Reviewing the “screen dominating” marketing of vivo’s full-screen mobile phones: How do you spend your money?

On October 8, Lu Han announced his relationship with Guan Xiaotong, which "paralyzed" the Weibo server. This single Weibo post reached more than 800 million users. On the tail of this Weibo post announcing the "relationship", it clearly says "from the vivo X20 full-screen mobile phone". This means that vivo's most important product in recent times, the full-screen mobile phone X20, has successfully taken advantage of the "Lu Han's relationship exposure" and has been shown to more than 800 million users.

This is vivo's luck, but in fact, such frequent incidents with spokespersons can easily turn from "luck" to "bad luck", just like Xue Zhiqian and Gionee .

However, the “screen-dominating” marketing of vivo’s new product launches is by no means based on luck.

In today’s marketing chaos, it is no longer possible to “dominate the screen” just by having money. The CCTV bidding winner “dominant the screen” is a story from another era that is unimaginable to the children born in the 1990s. As for how to cope with the era of youth, digitalization and consumption upgrading, in fact, marketing strategies have long been converging. There are sets of general principles to explain, but it all depends on the tactical execution and the level of understanding of each company.

Vivo has always used specific marketing tactics for the launch of new products to demonstrate a relatively complete integrated marketing strategy of "land, sea and air" media strategy and public relations strategy. Behind this specific strategy, what supports its budget allocation and rapid decision-making implementation is a deep understanding of marketing, audience and products. People in the industry joke that "vivo is rich" and "has been focusing on entertainment marketing for young people for a hundred years"... Behind all this, in today's era of diverse choices, the biggest challenges are to focus on goals, maintain strategy and "know how to spend money".

Yes, vivo is already successful enough. According to IDC's statistics on domestic mobile phones in the second quarter of 2017, vivo ranked third with sales of 16 million, second only to Huawei and OPPO, accounting for 14.4% of the market share, and it also maintained a high premium for its products.

Let's review the marketing of vivo X20 - this is the product that vivo attaches the most importance to and has used all its efforts and "big moves", from advertising "screen domination", topic creation, precise delivery based on big data , to the Great Wall Night press conference, and the subsequent combination of product performance and topics, offline sales topic activities... How was the tactical execution implemented step by step - behind the "money", how to spend it?

As the first full-screen mobile phone in the vivo X series, the X20 has indeed attracted countless attention, but at the same time it also needs to bear more pressure. On the one hand, it comes from the product and production capacity itself, and on the other hand, it comes from how to increase product influence and promote sales.

If we summarize the parts that can be learned from vivo X20's marketing promotion , there are the following points:

1. Time rhythm. The rhythm of vivo's communication time is closely integrated with its topic creation.

Time: late June 2017; Topic: sense of technology. At the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, vivo was the first to unveil a non-mass-production phone equipped with under-screen ultrasonic fingerprint recognition. Although Samsung executives mocked that the product would never be mass-produced, it did not affect the impression of "sense of technology".

Time: late August, early September; Topic: full screen . As Xiaomi is about to release its second-generation full-screen product, "full screen" has become a hot search term in the technology circle and even in the news field. Vivo decisively changed the name of the new product, renaming the previous new phone X11 as X20, and began to launch online and offline media placements with "full screen" as the keyword to establish a connection between vivo and "full screen".

Time: early September; Topic: spokesperson. The three new spokespersons made a strong debut and the hot search index rose significantly. Before the press conference, vivo cooperated with the sounding balloon project for the first time. The X20 mobile phone accompanied the three sounding balloons "Lu Hai", "Xian Yu" and "Ai Yan" to an altitude of 20,000 meters. The vivo X20 was used to take sounding balloon photos, and a competition to guess the three major celebrity spokespersons was launched. Subsequently, the TVC pre-heating pilot films of Lu Han, Zhou Dongyu and Eddie Peng were released, which attracted the attention of celebrity fans and young users as well as discussions on hot topics.

Time: September 21st; Topic: vivo X20 new phone launch conference . There are several key words during this period:

a. The press conference was shot at the Great Wall, which was grand and impressive with huge investment, leaving a deep impression on the media and fans. The night at Juyongguan Great Wall is the largest press conference held by a mobile phone company in recent years. It is also the first time that vivo has moved the launch of new products from indoors to outdoors. This is also evidenced by the fact that many media, V fans and dealers at the scene “flooded” their Moments and Weibo that night.

b. Product selling points keep up with hot topics: "18:9 full screen", "Face Wake facial recognition and facial unlocking", "In-depth cooperation with Honor of Kings ", etc., and continue to make headlines around industry technology hotspots and the brand's sub-logo "Camera & Music".

Time: After the press conference; Topics: Keyword rotation, hot sales on the first day . As for celebrity spokespersons, the three major spokespersons for vivo X20, Lu Han, Zhou Dongyu, and Eddie Peng, all cheered for X20 on the first day of sale, triggering a frenzy of attention from fans. vivo has always been good at using the interactivity of celebrity spokespersons. For example, on September 22, vivo X20 opened for pre-order, first releasing the pre-order promotional posters and videos shot by Lu Han, and then an H5 mini -game called "Lu Han Backlight Lu Router" was launched. As the number of X20 pre-orders increases, more interactive content videos with Lu Han in different regions will be unlocked. The final result was that with full payment reservations, the number of reservations in 6 days exceeded 1.5 million, which exceeded the total population of Mauritius. In terms of media placement, vivo continued to launch all-round online and offline placements to cover target users with maximum efficiency, initiated reports from traditional media and self-media , and launched a new round of communication after the successful first sale on September 30. At the product function level, "backlight" has become the key word for the promotion of vivo X20, forming a differentiated marketing selling point compared to other mobile phone camera functions.

"Backlight" has become the key word in the promotion of vivo X20, forming a differentiated marketing selling point compared with other mobile phone camera functions.

2. Integrated promotion + precise media delivery.

How to choose media and public relations assistance to achieve greater effects and cost-effectiveness based on full coverage? Take a look at the integrated media and activity options of vivo X20.

Joint marketing. Before the press conference, vivo teamed up with 64 well-known companies including JD.com , China Unicom, China Telecom , and Baidu to launch the "Illuminate the Full Screen Era" interactive marketing on Weibo. These corporate celebrities with millions of fans joined forces to bring huge user exposure . As of September 21, before the press conference, the number of topics on Weibo #vivo完整屏手机X20# exceeded 250 million, and user discussions exceeded 1.41 million.

Outdoor advertising. Offline, vivo X20 has occupied landmark buildings or first-tier large screens in major cities across the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Changsha, Jinan, Shenyang, Taiyuan, and Nanjing, and even lit up the lighting and stage effects on the Juyongguan Great Wall in advance.

Online splash screen ads. At the same time as the release of vivo x20, vivo X20's "Clear even in backlight" quickly occupied the splash screen ads of many clients such as QQ, UC, NetEase, Weibo, and Bilibili, and was placed in important advertising positions such as Weibo search, QQ space, and Toutiao . It basically covers the mobile phone user population.

Offline sales channels . The vivo stations built by vivo in the official experience centers in eight major cities across the country, including Beijing, Xi'an and XX, support the launch of the vivo X20 full-screen mobile phone. The backlight photography experience area and Lu Han mailbox and other installations in the "vivo station" attracted many V fans and Lu Han fans to come and experience them. For example, in the backlight photography experience area, many girls lined up to experience the X20's 2*12-megapixel backlight selfie. They can also make their beautiful photos into exclusive postcards on the spot and mail them to themselves or friends through the "Lu Han Mailbox".

As a mobile phone brand, products are definitely the top priority behind the fierce battle in the red ocean. Just as vivo senior vice president Ni Xudong told the media, if a company relies solely on marketing, it will only die faster. “Marketing is an amplifier and the icing on the cake. Product and service is the 1 in the front, and marketing is a question of how many zeros are filled in the back. Marketing is definitely valuable, but if the 1 in the front is not good, no matter how many zeros are filled in, it will be of no use.”

To see how complete the "1" of the product is, we need to look at the repurchase rate: in the "2016 Annual Mobile Phone Report" compiled by Toutiao and Canalys, vivo achieved a 29% user replacement retention rate , second only to Huawei and ranking second among domestic mobile phones. In other words, 29% of vivo users choose to continue buying vivo phones when they change their phones, which is enough to illustrate the problem.

How to amplify the effect of the "O" of marketing actually depends on the mechanism and system that the entire brand places marketing on. Although the reporter of Successful Marketing was unable to obtain the internal marketing system and incentive mechanism of vivo, one thing is enough to illustrate the problem:

At the beginning, when the predecessor of X20 was still X11, vivo told the media that it would have under-screen fingerprint recognition, and the hype in the first few months was all about under-screen fingerprint recognition. Just one week after the release of iPhone X on September 13, vivo X20 decisively stopped using fingerprint recognition and used facial recognition instead. In order to distinguish it from previous Android facial recognition and get as close as possible to Apple's face ID, they shaped the concept into face wake and promoted the depth of field front camera. One netizen commented: "This move has made passers-by fans excited. What's scary is that vivo made a quick decision in this process. The machine that will be mass-produced with 3.5 million units must have been finalized long ago, but they were able to extract '3D depth of field face recognition' immediately. I admire it very much."

Because this move requires the cooperation and rapid execution of all departments in the entire product project system. As the launch conference approaches, adjusting a new product concept into a hot marketing concept requires the supply chain, product design, marketing, and channels to face the pressure with extremely fast execution.

Cross-departmental unification and rapid execution are exactly the foundation and institutional strengths of vivo. For example, through a powerful advertising execution system, vivo can replace unified materials, unify new communication caliber, and unify new product selling points in more than 100,000 sales outlets in China "overnight"; it can light up advertisements on landmark buildings or large screens in major cities across the country; it can unify the opening screen and accurately deliver advertisements on many online platforms; and it can cooperate with variety shows and celebrities to carry out early product advertising implantation . As Su Yi of Yi Guancha commented, industry insiders familiar with integrated marketing know that investing money seems easy, but it is extremely difficult to achieve unified allocation of huge online and offline resources and obtain corresponding benefits and returns. From the perspective of the consumer electronics industry, there are only a handful of companies that can achieve the same level of "big opening and closing" as vivo.

After so many years of fierce competition among mobile phone brands, vivo is one of the few that has firmly grasped the concept of "youth + entertainment" and reaped huge rewards. It's because they are too lucky, and they have integrated the concept of "sustainability" into every project of the brand.

For example, in the X series, from the "light up your beauty" of the vivo X7 series, to the "20-megapixel soft light dual camera" of the vivo X9 series, to the "clear even against the light" of the vivo X20, all highlight vivo's ultimate and unique photo-taking experience, which continues throughout, and indeed continues to focus on the brand's sub-logo "Camera & Music". In comparison, some domestic mobile phone companies have one concept for each product, and there is a lack of connection and continuity between the multiple press conferences they hold in a year.

In terms of strategic execution, during the early promotion of vivo X20, Sun Honglei was photographed holding a full-screen mobile phone during the recording of "Go Fighting", which is vivo's upcoming X20. In the show "Mars Intelligence Agency" sponsored by it, Zhou Dongyu took out a mysterious mobile phone with a very narrow forehead and chin, and told everyone that this was the vivo X20. At the same time, the slogan of vivo X20 was also revealed in the program - clear even against the light, illuminating your beauty, and the execution of each project was also in place.

In addition, unlike the pre-sale system of other mobile phone companies, vivo's new mobile phones also insist on spot promotion. Before the press conference, the vivo X20 mobile phone had already completed the distribution of 3.5 million units in the channels. The press conference was also the launch conference. Users could purchase it offline + offline at the first time, and even go deep into the channels below the fifth tier.

This high degree of integration of vivo's marketing and channel operations has also paid off. On the first day of vivo X20's sale on September 30, official public data showed that X20 was the sales champion of single mobile phone products on Tmall and Suning.com that day. In addition, X20 also set the highest record for full pre-sale of mobile phones on JD.com. As vivo's flagship product, the X series has sold nearly 100 million units in the Chinese mainland market since 2012, according to Ni Xudong, senior vice president of vivo.