Two months after JD.com’s high-profile entry into the food delivery industry and triggered the “Jingmei Hunger” subsidy war, the business war seems to be showing signs of a break. However, in this fierce market competition, a phenomenon is particularly eye-catching – the invasion of “fan circle power”. With policies such as “commission free” and five insurances and one housing fund, JD Takeaway has won the support of merchants and riders, and even triggered the “star-chasing” behavior of netizens. However, this kind of “fan circle marketing” not only brings traffic, but also arouses controversy in public opinion and the attention of regulatory authorities. This article will delve into JD Takeaway’s “fan circle marketing” strategy and its impact on market competition, user perception and industry ecology, revealing the pros and cons of this marketing method and the deeper issues behind it.
More than two months after JD.com’s high-profile announcement of its entry into the food delivery industry, the fierce competition in the food delivery market has developed into a subsidy war with “Jingmei Hunger” as the core. However, the recent “Three Kingdoms” seems to have shown signs of a ceasefire.
At the end of April, some merchants broke the news that JD.com’s takeaway subsidies were reduced, and merchants were required to bear 50% of the cost, and related topics also appeared on Weibo’s hot searches. Although JD.com Takeaway refuted the rumors in the afternoon of the same day, under the rumor-refuting Weibo, some merchants posted a notice that they were required to bear 50% of the subsidy cost. In addition, many netizens have recently posted on social media platforms to complain about the shrinkage of takeaway red envelopes.
The subsidy war between Internet platforms, the script of “from more to less, until the end of none” has become the norm. However, as the tide of takeaway subsidies recedes, looking back at this “takeaway war” set off by JD.com, there is a phenomenon that is particularly worthy of attention, that is, the “power of the fan circle” that has accompanied the fermentation of public opinion from beginning to end.
01 The business war ushered in the “fan circle invasion”
It is not uncommon for competitors in the same industry to engage in fierce confrontations at the business level in order to compete for market share, but since JD.com officially announced its entry into the food delivery industry, online public opinion seems to be full of “antagonistic” emotions.
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With “commission-free” and five insurances and one housing fund, JD Takeaway accurately captured the two core groups – takeaway merchants and takeaway riders. In the field of public opinion, JD.com’s “commission-free” policy is to reduce the burden on takeaway merchants who are difficult to do business, and the five insurances and one housing fund allow takeaway riders to have a stable basic guarantee. Its image is so tall that it gives people a feeling of overthrowing the “shackles” of the takeaway industry and saving the people.
As a result, JD.com’s takeaway, which stands with the working people at the bottom, has won the recognition and support of netizens, gained a lot of fans, and has the momentum of “Chu Overlord Anti-Qin” to rectify the takeaway industry. In Liu Qiangdong’s hometown of Suqian, there is also a phenomenon of catering merchants making their own posters and pulling banners in solidarity with JD.com’s takeaway.
*Image source: Modern Express
According to the Modern Express, on April 28, on the streets of Suqian, Jiangsu Province, a number of restaurants hung big red banners to express their support for JD.com’s takeaway, and the atmosphere was full. The banner hung by a “duck blood vermicelli soup” also reads “Xiang Wang’s hometown is full of fragrance, and Jingdong takeaway delivers spring breeze”. The day before, the local culinary and catering industry association also issued a proposal, advocating that member units and the city’s catering industry should embrace the JD takeaway platform with the attitude of “host”, register quickly, operate quickly, and grow together with JD takeaway.
On social media, some netizens took screenshots of Liu Qiangdong’s video of inviting takeaway riders to eat hot pot, with the copywriting of “A man should be like this” into a poster, which has a sense of déjà vu for fans chasing stars to make support materials for idols. In Tianjin, a merchant held the poster and released a video, indicating that he “supports JD Takeaway”, and then received a response from Liu Qiangdong’s circle of friends, and said that he would “free commission for another year” for this store, just like fans and idols, completing a “two-way run”.
There is a behavior of deliberately pleasing fans called “flattering fans”, even in the fan circle there is a huge controversy, and now “copy and paste” to business is even more unacclimatized. If you can get a “commission-free card” by “showing loyalty” to the platform boss and indicating your identity as an “East Fan”, then is it also an inequality for merchants who honestly accumulate customers? Previously, a Dong fan named Ma Chuang was also invited to become an early batch of JD.com full-time riders after posting a video complaining that “full-time riders are too mysterious”. Such distribution according to support and distribution according to trouble has also made the industry fairness that Dongfan has been looking forward to for a long time become a “family law rule” within the platform.
In fact, from the perspective of bystanders, JD.com’s “10 billion subsidy” has indeed brought some short-term benefits to users, so there is no problem for netizens to play jokes or unilaterally express their praise for well-known entrepreneurs. But the strange thing is that in addition to the voice of approval, whenever there is a voice questioning JD.com’s takeaway on the Internet, it is easy to be labeled as a “black pink”. A group of East fans who are good at confrontation and cyberbullying appeared, and public opinion began to change.
The self-media account “Whispering Bibi” specifically posted an article mentioning that after he mentioned the change in JD.com’s subsidy policy in the article, small merchants protested in the comment area of JD.com’s official WeChat comment area, and as a result, the comment area was besieged, and some netizens questioned that it was a “water dog” of a competitor platform, smearing and spreading rumors about JD.com.
*Image credit: “Whisper Bibi”
The account also found that when the JD courier, who has worked for 11 years, posted to share his feelings about his work “very stable and fulfilling”, the comment area was full of thumbs. But when riders who have worked in Meituan for 9 years share their feelings and are unwilling to change platforms for one or two thousand yuan of wool, the comment area is a different style.
Some netizens left a message saying, “This is typical: it’s not you who work for the boss, it’s the boss who gives you a job”, and some people said “Huang Shiren is snickering at this moment, he likes Yang Bailao like this”, and some comments even questioned that his motivation for posting the video was “taking money to do things”. This scene can’t help but be reminiscent of the regular operation of fans rushing to the bottom of other celebrity topic entries to tear up and attack each other in order to protect their idols. And all kinds of one-sided comments also successfully frightened netizens passing by, “I don’t know why the hostility in the comment area is so strong.”
02 Three elements of fan circle marketing: fire, promise, and take pictures
Looking back at JD.com’s previous experience in rectifying other industries, it will be found that similar “fan circle phenomenon” is not accidental, which has formed a marketing routine that includes the three elements of “firing, promising, and taking photos”.
In 2012, the “price war” that broke out between JD.com, Suning and Gome was triggered by Liu Qiangdong’s “firing” at Suning and Gome on Weibo. At that time, Liu Qiangdong announced through Weibo that all major appliances in JD Mall would maintain zero gross profit in the next three years, and gave a promise to “guarantee that it is at least 10% cheaper than Gome and Suning chain stores”. This practice of publicly shouting and directly targeting opponents can also be called simple, rude and unpretentious in today’s terms.
After Liu Qiangdong fired, he quickly attracted opponents to counterattack, and as Suning and Gome ended up one after another and announced their response, a vigorous e-commerce price war quickly kicked off, and the capital contest behind it gradually surfaced. On the evening of August 14, 2012, Liu Qiangdong also revealed to the outside world through Weibo that a JD shareholder said: “We have nothing but money!” You can rest assured to fight (price war) and fight to the death! ”
However, after just over a week, the e-commerce price war did not intensify as advertised, but as all parties began to withdraw their troops, it was announced to be “suspended”. Later, according to the economic voice “CCTV Financial Review”, the price war set off by JD.com, Suning, and Gome was found by netizens to be “thunder without rain” and “fooling consumers”, and was investigated by the National Development and Reform Commission to be suspected of fictitious original prices and defrauding consumers.
Earlier, when JD.com “rectified” the book category in 2010, Liu Qiangdong also bombarded Dangdang with a “monopoly” on Weibo, known in history as “JD.com Dangdang ‘blocking the door'”. At that time, Liu Qiangdong posted on Weibo that some users complained that the books on JD.com were only “5%-10% cheaper” than others, so he immediately decided: starting from December 14, the price of each book on JD.com will be 20% cheaper than that of competitors.
Later, Whip Niushi mentioned in a report recalling Dangdang.com, “JD.com only has more than 200,000 kinds of books, while Dangdang has more than 600,000 kinds; Books are just JD.com’s side business, but they are Dangdang’s main business. Therefore, when fighting a price war, the cost of Dangdang will be several times that of JD.com. ”
Comparing the “wheel of history” and looking back at the “Three Kingdoms” staged in the current takeaway market, I am afraid that netizens also have to sigh that the plot is similar. It’s just that today’s public opinion field is different from the past, and Dong Ge has tasted the sweetness of making gods in the fan circle, and he doesn’t see how much price there is behind it.
On April 21, JD.com first used an “Open Letter to All Delivery Rider Brothers” to detail the “six deadly sins” of the food delivery industry, and even cited information that had been refuted by friend platforms many days ago to spread rumors for a second time. Although the letter did not directly name competitor platforms, it is no different from directly “reporting ID cards” under the already extremely stable market pattern of the takeaway industry. This move of searching for enemies in the void and pulling and stepping on porcelain is also the same as the fan circle.
Subsequently, after the executives of the rival platform issued a 4-point response, Liu Qiangdong’s internal chat record of “Don’t Fight” was leaked through the circle of friends of Qi Shanshan, spokesperson of JD.com, and he also said in the chat: If you have time, hurry up to join the “Little Brother Emergency Team” to see if there are any takeaway or express brothers who are in difficulty in the wind! Or go to participate in the procurement team of the enterprise with blocked exports and help them as soon as possible.
This wave of highly suspected self-directed and self-acting behavior is actually using promise slogans to attract public attention and fill the favorability.
Theoretically, large manufacturer wars are often concentrated at the business level, so it is not easy to maintain the popularity of public opinion for a long time, but JD.com can always find another way to harvest traffic through various live content every time there is a business war.
In 2014, during the first “618” promotion after JD.com’s listing, Liu Qiangdong wore work clothes, rode an electric tricycle to deliver express delivery to users, and left a classic photo – this incident is often interpreted as a sign that JD.com attaches importance to logistics services and front-line employee experience.
Later, a video of Liu Qiangdong pretending to be a new employee and going to the grassroots level to work in the warehouse went viral on the Internet, in which Liu Qiangdong was disliked by other employees because he was too slow to work, and was also recognized by female employees. Interestingly, this video full of “variety show” was pointed out by some netizens as a posing and showing traces, after all, the new employee also brought a cameraman to record the whole process, and this kind of treatment is not something ordinary employees can have.
When the takeaway war began, there was also familiar live content. A group photo of Liu Qiangdong personally delivering food to users spread all over the Internet, and the 4-minute video of inviting takeaway riders to eat hot pot was forwarded many times on short video platforms. Coincidentally, there were also takeaway riders wearing uniforms on the competition platform, and there were no more or no more than two of them.
When the “coincidences” in chat screenshots, user photos and 4-minute speech videos, combined with dramatic news content, have become high-quality materials for online media, and they also provide rich materials for the secondary dissemination of JD Takeaway on social media.
According to incomplete statistics, from April 21 to 25 alone, 25 topics related to JD.com or Liu Qiangdong appeared on Weibo hot searches, including “Liu Qiangdong and the takeaway rider were praised for drinking down-to-earth”, “Liu Qiangdong invited to eat hot pot and said that there were no rules to drink if he wanted”, etc.
03 Who is delayed by “fan circle marketing”?
In the Internet era, it has become a trend to create founder IP to empower brand marketing, and it is understandable to expand the business war from the market to the field of public opinion, the problem is that excessive marketing will have a negative impact on enterprises, industries and individuals.
In 2017, Alibaba was criticized by a large number of “black drafts” that attracted great attention from all walks of life on the Internet. At that time, a Weibo user broke the news that the incident was related to a project called “701”. According to Baidu Encyclopedia, the 701 project refers to a project directly commanded and funded by JD.com, instructing Beijing Wolai Public Relations Company and its controller Chen Zhanfeng to purchase citizenship information, register a large number of online accounts for publishing online posts and spread, and clearly agree that the ownership of the account belongs to JD.com.
Wang Shuai, chairman of Alibaba’s Market Public Relations Committee, mentioned in the “Three Sentences to the Organizers of the “701 Rumor Attack Master Plan” publicly released on November 30, 2017 that “defeating the stinky Alibaba will not ‘lay the foundation for JD.com’s long-term development'”.
In an exclusive interview with the Beijing News on December 5, 2017, Jack Ma also mentioned that there was manipulation behind it, and clearly required that he must write a manuscript and must show a photo of him with a bad artist. At the same time, Jack Ma also said: “Don’t fight verbal wars, don’t do this for Alibaba, we feel this is a responsibility.” ”
It should be noted that there is no conclusion at the legal level about whether the “701 project” exists and whether the project is planned by JD.com. The current takeaway war has not yet reached the level of “black public relations”, but some marketing actions have gone astray or have a negative impact on public opinion.
According to Qiangua data, only on the Xiaohongshu platform, JD.com has increased its investment since February this year, and the estimated delivery cost in March was as high as 32.7387 million yuan, an increase of 274% from 8.743 million yuan in the previous month, ranking first in the business notebook list. But from the actual situation, JD.com’s delivery may be too “saturated”.
The Jingzhi Research Institute saw on the Xiaohongshu platform that some accounts that had never participated in the topic of the food delivery industry, or had originally regularly posted notes in a vertical field, suddenly released promotional content involving JD.com’s takeaway, or negative content of its competitors.
Some accounts still share how to use the 24 solar terms to take a nickname, and the latter article discusses the cross-border business field “JD.com joins takeaway, what are the opportunities for ordinary people?” ”。 Some accounts were originally doing a drop delivery and gift customization business on Xiaohongshu, but suddenly released a 4-minute high-definition video of Liu Qiangdong inviting takeaway riders to eat hot pot. There are also suspected “zombie” accounts whose homepage posted only one note, but the content was to denounce the high commissions and takeaway health problems of rival platforms. These abnormal accounts and content are also quite some fan circles that use the water army to publish and smear the shadow of the “opponent” with rhythm.
The “fan circle power” that appeared in the takeaway war has also had a negative impact on a large number of ordinary users.
Some Xiaohongshu users reported that they only expressed different opinions on the public relations war and encountered infringement complaints; Some consumers said that they ate foreign objects in JD.com’s takeaway, and when they found customer service, they were actually “where did so many foreign objects come from” by Dongfen Yinyang, and also made fun of the competitor platform “others have been selling XX for a few years”; Some merchants posted to share their experience of refusing to go to JD.com’s takeaway, and as soon as they finished speaking, they received a reminder in the comment area, “Wait until you say that you are Meituan’s water army, and now you can’t say that JD.com is bad.” This is reminiscent of the “control comment” commonly used in fan circle marketing.
It is worth noting that recently, the State Administration for Market Regulation, together with four departments, interviewed several platform companies in the food delivery industry in response to the outstanding problems existing in the current competition in the food delivery industry, requiring them to operate legally and standardly, and compete fairly and orderly. JD.com, which has the smallest market share and is the last to enter the market, ranks first discordantly. The reasons behind it are naturally self-evident.
From the perspective of the takeaway business war, JD.com did occupy the moral high ground at the beginning and won unanimous praise from netizens, but now the balance of public opinion has quietly tilted. Because of the uncontrollable nature of “fan circle marketing”, brands will not only use traffic to bring high exposure, but also be backlashed by traffic and cause user disgust. In response to the marketing “fan circle” of JD.com’s takeaway, some netizens even made memes to complain about this online phenomenon, saying that Dongfan is one of the new groups on the Internet that cannot be provoked.
From the beginning of establishing a tall image, to the slow change of public opinion, and then to the state’s rectification, the “fan circle marketing” staged by JD Takeaway not only subverts the values of netizens with various abstract behaviors of Beijing fans, but also single-handedly allows people to see the horror of the fan circle invading business. But after all, the takeaway market is related to physical operation, and order sales are not exactly equivalent to traffic, just like the subsidy war will have a day of ebb and flow, and the business war in the takeaway industry will eventually return to how to meet users’ three meals a day, and how to help merchants make their business bigger and longer-lasting.
