text | Programming prodigal
Source | Mantis Finance (TangLangFin)
Tencent Video's "Qing Yu Nian" was first criticized by netizens for the "VVIP" incident, and then it was exposed for the leak of the entire episode. The outflow of pirated
made some viewers who were dissatisfied with the price increase even more vocal: "Look, you are pushing the audience toward pirated!"
If you look at this "Qing Yu Nian Event" from a larger perspective, looking back at the development history of the Internet, you can find that piracy and the Internet are like a pair of conjoined babies, and the development of piracy is synchronized with the development of the Internet.
Mantis Finance believes that in addition to increasingly perfect technical means and legal regulations, the more powerful killer weapon that can defeat is the customized humanized service customized by the Internet to meet the in-depth needs of consumers.
1. Pirate and the Internet are a pair of conjoined babies. The "consumption cognitive framework" is a scalpel
Pirates are rooted in the Internet and in human nature.
In the early days of the Internet, hackers who were deeply influenced by the Beat Hippie culture of the 1950s appeared in MIT, Bell Labs and other places.
The initial hackers were generally senior technicians, who advocated freedom and advocated information sharing. In addition to developing early Internet products, we firmly believe that "the world is flat" and regard the Internet as a revolutionary tool that can break down barriers of power and knowledge. The influence of this subculture is extremely far-reaching. Early Internet hackers were closely related to this cultural background. They were committed to achieving boundless knowledge and believed that human knowledge that should have been freely disseminated was controlled by large capital and government groups, which also violated the spirit of free sharing of the Internet. Kim Dotcom, the creator of the
file sharing website Megaupload, Fredrik Neij, one of the three founders of Pirate Bay, and Aaron Swartz, a computer prodigy who committed suicide due to invasion of JOSTOR, a US judicial system, etc. have all been influenced by this culture to some extent.
Even if you do not make moral evaluations of this left-wing hacking culture, obtaining free products is an instinctive choice for human beings. To this day, there are still a large number of pirated resources on the Internet that are constantly uploading various unauthorized products.
is targeting piracy. In addition to the legal crackdown, copyright holders are also attracting users to the path of genuine payment through various means in the Internet era. The main solution is to establish a complete set of "consumption cognitive framework" for genuine payment.
The so-called "consumption cognitive framework" is, on the one hand, a hint of the legitimacy of consumer behavior. By expressing the same problem through two different expressions, consumers will make different decisions and judgments. In the scenario of genuine consumption, a large amount of publicity of piracy is a way to establish a framework, but promoting the quality and guarantee of genuine products to consumers is another framework, and the latter is obviously easier to accept by consumers. On the other hand, a complete service system is used to make consumers irreplaceable dependence on service providers, and the so-called membership system is also the composition system of this "consumption cognitive framework".
Through the role of the discourse system and the experience effect generated by actual services, the authentic version will be internalized into a complete set of social cognitive structures, and the authentic habits of consumers will be successfully cultivated. A typical example of
is Apple's iPod, which provides users with the first service to convert music from CD to mp3 format through iTunes. As the usage of iTunes increases, the authentic event of "Spend 99 cents to buy a song" was launched in a timely manner. The revolutionary hardware + excellent music management software (shop) has allowed most music lovers to become paid users smoothly.
It is under the influence of the "consumption cognitive framework" that Europe and the United States have cut off the mainstream society from the perspective of piracy.
2. From genuine payment to membership system: Cut off the two stages of pirated version
authentic version first, let users pay for genuine version through the platform, and then provide preferential policies through the membership system to improve user stickiness and maintain the habit of long-term payment . Through these two stages, most users can be cut from piracy.
In the first stage, the main driving force that makes people pay for genuine products is the "consumption cognitive framework". Under this framework, genuine products are not only morally reasonable, but also provide pirated versions with irreplaceable experiences . This kind of experience can be convenient and social, which is the so-called "digital life". The most typical example of
is the authenticization path of the authentic game platform Steam. Before Steam, the game market was in a state of turmoil with piracy. Game publishers rely on CDs and serial numbers to control piracy, but piracy is still rampant. After the emergence of
Steam, its founder Gabe Newell firmly believed that the main reason why players download pirated games is that genuine games fail to provide a truly differentiated experience beyond pirated games.
has provided users' content management tool "library" since 2007; a friend system that displays the player's real-time play status, a "community" in the player's communication section; a "creative workshop" in the player's own content section, and a "cloud archive function" that saves players' game progress at any time through cloud technology, making Steam not only an online sales platform for genuine games, but also a spiritual home for players to communicate with each other, realize recognition and belonging.
Figure: The Steam community has rich experience, making players full of belonging
The second stage, on the basis of the paid experience satisfying users, attracts users to sign a longer-term contractual relationship with the platform through preferential measures and other additional benefits.
membership system is developed based on corporate decision makers’ understanding of the value and status of buyers. The goal of the
membership system is to move users from "buyer" to "orderer" to achieve a better sense of user belonging and brand identity.
Similarly, if the services and additional rights provided by members do not make the audience feel "reasonable" or even "super value" premium, causing consumers' psychological accounts to be unbalanced, the most normal choice for consumers is to find piracy as a substitute.
In the recent discussion on "Qing Yu Nian", most articles mentioned how the membership service systems of Amazon Prime and Nexflix are cost-effective, and they all provide consumers with rich experiences. What should be paid more attention to is that in terms of membership service content, the membership system originating from the West has achieved high differences.
Figure: Amazon members’ rights content
Take Amazon as an example. Amazon Prime’s second year renewal rate can reach more than 95%, mainly due to the clear hierarchy system of the Amazon membership system and the richness of high-level membership rights.
In this membership level system, the basic rights enjoyed by all members are unlimited videos, and differentiated value-added services provide driving force for consumers to purchase high-level membership rights. The setting of the
membership system shows a very strong contract Sentiment , users' efforts and benefits are very clear. Even the most basic members will not differ from high-level members in terms of videos. , which reflects the equity, , sense of fairness. Under this system, users can choose the membership level they purchase.
In 1996, foreign-funded membership companies entered the door of China, and international retail giants represented by Walmart and Pulsmatt brought the membership consumption model into the country with membership stores. As this model took root in the Internet era, the membership system was actually only equated with genuine payment in the service content of video service providers such as You, iQi and Tencent. l2
However, the services enjoyed by consumers are far from the "cost-performance ratio" that a "member" should enjoy from the perspective of consumers.
Consumers have high expectations, and service providers provide products that should be under a more complete service system in name, and the interaction between the two parties will inevitably be misaligned, and contradictions are inevitable.
3. The way of opening members is more complicated than imagined
In the domestic video payment industry, member production has generally adopted the method of genuine charging, so it is necessary to further explore some basic characteristics of the membership system.
l Effective membership content must meet the "psychological account" that exceeds expectations. According to Nielsen's report in 2017, current consumer loyalty has declined significantly, and the root cause is the lack of membership service content by most manufacturers.
In the membership mechanism in the retail and service industries, after consumers subscribe to members, most services encourage consumers to exchange for small discounts or gifted product gifts through large purchases. Whether or not members like
is not very different from consumers' shopping experience, and the card application fee is extremely low. Most consumers apply for members with dispensable expectations when applying for members.
members in online products are very different from those in retail and service. First, the member investment price is relatively high, secondly, consumers are more sensitive to prices in Internet consumption, and finally, consumers have relatively high expectations for member rights. The "sense of fairness" of consumers' self-measurement of investment and rewards is the so-called "psychological account".
. Since YouIi and Tencent members are substitutes for genuine payments, their member rights are relatively thin, resulting in imbalance in consumers' psychological accounts, which is easy to have the idea that it is better to buy pirated versions than to rush to this member. After the Yu Nian incident, a large number of viewers reported that "VIP's role is getting smaller and smaller, what else can besides the function of jumping advertisements?"
Figure: A Zhihu user's representative view on the "Yu Nian incident"
provides richer membership rights, allowing consumers to invest in addition to genuine consumption, and there are other additional psychological benefits, which is the only way to resolve this potential contradiction.
l customers have a growth curve in their dependence on membership services
From the membership incident in "Qing Yu Nian" to a series of controversies leaked by piracy, it seems to be a battle between genuine and piracy, but behind it is the question of how cultural consumer goods, a product, should be sold in the context of the Internet. According to public data from
, for the new generation in the United States, the acceptance of Netflix and Spotify is particularly high. For the younger generation in China, the number of iQiyi subscribers reached 87.4 million, an increase of 72.0% from the end of 2017, of which paid members accounted for 98.5%;
Tencent Video members reached 89 million, a year-on-year increase of 58%; Alibaba (BABA.US)'s performance in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 (April to June 2018) showed that Youku's average daily paid users grew by 200%.
genuine payment awareness is still in the stage of cultivating my country, and customers' dependence on genuine, platform and members are still in the stage of climbing the growth curve.
Further consolidation and strengthening consumers' payment habits should be the most preferred strategy. Too anxious to try to squeeze value from members, it is easy to have the opposite effect.
l membership service must have a sense of contract before transaction
How much money and how much things to do is the basic principle of the market economy, but in membership service, the sense of contract before transaction is extremely important. The premise of equivalent exchange of
must be standardized, and the user's experience cannot be damaged by players who are willing to increase the price.
Customer has signed an implicit agreement with the service provider in form starting from the membership he obtained. From the customer's perspective, this agreement stipulates the service content, duration and obligations of both parties to fulfill the contract.
. If the service party unilaterally revises the terms, the consumer will feel a strong sense of being deceived. If the subsequent terms distinguish the consumer's rights level (such as the VVIP's advance viewing rights), consumers' emotions of being treated differently will explode.
Because consumers who do not accept temporary new terms have become part of the experience of consumers who do not mind recharge in the short term and are unwilling to increase the price, the experience of consumers who are unwilling to increase the price is damaged, because in addition to the viewing value, the purchased videos also have social value. The privileged channels opened by merchants have forced everyone to move forward simultaneously.
For example, due to the advance explanation of the hierarchy differences in network disk tools, no consumers think this is a kind of discrimination.However, if the terms are unilaterally changed after purchasing the service, consumers will feel a strong sense of being deceived. The road to genuine payment in
is long and difficult, and how to establish an ecological and dependable membership system is a key product that all merchants need to further explore.
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