Next stop: Helping Chinese marketers better understand consumers

When I was a child, I saw a brain teaser like this:

“What is the thing that you interact with the most and benefit from every day, but you can’t see?”

When I was a kid, the answer to that question was "air."

But in today's marketing industry, I think the answer to this question is "consumer".

Anyone doing business in this world comes into contact with consumers every day (sometimes through products), and their greatest benefits come from consumers. Yet, most people never seem to truly “see” consumers.

(For example, I saw a palm mattress with a self-congratulatory message "Give you a five-star sleeping experience". They don't seem to know that no one has ever seen such a hard mattress in a five-star hotel.)

In short, in our eyes, what products consumers like, what creative ideas are easily impressed by them, why they buy, etc., are all invisible and so vague.

Over the past two years, I have been committed to eliminating this "ambiguity" as much as possible and using many " Li Jiaoshou methods" to help more people understand consumers.

But I still feel that this is too difficult - the theoretical laws are correct, but it is difficult to learn and apply them, especially when there is insufficient data.

Just a few months ago, Baidu, a client for whom I provided consulting services, told me that they found that my method system and ideas were very suitable for learning with artificial intelligence and developing them into tools . They hoped to acquire my team and provide support in artificial intelligence and big data so that I could independently develop the products I wanted to make. (Just in September, Baidu proposed the transformation into an artificial intelligence company and is seeking artificial intelligence applications in various fields)

Finally, after careful consideration and product research, my partner BMAN (Li Bowen) and I decided to accept this invitation - while maintaining the independence of the team operation and brand, we combined a large number of theoretical methods in the past with artificial intelligence and data to turn them into truly useful tools that can predict consumer behavior and provide creative inspiration.

Many people (including myself) were surprised to see this decision. After all, this doesn’t seem to be the normal path for someone like me who is considered a “content influencer ” by everyone.

According to the conventional path, I should focus all my energy on dissemination (in fact, I only spend one day a week writing articles), and after gaining traffic, continue to monetize it through various channels - in addition to lucrative rewards such as speaking outside and publishing books, I should also further use the traffic to sell goods.

But this is not what I really want. Let me tell you what I think.

Let me start with what I always felt I was destined to do.

I have always felt that marketing is a job that has seriously lacked progress over the years, and has become increasingly unable to fulfill the important role it is supposed to play (creating customers and meeting needs).

• The development ability of a programmer 50 years ago would not be able to reach the level of an intern at an ordinary Internet company today; but a marketing master from 50 years ago is still a master who is popular in the circle today.
• Technologists can send humans to the moon, but marketing experts often can't predict what consumers want.
• Over the past few decades, technicians have had better and better compilers, training has become simpler, and talent has become more and more scalable; but marketers can only take out a piece of paper and write down in pencil the consumer insights they have thought of after several days.

This results in: marketing is highly dependent on the inspiration of a few geniuses, while the general public lacks the methods and tools that can really be used to get the job done.

Many people think that this is because consumers change too quickly and are too difficult to predict, or because creativity and other aspects lack regularity, but in fact , I think it is simply due to the lack of good tools that can combine theory and data .

A century ago, Einstein said , "God never plays dice," which roughly means that many events that we think are random are not actually random.

For example, we believe that tossing a coin is random, with a 50% probability of heads and a 50% probability of tails.

But this is only because we have not yet mastered the theory and data - in fact, once the coin is tossed, the magnitude of the force, the position of the force, air resistance, gravity, direction of rotation, etc. are all determined. If we can know the theory that determines these forces (such as fluid mechanics) and the specific data (such as the speed of air flow), we can actually accurately control the landing of the coin.

Similarly, consumers' preferences, behaviors, demands, and the factors that influence these demands are themselves relatively certain. In the past, we felt uncertainty and difficulty in influencing things simply because we did not truly grasp the theories and data.

In the past, we relied on our own subjective feelings to find insights, combined with our own life experiences to write a few sentences that we thought would impress consumers, and then looked for people who might be interested in the product - isn't there any way to make this process a little easier, even in this era where artificial intelligence can play Go better than human champions?

And this is what I really want to do and should do, but I always feel ashamed that I haven't done it well enough.

Next, I hope to combine artificial intelligence and data based on theoretical laws to create truly useful tools that inspire creativity and generate solutions.

Consumer behavior is a black box, but this time I’m going to break it open.

In addition to the things I really want to do above, here is the impact on me personally.

Two years ago, I was a graduate living a day-to-day life. I saw many business analysis articles that relied entirely on guesswork (for example, I suddenly read an illogical article that said "Xiaomi is bound to die"). I felt that I should use professional business theories to analyze these phenomena, so I decided to leave my comfort zone. Even though I had no experience in the media, I opened a public account and insisted on writing.

A year ago, I wanted to use effective methods to change more people, so I left my current project (smart camera) and started a company . (I didn’t expect that thousands of companies would come to us for cooperation within a few months).

Then, I started my current life. For example, I implemented online training on the "14-day change plan" to enable thousands of people to learn how to use the method of "awakening user pain points", gained experience through consulting projects , and then used it to develop new methods, or spent one day a week organizing my latest ideas into articles for the official account.

I am very good at these things, but gradually I entered my comfort zone (repeating in an environment that I am already good at and familiar with), until a few months ago when Baidu mentioned to me that I could use artificial intelligence to do it and made an acquisition invitation (but still maintaining an independently operated scientific research team).

I hesitated for a while. After all, at least for entrepreneurs , acquisitions didn’t sound very good, and it also meant leaving behind the familiar and entering a relatively unknown field (such as artificial intelligence products).

What finally made me leave my comfort zone and embark on my journey again was this question: What do I really want to do?

I hope that through the "tool approach", excellent marketing plans will no longer belong to a few people, but will become available to everyone.

Just like Ford more than 100 years ago, his biggest dream was not to produce better cars for the nobility like other car manufacturers, but to make "cars", a luxury means of transportation for ordinary people, enter thousands of households through productivity innovation and make it something that the working class can afford. Later, he did it by inventing the assembly line.

This is of course difficult, because scaling up any method is much more difficult than simply knowing how to use it.

Some time ago, I was doing research on information flow copywriting. When I saw a plan, I often knew how to change it to improve the effect, but it was difficult to scale it up. For example, the copy of a financial management APP is "Estimated return 7%". Obviously, users will not pay attention to it. Recalling the theory I learned before, I changed it to "Estimated return 7%, it is not popular to queue up at the bank to save money in 2017". As a result, the click rate doubled.

The theory here is very clear. For example, according to the characteristics of this APP, it is necessary to stimulate users' pursuit of unfamiliar products and higher returns, and this requires people to enter a state of "promotional regulatory focus" (at this time, people pay more attention to returns and are willing to try), so it is right to use "2017" to arouse a sense of anticipation at the end of the year.

But each method is so fragmented that the difficulty lies in how to make it easy for people to use it on a large scale (including my own method, which has limited application). After learning more about it, I think the application of artificial intelligence may be an important breakthrough.

Finally, after internal discussions, our team decided to accept this acquisition (not related to my personal public account "Li Jiaoshou"). Here is the official plan:

• My friend BMAN (Li Bowen) and I founded a company called "Shoujiao Information Technology" which is specifically for the development of intelligent tools. It was acquired by Baidu with a valuation of nearly 100 million yuan, but it still maintains an independent brand and independent operation, focusing on using academic research and artificial intelligence (supported by Baidu) to create tools that inspire creativity and solutions (it does not involve the original search and other businesses).
• After the acquisition was completed, in order to support the business, I became the vice president of Baidu.
• The original training and other businesses will continue to operate, but in order to help the course itself improve and allow ourselves to be more focused, we will cooperate with Sanjieke in the operation. In the future, the opening and teaching services of the "14-Day Change Plan" course will be exclusively provided by Sanjieke.
• In order to maintain the objectivity and independence of my views, the "Li Jiaoshou" public account is still operated by me personally. In the future, I will still use this public account to share my ideas and insights for free (equivalent to my personal blog). At the same time, with the support of data sources, new analyses in the future will gradually become more rigorous and scientific. (However, due to the recent company handover, team recruitment and product early development, the frequency will be reduced to a certain extent)

A few days ago, I was reading a book called "Becoming Steve Jobs", which mentioned a sentence that Jobs said back then, which inspired me deeply:

“The only problems worth spending time on are the ones that will take years to solve.”

This time, I chose a difficult problem for myself, but I will definitely go on.

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The author of this article @李叫兽 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!