Click the image above for details Source: Lao Miao Tears Marketing (ID: yiheyingxiao) Live streaming is not just for internet platforms; physical enterprises have greater application space. -01- 2020 is truly a magical year. Just sitting at home witnessing history is thrilling enough. The most magical thing in the business circle is of course live-stream selling. Not long ago, people everywhere were urging others to get on board quickly. Some said: "No, I'm not ready yet, I haven't even had time to pee." People on the bus shouted: "Hurry, hurry, if you don't get on now, it'll be too late. You couldn't catch up even if you ran off eight pairs of shoes." So many people got on the bus holding their pee. After a while, those who held their pee basically wet their pants. At first it was a bit warm, but gradually it became ice-cold. And they got a bad reputation. No, it should be a bus full of bad reputation. In this lovely information society, a concept bubble from inflation to burst takes at most a year. It will get shorter in the future. This round of live-stream selling is very disappointing; it's already in this state after just a few days. At the beginning of the year, due to the pandemic, a friend in the exhibition business saw his business hit rock bottom. He had a large number of former clients and rich execution resources. When the live-stream selling trend came, he felt it was a gift from heaven. "If heaven gives you something and you don't take it, you'll suffer the consequences," so he went all in. He quickly established an MCN agency with a dozen live-stream rooms, dozens of "internet celebrities," and over a hundred staff, and jumped into the fray with fiery wheels. It's been half a year now. Everyone can guess what it's like now. This friend is at home shouting "My fate is determined by me, not by heaven." To avoid causing him secondary harm, I won't describe the process or the current result. What live-stream selling is like now is clear to anyone not brainwashed or hoping for someone to take over. Wu Xiaobo's fifteen cans. Teacher Luo's 97% drop. Various celebrity live-stream failures. Various MCN agencies closing down. Various fake orders, data fraud, suppliers being cheated, product complaints... Of course, it's not objective to say live-stream selling has no value at all. It's just that a mouse was blown up into an elephant, and now it's being punctured, looking a bit ugly. -02- Like TV shopping, live-stream selling has some value, such as increasing product experience. Traditional e-commerce sales are mostly planned purchases. But live streaming's on-site encouragement and superb demonstrations can make customers order quickly, increasing some impulse purchases. That's all: increasing sales opportunities for impulse-buy products. But compared to physical contact, the effect is still far behind. The big difference from TV shopping is that TV shopping repeatedly instills at specific times, a brainwashing approach. Live-stream selling plays on instant impulse. So we see the former often sells high-priced products, while the latter basically sells under 100 yuan. Live-stream selling was blown up for several reasons:

1. Pandemic-driven. 2. Monopolistic platforms (traffic owners) use this to redistribute traffic, change the game, and sell more traffic. 3. Monopolistic platforms and media fuel the fire, advocating disruption, forming strong public opinion, and further seizing discourse power. 4. Due to traffic redistribution and game changes, they created live-stream selling myths like Viya, Xinba, and Li Jiaqi, which under strong public opinion influenced physical enterprises to follow and be harvested. 5. Due to the macro environment and individual business reasons, many physical enterprises can't find marketing outlets, and in fear and anxiety, they boarded the ship confusedly. 6. This year, celebrities have nothing to do, so they use their influence to earn money from physical enterprises. There are other reasons, like the fanatical follow-up of many entrepreneurs, and blind support from some departments that don't understand market rules. In short, with the right time, place, and people, except for its own low value, everything else was in place, so the big trend naturally blew up. After too many celebrity live-stream failures, there's recently a very absurd opinion: "When celebrities sell via live stream, you shouldn't just look at sales volume; you should also consider the celebrity's endorsement effect. This is called brand and effect integration." That's going too far. Treating us physical enterprises as fools isn't done like this. If you can't sell anything by directly hawking, and I spend money to promote "this is the product you sold in the live stream," isn't that suicide? Are you advertising the product or yourself? Celebrity endorsements can bring huge promotional momentum, endorsement, and topics to enterprises, which has nothing to do with live-stream selling, right? -03- In the end, live streaming is just an internet tool, and live-stream selling is just one of its many applications. It's the most visible, but definitely not the most important application; it's just one leg of an elephant. Platforms are closest to consumers, and celebrities and influencers have influence over consumers, so the most appropriate way for them to use this tool is "selling," while physical enterprises exactly need to "sell goods." So live-stream selling is a great business for platforms: they can sell more traffic, shear a wave of wool, and grab another wave of discourse power. But for physical enterprises, it's not like that. Lao Miao repeatedly emphasizes: all commercial value ultimately reflects in user value. Users need goods (including service products), not traffic. Traffic must be parasitic on goods to realize value. In the entire live-stream selling chain, all value ultimately reflects in the one link where consumers buy goods. Then the problem arises: live-stream selling requires "lowest price across the internet," so most merchants have little profit from selling goods. But platforms must make money, celebrities and influencers must make money, MCN agencies also need to keep profits, and risks (like returns) are basically borne by merchants. So the result is clear: Nominally, everyone helps physical enterprises sell goods. Actually, everyone shears the wool of physical enterprises. The savings for consumers and the money earned by each link ultimately come from the suppliers. Except for physical enterprises not making money, everyone is happy. What's more disgusting is that in practice, platforms and celebrities always put on a face of representing consumers to denounce bad merchants. "You need to give me a discount," "Your price still has water," "This quality needs improvement," "That service can be added more"... Damn, being "eaten by the big household" and "sheared," and still being labeled as "unscrupulous merchants." At this time, someone stands up and says, "It doesn't matter if celebrities don't sell goods; just treat it as earning endorsement fees." Have you seen anything more rogue than this? -04- Conclusion:

  1. Live streaming is an internet tool, and live-stream selling is just one application of this tool. It suits platforms, not physical enterprises. If you have all conditions, like Gree, you can participate in this application, but most enterprises in most situations can't.
  2. Internet tools are not exclusive to internet platforms; physical enterprises have more space to use internet tools. Don't follow the platform's rhythm.
  3. What can physical enterprises do with live streaming? There are many things. Live-stream your store, live-stream corporate events, live-stream production processes, live-stream product experiences, live-stream corporate culture... You can live-stream all your advantages, all your talking points, and all the points where you want feedback, interaction, and experience. What is marketing? Marketing is discovering and creating value, communicating value, and delivering value. Live streaming is such a great tool for communicating value. Why do we all rush into the platform's game? Regarding how physical enterprises should use live streaming as an internet tool, Lao Miao happens to have a few cases here. I'll write a special article about this later. Finally, I can't help but nag a bit. In recent years, the market has changed quickly, competition is fierce, and the macro environment is bad. Due to pressure and anxiety, many enterprises have been brainwashed by monopolistic platforms and media, losing even common sense. We do physical enterprises, just like those farmers in my hometown in Shandong who grow greenhouses. Besides daily watering, fertilizing, sowing, and harvesting, they also need to consider what to plant this year (product mix and market research), how to increase yield per unit (cost reduction and efficiency), greenhouse and cultivation technology (R&D and production processes), and early contact with vegetable vendors (channel construction). Doing live-stream selling is like suddenly someone appears in the vegetable market with a loudspeaker, claiming to sell better than others, and they tell you that if you don't use a loudspeaker to sell vegetables, you're doomed. But to use his loudspeaker, you have to pay a usage fee, which is equivalent to a month's earnings from selling vegetables. Anyway, the farmers in my hometown wouldn't believe it. They know that these things really have little to do with them. If I follow your loudspeaker to sell vegetables today, tomorrow you'll have speakers, the day after there'll be young ladies singing and dancing to sell vegetables, and later there'll be private domain selling, IoT selling, virtual selling... Playing occasionally is fine, but if I follow everything, my greenhouse would have been abandoned long ago.