---
title: "Don't Pretend to Know What You Don't: Don't Mistake E-commerce for Micro-marketing!"
description: "This article clarifies the distinction between e-commerce and micro-marketing (WeChat/Weibo-based social selling), arguing that they operate on fundamentally different human behaviors: shopping versus socializing. It warns that applying e-commerce strategies to micro-marketing will fail, and suggests that micro-marketing, when combined with trust management, could offer a viable path for small sellers."
author: "涛哥"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2014-11-05"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/don-t-pretend-to-know-what-you-don-t-don-t-mistake-e-commerce-for-micro-831a8640/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/don-t-pretend-to-know-what-you-don-t-don-t-mistake-e-commerce-for-micro-831a8640.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FaK4WITt1YrDl2VkNtoS0Q"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E6%82%A8%E5%88%AB%E4%B8%8D%E6%87%82%E8%A3%85%E6%87%82-%E8%AF%AF%E6%8A%8A%E7%94%B5%E5%95%86%E5%BD%93%E5%BE%AE%E5%95%86-831a8640.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/don-t-pretend-to-know-what-you-don-t-don-t-mistake-e-commerce-for-micro-831a8640/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# Don't Pretend to Know What You Don't: Don't Mistake E-commerce for Micro-marketing!

> This article clarifies the distinction between e-commerce and micro-marketing (WeChat/Weibo-based social selling), arguing that they operate on fundamentally different human behaviors: shopping versus socializing. It warns that applying e-commerce strategies to micro-marketing will fail, and suggests that micro-marketing, when combined with trust management, could offer a viable path for small sellers.

Friendly reminder: **Click****↑****"FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting"** to learn more about marketing and distributor internal management.
Like internet thinking, micro-marketing is a vague concept with many differing opinions. The popular sayings in the market are not true, because no one has truly and successfully done micro-marketing. The definition of micro-marketing is not yet clear. Some people insist on calling e-commerce micro-marketing, which actually confuses the public.
Don't Mistake E-commerce for Micro-marketing
E-commerce and micro-marketing are two different concepts. E-commerce, in simple terms, means doing business on Taobao, Tmall, or JD.com. You can't just move your Taobao store to WeChat and claim you've changed industries, from e-commerce to micro-marketing. It's like changing your vest and continuing to hang out.
These two are completely different. Although both are played online, their natures are vastly different. So where is the difference?
The difference is not in the form of selling on the ground or online, but in people's behavioral habits. On Taobao and Tmall, our behavioral inertia is to shop, seeking maximum marginal benefits. On WeChat and Weibo, our behavioral inertia is socializing. On a platform with social inertia, achieving your commercial goals is what we call micro-marketing. Selling things on a shopping platform is e-commerce. With this definition, I have indeed seen people doing micro-marketing. A friend of mine was promoting products on Weibo a few years ago, doing it vigorously, and indeed lost hundreds of thousands.
Using e-commerce thinking to do micro-marketing is doomed to fail.
WeChat's Weidian (micro-shop) has a Taobao relocation function, which is misleading. It makes e-commerce people mistakenly think they can just move their original routine to do micro-marketing. This also shows that the WeChat team, which is at the forefront of platform development, is not particularly clear about what micro-marketing is. They are mature software developers but half-baked human nature researchers.
Mixing Emotional Business and Friendship Won't Work
Tencent is praised but not profitable. Watching Alibaba rake in money, they are anxious and sweating, so they try hard to lean towards shopping: pulling in JD.com, developing Weidian, buying Dazhong Dianping, sending red envelopes, using every possible means. But people's behavioral inertia is so hard to change. People love to chat and gossip on WeChat, but they don't like spending money. Although WeChat consumes 70% of our time on mobile, on WeChat, we "would rather say a thousand words than part with a penny." Mobile Taobao is not often opened, but when opened, it leads to shopping and spending. This feeling, for Little Ma (Ma Huateng), is like having a spiritual love affair with a woman: she talks love with you but always goes to bed with others. The deeper the love, the more painful it is for Little Ma.
But conversely, Little Ma need not be sad. Skinny Ma (Ma Yun) also has spiritual loss. We shop on Taobao and Tmall every day, but we don't make any friends, right? He is just the richest man, so poor that he only has money left.
In our nature, business is business, and friends are friends. Alibaba is business, Tencent is friends. The difficulty of being a micro-merchant is that you have to mix these two together and muddy them. It's easy to mix other things, but hard to mix this.
When you find a friend starting to sell things to you, you begin to categorize: is this guy a friend or a businessman?
Selling things on Weibo has no emotional ties; if annoyed, you can tell him to get lost. But on WeChat, when an acquaintance recommends something to you, you feel obligated to buy a little. Buy too much, and the friendship fades. This guy moves from the friend category to the businessman category.
How Strong is the E-commerce Backend?
Alibaba's e-commerce system based on shopping platforms is a "person-to-object" relationship. Tencent based on SNS is a "person-to-person" relationship. On shopping platforms, we must calculate carefully to maximize marginal utility, with no emotion involved. For the same product, if you are one yuan cheaper than others, I buy from you. In the e-commerce world, the world is flat, and in the end, the winner takes all. Only the final few are profitable, because the only way to ensure profit is huge sales volume. Sellers need huge sales to ensure lower product costs and lower shipping costs. This profit characteristic of e-commerce fits traditional scale-economy enterprises. The characteristic of traditional scale-economy enterprises is that the larger the output, the lower the average cost, and the enterprise can profit. So the huge transaction volume of e-commerce is closely related to this: e-commerce and traditional enterprises are both scale-economy types, a perfect match. The huge production capacity of traditional enterprises is digested by e-commerce platforms. No wonder so many processing enterprises in Dongguan are connecting with e-commerce.
It can be said that the e-commerce model is the online version of "mass" marketing, inseparable from scale economy and production capacity. These products trigger consumer purchases based on basic functional benefits. In fact, when we go to Taobao and Tmall, we buy based on basic functional needs. The explosive power of e-commerce just leverages our accumulated decades of scale-economy construction foundation. Many things on e-commerce are dirt cheap. Why? Besides reducing transaction costs in the channel, I think it's more about digesting excess production capacity.
High-End Products Can't Be Made
Since in the e-commerce system we pursue cost-effectiveness based on functional benefits, generally speaking, products on e-commerce platforms are hard to have added value. When we mock someone, we say their clothes were bought on Taobao, to indicate lack of class.
Most Taobao and Tmall sellers cry that they don't make money, just to earn traffic. So some people try to make high-end products. Because these distinctive products can avoid the dilemma of only earning traffic without profit. After satisfying customers' personalized needs, they can appropriately raise prices. So the e-commerce industry calls on everyone to make high-end products, requiring sellers to have a craftsman spirit. High-end products bring good consumption experience, thus word-of-mouth, thus internet spirit, and so on.
The original intention is certainly good, but the problem is that our economic model prioritizes shoddy production capacity, making it hard to create such high-end products. The manufacturing industry lacks the European-style craftsman spirit. They talk about handcrafted everything. Europeans can make products with the mindset of creating art. Do our manufacturing workers have this quality? It's good enough if they don't abandon work during the busy farming season. Their workers are senior technicians with artistic cultivation and centuries of heritage. Our workers are more like migrant workers from the slack farming season. How can they be compared? From these aspects, making high-end products can be our ideal, but not our reality.
High-end niche products are still a castle in the air in China. Although those scale-economy enterprises also advocate it, they hope more to start with niche products, tear open a market gap, and ultimately realize their dream of mass marketing. But the past is past. Look at the operation models of H&M and ZARA: they have many varieties of small products, employing scattered and flexible small processing factories. These fragmented numerous small factories replace large-scale mass production factories, supporting H&M and ZARA, producing a wide variety of clothing, meeting more niche personalized needs.
Look at Belle's over 20 women's shoe brands. You'll know that these so-called big brands, large-scale "mass" marketing, are actually a patchwork of countless fragmented "niche" marketing. There is no scale economy, no mass marketing, only countless niche marketing. Mercedes-Benz and BMW have also developed countless car models. Even the rigid Germans have become flexible.
Social Interaction is the Ultimate Consumption
People's needs are no longer just based on product function and practical value, but personalized needs. That's why customers increasingly like high-end products. But if you think that just making high-end products will bring consumption experience, create word-of-mouth, and be internet thinking, you are greatly mistaken.
Because people's ultimate need is not top-tier high-end products; people's top need is social interaction, gaining recognition from others. A rich person acquiring more wealth is no longer for purchasing power. Maybe he still proves something through purchasing power, but his essential need is not to buy functional needs. It's to show others, to prove his status and ability. This is essentially a social need. High-end products can provide some technical support for this social need, like handcrafted luxury cars. Such high-end products are not because they run faster or are safer, but because this high-end allows the owner to express their superiority. So the value of high-end products is not the practical value of the high-end itself; high-end products are merely the technical support for people's social needs.
Speaking of social needs, it brings us back to WeChat and Weibo. The emergence of new tools like WeChat makes it easier for us to contact the people we want to contact. In the past, without the internet, we were limited to certain spaces to contact people, such as colleagues, classmates, neighbors, relatives, and friends. In the internet world, we truly realize the free association of free individuals. We finally find that in the internet world, there are many tribes composed of different preferences. These scattered small organizations are everywhere, forming the basic framework of niche demand. But we cannot think that these niche groups will purchase based on certain product characteristics. These niche groups are more about small group social needs than products. They even naturally reject products. If you don't believe it, try posting ads or promoting products in those WeChat groups. They will kick you out immediately. In their eyes, your ads or promotions are incompatible with them. They think their community culture is far superior to your commercial promotion. In their eyes, you are an unacceptable alien. They have nothing to say to you. To them, you are like a dinosaur from the pre-internet era charging in. They want to drive away this backward species. They naturally reject ads and promotions.
Because the products you offer are often functional products they have in excess, unable to meet the needs of their social circle. You simply don't understand the relationships between people in their small circle. You are a reckless salesman. Of course, when I say this, I'm not sure what culture exists in each group that gives them such high stickiness.
But we can discover these secrets from real-world small circle cultures. Like the golf crowd: the skill itself is not important, even the outcome of betting is not important. What matters is getting into certain circles. Like the popular EMBA, business schools, etc. The important thing is no longer learning knowledge, but the social circle here. For this social circle, you could even sell them some qiegao (a type of cake) and they would accept it.
So products with such niche organization imprints, even without more high-end, can still sell. Even without products, it can work. For example, charity can buy donors happiness and respect.
Micro-marketing is the New Path
Micro-marketing does not really focus on how high-end the product is, but more on people's marketing. Of course, it cannot be compared to scale-economy e-commerce. It is still niche "micro" marketing, requiring higher difficulty.
Of course, if micro-marketing is so small that only products with added value can be done, that's too insignificant. There is also a marketing method based on trust agency, which might have the opportunity to become mass marketing.
That is the online version of the Amway model. Amway provides us with a good non-internet version: when consumers have a good consumption experience, they can use the trust relationship between friends to recommend products to friends, spreading from one to ten, ten to a hundred. This model itself is not wrong, but it easily changes flavor in China. This model eventually becomes a tool for some people to accumulate wealth. So if this model is moved to internet social circles without improvement, it will definitely attract criticism. This trust-agency marketing model lacks a "trust management" system. If "trust agency + trust management" is combined, micro-marketing can definitely create a mass marketing future. This zero-cost promotion model of spreading from one to ten, ten to a hundred, will quickly become popular, solving the dilemma of small and medium entrepreneurs who only earn traffic on Taobao. Tencent's LBS-based regional marketing strategy can allow more small and medium sellers to avoid the impact of large-scale sellers on Alibaba's platform and survive in regional areas. On Alibaba's platform, "the world is flat," the winner takes all, and most small sellers without advantages are just making wedding dresses for others.
On Alibaba's e-commerce platform, only a few win. On Tencent's social platform, more people can get rich.
However, one thing is foreseeable: in the future, "mass" marketing on Tencent's social platform will also be a patchwork of many "niche" marketing individuals, which is very similar to the H&M and ZARA models.
Source: Tao Tao Bu Jue
**WeChat Official Account: taotaobujue99**
\--------------------------------------------


---

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671