Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou after 4 hours, a self-congratulatory marketing trick!

Yesterday morning on my way to work, I saw a WeChat message from Xin Shi Xiang titled “I’ve bought 30 plane tickets waiting for you at the airport: Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours.” More than 30 people in my circle of friends forwarded this WeChat message.

Xin Shi Xiang defines this event like this: "Today, I'm going to do one thing: right now, I've prepared the tickets, and as long as you come, I'll let you go. It's 8 a.m. now, and the countdown starts now. As long as you get to the airports in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou within 4 hours, I've prepared 30 round-trip tickets, and will take off immediately to an unknown but beautiful destination. Now you may be on the subway, in a taxi, in the office, or in a messy bedroom. You will ask: Can I? - The things you decide in an instant are your true self."

When I first saw this event, I was also shocked: good marketing, good creativity! It not only highlights the mentality of being able to go at a moment's notice, making the white-collar workers who have no choice but to do so, but also sells the literary and artistic sentiments, and is very pretentious. At the same time, it also incorporates the most popular live broadcast App as a real-time communication platform. The three-in-one communication is eye-catching.

Later, Xin Shi Xiang disclosed that the article had been forwarded on WeChat over one million times and the number of followers had increased by over 100,000, which seemed to have brought the spread of the article to a relatively satisfactory conclusion. However, was this really the case?

1. Successful event planning and successful PR promotion

Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours is undoubtedly a successful marketing campaign. Whether it is the creative idea of ​​going on a whim or the choice of destinations to escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, it is a communication that touches on users' pain points. Such content is always successful in touching on users' fragile hearts. Gao Xiaosong's immediate compromise is one of the successful examples, and Heineken Beer's change of itinerary and free air tickets three years ago was also such a template.

After the Shixiang account with 480,000 followers was blocked, Zhang Wei, former deputy editor-in-chief of GQ, quickly launched the New Shixiang public account, which is undoubtedly an equally impressive and large account. With the help of the media's news acumen, the topic of fleeing from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou was quickly brought up. The topic itself has been a long-term hot topic. At a time when the number of immigrants and temporary residents in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is more than twice the local population, and rising housing prices have brought about a sharp increase in the cost of living and competitive pressure in first-tier cities, fleeing from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou has itself become a hot topic that is mentioned from time to time.

At the same time, the literary and artistic content of the copywriting itself is in line with the consistent positioning of Xin Shi Xiang. (Mr. Man, the editor of Jundale at Han Jinliang Film and Television Studio, once said: "New World View's articles always look like a middle-aged man who wants to trick you into bed.") That is to use a literary topic to arouse those young people who are both literary and hormonal, and then combine it with the excitement of randomly going to an unknown destination and the restlessness of just going, and then embellish it with interesting tasks - such as meeting a Miss Dong for ramen, taking photos with 5 animals - everything is very cool.

So after the launch of this event, almost all marketers or planners were excited. I even saw a marketer comment that this was "the best marketing planning event in the second half of the year," even though the second half of the year had just begun. The Moments were also flooded with messages from marketers. Shi Xiang announced that the article had over 100,000 reads in 1.5 hours, and over 1 million reads for the whole day. The increase of over 100,000 fans also shows the breadth of the topic's self-propagation. In this restless season of summer, it seems that everyone has a psychological outlet.

From the perspective of communication, whether it is the event content planning, the event copywriting, the event mechanism, the event creativity, and the event communication trigger point, it is a remarkable creativity and a successful event. Even if it wins an award as a new media marketing case for the whole year, it is completely understandable, even without considering the secondary dissemination on weekends and the continuous marketing of subsequent topic hype.

2. A typical marketing self-entertainment without commercial goals

A big problem for marketers and advertisers is that they cannot avoid self-satisfaction. People who come out of 4A companies or marketing agencies have a special complex, which is to create some cool ideas to win awards, and ultimately measure the success of the planning by whether it wins an award or is widely disseminated.

The entire brand commercialization behavior should be, either to make creative plans based on self-ideals, and to achieve the purpose of event communication through beautiful copywriting and event mechanisms; or to do it purely for the boss to see, but they forget that the ultimate goal of all activities and planning is to serve brand communication; or to serve performance drive and user recognition.

All commercial activities that are separated from the goal of commercializing the brand are just self-satisfaction. How much value can they have even if the communication purpose is broad? What’s the value of winning the Effie Award or the Cannes Advertising Award? The advertisement of Melatonin has not changed at all for several years and is extremely low-end, but it still drives sales. Although Red Star Macalline has won many awards, it is unclear what they mean. The same is true for Flight Butler's "At this moment, be your own master" elevator advertisement. Many of the author's marketing friends and friends outside the Internet circle said they couldn't understand it.

The reason why escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours is a typical self-entertainment is because:

1. The platform’s target customer group is not suitable

As a brand sponsor, Flight Butler wants to express its appeal most by issuing tickets quickly, and its elevator advertisement is based on this appeal. But the real appeal and target customer group of Flight Butler should be business people of the same lineage, which is also the group it started with. The official website of Flight Butler still introduces itself as "Flight Butler is the first mobile business travel application in China". CEO Wang Jiang's official introduction to its own product at the 2015 "Win in China" was also "Flight Butler is the first company in China to propose the concept of 'scenario service' and is deeply loved by the majority of business travelers."

However, in order to cater to the target audience of the executor Xin Shi Xiang, this event was forcibly turned into a communication targeting literary and artistic young people. (Who made Xin Shi Xiang so popular by positioning itself as a platform for young literary and artistic people?) However, most business people are older and male, and the male users of many OTAs exceed 60%. Zhang Wei shared the user portrait of Xin Shixiang at the MindStore conference: about 70% of Xin Shixiang's users are women, most of whom are concentrated in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and about 60% of them use iPhones. Students are one of the main groups, and practitioners in traditional industries, such as finance, teachers, etc., are also one of the main groups.

Therefore, the overlap between Flight Butler’s target customer groups and New World View’s target customer groups is not high. The effect of placing advertisements in a completely inaccurate market segment can be imagined.

2. The activity creativity makes it impossible for the target audience to participate deeply

The "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 Hours" event requires users to arrive at the airport to participate and to confirm whether there are tickets at the airport, which is an extremely high participation cost. After all, the airport is not a commercial area, and the long distance of the airport makes the threshold for participants very high. Whether you are a literary young person, a business person or a white-collar worker, it is unlikely that you will spend special time to go to the airport to try to get a chance to participate in an event with a maximum of 14 air tickets (14 in Beijing, 8 each in Guangzhou and Shanghai), especially during working hours.

The real participants of the event are college students or freelancers, but such groups are not the target customers of Flight Steward, and of course it is even more impossible for them to achieve the original intention of just going on a trip. So this has formed a vicious circle. The literary young people and white-collar workers who really need to participate in the event and escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will not and do not have the time to participate in the event, and the students who really participate in the event are precisely those who do not have the need to escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

So from the perspective of the activity mechanism, escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou after 4 hours is itself a self-satisfaction that does not reach the target user group of Flight Butler. The goal of self-entertainment is not to promote the brand, but to spread for the sake of spreading, and to hype for the sake of hype.

Of course, if you want to question the professions introduced by the participants in the live broadcast, it is recommended to review the soft implantation of Uber by the winning users, and the fact that the host, Shao Yufei, a well-known model from Ruili, actually brought her own makeup and Hong Kong and Macau Pass to the remote Beijing airport to participate in the event in order to get two round-trip tickets to Hong Kong.

3. The communication platform is also a big failure

As a gathering platform for young users, especially those born after 1990, live streaming does not attract much attention from white-collar workers and business people. It is also nonsense for young artists to participate in live streaming. What's more, the mainstream audiences of most live streaming platforms are not in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but in second-, third- and fourth-tier cities. Therefore, choosing live streaming as a medium for communication with the target audience is also not valuable.

4. It’s not the WeChat Moments that are going viral, but the WeChat Moments of marketers

As I mentioned before, this activity really went viral among marketers and salespeople’s friends. Among the more than 30 friends who shared it with me, only 3 were not marketers and salespeople. After consulting other friends, they also found that Xin Shi Xiang’s activity did not achieve the crazy screen dominance among ordinary users.

5. The content mechanism is also self-entertaining.

The event copy of Xin Shi Xiang said, "If you need to take a leave, I can talk to the company on your behalf." This is a very self-aggrandizing copy.

You can imagine what kind of expression and tone your friends have when they say such a condescending copy. What value can this copy really bring to users who need to take leave? You can also imagine what the situation would be like when your company receives such a call. As for an individual, if someone cannot even handle the boss of his own company and wants to leave freely, he is probably not a mature individual. It is undoubtedly extremely irresponsible for Xin Shi Xiang to encourage such individuals to participate in its activities, and such copywriting is extremely self-satisfied.

3. The scheming of the world and the helplessness of the flight stewards

Company commander Wang Jiang is a second-time entrepreneur and an extremely shrewd entrepreneur. However, he made a mistake this time. As the sponsor and promoter of the entire event, Flight Steward theoretically aimed to promote its new slogan of "quick ticket issuance" and "be your own boss". However, in this operation and promotion, all of them became dominated by New World:

WeChat channel: The display of WeChat content, the main collection platform, on Flight Butler is negligible. There are only two places where the WeChat content reflects Flight Butler: 1. A logo is displayed in an inconspicuous place on the poster; 2. It reminds people that New World View and Flight Butler staff are waiting at the airport.

Weibo channel: As the host of Xin Shi Xiang, the Weibo topic #Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours# does not have any mention of Flight Butler, as if it is the only operator. Moreover, in the interaction on Xin Shi Xiang’s Weibo, except for the notification post, there is no @ of Flight Butler, and Flight Butler’s own Weibo is also a solitary post.

Live broadcast channel: During the live broadcast, New World had a strong background and logo implanted, and the host’s voiceover all became New World. The only implantation of Flight Butler was that the winners could contact Flight Butler’s staff to book tickets. There was no mention of Flight Butler’s APP features or the fast ticketing function that Flight Butler wanted to promote. Even the large paper tickets that were best implanted with Flight Butler’s brand did not show the presence of Flight Butler. All PR articles before 1 o’clock were about New World’s activities.

The author can't help but ask, where have the flight stewards gone ? As a brand sponsor and organizer, if an event cannot fully reflect the brand and its connotation, then what is the point of such an event? What is the value of running such activities to the brand? Therefore, the more widely the event is disseminated, the more disappointed Flight Steward, as the event sponsor, will be. What will happen even if a marketing company like WeMedia joins in? So this event has probably become a nightmare for Flight Butler. Xin Shi Xiang gained 1 million reads and 100,000 new fans, but Flight Butler gained nothing.

After the live broadcast ended at around 10 a.m., Shixiang (Zhang Wei), Flight Butler (Wang Jiang), and Wemedia (Li Yan) also staged a love-hate relationship at noon. After the planning became popular, Wemedia's Li Yan said that it did not cost much money. Then Zhang Wei posted a Weibo announcement at 12:31, saying: "I decided on this plan in 1 minute while smoking a cigarette at the door of my office. After I mentioned it to Flight Butler, we hit it off. Flight Butler is the co-organizer, and no one else helped." "Our appeal is a brand + business plan. We want to make money (and let those who pay get the best feedback), and have a good brand effect."

We are of the same root, why are we so eager to fight each other? The result of their love-hate relationship is probably that Zhang Wei realized that something was wrong.

What’s interesting is that the number of answers and likes to the question “How do you evaluate Flight Butler’s activity of escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou within 4 hours?” on Zhihu exceeded that of “How do you evaluate New World View’s activity of escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou within 4 hours?” It should be noted that when Zhang Wei posted the announcement on the Flight Butler Zhihu post at 1:05 pm, the post had only one fan comment, while the number of comments on New World View’s Zhihu post had exceeded 20. After that, Flight Butler appeared as the protagonist in New World View and Flight Butler’s own PR articles. Some voices began to report that Flight Butler was the sponsor of this event, and Yizhibo, as a live broadcast platform, also did not receive much display and reflection.

Therefore, the whole plan of escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours is nothing but a deliberate marketing campaign of New World View, the purpose of which is to make fans remember New World View and to make itself more prominent and others less prominent. After reading the promotion, you still don’t know that it is a joint venture between New World, Flight Butler and Yizhibo. In order to weaken the other two parties, New World may not have had in-depth communication with Flight Butler and Yizhibo. We will analyze it in the fifth part later.

4. The negative impact of high thresholds and low winning rates is inevitable

Everyone should still remember the most successful and most failed activities in the first half of the year, right? That’s right, it’s Alipay’s Five Blessings Collection activity during the Spring Festival. Despite the extremely high entry threshold for Alipay's Five Blessings Contest, it still attracted 420 million people to participate, but only 790,000 people won the prize, and the winning rate is so low that it can be ignored. This ultimately brought about a huge wave of negative public opinion, because the higher participation threshold means higher costs for users and higher expectations of winning. When users' expectations are not met, it eventually turns into negative public opinion. The uninstallation and deletion of friends behavior that followed the Alipay Five Blessings event is an example of this.

Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 Hours is also such an activity. The threshold for user participation is extremely high. Users need to go from their place of residence to the airport. Only after arriving at the airport can it be determined whether they have won the prize. Even if the winning users arranged in advance are not taken into account, only 8 or 14 users in each city can win the prize. According to the data released by the backend of Shi Xiang, thousands of people have signed up. Someone posted on Weibo that he was stopped by the staff when he arrived at the airport when there were only three tickets left.

There were also constant negative comments about Xin Shi Xiang on Weibo. Netizens said that they could not find the organizer on site, and in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which all have two airports, users had no idea where to gather. Many users also said that they were waiting at Hongqiao Airport, but the airport where they participated in the event was Pudong Airport, 50 kilometers away. More netizens questioned the deletion of negative comments on Shixiang Weibo.

Therefore, if users with high expectations fail to obtain prizes after arriving at the event, it will also bring about a huge negative word-of-mouth storm. But it is obvious that Xin Shixiang has not made adequate preparations. What I have seen so far is that it blocks negative voices by deleting Weibo posts, while at the same time filling in users' doubts and questions about the event through one Weibo picture and text and Weibo reply after another.

5. An imperfect, slightly rough marketing campaign

As the operator of the event, Shixiang has overall control over the event. From the interests of the flight stewards and Yizhibo, we can see that the latter two are extremely weak. At the same time, Xin Shixiang may not have smooth communication with the latter two partners, and the frequency of mentioning Flight Steward and Yizhibo in the announcement is very low.

The author only takes a look at the slots of this activity from five points:

1. The anchor is not professional

The most important thing about live streaming is the host. Live streaming seems to be a very simple thing, but the host and content planning are the two core elements of live streaming. However, there are big differences between live streaming and hosting. The interactivity of live streaming depends on the host's understanding of the platform and the interaction. However, the hosts of "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 Hours" are not very professional in terms of on-the-spot performance or interaction. Judging from the interactivity of the content and the jokes with the audience, there is still a big gap between them and the high-quality hosts on the live streaming platform.

The author suspects that these anchors may be editors of Xin Shi Xiang. Among them, the anchor in Beijing has only 775 followers on Weibo. If Xin Shi Xiang maintains in-depth communication with Yizhibo, Yizhibo will send a signal debugger to the scene and may also send a special anchor to report on the event. The fan interaction value brought by professional anchors will far exceed that of current anchors, and the number of viewers will double.

2. Live streaming accounts lack fans

Xin Shixiang's three live broadcast accounts lack fans, and starting the live broadcast from 0 fans is completely dependent on platform recommendations. Therefore, the maximum number of concurrent online users of Xin Shixiang Yizhibo's Beijing station was ultimately 23,000, and only 419,000 people watched it (without considering the situation of platform data manipulation). If Yizhibo's anchors were invited to use their own accounts to broadcast live, the number of viewers would increase several times or even dozens of times, which would help spread the brand among more young live broadcast users.

3. The theme of "go anywhere, go anywhere" does not fit the flight steward

To ordinary users, the entire 4-hour escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is simply "just go on time". This has been the main theme and main appeal of New World in its previous WeChat warm-up and in its interview with Frees Capital yesterday.

But “Just Go” is the slogan of Ctrip , the leader in the travel industry, so some of my friends even asked on Weibo and WeChat Moments whether this was an implantation by Ctrip? There are also netizens in the Zhihu discussion thread asking whether it was an implantation by Ctrip. If there had been in-depth communication with Flight Butler, it would certainly not have been possible to use Ctrip's "Just Go" as the theme of the event.

4. Too much control over activity presets

Behind a successful marketing and live broadcast, there must be preset and advance script rehearsals, but the real preset is clever implantation. Add one point and it will be too long, subtract one point and it will be too short.

But the assumptions made by New World View were undoubtedly unsuccessful, with the Hong Kong route being the most obvious failure, because the beauty Shao Yufei, who happened to be drawn, had exquisite makeup, happened to have a Hong Kong and Macau Pass, happened to have a valid visa, and could fly directly to Hong Kong. Shao Yufei has 1.05 million followers on Weibo, and is a well-known print model, one of the top three in the first special model selection contest of the Chinese version of Japan's "mina" magazine, and a street model from Ruili. So such a well-known model "saw the event notice on Weibo, followed New World View, and packed her luggage and took a taxi after seeing the push at 8 o'clock in the morning" for a round-trip ticket. Such an assumption is not tenable no matter where you are.

5. Hard-nosed marketing that doesn’t take into account the characteristics of travel

Chinese flights often face various problems, such as delays and even cancellations. As a practitioner in the industry for seven years, Flight Steward has deep insights and experience in this regard, and of course, has a complete set of response plans. However, in yesterday's live broadcast, we saw that Xin Shixiang did not consider such a situation at all, and did not consider the risk of flight cancellations and delays caused by the typhoon in Shanghai and Guangzhou over the weekend, and still allowed users to travel and return on Sunday.

Therefore, there are only two possibilities to explain this reason: 1. Xin Shi Xiang did not have in-depth consultations with Flight Steward on the event; 2. Some users may be gimmicks or pre-determined, and the typhoon will not affect subsequent dissemination.

The topic of "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours" #4小时逃北上海广# had 10 million reads as of 14:00, but only 2,965 participants. The live broadcast had a maximum of 23,000 people online at the same time, and ultimately 419,000 people watched the data (without considering the water content of platform data). Judging from the public data on Weibo and live broadcasts, this was not a explosive event. Although Xin Shixiang revealed that its WeChat official account brought in 1 million views and 100,000 new fans, the credibility of the data in the black box is probably questionable.

But no matter what, from the marketing PR perspective, this is definitely a creative marketing campaign. But leaving aside the concept of marketing, from the perspective of Flight Butler as an event sponsor, Flight Butler undoubtedly has no presence at all. This is undoubtedly a self-congratulatory act by New World. More and more companies may cooperate with New World in the future. However, Flight Steward, which has raised 933 million yuan, has undoubtedly been overshadowed by the scheming of New World. Alas! Are you satisfied with this self-entertainment?