---
title: "Business Returns to the C-End"
description: "Shi Wei says business comprises cognition, transaction, and relationship. China's relationship-based society, rooted in agrarian culture, favors C-end business, while the institutional societies of Europe and America favor B-end business. In the information age, business returns to the C-end, leveraging technology and infrastructure from both industrial and information eras."
author: "刘春雄"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-10-20"
categories: "Brand Marketing"
language: "en"
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attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/business-returns-to-the-c-end-f8f9dc62/"
citation: "刘春雄. “Business Returns to the C-End.” New Distribution, 2019-10-20. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/business-returns-to-the-c-end-f8f9dc62/"
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---

# Business Returns to the C-End

> Shi Wei says business comprises cognition, transaction, and relationship. China's relationship-based society, rooted in agrarian culture, favors C-end business, while the institutional societies of Europe and America favor B-end business. In the information age, business returns to the C-end, leveraging technology and infrastructure from both industrial and information eras.

**Shi Wei says business comprises three links: cognition, transaction, and relationship.**
**The particularity of Chinese marketing mainly lies in the form of relationships.** Relationships help lower the threshold of cognition.
**China's relationship form was shaped by agrarian society, i.e., a relationship-based society, manifesting as C2C relationships. In both public and private business, personal relationships are crucial.**
**The European and American relationship form was shaped by city-state society, i.e., an institutional society, manifesting as B2C relationships, i.e., business-like relationships (though one-on-one relationships also exist).**
**Before industrial society, social forms were the result of natural selection, adapting to geography and climate, forming social civilizations. The business form was mainly C-end business.**
**Industrial society's business is B-end, more often B2B and B2C, where institutional relationships have an advantage.**
**In the information society, business returns to the C-end, with C2C and B2C becoming mainstream, and relationship-based societies have an advantage.**
-01-
Agrarian society's business was C2C and B2C; industrial society's business was B2B; information society's business is C2C, B2C, and B2B2C.
**Agrarian society's business was C-end, industrial society's was B-end, and information society's business will return to C-end.**
This is the negation of negation in business, i.e., the spiral ascent of business.
Returning from agrarian C-end business to information society C-end business is not a simple reappearance but borrows the high-efficiency C-end tools of the information society and the infrastructure of industrial society, B-end business.
-02-
Years ago, I heard a lecture on Phoenix TV about historical geography, and I have particularly liked this discipline since.
**History is the time axis; geography is the space axis. Historical geography is time and space.**
Social science matters sometimes need to be explained from a historical perspective, sometimes from a geographical one. In history, there are vertical changes; in space, there are horizontal comparisons.
The temporal and spatial changes in marketing involve the time axis, so we must discuss history; and the space axis, so we must compare China and foreign countries.
From the time perspective, we must discuss the historical changes of agrarian, industrial, and information societies.
From the geographical corner, we must discuss China-foreign comparisons, mainly China-West comparisons.
**From history, it is the negation of negation; from geography, historical traces remain forever.**
Once you understand it from historical and geographical space perspectives, you basically thoroughly understand marketing, especially the historical trajectory and spatial differences.
-03-
Before industrial civilization, the main body of business was C-end business, manifesting in three forms: first, merchants' "front shop, back factory," which is B2C; second, farmers' exchange-style commerce at "markets," which is C2C; third, merchants' long-distance trade, such as the Shanxi merchants in "Qiao's Grand Courtyard" who transported tea from Wuyi Mountain, which is B2B2C.
China has always pursued a policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, so C2C and B2C were the mainstream of business; Europe was mercantilist because land was not abundant, so long-distance trade was mainstream, and B2B2C was mainstream. The Age of Discovery was due to the Ottoman Empire blocking European trade routes, leading to voyages to find new routes.
**"Good wine needs no bush." This is the basic characteristic of C-end business.** Because the alley is not deep, and the business radius is not large enough.
Before industrial civilization, business was C-end, which in China manifested as two stabilities: first, consumer stability; in agrarian society, land immobility determined farmers' high stability, unlike the "moving with water and grass" of grassland civilizations; second, merchant stability. Although Europe's mainstream was B2B2C, B2B was unstable, but B2C was stable.
**C-end business determines that C-end trust in B-end is extremely important.** This trust is accumulated over the long term and formed historically. The value of trust lowers the threshold of cognition and reduces transaction costs.
-04-
The main body of industrial society is B-end business, which emerged because two major business infrastructures appeared.
Entering industrial civilization, urbanization developed rapidly. Population concentration and technological progress formed two major business infrastructures.
**Business infrastructure one: mass media.** Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio are called the four major media of industrial society. The four major media were generally in an oligopolistic state. The public obtained information mainly through these four media.
Thus, business information also mainly relied on the four major media. With mass media in an oligopoly, high-quality communication resources became scarce, so advertising prices continued to rise. Eventually, communication became exclusive to a few major brands.
The word-of-mouth cognition of C-end business, the "one VS one" social cognition, was replaced by mass communication.
**Business infrastructure two: modern retail business.** Modern retail business grew larger and larger. In the past, there was a phenomenon: building a large supermarket killed a batch of supermarkets; building a mall killed a batch of small shops. As a result, the United States enacted the "Large Store Law" to protect small businesses.
B-end business is characterized by two stages: the first stage is B2B, which is still "one VS one" interaction, such as between manufacturer salespeople and merchant buyers; the second stage is B2C, which is "one VS many" interaction. For salespeople, they do not know who the consumers are. Consumers are abstract in the eyes of merchants.
**The two major infrastructures formed two types of giants in industrial society: manufacturer giants and retailer giants.**
The advantage of giants is scale and efficiency; the problem is the elimination of individuality. Walmart used price as a killer and was initially very popular with consumers. However, when Walmart eliminated the traditional business ecology of small towns and became an oligopoly, consumers had fewer choices. Hence, there have been repeated anti-Walmart movements in the United States.
Although Walmart has abundant goods, its product selection inherently includes "elimination of the weakest" factors. Individual consumption and abundant goods are two different consumption options; abundance does not represent individuality but rather more commonality.
-05-
**In the Internet era, Taobao started C2C, then B2C. Business has restarted on the C-end track.**
Unlike Alibaba's platform e-commerce, Amazon, which was earlier than Alibaba, was vertical e-commerce. Vertical e-commerce is just an e-commerce version of Walmart's business, not C-end e-commerce.
**Ma Yun's new retail, "people, goods, and places," where the most important "people" is based on human connection, i.e., C-end business. This is the rhythm of turning traditional B2B business into B2B2C.** Many critics of new retail have not seen this point.
Of course, C-end business in the Internet era uses both Internet tools and traditional business infrastructure. For example, community group buying is B2B2C; it has the channel advantages of traditional B2B and also uses community connections to reach C-end, directly dialoguing with C-end and transmitting information to C-end.
The difference between platform e-commerce and vertical e-commerce: platform e-commerce is C-end e-commerce; the platform only provides a trading platform, matching transactions and reaching C-end directly; vertical e-commerce, the platform is the trader. Although the retail targets are all C-end, the difference lies in "one VS one" versus "one VS many," and stable C-end versus changing C-end.
-06-
The shift from C-end to B-end and then back to C-end feels different in China and abroad.
China's social form is rooted in agrarian civilization and is a typical relationship-based society; European and American civilization is rooted in Mediterranean city-state civilization, combined with mercantilism, forming an institutional society.
Relationship-based society provides soil for C-end business; institutional society provides soil for B-end business. Some people leave comments on official accounts criticizing various problems of relationship-based society. In fact, any social form has problems and has its suitable soil. I treat social forms as neutral concepts.
**Institutional societies excel at "one VS many" and "many VS many" management and business,** so in industrial society's B-end business, Europe and America have inherent advantages.
**Relationship-based societies excel at "one VS one" responses,** so they have advantages in small-scale business.
In 2018, China's urbanization rate reached 60%, already an urbanized society. After the baptism of industrialization and urban survival, China has adapted to both the institutionalized social form of economic organizations and the relational social form of personal life. This is dual adaptability.
-07-
Social development is the negation of negation, spiraling upward. Business is the same.
**C-end business in the Internet era manifests as [platform + unit organization], which is different from both the large B-end business organizations of the past and the C-end business organizations of agrarian society.**
B-end business organizations will gradually transform from human organizations to organizations supported by technical platforms. The role of people will weaken, shifting from operators to system designers.
Even in B-end organizations, more people will become C-end operators, i.e., so-called user management. The "people" in new retail's "people, goods, and places" refers to connecting users and managing users.
Use technical means to support B-end, and use people and technology to manage C-end. This combines the advantages of B-end and C-end business.
In Internet technology, the United States still has advantages. **But the Internet business of the United States and China will ultimately take different paths.** This choice is due to different business cultures in the bones, because Chinese business culture is inherently C-end culture. The Internet supports C-end business culture with new technical means, and China is like a fish in water.
-08-
**C-end business is core to connecting people and users.**
In agrarian society, the living radius and business radius overlapped; acquaintances were regular customers. Interactions in life were the groundwork for business interactions.
In industrial society, after urbanization, the living radius and business radius separated. People live in communities and work in factories. Factories and communities basically do not overlap (except for old state-owned factories). Large commercial centers formed larger business radii, and business lost its C-end characteristics, purely focusing on building commercial district appeal.
**In the Internet era, there are technical means to connect users, such as communities, mini-programs, and apps, with more interactive methods.** Some communities, such as community groups, naturally have overlapping living and business radii, like community group buying; some communities, such as vertical communities, offer personalized products that can connect across regions, ordering through technical means like apps and mini-programs.
Personalized products and long-tail products, because they lack density when divided by geography, traditional business cannot handle them, but the Internet provides means to connect users and ordering tools.
-09-
In the Internet era, there are both B-end and C-end business elements, with the core being C-end.
More precisely, Internet business has B-end characteristics in the supply chain, Internet characteristics in the platform, and C-end characteristics in cognition and transaction.
C-end characteristics mean the integration of cognition, transaction, and relationship.
In agrarian society, Chinese business was the trinity of cognition, transaction, and relationship.
In industrial society, the integration of cognition, transaction, and relationship was more evident in the channel field; deep distribution was about getting as close to C-end as possible.
In the Internet era, we return to the trinity of cognition, transaction, and relationship.
**Whoever owns the C-end has more leverage to build the B-end.**
**Whoever can manage users can force the supply chain to reverse. Future business will definitely be C2B.**
Traditional business is C2B in concept but B2B in operation. Internet business has consistency between concept and operation.
Source: Teacher Liu's New Marketing (ID: liuchunxiong1964)
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted. **China FMCG + Internet professional new media** **Dedicated to FMCG manufacturer and distributor transformation and channel digital solutions** **Copyright issues | Business cooperation | Project consultation | Reader submissions**


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 刘春雄
- Published: 2019-10-20
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/business-returns-to-the-c-end-f8f9dc62/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3OXB1zhAQpg96M787VjZyA

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