too. 

If this is the case, it will also be an issue for Fan’s personal brand Fan Beauty whose popular face masks feature her image on the box.

4) Live streamers, accounts and ID should match

To start a livestream, a precondition is that the live streamer, the ID and the live streaming account ID must all match.

This may sound easy, but actually many live streamer’s accounts are in fact owned and registered by the MCNs they are signed with. This is done so that the MCN can retain more control over the live streamer. 

Oftentimes streamers are not loyal to MCNs and will try to leave once they’ve gotten successful. Usually because the MCNs take advantage of the streamer and keep most of their earnings. 

So this new rule that a streamer must own his or her account is actually a positive change for content creators who will now have more ownership over their traffic. 

Read more: 独家｜为什么抖音头部主播都停播了？

The post New Commerce Live Streaming Regulations You Need to Know appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

Kuaishou top live streamer Xinba (辛巴) sold fake bird’s nest to his followers and is now under investigation.

Recently we wrote about Xinba’s ambition to achieve over 8 billion RMB during Double 11. He made it, with total sales of 8.8 billion RMB during 11.11. But now Xinba’s future is up in the air after losing the trust of his followers. A famous influencer caught Xinba’s team member selling fake Bird’s Nest supplements which turned out to be only sugar water.  Although it wasn’t Xinba selling the product, it was his team member. Plus, Xinba repeatedly denied the claim and tried to cover it up. Xinba is one of China’s top e-commerce live streamers, making this scandal a serious offense. The fact that it is a health/food product makes it even worse.

What is edible bird’s nest?

Chinese people love having bird’s nest. They believe this supplement can improve a person’s immune system and help a person look younger. It has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past year as Chinese consumers are putting more faith in traditional health and beauty products. 

Because of its production process, bird’s nest is expensive. For example, top brand Xiao Xian Dun’s (小仙炖) Tmall store sells 45 grams of bird’s nest for 100 RMB.

How the Scandal Unfolded

On October 25, a member of Xinba’s live streamer family (aka his team) Shida Piaoliang (时大漂亮) sold bird’s nest at the price of 17.2 RMB for 100 grams. Compared with the price at Xiao Xian Dun, you know how cheap this bird’s nest is. Not long after, on November 4, people started posting on social media, saying the bird’s nest he sold was actually sugar water. 

At first, Xinba was very angry and scolded some WeChat official accounts for making this up. The turning point came to November 19, when a KOL Wang Hai (王海) published a Weibo post saying Xinba’s bird’s nest was indeed sugar water. Wang built his following by finding and revealing fake products so consumers trust his findings. In the next 3 days, Wang posted nearly 30 Weibo posts on the topic. 

On November 22, Xinba responded to the accident but by that time, things were out of control. Not only were people talking about the bird’s nest, many consumers were also saying that other products that they bought from Xinba’s team, such as toothpastes, mooncakes, down jackets, all have problems. People’s attention on this scandal was exploding. 

On November 27, Xinba made his fourth response. This time, he apologized to consumers while crying on a livestream. Right now Xinba’s team is being investigated by the government and Xinba might be sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The Impact on the Bird’s Nest and Live Streaming Industries

Bird’s Nest Industry

Fake bird’s nest has always been a big issue. This is why the top brands place a lot of emphasis on promoting the extreme measures they go through to ensure quality control. They even create special codes and labels allowing consumers to check to make sure they purchased authentic products. This incident may cause some consumers to stop purchasing bird’s nest. However, that isn’t likely. I think that this scandal will actually help the top brands such as Xiao Xian Dun gain a stronger foothold in the market as consumers will turn to the well-known and trustworthy brands, even if that means paying more. 

Live Streaming Industry

As for the ecommerce live streaming industry, this scandal is sure to bring about some repercussions since it involved one of the largest streamers in the industry. 

It is hard for a live streamer of Xinba’s level to ensure that each and every product is high quality. He sells thousands of products in a live stream and has a large team of streamers streaming on his or her behalf. But selling fake products is unethical and he needs to be held accountable.

Ensuring high quality is possible. For example, Top streamers Viya and Austin Li have become so successful partly because of their stringent measures to check every product they promote. Both of these streamers have large teams dedicated to testing out products. They know that if they feature sub-par products and lose the trust of their followers, their careers are over. 

Xinba promised that he would pay customers who bought his bird’s nest three times the amount of money they paid. This amounts to over 60 million RMB in total. Yet this will not bring back the trust that customers had in his personal brand. To make matters worse for Xinba, the scandal was covered by CCTV (China Central Television). This state run news outlet is regarded as the official mouthpiece of the government. By them covering this scandal, they made a much wider audience aware of it.

It is likely that we may see more regulations for the streaming industry, particularly around food and health supplements, as a result of this scandal. 

Find out about Xinba’s punishment and new live streaming regulations here.

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Why Top Live Streamer Xinba’s Scandal Had Little Effect on Kuaishou’s IPO

The post Top Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Caught Selling Fake Products appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

On Oct 18, Xinba held a concert in Shanghai and at the event, he revealed that his goal for this year’s Double 11 is to achieve over 6 billion RMB sales at least, and he hopes his team can make a combined 8 billion RMB ($1.2 billion).

This number would be an impossible number for many people’s lives. So, gossip time, can Xinba achieve this? Or is he just gaining eyeballs? 

Xinba’s performance

Up to Oct 16, Xinba has done 20 live streams in 2020, 2 live streams each month on average. In total, he achieved over 5.3 billion RMB sales. The largest one was his stream for 618. On that day, he made 1.25 billion RMB in sales. 

You may already notice that, compared with Austin and Viya and other live streamers, Xinba streams at a much lower frequency. This is because he’s got a good team behind him who often run streams on his behalf. His team includes: Dandan (蛋蛋) who made 8 billion RMB sales last year, Shidapiaoliang (时大漂亮) who made over 3 billion RMB sales and Zhao Mengche (赵梦澈) who achieved over 1.5 billion RMB in sales. And that was even before live streaming got as popular as it is now, incredible…

In total, Xinba’s team has 14 live streamers including himself. And the team’s sales performance from January to October 16 is 14.7 billion RMB. On average, each order is 115 RMB, and each month his team achieves over 1.5 billion RMB in sales.

The numbers are pretty, but can he achieve his goal on this Double 11? 

While Xinba does 2 live streams per month throughout most of the year. Based on his performance during last year’s 11.11, he will raise his frequency to daily live streams during the 11.11 pre-sale period. He was live streaming for 21 hours non stop on 11.11 last year, and his wife was pregnant and accompanying him to until the end of the live stream.

Xinba has also got more followers this year. Last year’s Double 11 he had around 30M followers and this year, the number has doubled to 60M. Besides, his team has also become stronger. In an interview, Xinba said in his “family”, there are 7 top live streamers and at least 4 of them can compete with Austin Li and Viya.

The live streamer Dandan (蛋蛋) we’ve mentioned before, she once achieved over 650M RMB sales in one live stream. And Shidapiaoliang (时大漂亮), he just started his first live stream on April 18 this year but has already achieved 3 billion RMB in sales.

Xinba said he wanted to develop at least 30 live streamers like them.

Why is Xinba so popular?

Xinba has 70.5M followers on the video platform Kuaishou. He chooses the right platform for the reason that the majority of Kuaishou’s users are located in third and fourth tier cities and Xinba grew up in the countryside, so he relates to and understands his followers very well.

Xinba initially grew his following by sending virtual gifts to other content creators and live streamers on the platform. He was very generous and his name often showed up on the top ranked gifter board. By supporting others, he actually guided traffic to his own Kuaishou account.

On top of that, Xinba’s wife Chu Ruixue (初瑞雪) is also a top live streamer on Kuaishou with 29.4M followers. Chu’s parents and Xinba’s parents all have Kuaishou accounts, and the family is guiding traffic to each other.

Taobao is not the only place where we will see live streaming play a big role in this year’s 11.11. I am really curious whether he and his team can achieve his goal!

Read more: 保60亿冲80亿，辛巴的双十一目标能成吗？

The post Kuaishou Live Streamer Xinba Aims to Earn 8 Billion RMB During This Year’s 11.11 appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

CNY is typically a peak season for video apps with people having more free time to kill. This year that was magnified with the virus outbreak as people were asked to stay indoors and there were even less entertainment options. Naturally many Douyin and Kuaishou accounts saw massive growth spurts with three accounts each gaining over 10 million new followers. 574 accounts gained between 100k-500k new followers.

The People’s Daily Douyin account saw the most growth with 12.8 million new followers. Popular science Douyin account 回形针PaperClip shared a video educating people about the Coronavirus that went viral and got over 1.5 billion views.

Governmental organization and state-run media accounts experienced the most growth on both platforms, followed by funny videos and celebrity videos on Douyin and gaming, funny, and food videos on Kuaishou. Check out the article for lists of the top 30 fastest growing accounts on each platform and a full breakdown of growth by content type.

Read More: 我们统计了800名抖音快手达人，谁是今年春节档最大的“黑马”？

Effect Of The Virus On The Media Industry

As this meme above shows, Q1 is not only rough for brands, but for KOLs and the media industry as well. By and large, brands have cancelled their advertisements and KOL campaigns for February. This article predicts the industry will recover by May, but may not have a full recovery until the 618 shopping festival.

Media related to the dining, real estate, movie promotion, and cross border e-commerce are suffering the most while some businesses in the gaming, health & fitness, and insurance industries are actually increasing their ad budgets. 

Government mandates to stay at home and not gather in groups are affecting new content creation, particularly KOLs that rely on teams for video or live streaming content production. WeChat Official Account KOLs and WeMedia are not as affected because their teams can easily produce content from home. 

Read More: 2020开局这么难，来聊聊自媒体行业怎么办吧

Alibaba Heavily Promotes Juhuasuan During This Year’s Spring Festival Gala  

Alibaba once again collaborated with the Spring Festival Gala, this year focusing on the group-buy platform Juhuasuan(聚划算) in an effort to gain a stronger foothold in the Xiachen Market (下沉市场). Xiachen market refers to consumers in China’s 3rd tier cities and below. These consumers are seen as the next big opportunity for brands, commerce platforms and apps in China. According to Alibaba, about 70% of Taobao and Tmall’s new users are from Xiachen market. 

The Spring Festival Gala reaches over 1 billion viewers every year. It is a tradition for Chinese families to sit together and watch the show as a family and Xiachen users are the largest viewer demographic. 

Two interesting campaigns: 

1. During the gala they ran a special campaign choosing 50k platform users and paying for all of their products placed in their shopping carts. This incentivized people to download the app and browse through it and find products they like. 
2. For the first time since the Gala launched 37 years ago it created and sold a Gala-branded product. Taobao sold a bowl called a Chunwan(春碗) which was a play on words for the Chinese name of the Gala or 春晚. “Wan” in Chinese means bowl(碗) and evening(晚). The Gala is following in the steps of the Palace Museum, leveraging its IP for product collaborations. 

Read more: 淘宝又上春晚了，10亿补贴背后是一个超级流量洼地

The post Douyin and Kuaishou Accounts Gained 10M Followers During CNY appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

In an attempt to sustain long term success, wanghong tea brand Hey Tea has slowly been diversifying its product categories, expanding beyond tea to offer bread, ice cream, moon cakes, coffee, Qingtuan(青团) and cookies. 

On March 23, Hey Tea (喜茶) introduced two flavors of Greek yogurt, sold at 19 RMB. These two products began selling out quickly. In Shanghai, they usually sell out in the morning. Customers have different responses to the yogurt. Some are saying it is very healthy, and it may be the healthiest item that Hey Tea has ever offered. Some are complaining that Greek yogurt is too thick to stir, and that it doesn’t taste good enough to justify the cost. 

Keep in mind, greek yogurt is still a relatively new product category for most Chinese consumers. Right now the most well-known brands in the category are Ambrosial (安慕希) Lepur (乐纯). The yogurt market has been growing at a stable speed of 20% since 2014 in China. In 2017, the market scale surpassed the milk market, valuing at 119.2B RMB, so this appears to be a smart category for Hey Tea to move into.

Read more: 投资牧场、开卖19元酸奶，喜茶你“变”了

Loyal Bilibili Users Disgruntled as More And More Celebrities Join The Platform

Bilibili is known for its strong ACG culture, but is that culture threatened? Recently many celebrities have joined the platform including singer Zhang Liangying(张靓颖), actor Xiao Shenyang(小沈阳) and Yin Zheng(尹正). Longtime Bilibili users understand that the platform is doing this in order to boost its user base, but they are concerned that celebrities’ followers sometimes could be irrational and turn Bilibili to yet another Weibo. 

Their worries don’t come out of nowhere. Last year, an Up Zhu (up主: a Bilibili slang term meaning content creators or influencers) made a funny and joking video about Cai Xukun(蔡徐坤, one of the hottest idols at the moment) playing basketball. It received a lot of views, but not long after the video got published, Bilibili was warned that it had violated Cai’s right of reputation and right of portrait and if Bilibili didn’t delete the video, it would be sued. 

Cai’s followers joined the fight as well. They wanted to leave Danmu (弹幕: another slang term from Bilibili, meaning bullet messages or comments moving across the screen while watching videos) on the video. But not anyone can leave comments on Bilibili, to be able to write Danmu, they need to become members of Bilibili first. But it’s not easy to join Bilibili. To do so, users must pass a test on ACG culture. But instead of trying to take the test themselves, some of Cai’s fans bought Bilibili memberships on Taobao, which can cost up to 9,000 RMB. (They are crazy!) 

And this is what longtime users are worried about, they don’t want Bilibili to become a celebrity chasing or fighting platform like Weibo. They want those mad and crazy fans out of the platform. But Bilibili is obviously not worrying this issue too much as it actually decreased the difficulty of the membership test, worrying longtime users even more.

Read more: 入驻大量明星后，B站终将“饭圈”化？

Louis Vuitton held its first livestream on Xiaohongshu – and it wasn’t great

While they’ve gotten a lot of attention for it, it really wasn’t that great, only 15k people joined the stream and the set was tacky. Chinese Gen Z’er Kejie shared, “I have seen screenshots of the livestream, the poor resolution and the setting totally ruined the aristocratic feeling of Louis Vuitton. It feels like I am watching a cheap Taobao store’s livestream.”

Douyin is banning lucky draws during livestreams 

Lucky draws are a common tactic used by live streamers to get audience members to show up and stay in the stream. According to Douyin, lucky draw behaviors include: 1. Live streamers guide users to type words and they take a screenshot. Whoever shows up in the screenshot will be awarded. 2. Oral lucky draw 3. Live streamers guide users to answer their questions and whoever is the first to answer or whoever shows up with the right answer in their screenshots will be awarded. Douyin has said that these behaviors will be banned starting sometime in April or May. Violators will be banned from livestreaming for 24 hours.

Kuaishou is testing private live streams that require a passcode

Kuaishou wants to offer the ability for streamers to be able to select their audience, for example KOLs could invite members of their fan groups only, or teachers could invite their students. The password is single-use and a new one will be generated for each stream.

Douyin is trying to revitalize its socializing app Duoshan(多闪) with new features

Duoshan has been reactivated and it has new functions including video calling and a “what my friends are watching” or “好友在看”. The feature is similar to WeChat’s Top Stories. The difference is, on Duoshan, the contents are videos from Douyin, and on WeChat, the content is articles. Duoshan’s slogan has also been changed to “Douyin’s socializing APP” (抖音好友社交APP).

ByteDance announced it will increase its employees in Wuhan to 5,000

ByteDance will add 2,000 job positions in its Wuhan office, and will hire many university graduates.

Read More:抖音上线投票小程序；快手宣布对品牌进行升级管理；真人版“房似锦”5天卖出2套房｜本周资讯

People are Selling Planes and Helicopters on Alibaba’s Resale Platform Xianyu

On second-hand platform Xianyu (咸鱼), there is a user called Tang Xiao(唐笑) selling a plane worth 400M RMB. While no one has bought the plane yet, another user from Zhejiang Province bought a helicopter on Xianyu for 2.73M RMB.

Luo Yonghoa(罗永浩), CEO of Smartisan(锤子科技), held his first livestream on Douyin

Luo is also referred to as “the first generation of Wanghong(网红)”. In his three-hour livestream, he achieved over 110M RMB sales with 48M viewers (maybe now you see why LV getting 15K viewers in their Xiaohongshu stream isn’t that great.) He broke Douyin’s record for most viewers during a livestream and brought a lot of new users for the platform. It was also many people’s first time to purchase something through Douyin. 

Read more: “咸鱼日”直播开卖4亿元飞机、携程梁建章淘宝直播带货｜大播快讯

China Marketing Podcast Episode 68: Programmatic Advertising in China with David Nottingham of iPinYou

Today’s episode features an in-depth discussion on programmatic advertising in China with David Nottingham, the EU general manager at iPinYou, a digital advertising technology company and the largest demand-side platform in China.

To kick off the conversation, David provides an overview of China’s programmatic ecosystem and how it is different from that in the West. Then, the conversation moves to:
Do you need to know about Chinese media to be able to run programmatic paid media campaigns?
Can Chinese media be trusted?
How can you manage ad fraud?
What are the latest trends in Chinese programmatic advertising?
As David points out, it’s hard to talk about programmatic advertising without getting technical. But he did a great job of helping those with little or no background in digital advertising to understand what he’s talking about.

Listen on iTunes, Spotify, or search China Marketing Podcast on your preferred player.

The post Hey Tea (喜茶) Becoming More Than Just a Tea Brand appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

It appears that women are more willing to spend money than ever, placing increased value on health and fitness, medical care, fashion, and beauty.

• During the quarantine period, 82.8% of females spent more time on online learning.
• 49.3% of females say that after the virus they will focus more on the enjoying the present and are willing to spend more money to improve their lifestyle now
• Only 15.2% of females say they will save more and focus more on money management
• Some of the offline activities they are looking forward to are exercising, going out to eat, going to cafes and tea stores, eating hotpot, and going to the cinema. 

Read more: 新冠疫情下的女性消费者动态

Vivo Takes Over the Fashion Industry to Promote its Newest Phone

On March 20, Vivo launched the new Vivo X30 cell phone designed by Alexander Wang. With the phone being designed by a fashion designer, Vivo went all in on the fashion theme, promoting the phone as a fashion item instead of just a mobile phone and running a full-scale PR and influencer campaign to generate massive buzz within the fashion industry:
Back in November 2019, Vivo announced supermodel Liu Wen(刘雯) as its ambassador
In December 2019, it officially announced its collaboration with Alexander Wang.
On March 16, 2020, fashion media such as Vogue, Bazzar, Cosmo, and Elle posted WeChat articles about the new Vivo X30. Most of these articles reach over 100k+ views. Many celebrities were involved in the promotion and other high-profile technology industry people as well, becoming a trending topic on social media.
Then the day it launched, March 20, many top tier fashion bloggers such as Gogoboi, Becky Li(黎贝卡的异想世界), Fil Xiaobai (Fil小白), Mr. Jiliang (吉良先生) and Dasao (原来是西门大嫂) published sponsored posts.
The influencer marketing doesn’t stop here. To create a long tail effect, since March 21, Vivo has had KOCs consistently promoting the product.
Read more: 深度｜vivo是如何快速打入时尚界核心圈层的？

China Marketing Podcast Episode 67: Rethinking the WeChat User Experience: Personalization, Commerce & Customer Journeys with Tom Kruger of Chatly

In this interview, Tom explains why brands need to rethink their WeChat strategies and position WeChat as their brand’s core customer engagement hub in China. He guides us through the entire funnel, from building an identified contact, creating 48-hour journeys, setting up segmentation and retargeting, and designing commerce and loyalty mini programs.

This episode is super detailed, it’s essentially a free WeChat CRM master class so be prepared to learn a lot!

Listen on iTunes or Spotify.

Is Kuaishou Better for New Brands Than Douyin? + Some Content Tips

Should newer or smaller brands be considering Kuaishou instead of Douyin? This article argues yes. Why? 

Douyin is more like Weibo, it is very entertainment focused. It can easily make something go viral, but it is not as tolerant and open as Kuaishou. Douyin is full of celebrities and lacks a sense of accessibility, is not down-to-earth. Because of Kuaishou’s tolerance, if you are a brand, you don’t need to have funds first, you can develop your fan base with simple, down to earth content. 

Some other content creation tips from the article: 

• Brands need to produce content that resonates with viewers, not what the brand thinks is best.
• Customers are real masters of your brand, not you. They can make your brand famous and they can also destroy it. Your role is to be a guardian of the brand. 
• Brands should dare to hire more young people, and hire people who often use live streaming. It is the future of commerce. 
• Don’t focus on creating viral content, focus on steady growth. If your account gets 300 new followers every day, at the end of the year, you will have 100k followers. 

Read more: 为什么中国所有的生意，都值得用快手重做一遍？

The post How Female Consumers Plan to Spend Money Post COVID-19 appeared first on China Marketing Insights.

In recent years, the Chinese public seems to be fascinated by older celebrities who are able to maintain a youthful appearance, giving them the nickname “冻龄女神” and “冻龄男神” or “age freezing gods and goddesses”. Everyone wants to know their secrets, prying into their eating habits, skincare routines, and positive mindset practices. 

Many skincare brands are capitalizing on this trend and promoting their products by appointing these age-freezing celebrities as their spokespeople, including Zhong Liti (钟丽缇), Lin Zhiying (林志颖) and Bao Wenjing (包文婧). Most recently, domestic facial mask brand MECMOR (名膜壹号) named Yuan Yongyi (袁咏仪) as its ambassador. Yuan (pictured above) is 47 years old and is famous for her skincare and “age-freezing” abilities. Working with her has proven to be a wise choice as the brand has gained a lot of attention – and new customers. 

On top of this, MECMOR also appears to have a good PR team. The company was recently featured on a national news program on CCTV, where they reported that the brand’s products are safe to use, and are free of additives. The CEO of MECMOR even drank 75ml facial mask serum in front of the camera. The stunt garnered a lot of attention from consumers, and seems to have been an effective method to convince people of the products’ safety. 

Read more: 49岁的“斩男鼻祖”重返银幕，霸占热搜，网友给跪了：哪里买的防腐剂？！

Let’s Not Forget Chinese Male Consumers

We hear A LOT about female consumers of all ages, but not nearly as much about the male consumer. In the past Chinese males didn’t pay as much attention to style and appearance because it was associated with being too feminine and not manly, but this perception is changing. From the massive sneakerhead economy, to the growth of the male skincare industry, this is a consumer segment companies should start paying more attention to. Fashion and style are becoming just as much of a status symbol as a house and car. 

According to the “China Luxury Online Consumption” whitepaper, male consumers on average spent 6% more than females, and the number of males who made three or more luxury purchases in a year was also found to be higher than females. 

Interesting takeaways about shifts in the male consumer market: 

• As Chinese women’s salaries have gone up, and are the same, if not higher than the men they date, it’s not as easy for men to use their salaries or material items to attract women, and women have started to care much more about men’s appearance
• Women control the media. 80% of writers and editors of WeChat OAs are women, meaning that womens’ higher requirements for their male counterparts gets amplified by the media. 
• In the past a “good husband” would be spending all his money on taking care of the family and spending money on himself was looked down upon, but as the standard of living has gone up, this has changed.
• Limited edition items from trendy brands have become social currency and status symbols for young men, from Supreme, to Air Jordans, to the recent Uniqlo x KAWS t-shirts, they are a means of self-expression, and a way to find belonging 
• Peer pressure also plays a big role: compared with female consumers, males consumers are more likely to buy trending, must-have items, and are more likely to succumb to peer pressure if others in their social group purchase those items 

What it takes to make a product popular among male consumers: 

• Must be social currency, a status symbol – make others look up to them
• Whether price is high or low isn’t the determining factor. You must give them a greater reason to want the product
• Limited edition and beautiful design are important 
• Provide increasing purchasing levels so they can grow with your brand

Read More: 优衣库 x KAWS、毒APP、CHAO社区爆发，为什么男性消费开始崛起？

Kuaishou Wanghong Makes 13M RMB Off of His Wedding

A couple years back when Angelababy got married, everyone was discussing how commercialized her wedding was. Well now making money off your wedding day is something that internet celebrities are doing too. 

On June 12, Liu Yishou (刘一手), who has over 18M followers on Kuaishou and 3.58M followers on the live streaming platform YY, held a live stream on Kuaishou ahead of his wedding. During the stream, the host, Liu and other special guests sold over 30 products, including baijiu, French wine, and skincare products from the brand JLV. 

While people were shocked that he was trying to make money off his wedding, even more shocking was his explanation why. He said he had no choice because he still needed to pay debts to YY for 23m RMB (not sure how this happened), and he also mentioned that he was not sure whether he could continue live streaming after that night. He said it will depend on that night’s sales. Whether or not this was all true it appears to have really motivated his fans to “help” him out.

But that’s not all. There were multiple streamers attending the wedding and people streaming at the wedding and they got into a bit of trouble due to one of the attendees. You see Liu had invited former popular Kuaishou live streamer Tianyou (天佑) to his wedding. Tianyou had gotten kicked off of Kuaishou for talking about doing drugs, so when Liu and Tianyou hopped on Liu’s wife’s Kuaishou account to live stream, the stream was shut down within a minute. And the same thing happened with all of the streams in which Tianyou appeared. That’s some rigorous censorship right there! 

While selling out your wedding might seem tacky, it’s not a China thing. Check out this recent story that went viral in Western media: This viral “surprise” proposal shows the less glamorous side of influencing

Read more: “网红婚礼”生意经！快手千万粉丝结婚卖货，天佑露脸直播被封…

China Influencer Marketing Podcast Episode 50: How Mogu (蘑菇街) is Dominating Chinese Fast-fashion with Raymond Huang, SVP of Strategy at Mogu

Welcome to episode 50 of the China influencer marketing podcast!!!! 

Today’s guest is Raymond Huang, SVP of Strategy, at the publicly-traded fast-fashion social commerce platform Mogu or, in Chinese, 蘑菇街.

If you’re like me and have a general awareness and understanding of Mogu but don’t really know what makes the platform unique, then this episode is for you. Raymond starts off by sharing a complete overview of Mogu, such as the apps content, the products it sells, and user demographics, and more.

Then we dig a bit deeper and learn what makes Mogu unique, from their tailored content algorithm, to their hundreds of homegrown influencers, to their regulations which prevent sellers from offering the same products as each other. We also discuss e-commerce live streaming and why adding this feature a couple years ago has been incredibly beneficial for the platform. 

Listen online here, on iTunes here, and on Ximalaya FM here.

Mommy Blogger Mini-program Makes 120M RMB a Month and Only 20% of Traffic Comes from the Blogger’s Official Account

小小包麻麻 (Xiaoxiao Baomama) is a popular mommy-baby WeChat Official Account and a very successful ecommerce mini-program that earns 120 million RMB a month and has an 80% repurchase rate. But what is fascinating is that the company has managed to make this MP extremely popular, so much so that people are seeking out the mini-program on its own. Unlike many e-commerce MPs which rely on traffic from the corresponding OA, only 20% of Xiaoxiao Baomama’s traffic comes from its OA. 

Growth strategies: 

• The CEO of 小小包麻麻 Jia Wanxing (贾万兴) doesn’t think mini programs need to rely on WeChat Official Accounts. You can find ways to drive traffic to them just like independent apps. 
• Strategies that Jia uses to build the MP customer base include group buying and earning credits. Group buying is nothing new, but that’s why he uses it, consumers already have this habit and it has proven successful
• Jia’s team selects specific products for group buy campaigns, specifically lower priced or trending items, because when it comes to these products, customers don’t spend too much time making purchasing decisions and are more likely to participate
• The credits system is their “secret weapon”. When old users bring new users to the platform, they earn virtual coins. Once they accumulate enough coins, they can get discounts, or sometimes win items for free
• After applying these two strategies, the MP’s user base grew from 100,000 to 4.3M from 2017 to 2019. 

Understanding their customers: 

• Platform claims to be strict about product quality, logistics, package, after service, making sure that users are respected when they are shopping. 
• Direct and easy participation in discount campaigns. Don’t make the rules overly complicated like many platforms do
• Customers receive 3 messages after they purchase products on the platform. The first tells them payment is successful, the second is a shipping notification, and the final one is coupons. If a customer buys diapers, the team sends her other products’ coupons, for example, formula. 
• When writing product descriptions, the team first identifies what emotions customers might have when they are shopping. Curious? Caring? Or in pursuit of authority?
• For example, when introducing international brands, the team expects customers might question the authenticity of products. Instead of telling customers how to identify real ones and fake ones, the team directly post group photos of the main KOL 包妈 and other execs visiting the brand’s factory 
• They customize content depending on how much info they think the customer will need to see before making a purchasing decision. When it comes to products that customers don’t need to spend too much time thinking about, such as diapers, they choose words and images. When it comes to products that need more demonstration, such as food and toys, they use videos or live streaming.

Read more: 不靠公众号粉丝，这个月入1.2亿的母婴自媒体用什么变现？

The post Chinese Consumers Obsessed With “Age Freezing” Celebrities appeared first on China Marketing Insights.