Some Beauty Brands

Xiaohongshu's efforts to crack down on "false marketing" have been even more intense and extensive than before, not only simply taking notes down and closing abnormal accounts, but also directly covering the upstream and downstream of the entire "ghost writing and ghost publishing" grayindustry chain.

Recently, the topic of "Xiaohongshu banning 29 brands suspected of false marketing" has triggereda lot of discussion among Weibo netizens. Suspected of false marketing, the posts and notes of 29 brands such as Dove, Neutrogena, Banmu Huatian, Nivea and Wonderlab can no longer be searched on Xiaohongshu.

Can such a crackdown on the false marking of “ghost writing and ghost publishing” on Xiaohongshu platform do the trick?

01

Suspected of Publishing Large Number of Notes

without Actual Consumption Experience

Multiple Beauty Brands Banned on Xiaohongshu

Among the brands banned on Xiaohongshu, there are Dove, Neutrogena, Banmu Huatian, Nivea, etc. It is worth mentioning that although there are not any posts showing up after searching brands names, the information ofthe brands’ official stores and products still exists.

△Dove, Neutrogena, Banmu Huatian and Nivea have disappeared on Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu responded to the media that the platform now has launched a new round of governance to crackdown on “false marketing”, and has banned the first batch of 29 brands suspected of false marketing. Compared with its previous efforts, the scope has been further expanded this time to cover the upstream and downstream of the entire "ghost writing and ghost publishing" gray industry chain

How do we define a "brand involved in false marketing"? According to Xiaohongshu's Community Convention, false marketing specifically refers to the fact that a brand has published a large number of notes without actual consumption experience in the community, which would affect users' judgment and interfere with the platform order. Therefore, in order to create a more objective and real content experience for users, Xiaohongshu decided to take actions.

As an App that started as a platform for users to sharing beauty experience, Xiaohongshu serves as an important reference for users’ beauty consumption.  According to Qiangua Data, Xiaohongshu continued to flourish in 2020, in which the interactive volume of beauty-related notes reached 970 million (sample data), accounting for 8.1% of the total notes. Althoughthe number is slightly lower than that in 2019, beautyundoubtedly remains the first and foremost sector of Xiaohongshu.

Thanks to the vigorous development of the platform, the commercial value of Xiaohongshu has also grown rapidly. According to Qichacha, since its establishment in 2013 Xiaohongshu has obtained a total of six rounds of financing, i.e., Angel Round, A Round, B Round, C Round, D Round and E Round, with the estimated amount reaching USD 20 billion (about RMB 127.36 billion). The most recent financing was on November 8, amounting to USD 500 million, led by Tencent Investment and Temasek and followed by Alibaba, Tiantu Capital and Genesis Capital.

△Source: Qichacha

With the rapid growth of its business value, controversies have been lingering around Xiaohongshu, and chaos such as the“ghost writing and ghost publishing false advertising”, "showing off wealth", "secretly and illegally obtaining traffic" and "fan culture" have been flooding onto the platform, causing many users to complain,  and the app was even being removed from the shelves of major Android app stores in July 2019 due to content quality issues.

Take the “ghost writing and ghost publishing” case as an example. As early as 2019 it was exposed that, for tens of Yuan, many third party organizations or individuals on QQ, Taobao and other platforms could provide “Xiaohongshu” ghost writing and publishing services. Because of the above phenomena were prevalent in the gray industry chain, Xiaohongshu was criticized by CCTV's program "Morning News".

After that, although Xiaohongshu has repeatedly announced that they will take actions to regulate the platform,such issues have continued to occur.

On December 5th of this year Xiaohongshu found itself on hot search on multiple platforms for recommending short videos of under-aged individuals inappropriate content. Being exposed by the media, Xiaohongshu routinely apologized and stated that a new round of governance efforts for minors would be launched soon. A month ago, Xiaohongshu just publicly apologized for the notes on "over-beautifying scenic spots". Before that, the app had apologized for publishing advertisements using medical terms involving treatments of diseases , and confusing the products with medicines and medical devices, and it also apologized for publishing disguise notes that actually recommend tobacco. 

02

By Intensifying Its Efforts

Can Xiaohongshu Regain the Trust of Consumers?

Rectifying while apologizing at the same time seems to be a normal for Xiaohongshu. Unlike before, Xiaohongshu's efforts this time to rectify “false marketing” seems to be more intense and extensive.

This time, its efforts included not only simply taking down notes and closing abnormal accounts, but also directly covered the upstream and downstream of the entire "ghost writing and ghost publishing" gray industrychain. At present, the notes involved in the incident are all gone, indicating that the impact is extensive.

Compared with this time, the last efforts to rectifyin the field of beauty and makeup were muchmilder. It is reported that as of June 1 this year, in order to further crack down on false medical beauty content and provide consumers with more authentic and useful medical beauty content, Xiaohongshu launched a special action to control false medical beauty content—"For Beauty", which has been ongoing for nearly two months. Through the action, Xiaohongshu has intensified its efforts to crack down on false medical beauty content by various means such as AI technology inspection, manual verification and consumer reporting, and discovered and removed 7,626 rule violating medical beauty notes and closed 4,891 abnormal accounts.

In addition, in order to maintain the long-term development of the platform, Xiaohongshu has also made efforts to rectify the content ecology, including strengthening the supervision of content, intensifying the audit and improving the audit system. In September last year, Xiaohongshu launched its "Woodpecker Program" to crack down on false promotion activities, and resorted to means such as carpet investigation, full note coverage, and closing the accounts of severe violators in its efforts to crack down on false promotioncommunities. It also announced punished accounts according to users reporting and platform verification. In April this year, Xiaohongshu released the Community Convention, which advocates the philosophy of "sincere sharing and friendly interaction", and has laid out regulations on user's community behaviors from the two dimensions: sharing and interaction, including restrictions on beauty products promotion and showing offwealth. These efforts have helped Xiaohongshu to gain users recognition and praise.

In fact, with the diversified development of social platforms, Xiaohongshu is no longer the one and only "apple of the eyes" in the field of beauty and makeup. In recent years, with the rise of their platforms, Douyin, Kuaishou and Bilibili have taken some traffic from Xiaohongshu, and the normality of e-commerce live show on other platforms has alsoadded pressure to Xiaohongshu.

According to Yiguan Data, the MAU (monthly active user) of Xiaohongshu in August 2021 was 160 million.As early as July 2019, the MAU of Xiaohongshua lready exceeded 100 million, which means that in the whole two years after 2019, the MAU of Xiaohongshu grew slowly, which is nowhere near its fast-growing market valuation. It is fair to say that how to maintain its traffic and achieve incremental growth will be the top priority for the long-term development of Xiaohongshu.

The fact that currently 29 brands have been banned as punishment for false marketing obviously shows Xiaohongshu’s determination and courage to maintain its core competitiveness of content quality.