Chinese Beauty Brand Florasis Creates its Own Virtual Influencer
On June 1, Chinese beauty brand Florasis announced the launch of its virtual influencer, which is named after the brand. While cosmetics brand Perfect Diary has its virtual persona Xiao Wanzi, Florasis is the first domestic beauty brand to create such an ultra-realistic avatar.
Florasis (the avatar) is designed to be a personification of the brand and reflect the brand’s emphasis on traditional Chinese heritage and beauty.
Florasis was founded in 2017 and it has been growing fast. In 2019 it broke 1.1 billion RMB in sales, which was 25 times higher than its performance the year before. Florasis continued to make great progress in 2020, when it achieved over 3 billion RMB in sales, a 165.4% growth year over year.
How Will the Virtual Influencer Benefit the Brand?
Or a more direct way to say this is, will the virtual avatar help Florasis boost its sales? Having just launched, it is still unclear what role Florasis (the influencer) will play. Will she merely appear in brand content or they give her a voice and have her appear in videos and live streams? Will she have her own social accounts and appear alongside the brand’s ambassadors such as celebrity model Du Juan?
All of this has yet to be seen so it is too soon to say how or if she can benefit the brand. What we do know though, is that when used correctly, avatars such as this can help consumers feel closer to the brand and strengthen the brand’s image.
Other Brands Are Leveraging Virtual Influencers in China
Virtual influencers are already becoming quite common around the world, however, the majority of them are operated independently, not created by brands. For example, Chinese influencer Luo Tianyi (洛天依). She is a virtual singer born in 2012. Luo attended many offline events with real celebrities, such as appearing with Austin Li in his livestream. She has 5 million followers on Weibo and works with brands such as Huawei and Master Kong (康师傅), an instant noodle brand.
An internationally-known avatar is Miquela, from California. She used two years to build up her 2-million fan base on Instagram. She is a model and a singer, and she has appeared in luxury brands’ advertisements including Chanel and Burberry. Miquela even created her own fashion brand in 2019.
As for brands, in China, L’Oréal and beauty retailer Watson’s have created their own virtual ambassadors. The ambassador that L’Oréal has created is for one of its sub brand Mei Ji (美即) or MG. It was a Guangzhou-based beauty brand, and L’Oréal purchased it in 2014. The virtual ambassador is called Sister M or M Jie (M姐), a play on the name of the brand, and she was introduced to the public in 2020.
Sister M has participated in many events, such as MG’s Tmall and JD livetream during Double 11 Shopping Festival last year. She is also very active on Chinese social media. For example, M has her own column on Little Red Book called Sister M Talk (M姐TALK). It covers topics such as how should women face heavy working pressure, how to improve yourself, and how to maintain your body etc. M also has a series on Douyin called Sister M Visits Laboratory (M姐探秘实验室). It shows how the brand invent their products. Those videos are very informative and scientific.
Prior to Sister M, Waston’s introduced its virtual influencer Qu Chenxi (屈臣曦 or Wilson). It is a boy with those “fresh meat” looks. Wilson not only shows up as the ambassador of Waston’s, but also as a customer service representative with those CRM statistics backing him to better serve his customers and followers.
Wilson also has his Weibo account (@屈臣曦-Wilson) with more than 180k followers. He often holds lucky draw activities on Weibo, inviting his followers to either comments and like a post or to repost it so as to be chose to win gifts.
Why Are Brands Working With Virtual Avatars?
Compared with real celebrities, these virtual influencers are a lower risk alternative. Its less likely they will become involved in personal scandals that can ruin their career together with brands’ reputation.
Prada and Zheng Shuang’s (郑爽) collaboration is an example. Zheng’s scandal caused the fashion group’s stock drop 1.7%. Another celebrity Show Lo (罗志祥), when his scandal went public dairy brand Chun Zhen (纯甄) immediately changed its ambassador, afraid of Show’s negative influence.
Compared with these real people, virtual avatars are easier to control either by its teams or brands. Their hobbies and personalities are shapable based on followers’ preference. They don’t get old, and they can maintain the body shape that they want. With the development of technology, they are able to have real-time interaction with their audience.
There Are Downsides of Course
A serious problem that no virtual influencer can escape is the potential for technical issues, especially during live streams. Luo Tianyi had a livestream in May 2020 where at one point during the stream there were over 2.7 million people viewing simultaneously, and throughout the course of the stream, nearly 2 million people either commented or sent virtual gifts to her. But because of a technical issue, she couldn’t sing when it was her time slot, and it remained dead silent, leaving a lot of viewers disappointed.
On her live stream with Austin Li, while I was watching it, I noticed the volume of the sound decreased a lot when Austin transferred to the scene with Luo, and many viewers were saying they can’t hear what they were talking about. If brands want to work with virtual influencer interactively, they will need strong technical support.
The other downside is that, though virtual avatars are controllable, they lack something real. They are not real people after all. Some people find it hard to connect with them. They know clearly that teams are controlling these avatars and the commercial purpose is too obvious for them to develop a connection with the character.
It will be interesting to observe how Florasis will make use of “Florasis” the virtual influencer.
Read more: 花西子虚拟形象“花西子”，首次亮相。
