| Edited by Yan Qiu
| Title picture by Li Xinma
| Bilibili@Chengqian Moments
"I hope that next year, I can still see a few teachers, wearing red clothes, so many years have not let me go." His character has become more restrained, so I don’t have any hope that his character will become restrained in 2024, but for those who wear conservative colors, I hope that he will live longer, be healthy and live longer."
"The one wearing red", It was Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, and the person who output these words was a business blogger born in the 1990s.
’s disastrous speech quickly spread on the Internet, and the young man’s name became known to more people. Perhaps he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to be on the same stage with the big boss to gild himself, but this method was obviously not decent enough.
1. Exerting too much force and overturning twice
html On the evening of January 5, Fengmaganiu Media, owned by real estate tycoon Feng Lun, held a roundtable forum on the 2023 Fengmaganiu year-end show.Feng Lun was so proud that he invited two big guys, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, and Wang Shi, the founder of Vanke Group, that night. At the same time, there is his fellow Xi'an, Cheng Qian.
Who is Cheng Qian? He has become very popular on Douyin in recent years, and he has been promoted to a leading blogger by relying on business interview videos. The IP named after him @Cheng Qian Moments currently has 6.27 million fans on Douyin. @成青 Moments The introduction is "Focus on Business Interviews". In the video, Cheng Qian interviews entrepreneurs about their business models and money-making ideas through conversational interviews.
Zhou Hongyi and Wang Shi are both "old people". As a representative of the new model and new economy, Cheng Qian's appearance can, on the one hand, present a spark of collision between old and new ideas in the program, and on the other hand, he can interact with the older generation of entrepreneurs. On the same stage, you can also gild yourself.
had a lively chat at first, and everyone had their own speeches. However, compared to the other three "old masters", Cheng Qian's content was mostly chicken soup, and reading short compositions from the script also made him seem out of place.
Source: Forum video
Perhaps because he wanted to read the manuscript to himself, Cheng Qian suggested when the four of them were talking: "I'm very curious. Teachers, what do you want to say after listening to young people's thoughts?"
Feng Lun and Wang Shi didn't tell the truth and answered very euphemistically, but Zhou Hongyi said it very bluntly: First, it means that Cheng Qian cannot represent young people as a whole; second, his manuscripts "are all big words, lyrical words, which are very important to the creators." It doesn’t make much sense”.
Picture source: Forum video
Before Zhou could finish speaking, Cheng Qian interrupted directly: "Isn't this the same word I used? Curiosity, longing."
Picture source: Forum video
Zhou was not used to it either. In response, this is not a college debate competition, and I don’t like “exaggeration”.
From then on, the two of them got into a fight. Cheng Qian thought that he had carefully prepared his essay, but the big bosses were "laughing and laughing". Seeing a roundtable forum heading towards a verbal confrontation, the organizer Feng Lun had no choice but to smooth things over.
But this is not the end. When publishing the conclusion of the forum, Cheng Qian directly said the explosive speech at the beginning of the article. Of course, there is a pale additional explanation at the end: "Just kidding."
's crazy output made even Cheng Qian's fans unable to agree with what he did.
html On the evening of January 10, Cheng Qian released an apology video on the short video platform, saying that his performance in the "Wind Horse and Ox Year Mid-year Show" was unforgivable and his mistakes were low-level. He also emphasized, "I want to sincerely apologize to Zhou Hongyi. This was never my intention."Zhou Hongyi showed his magnanimity and said that "the future belongs to young people." In addition, he turned on the traffic password and planned a 3-hour live broadcast titled "You Can Be Eloquent - How to Speech", which seemed more like a complete response to the "mutual controversy".
Source: Weibo
In this live broadcast, Cheng Qian appeared again, wearing a red top, but his low emotional intelligence statement of "Join if you can't beat him" was once again criticized as a hot search. Zhou Hongyi replied this time: "You don't need to join us, the business I do does not compete with yours."
At this point, this matter has come to an end.
2. Cheng Qian’s “circle business”
As Zhou Hongyi said, Cheng Qian does not represent the young people, but as a leading business blogger, he is undoubtedly the epitome of successful cases in the internet celebrity economy. Before
overturned, Cheng Qian had always presented himself as a high-end, elite, gentleman, etc. His resume is indeed very beautiful: he was born in 1993, majored in finance as an undergraduate, and studied at the University of London as a graduate student. When
was a student, Cheng Qian had rich interview experience. Jiang Wenli and Nobel Prize winner Myron Hughes were both his interview subjects. After graduation, Cheng Qian stayed in Lujiazui, Shanghai for five years, working in finance. According to his words: "I visited more than 300 companies and met many customers, which allowed me to accumulate a large number of friends from different industries during my work."
Source: Bilibili@chengqianmoments
Check out a few articles In Cheng Qian’s videos on Moments, you will find that his content style is distinctive:
directly labels the personal characteristics of the interviewees and writes them on the cover of the work.
captures entrepreneurs' desire for exposure by talking about entrepreneurial stories, and effectively promotes videos to people who pay attention to this field, arousing public interest.
"Why do you make money?" is a golden sentence in Cheng Qian's early works. It guides the audience to continue reading and strengthens the personal memory of Cheng Qian. Most of the protagonists in
are from ordinary people, focusing on contrasts, such as "A boy born in the 1990s has a debt of 2 million for catering, and earns 500 million a year from hot pot and cakes", "Adopted since childhood, his daughter has a heart disease, his marriage has broken down, and he has cancer." , "See how literary youths make money while lying down"...
Picture source: Douyin
The tagged cover and carefully refined title are used to attract attention; experiences and emotions can resonate with the audience; useful information, Experience is the concrete starting point. In this way, one entrepreneurial story after another is established, and the audience will inevitably have a kind of blind confidence that "I can do it" after watching it, and @chengqianmoments has attracted a large number of fans. With
having a huge fan base, business realization will go smoothly.
@ Chengqian’s circle of friends mainly has two channels. One is commonly known as "chafen", which includes business interviews, brand projects, etc., and is a cooperative payment; the other is "selling circle", which includes offline classes, online communities, etc. We provide one-on-one consulting services to private boards and companies, and teach people to start a business and become rich through the integration of connections and resources. The underlying logic of
's business model has now formed a closed loop: front-end works attract users into the circle, help users prescribe the right medicine through online communities, offline activities, private board meetings and other products, and users feed back @chengqianmoments and build trust in them Endorsement to further attract new users. The monetization ability of the commercial IP of
is also comparable to that of printing money, and it can realize over 100 million yuan a year. According to previous reports from the Red Star Capital Bureau, one of Cheng Qian’s interview videos currently costs around several hundred thousand yuan, and his paid knowledge course (“New Generation Business Community”) requires a membership fee of 2,198 yuan per year. According to the details page, membership is suitable for people who want to learn business content, are starting a business, and need high-quality business resources.
Picture source: Xinhuo Mini Program
There is also a higher-end circle called the "Private Board of Directors" (which has been renamed "Dengxian Research Society"). You can get one-to-one service by joining the membership, but it is expensive. 59,800 yuan per person per year. Application conditions include: company founders, CEOs, investors, etc., and the company size is required to be more than 10 million or the market value is over 100 million. After joining, you can participate in closed private board meetings, private dinners, charity activities, job training, etc. It is reported that there are about 100 members of the private board of directors.
@Chengqian Moments It is precisely through this kind of circle business that they can harvest traffic and wealth like crazy.
3. Two sides of traffic
In recent years, with the development of short videos, commercial Internet celebrities represented by Cheng Qian have gradually entered the public eye. Relying on traffic, these business bloggers have developed various ways of playing games starting from paying for knowledge. The target audience has also moved from the middle class to the third and fourth tiers, giving birth to huge IP empires.
However, traffic can carry or overturn a boat.
Cheng Qian is not the first business blogger to face a crisis. Prior to this, Liu Run mistold key data in a speech filled with data, and his professional level was questioned. @ Wizard Finance was once hammered Manuscript, @安senyao has been questioned about wrong knowledge in popular science, and so on.
If it hadn't been for this incident, Cheng Qian might have become successful in the commercial video field in a short period of time. Although Black and Red brought more popularity, it also caused the personality that Cheng Qian had worked so hard to maintain to collapse. donews found that the number of fans on Douyin of @成青友群 is falling every day and currently remains at 6.27 million (as of January 18). Zhou Hongyi on the other side of
instead took advantage of this wave of traffic to not only plan a live broadcast of the speech, but also visited Oriental Selection in a humble manner, claiming to learn from Yu Minhong and Dong Yuhui. The old Jianghu's attitude also won the favor of netizens.
A wave of traffic, two-sided effect. It corresponds to a sentence in the popular TV series "Flowers":
"To do business, you must first learn two words: don't make a sound. What you don't know, what you can't explain clearly, what you haven't thought about or planned, will embarrass yourself and embarrass you. It doesn’t matter to anyone else. You have to leave room for things to happen, right."
Source: TV series "Flowers"
Being young can be fearless, but youth is not a capital for arrogance. This was probably the first lesson Zhou Hongyi taught Cheng Qian.
However, putting aside the worldly wisdom, Zhou Hongyi taught Cheng Qian another lesson. He used to "shoot everywhere", but now he imparts experience and shares knowledge through open classes. When doing business, you must also learn to find a business model that suits you in different market backgrounds. While the
"selling circle" model has brought commercial success, a problem has also emerged: is the exquisite high-end product full of exaggeration and illusion? Can people teach you how to make money? Have the true facts of those entrepreneurial stories been revealed? How many risks and bubbles are hidden in the so-called helping entrepreneurs realize cash? None of the above issues can be studied in detail, let alone how many people will stay in Cheng Qian's "circle of friends" after a battle?
What Cheng Qian faces is not as simple as hiring a professional publicist or not. It is time to seriously consider how far he and his business circle can go. Otherwise, the money earned by luck will definitely be paid back by skill.
