Once again, I was overwhelmed by the event marketing of Xin Shi Xiang

On November 15th, I wonder if you also saw in your circle of friends that friends in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou “lost” books for a day?

The incident that went viral was that Xin Shi Xiang threw 10,000 books into subways, flights, and ride-sharing cars in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and invited celebrities such as Huang Xiaoming and Xu Jinglei to participate in a book drifting activity called "Book Throwing Operation." As for the purpose of throwing away the books, just let these books spread and circulate. This idea was inspired by the book-sharing activity initiated by Hermione and Book On The Underground some time ago. The "Hermione Throwing Books" event caused quite a stir in the UK at the time and also generated a lot of heated discussion in China.

As a book drifting activity, from the perspective of knowledge dissemination and social interaction as well as the actual experience of the event audience, the "Book Throwing Campaign" in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou may not be well received. But from the perspective of brand communication, Xin Shixiang won - its exclusive online drifting system connects online and offline time, place and people; it leverages celebrity endorsements to attract more attention with less effort; it calls on the public to participate in throwing books to increase participation and cover more types of books... Even if these 10,000 books fail to really circulate, or even get lost in the end, it will not prevent Xin Shixiang from making a successful event marketing campaign .

Gladwell proposed in "The Tipping Point" that all trends are the result of the combined effect of the law of individual characters, the law of adhesion factors, and the law of environmental power. I will call these three laws the "laws of popularity" here. In this book-throwing incident, we who are far away from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou can still see waves of "self-entertainment" dissemination in the circle of friends, and the law of popularity played some role behind it.

1. The Law of Individual Characters

There are three key roles in the Law of Individuals: connector, expert, and salesperson. Connectors maintain large-scale weak connections and are social brokers in the small world. They will not shirk their obligations to social relationships and find happiness in maintaining simple, casual and extensive social interactions. Insiders will actively absorb information and find ways to spread it, and are information brokers. Salespeople are usually the ones who complete the "last mile" and require strong persuasive skills.

In the book-losing incident, we can still find the shadows of the above three key roles:

(1) Celebrities who participated in the book dropping, recommended books, and took photos and posted them on Weibo and WeChat Moments early in the morning played the dual roles of connectors and insiders in this rule. They had access to specific information about the book dropping event, and at the same time, they were connected to millions of fans, exerting a strong influence. By having this character intervene in the activity at the beginning, it can quickly arouse the enthusiasm of the masses to participate.

(2) The passengers who participated in the event were more like insiders. They also had first-hand information about the event. Due to their sense of superiority in occupying the information high ground, and because of their desire to follow the crowd and help others, they eagerly spread the details of the book-throwing event in their respective social networks.

(3) Outside the event, there were also many “critics” on social networks. They were more like salesmen. They might not participate in the event itself, but when they saw their friends on the front lines flooding their screens with comments, they couldn’t help but express their likes and dislikes, which triggered secondary dissemination and allowed the event to reach more people on the Internet.

With the help of these three key roles, your circle of friends was successfully flooded with messages about the lost book.

2. Adhesion Factor Law

The law of the adhesion factor states that if you want to spread the value of a communication event or advertisement, you must make it stick. There is always an easy way to package information to make it irresistible, given the right circumstances.

In event marketing , stickiness means people’s motivation to participate, share and comment. In this book-throwing event, adhesion is generated in the following three aspects:

(1) Complex. In this book drifting activity, books are good marketing carriers, carrying emotional labels such as "literary", "highly knowledgeable", and "elegant". It has a wide audience, and even people who do not read will not reject being associated with books. However, the uncertainty of the random drifting of books also brings a glimmer of hope of encountering the unknown world to urban people who are busy day after day.

(2) Free of charge. If you participate in the event, you can take away for free any good books you come across on the subway. While people are enjoying this commercial charity, they also have enough motivation to share it with more relatives and friends around them so that they can enjoy the benefits like themselves, although at present this seems to be just an expectation.

(3) Sense of participation. For citizens in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, this is an activity with extremely low participation costs but not boring - celebrities or friends sharing and communicating about the event, unexpected encounters with books on the public transportation system, small notes sandwiched in books, online system drift tracking, spontaneous book throwing applications and pasting tool kits, casual photos and sharing on social networks... Enough interactive touch points satisfy the citizens' sense of participation.

3. The Law of Environmental Power

Epidemics are closely related to the conditions, time, and place in which they occur, because people are extremely sensitive to subtle cues from their environment. There are always some inconspicuous information points like this in our society, but these are the detonating points of group effects - the "broken windows" theory confirms this well. If a window is broken and no one comes to fix it for a long time, passers-by will infer that this is a place that no one cares about and no one manages, and soon more windows will be broken, and then anarchy will begin to spread from this building to the adjacent streets.

In the book-throwing campaign, the organizers chose places with high traffic density such as subways and airplanes to distribute the books, which greatly guaranteed the exposure and mobility of the books. In addition, the passengers include people from various professions and classes in society, which means that there will be more possibilities for stories related to the book, thus ensuring the richness and diversity of the content sources for event dissemination to a certain extent. It is foreseeable that if the placement of funds is changed to hospitals or vegetable markets, the effect will be greatly reduced.

When people follow the trend and share on social networks, in order to meet the psychological need of "pictures tell the truth", they often take photos of the books or take selfies with the books. Under the watchful eyes of the public, this is another set of secondary dissemination with a sense of ritual and good effect - perhaps other passengers will cast curious glances at them.

The law of environmental power holds that the size of a group is also a subtle environmental factor that can have a significant impact. To launch a large-scale epidemic, you must first launch many small-scale epidemics, and the most effective team for launching a small-scale epidemic is no more than 150 people. Multiple experiments have shown that if the number exceeds 150, there will be structural obstacles to the group's unified ideas and concerted actions.

This book-throwing campaign was spread through circles of friends and small groups, gradually becoming a highly exposed marketing event. Just imagine, if only Weibo celebrities forwarded it this time, how many people would still care about it?

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @vertu-huang was compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!