The age of platform creation
The hottest marketing phenomenon in China recently has to be the live broadcast room of “Oriental Selection”. From June 9th to 10th, the number of viewers in the live broadcast exceeded 760 million, the total sales in a single day exceeded 1,500 million RMB. Previously, only 65 million people watched the live broadcast online and the daily sales volume is only 100–200 million RMB. That’s an explosion that even New Oriental didn’t expect.
As a former giant in the education industry, New Oriental decided to donate all the desks and chairs to rural schools in November 2021, ending the nearly 30-year “education and training era”. In December, New Oriental decided to use the name “Oriental Selection ‘’ to conduct live commerce targeting agricultural products to help farmers get rich. The next day, the share price of New Oriental dropped 21.78% on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Many people were strongly negative about the prospect of New Oriental’s live broadcast. After all, many successful live streaming products have head traffic and low price promotion. The “Oriental Selection” has neither of these qualities. There is even a lot of suspicion that agricultural products are being sold at higher prices than market prices.
Many people attribute the explosion of “Oriental Selection” to his live broadcast format and content. I think it’s culture and empathy. “My name is Dong Yuhui, a farmer’s child who used to be a teacher and now works as a salesperson,” said Dong Yuhui, a streamer. The phrase went viral on the Internet. While many netizens think that the products are expensive, Dong Yuhui said that the low price of grain hurts the farmers. If profits get smaller and smaller, no one in the countryside would like to farm, so the price can’t be too low. He knows astronomy and geography, and he can talk about poetry and homely life in both Chinese and English at the same time, without forcing customers to buy goods.
The combination of teaching and live commerce enables the audience to experience the freshness of “cultural people live commerce”. Many times, a product is sold short before it has even been introduced, and Mr. Dong is still teaching knowledge points. It is these super ordinary teachers who take the studio as a platform to express themselves in the camera. It’s not just the power of culture, but the ability to empathize with consumers. The latest generation of consumers prefer emotional consumption, no longer shopping out of need, just out of love and empathy. The explosion of “Oriental Selection” has achieved a high degree of emotional needs.
The explosive delivery made me feel like DOUYIN was the “invisible hand” behind it.
In half a year, the same live broadcast with the same style, the sales volume of the previous live broadcast was only 450 million RMB in two months, and then reversed in a few months. This is a true platform creation. At a time when platforms are competing, market acumen is very important. The platform selects users with correct values, gives feedback quickly, strengthens its positioning, and releases signals and labels. As a result, DOUYIN has retained a number of high-quality users who love culture and lecture halls. It’s not a coincidence, it’s a calculable digital star-making movement.
