---
title: "The Essence of Brand Owners Doing Private Domain Traffic Is Managing KOLs!"
description: "The article discusses how brands like 自嗨锅, 王饱饱, and AKOKO have risen rapidly due to changes in media, channels, and consumer behavior, shifting from traditional retail logic to attention-based marketing. It argues that private domain traffic is not just about accumulating followers but about building trust and relationships through KOLs and community, ultimately enabling effective recommendations."
author: "赵波"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2020-03-09"
categories: "Brand Marketing, E-commerce & Instant Retail"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gxHfttqicm5WqB-thcr4Bw"
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attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-essence-of-brand-owners-doing-private-domain-traffic-is-managing-kol-4adf7d6e/"
citation: "赵波. “The Essence of Brand Owners Doing Private Domain Traffic Is Managing KOLs!.” New Distribution, 2020-03-09. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-essence-of-brand-owners-doing-private-domain-traffic-is-managing-kol-4adf7d6e/"
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# The Essence of Brand Owners Doing Private Domain Traffic Is Managing KOLs!

> The article discusses how brands like 自嗨锅, 王饱饱, and AKOKO have risen rapidly due to changes in media, channels, and consumer behavior, shifting from traditional retail logic to attention-based marketing. It argues that private domain traffic is not just about accumulating followers but about building trust and relationships through KOLs and community, ultimately enabling effective recommendations.

**-01-**
**From People Moving, Goods Not Moving to Goods Moving, People Not Moving**
Brands like 自嗨锅, 王饱饱, and AKOKO have suddenly become popular in the past two years. While many people envy them, they also wonder: **Can these brands sustain their popularity?**
In fact, those with this question overlook the fact that today's media, channels, and consumer behavior have fundamentally changed. We can no longer use traditional marketing experience to understand the growth path of new brands.
Those who have been in marketing for years feel that retail channels are gradually shifting from large to small, from few to many. You can no longer cover all consumers in China by just securing one channel.
At the same time, the internet brings products closer to people, decisions are made faster, and consumption is more random. If you can't get consumers to place an order within three seconds of seeing your product, you'll never have a chance to close the deal.
In the mobile internet era, it's a must for every brand to become a big single product and an internet celebrity. Sadly, many traditional brands don't even get the chance to become internet celebrities.
**In the past, the retail logic was: goods don't move, people move; everyone goes to supermarkets to shop, so retail terminals became crucial and were the focus of competition for all brand owners.**
The difference in transaction opportunities between good and bad locations is huge. Moreover, some products, even without a brand, can still solve sales problems if they have strong salesmanship.
**With technological development, today's retail transaction logic is: people don't move, goods move, and users can switch apps to find products with almost no switching cost. So, the essence of marketing today has shifted from grabbing locations to grabbing attention.**
The success of internet celebrity brands is first and foremost about successfully gaining everyone's attention.

**-02-**
**A Company's Official Account ≠ Private Domain Traffic**
In the early years when new media had dividends, many brand owners like 东鹏特饮 and 泰山啤酒 did promotions like scanning QR codes to follow and receive WeChat red packets. Their official accounts accumulated millions or even tens of millions of followers. In the past two years, the topic of private domain traffic has become very hot, and many companies are thinking about activating those followers on their official accounts to monetize them.
Frankly, I am not optimistic about these companies that gained followers through red packets and QR codes. They want to monetize their official account followers. These people who follow corporate accounts are superficially called fans, but in reality, they are just "followers" who came for the red packets.
They are not like fans of 江小白 or Apple, who actively follow because they passionately love the product or strongly identify with the brand culture. So if you stop giving red packets and start sending ads or promoting products, they will immediately unfollow. Shallow relationships come and go quickly.
You might wonder: Why can 薇娅, 李佳琦, and 辛巴 sell products directly on their official accounts? My brand has no fewer followers and no less influence than theirs. Why can't I do the same?
There's a knowledge blind spot here:
**Your own official account serves your own brand, and the essence of its operation is selling.**
**But internet celebrities or third-party media serve consumers, and the essence of their operation is recommending.**
Regardless of the type of followers, people can accept recommendations, but no one likes being sold to.
Moreover, just because you reach users or they follow you doesn't make them your fans. If you forcefully push product information to such users, you may not get good conversion or reviews, and sometimes it can backfire. And 薇娅 and 李佳琦 don't sell the same product 800 times a day.
So, if you're a food and beverage company trying to sell directly through your official account, it's hard to achieve good results.

**-03-**
**Internet Celebrity Live Streaming Solves Consumers' Decision Paralysis**
In the 1970s, scientists conducted a psychological experiment:
They randomly divided two groups of consumers, presented a series of expensive beers, and offered tasting opportunities and coupons. Group A had 6 beers, while Group B had 24 different beers. The results showed that 30% of Group A consumers eventually bought beer, while only 3% of Group B did. It's often said that more choices are better, but **too many choices exhausted Group B consumers during comparison, leading them to abandon the purchase. In psychology, this is called decision paralysis.**
People have an instinctive aversion to information retrieval. The problem with information explosion is that you have to search through excessive junk messages to find valuable information and products, wasting a lot of time and cognitive cost.
The value of 李佳琦 and 薇娅's live streaming model lies in helping users curate a vast array of products, reducing decision difficulty. Why do girls like 李佳琦? There are too many lipstick shades. 李佳琦's appearance successfully saved girls from the problem of insufficient intelligence when facing hundreds of lipstick shades.
So, a good recommendation is far more useful than a bunch of good sales pitches.
But people's attention is limited, and the Matthew effect is obvious in live streaming: 20% of internet celebrities occupy 80% of users' attention. Top influencers like 李佳琦, 薇娅, and 辛巴 absorb most of the traffic.
So 李佳琦's recommendation power becomes a scarce resource, leading everyone to compete for it. The result is that no player can make money from live streaming with 李佳琦.
Companies should think more deeply: besides 李佳琦, can consumers proactively recommend our products to their friends?

**-04-**
**How to Be Effectively Recommended Is a Whole Operating System**
**A product's ability to be recommended is a standard requirement for a company's survival in the future.**
Consumers are bombarded with recommendations every day, but from an effectiveness perspective, relationships far from the user can be seen as selling, while close relationships can be seen as recommending. There's a conversion process from far to near, and whether consumers view pushed information as selling or recommending depends on their trust in the recommender.
From a purely consumer perspective, user trust can be divided into five circles:
From an effectiveness standpoint, consumers trust most: first, relatives; second, friends and colleagues; third, KOLs and internet celebrities they like and approve of; fourth, comments and reviews; and finally, media ads.
From an efficiency standpoint, the highest communication efficiency is from media ads, then comments, KOLs, friends and colleagues, and finally relatives, where there seems to be little influence.
Today, almost all brands are gradually realizing the importance of KOLs and are starting to find ordinary people, KOLs, and influencers on apps like 小红书 for product seeding. However, we see that the effectiveness of such recommendations is significantly declining.
A couple of days ago, I chatted with teacher 刘春雄, and he mentioned a viewpoint: the essence of marketing is the advancement of marketing technology. When everyone learns a method, it means the method becomes ineffective (diminishing marginal returns).
This is the dilemma all brand owners face in today's media environment: high efficiency but poor results. If we can't influence consumers' colleagues and friends on a deeper level, small brands may have no media to spread through!
How to break this deadlock? Let's go back to the official account issue.
**Today's media technology's most valuable point is that we can directly reach consumers on a large scale and quickly.** Many companies want to monetize through media, but this traffic thinking is worthless because, under the new three forces logic, it can't achieve retention. The more information you send, the more followers you lose.
So, after connecting with consumers, the most important task is not to send so-called media ads, but to think about how to rebuild the relationship with consumers through effective organizational forms, from simply knowing "big brand!" to trusting "good product!" This process requires a whole set of conversion logic and systems to support the company's operations.

**-05-**
**Three-Dimensional Space, Trinity**
In teacher 施炜's book "Connection," he clearly describes how to build effective trust relationships with users: **Cognition online, transactions offline, relationships in communities.**
In my previous articles, I supplemented this basic theory with a model:
The operational logic within communities is based on KOLs, social relationship chains, and using the community pool to rebuild a trinity relationship with consumers.
Simply put, use official accounts to attract followers, operate the accounts to continuously interact with users and provide good experiences, then pull users from online to communities, and even offline for monetization. Through fan meetings and community sedimentation, let consumers re-understand, accept, and approve of you, ultimately achieving strong relationships with users.
Based on this strong relationship, and according to Dunbar's number theory, each user with a strong relationship can influence six close friends, helping you spread to 150 people, and so on, achieving the opening and connection of the three-dimensional space with users.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 赵波
- Published: 2020-03-09
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-essence-of-brand-owners-doing-private-domain-traffic-is-managing-kol-4adf7d6e/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gxHfttqicm5WqB-thcr4Bw

## Copyright and AI use

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