Is Brand Rating by Mega-Influencer A Great Opportunity for New Brand to Acquire Customers?

On March 2nd, Tmall introduced “Scoring Qi” where Jiaqi Li, a famous mega-influencer in live-stream e-commerce, scores each product of each brand. Meanwhile, Jiaqi was also named as Chief Discovery Officer of Tmall Treasure’s new brand.

This reminds me of the Michelin restaurant scoring system, which further brings prestige and wealth to these restaurants. Like many influencers, they test and recommend popular products in their channels, further helping these products attract more customers. As live-stream e-commerce became popular and mature, influencers, like Jiaqi Li, can test and recommend a lot of products from all over the world in a few hours of live broadcast under the lower production cost. After acquiring trust by recommending popular products, Jiaqi started reviewing products of new brands.

He knows a lot about customer preference and product advantages and will make use of the methods, like lowering key competitors’ brand images, emphasizing the importance of certain criteria this new brand performs well and introducing new decision criteria, to persuade customers and set off a trend. Therefore, many new brands invited Jiaqi Li to be Chief Recommendation Officer. Huaxizi is the most famous example. In cooperation with Jiaqi Li, it chose to focus on Chinese culture that was scarce on the market and concentrated on polishing high-quality products based on Jiaqi’s recommendation and finally became the top-selling category on Tmall.

In order to expand the current market and attract the customers who have no time to see live video, Tmall introduced “Scoring Qi” so that these customers can take Jiaqi Li’s recommendations without joining live video.

This sounds like a great idea for new brand to acquire customers, but it relies much on the prestige and taste of Jiaqi and his team. Although Jiaqi knows a lot about women’s preferences, different women still have slightly different preferences. It is difficult to rely on Jiaqi alone to develop a mature scoring system endorsed by everyone. Therefore, it would be better to see that more different influencers in different areas are also included into brand rating system and gradually improve the scoring system.