A PR disaster? Shenzhen's best sellers fail overseas

Generally speaking, brands will contact a large number of influencers via email to seek cooperation, and choose appropriate promotional content based on the other party's quotation and style.

In most cases, cooperation between brands and influencers is a win-win situation for all three parties: the brand gains exposure, the influencer makes money, and the influencer's fans also feel that they have been encouraged to try good things.

However, sometimes unexpected situations occur.

Celebrity marketing fails, Shenzhen seller is caught in public relations accident?

Some time ago, a well-known blogger in the digital area of ​​Youtube posted a video, revealing a cooperation dispute between him and a certain brand.

It is understood that when the brand was communicating with the blogger via email, it asked the other party whether it could conceal the fact that it had received sponsorship when promoting the product.

From a third-party perspective, it is understandable that the brand has such an idea, after all, doing so can make the entire promotional video more credible and generate more conversions. But in the blogger's view, doing so is deceiving his fans.

According to the blogger, this behavior is not only unethical, but also violates the relevant regulations of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Therefore, he decisively rejected the proposal and instead posted a video to expose the email sent to him by the brand.

In the video, the blogger laid out the entire story of the incident and accused the brand of becoming increasingly "aggressive" in its marketing, from seeking authentic reviews from bloggers in the early days to now making demands on bloggers in all aspects.

After the video was released, it quickly attracted attention from many parties, and the number of video views continued to rise. As of press time, the video has been viewed more than 100,000 times and received 9,088 likes. In the video comment area, netizens expressed their affirmation of the blogger and believed that this behavior was not what a well-known brand should do.

According to the information provided by the blogger, it can be found that this brand belongs to a Shenzhen electronic product giant. In recent years, this brand has developed rapidly, with sales exceeding RMB 2 billion in 2022 and its market share rising to second place in the global sports camera market.

In fact, as brands continue to develop, the relationship between them and influencers is also constantly changing. In the early stages of brand development, due to the weak brand influence, brands often have little say when cooperating with influencers to build relationships, and most of the time they have to meet the influencers' various requirements.

But after the brand has developed slowly, it has accumulated a certain amount of bargaining chips. At this time, when negotiating with influencers, it will be more confident and will also make more demands on the other party.

According to the content of the email exposed by the blogger, it can be seen that the brand staff was relatively polite during the communication, and asked the blogger whether he could accept this form of cooperation. The implication was that it was completely fine if he did not accept it, but the blogger still ruthlessly exposed the other party.

The reason for this is that it is not ruled out that he wanted to use this topic to harvest another wave of traffic, and by the way "show loyalty" to his fans , to show that he would not deceive his fans.

After the incident, the brand's public relations team responded urgently, saying that this was a problem caused by insufficient training for new employees and that they would strengthen training in this area in the future. So far, the public relations incident caused by influencer marketing has finally come to an end.

In fact, as influencer marketing becomes more and more normalized, more and more related issues have begun to surface.

Influencer marketing frequently fails, what went wrong?

It has been reported that after the influencer marketing model became popular, related businesses also began to emerge, most of which were service providers that helped sellers connect with influencers.

Some sellers have found that they have received greetings from 2-3 service providers almost every day , asking whether they need off-site celebrity promotion services.

The chat records show that a service provider said that the company recently launched a promotional price for blogger and celebrity stickers. The original price of a single sticker was 1,160 yuan, but now the price of three stickers is only 2,188 yuan, with a quality guarantee of 390 stickers.

Regarding the cooperating influencers, the service provider said that the company has 50 Instagram influencers, 12 big bloggers and 12 LV6 influencers. They post promotional posts in three major fields at the same time, which is suitable for various unpopular and slow-moving products, and only requires a discount of about 20%.

Not only is the price not expensive, but they also claim that they can guarantee a certain number of orders. Is this really a pie in the sky? The seller began to wonder.

Afterwards, the seller tried to contact several other off-site promotion service providers and found that the prices quoted by different service providers were quite different.

The original price of a single post is 1999 yuan, and the current price is only 1088 yuan, with a warranty of 150 orders. If ten big influencers and groups post continuously for 7 days a week, orders will be placed every day, allowing your sales to rise step by step! Another service provider guaranteed this.

From this, we can infer that there is currently no fixed standard for charging for influencer promotions , and different companies will formulate different charging standards based on their own circumstances.

Regardless of the fees, can the influencer’s sales effect really be as good as the service provider guarantees? Facts have proven that this may not be the case.

According to a post by a seller online, he contacted a service provider claiming to do off-site promotion for Amazon through WeChat and reached a cooperation agreement. He purchased the off-site celebrity promotion service of three Amazon links for 998 yuan.

But after a few days, the seller found that there was no effect. He contacted the service provider and the other party said that the post was not popular yet and he needed to wait. As a result, he received no reply to several messages he sent later, and the phone calls were not answered.

Afterwards, the seller searched online and found many cases with similar rhetoric and tactics, and realized that he had been scammed.

According to the seller, the other party's company was called Shenzhen Amou E-Commerce Co., Ltd., and they even issued him a value-added tax invoice. He didn't expect that it turned out to be a scam.

Judging from various case analyses on the Internet, the celebrity promotion industry is indeed still in its early stages of development, so it is not surprising that there are all kinds of mixed situations.

After all, if an industry is profitable, it will attract some people with ulterior motives who want to join in to make a quick buck . Therefore, sellers still need to keep their eyes open when choosing to avoid being deceived.

Shenzhen big seller

Rollover

Influencer Marketing