Double Eleven "Building Activity" Addictive Model!

Late October to early November is an unstable period.

Why is it said to be unstable? I believe everyone has seen it in their respective friend circles and WeChat groups. In preparation for Double Eleven, all platforms have tried their best to come up with various tricks. Pinduoduo's epic copywriting, JD's pervasive advertising, Taobao's heart-wrenching promotion...all these have made some of our friends around us become quite crazy.

I have a friend who persisted in building a building from the first day to the last day. Under his influence, out of curiosity I also joined this "battle".

In addition, I just happened to read a book that I had kept in my closet recently - "Addicted: Four Major Product Logics That Help Users Develop Usage Habits", and I can use this model to analyze how this "building" has made some people addicted.

1. Hidden entrance

As we all know, Taobao, founded by Alibaba Group in May 2003, is the most popular online shopping platform in China.

In 2009, the platform launched the Double 11 Shopping Festival, with only 27 brands participating and sales of 50 million yuan. With a transaction volume of 213.5 billion in 2018, the Double 11 festival seems to have grown into the minds of many of us in the past 11 years.

According to Alibaba’s latest financial report: In the first quarter of fiscal year 2020 (April to June 2019), the number of monthly active mobile users on Alibaba’s Chinese retail platform reached 755 million.

It is obvious that Taobao itself is already a super APP. In addition, over the past 11 years, Alibaba's commercial layout on the C-end and a series of family bucket APPs have benefited and achieved each other. Alipay, UC Browser, Tmall Genie, Cainiao, Taopiaopiao, Youku, etc., all contributed to Double Eleven.

Secondly, in the huge supply chain, brand owners have also made great contributions to this. For example, the startup page ads on Weibo are often Tmall Double 11 ads of some big brands. Clicking on them can directly lead to the brand’s Tmall flagship store homepage or Double 11 promotion page, all of which are aimed at attracting traffic for Double 11.

In such a favorable ecological environment, during today’s Double Eleven Carnival, as long as you are using your mobile phone, it will not worry that you don’t know.

So, does the “Building a Building” game lack traffic?

Obviously, no, what is he lacking?

——Target users.

As can be seen from the picture below, its entrance is placed in the lower right corner of Taobao’s home screen. When you open it for the first time, a corresponding pop-up box will appear. Click it to directly enter the Miaopu interface. This layout is not obvious enough and can be easily overlooked.

However, if there are people around you who are playing the game, and you are sensitive enough to prices, or care about low prices, you will find the entrance no matter how hard you try. So don’t be fooled by the fact that the entrance to “Building a Building” is so hidden. Its purpose is to screen out people who are price sensitive.

Why do we need to screen out “price-sensitive people”?

In fact, it is also for the efficiency of the "game" and not to waste everyone's time. Because people are insensitive to prices, it is easy for them to become "dwarfs in action" at this point. This is a loss for both users and sponsoring brands.

From this we can see that Taobao, as an intermediary platform, is very careful to balance the interests of merchants and users.

Therefore, hiding the entrance to "building a building" a little deeper and screening out target users is a win-win situation for both incoming users and sponsoring brands.

2. Get cat coins, upgrade your cat shop, and build a building

After entering the main page of "Build a Building", what comes into view is your own Cat Shop, and the "Upgrade and Receive Red Packets" button in the middle is particularly eye-catching. To make the story more vivid, let's imagine a main character.

Main character: Big Fish.

One day, Dayu opened Taobao and browsed around. When he opened the screen, there was a pop-up window. He didn’t look at it carefully and closed it. Suddenly I remembered that it seemed to be the Double Eleven event. I thought about my own project and was planning a similar marketing event, so I felt regretful and wanted to do some research on it.

You will see the entrance at the lower right corner of the homepage "Double 11 partners can open a Miao Shop and win 2 billion yuan". Click to enter and you will see that you can win 2 billion yuan in red envelopes by forming a team to "build a building". Prepare to invite friends to form a team.

Once the link is sent to the WeChat group, friends A, B, C, and D join the team for different reasons, as shown below:

Once a team is formed, everyone's cat shop upgrade will receive allowances and red envelope rewards; the sum of the levels of each member's cat shop is the total floor of the team; every time a friend is invited to help, the friend's corresponding floor is added, and the floor is added continuously, and a "building" is formed.

Here are some brief features:

1. Complete tasks and earn Meow Coins to upgrade your Meow Shop

The method of obtaining cat coins is very simple, and there are many ways to do so. You can sign in, invite friends to join the Double Eleven partners, use Alipay to water and feed chickens, etc.

However, the simplest and most commonly used method is to browse the merchant’s promotion page. The duration of 15 seconds is very short, so users will not feel much disgusted; merchants can also obtain massive traffic from it. If the conversion rate is reached, it will be a win-win situation for both the merchant and the platform.

After your store reaches level 20, further upgrades will become relatively more difficult, and you will have to browse more marketing pages.

2. Invite new users to get extra bonus

As the cost of acquiring customers continues to rise, Taobao will certainly not miss any opportunity to attract new customers. For every new member invited, the team will get a 50-level floor bonus.

3. 88VIP members will also receive additional bonuses

Taobao is also good at guiding users to pay.

If you have carefully observed this year's Double Eleven, you will find that there are definitely more than one place guiding users to open 88VIP membership. When my friend was receiving the coupon, he was told to activate 88VIP to receive it, otherwise he would have to contact customer service and wait endlessly.

4. Automatically join the Double 11 official mutual aid group

The most common phrase in the group is: @XXX, are we interacting with each other ?

Automatically joining the official mutual aid group is very good in my opinion, as it saves a lot of time and energy. It also captures another pain point of users: not wanting to disturb friends on WeChat.

Secondly, for the activity itself, it also prevents the possibility of malicious sharing being blocked by WeChat and causing the activity to fail, which really kills three birds with one stone.

There is an upper limit for sharing in this mutual aid group. Once the limit is reached, you will no longer be able to share links to help build a building. You can only chat in it, but you can help each other individually by adding friends.

I believe that during this period of time when friends who play the “building game” game are preparing for Double Eleven, their Taobao address books have become much more complete. This is equivalent to Taobao building a bridge of communication between stranger users on the platform, and even sees a little bit of the shadow of stranger social networking.

5. Automatically match teams for "building" PK

As long as you form a team, Taobao will automatically match you with opponents based on your wallet for PK. The winning team will receive a bonus from the sponsor's bonus pool and get a star. The more money your wallet accumulates, the higher the level of matches you will receive, and so on.

6. The power of the desire to win

One point mentioned in "Addicted" left a deep impression on me; that is the power of negative emotions, which are much stronger than proving emotions.

This point is also vividly reflected in the "building" game - it arouses the players' desire to win.

In a game, there will be winners as well as losers; if you lose consecutively, the desire to win will be easily aroused, and this can be achieved through algorithms.

But is that all?

Not really, Taobao has a trick, which is actually just two words: “change name”.

Every team and every player can change the team name in real time anytime and anywhere, and the opposing team can see the team name, just like a conversation.

This is a bit like socializing with strangers, just like playing mobile games/online games, you can't avoid being scolded, and after scolding each other, you can play a solo game, and in the end, maybe the enemies will become friends.

The "Building a Building" mini-game is also prone to being ridiculed by opponents. The more you are ridiculed, the more dissatisfied you will be and the more you want to win.

Pictures speak louder than words:

In the end, some people were even forced to buy houses.

There are many people in the support group who are afraid of losing, and finally give up and sell their buildings (with the mentality of making every penny counts); the prices on Xianyu are even clearly marked, such as 40 yuan for 1,000 floors, and so on.

In order to win the game, I also tried buying a house.

The Taobao friend who sold a house to me (added in the group) told me his own painful experience: he didn’t win at all in 5 days, and now selling houses is really pure fun. He also kindly advised me to consider whether the money in the bonus pool was worth buying again.

Finally, I weighed the pros and cons and bought more than 100 layers to keep it around 1,000 layers ahead of my opponent. Unexpectedly, our opponent surpassed us by buying 2,000 floors in the last 10 minutes...and in fact, the money in the bonus pool was much less than what they bought the building for.

It has come to this point, which shows that playing this game is no longer limited to whether or not to receive red envelopes. I once again sigh at the power of negative emotions.

3. Continuous small rewards and the ultimate prize

Of course, there are rewards for the event.

"Gailou" seizes the fact that users are sensitive to prices. Every time Miaopu is upgraded, there will be red envelopes and shopping allowances of varying denominations. Each PK will directly receive a cash red envelope from the bonus pool (ranging from 0.5 yuan in the casino to 111 yuan in the Wish Factory), and then the bonus will be distributed in proportion to the level of your teammates.

If you play the entire event seriously, you will probably get a cash red envelope of around 200.

But the biggest boss is the final ultimate grand prize - "¥9999 Wish Grand Prize, Empty Shopping Cart", which is similar to last year's flower card, drawn randomly and carries a lot of uncertainty.

What if you are the lucky koi?

It is this uncertainty that stirs the hearts of every "building builder". Even if I don't win a PK, I want to upgrade my Meow Shop to level 50 to qualify for the lottery.

In addition, there are two types of lottery qualifications:

1. Teams that get 6 stars or above in building PK;
2. Miaopu has been upgraded to a partner at level 50.

What's so magical about these rewards?

Studies have shown that variability makes the nucleus accumbens in the brain more active and increases the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes us eager for rewards.

Therefore, "limited variability" will cause the product to lose its mystery and appeal over time, while "infinite variability" is the key to maintaining users' long-term interest.

In fact, from 2009 to now, the Double 11 shopping spree has been played differently every year, which is a good proof.

The red envelopes and allowances of varying denominations, and the ultimate prize that is within reach but has yet to be won, all stir the hearts of every person who is "building a building".

4. Day after day, PK on time

Unconsciously, "building a building" has already consumed a lot of our time and energy; and the more time you spend, the more reluctant you are to leave - this is how habits are formed.

"Addicted" mentions that in order to make users empathize and take automatic actions, they must first be invested in the product; and the idea behind investment is that users believe that the more they use (personal investment), the better the service and the more they get.

We can summarize the development of the user habit of "building a building" with a picture:

Investment can be investing time, energy, money, and connections, etc.

In fact, the membership-based operating models of major APPs and the purchase of skins and equipment on game APPs all utilize users' investment in products to enhance user stickiness and continuously make users become "return customers."

The addiction model is, overall, a very good methodology. It can not only be applied to marketing activities like Double Eleven, but is also more conducive to the development of habit-forming products and can even be used to educate children.

In product design, our ultimate goal is to make users develop habits with the product. But getting users to develop usage habits cannot be achieved in a day or two. This requires continuous optimization and iteration of the product to continuously help users solve problems and meet their emotional needs. In this way, users will naturally become dependent on it.

Author: Wan Su

Source: Wansu