Keep brand marketing promotion model!

In recent years, I have found that vertical Internet apps, both from a business and brand perspective, are fighting to break out of their circles. Apps in vertical fields will no longer be satisfied with just making friends with a group of people. They want more people to fall in love with them and want to grow. For example, Douyin, since the first day of 2017, has been gathering trendy people who love music and dance. When you open Douyin, you will see all kinds of "technical flow" screen rotation. After March 2018, Douyin has changed dramatically, and various talents have joined, including comedians, family comedians, makeup teachers, and so on.

From a "pioneering trendsetter" app to a "life recording" app, Douyin has grown from tens of millions of users to hundreds of millions in just over a year.

A closer look at its branding strategy also confirms the important nodes of its growth and success:

Douyin was initially positioned as a "music short video community focused on the new generation". It also launched The Rap of China, highlighting the trend and the memorable point of "shaking". Do you still remember the imaginative H5 "World Famous Paintings Shaking"? In 2018, Douyin's brand was upgraded to "Recording a Beautiful Life", returning to life and values.

Tik Tok has evolved from "Love Tik Tok, Love Tik Tok" to "Record a Beautiful Life"

There are also many vertical apps that are also going viral, but we can see that all apps are somewhat confused in the process: Zhihu, which has expanded from intellectuals to the general public, has changed its brand slogan from "Share your experiences, knowledge and insights with the world" to "Discover a bigger world" and then to the World Cup slogan "If you have any questions, go to Zhihu", but the progress has not been as smooth as expected and it has finally returned to the question and answer phase.

Zhihu has evolved from "Share your experience, knowledge and insights with the world" to "Discover a bigger world" and then to the World Cup slogan "If you have any questions, go to Zhihu".

From an overseas shopping community to Xiaohongshu, a place for showing off food, drinks, children and daily life, the brand slogan has evolved from "Put travel in your shopping bag" to "Find good things from abroad" and then to "Good life all over the world, mark my life..." Xiaohongshu also wants to expand its audience. But from a brand perspective, Xiaohongshu seems to be always looking for the focus of life.

▲ Source: Xiaohongshu Information Network

It is not difficult to find that as vertical APPs go viral, every APP will eventually return to the word "life". Anyway, I, Daojie, have never been able to remember the slogan of each APP: Is it Douyin that records life, Kuaishou that records life, or Xiaohongshu that records life (dog head.

It is not easy to return to "life", and we need to start from the product characteristics.

Today, I was surprised to see that the always hardcore Keep also launched a new advertisement, quietly changing its style——

In the past, Keep’s advertisements were always like this, encouraging sports enthusiasts to sweat and persevere, “Self-discipline gives me freedom”:

The latest commercial "This is all Keep" is a set of ten common scenes in daily life, such as squeezing in the subway, swatting flies, and scrambling to pay the bill...

The sports-related Keep is also returning to our lives. The change in advertising style reflects the upgrade of the business - Keep has also joined the battle to go beyond the circle, and is shifting from the initial fitness training tool to a mass sports lifestyle platform.

As a vertical APP, Keep has always had its own set of brand building methods. Its founder Wang Ning once said in the media, "I hope to become a sports brand as popular as Nike in the digital track."

Today I would like to use Keep as an example to discuss a brand marketing model: From niche to mass, from millions to hundreds of millions of users, how should vertical APPs fight the brand marketing battle to consolidate the core while expanding users?

I summarize it into three steps:

1. Brand early stage: stabilize core users

Distill users’ core driving force: from function to spirit.

In early 2015, the newly established Keep entered its first stage of development: focusing on online indoor fitness courses, Keep positioned itself as a "mobile fitness coach". At that time, the tool + social attributes of Keep were more obvious. At the beginning, Keep, which targets newbies, invited 4,000 people to conduct internal testing on social networks.

During the internal testing phase, the Keep operation team serialized fitness experience posts in some communities with large traffic and cultivated regular users. When the APP was officially launched, they focused on attracting traffic from these posts. Combined with word of mouth, Keep had its earliest seed users: sports enthusiasts.

In the following three months, the number of registered users reached 2 million.

In order to solidify the core positioning of the product as a "mobile fitness coach", they chose to embed it in the nationally popular program "Happy Camp". On the day the program was broadcast, Keep's new users approached 1 million, and more people knew about this fitness tool.

During its seed stage, Keep relied on the 15-year sports APP trend, native content, rapid word-of-mouth spread, and variety show traffic. When the number of Keep users exceeded 10 million, Keep expanded into a community form based on its sports functions. Founder Wang Ning once said in Southern People Weekly, "We found that users have an urgent need to communicate, they want to be noticed and supported, they want to exercise together, and they hope to find like-minded people."

In May 2016, Keep had 30 million registered users. The simple tool attribute was no longer enough to maintain user loyalty and attract more new users. At this time, Keep launched its first brand battle - "Self-discipline gives me freedom", which caused a sensation across the country.

As far as I know, this advertisement actually cost nearly 10 million yuan in production budget and purchased several important channels, such as outdoor advertising.

The ad copy reads: "It's not something we are born with, it's just something we persist in doing every day." Different from many apps whose first brand battle was a battle of functionality, such as "an app that allows you to exercise at home", why does Keep play a spiritual card, "Self-discipline gives me freedom", and still bring such good results?

The core point of brand strategy in the early stage of the brand is not to focus on functions for the sake of functions, nor to focus on spirit for the sake of spirit. The key point is to improve user cognition, that is, to find the core driving force for users to use your APP - why should I use you to solve my task?

The driving points for users to use different categories of apps are different. For example: people on shopping apps will care whether the goods are good and the price is low enough;

Short video apps focus on whether the content is interesting and cool, and whether it is relevant to me; while fitness and sports apps, especially a fitness community, are more concerned about whether you are professional enough and whether you can gather people who are as professional and like-minded as me.

Since you can exercise just by walking out of the house, why do you need to choose a sports app? The core driving force here is "bringing together like-minded people."

In order to stabilize core users, make them proud of using Keep, and be willing to express and share this hardcore attitude, and attract more sports enthusiasts to join this "alliance", Keep no longer chooses to hit functional points, but to inject soul: calling on all those who are looking for freedom in self-discipline through fitness.

It says to all sports fans, we understand you, we need you, and the people you like are here with us.

Within three months after the commercial was released, Keep quickly gained 20 million new users.

After this battle, Keep finally established its brand foundation, and this core has continued to this day.

2. Brand acceleration period: Seize the high-speed growth points

Marketing helps to accelerate the expansion of product categories

Since 2017, Keep has gradually transformed from a mobile fitness coach to a free sports field. They have expanded the sports category in their product range to include various forms of sports such as fitness, running, cycling, walking, yoga, dance, and ball games. At this time, Keep's user base has accumulated over 100 million, but the competition for users is still fierce.

According to Analysys data, the penetration rate of active users in the online sports field in the entire network was only 6.98% in 2018. Not only does it need to attract new users, but it also has to compete with other apps for existing users.

As its business develops, Keep also needs to expand its user base. Since it already has an absolute advantage in the fitness field, it needs to look for the next high-growth point. On the Keep platform, running has become the second largest category after training. It has a relatively fast growth rate and is a direction in which incremental growth can be achieved. Therefore, in the second phase, we seized the incremental categories and quickly expanded in terms of products, operations and brands.

Keep has made great efforts in running functions: when it was first launched, it only had two basic functions: track recording and data statistics. Later, it gradually added "Fat Burning Segment Running" and "Fartlek" training courses, as well as "Music Running" and the first "Story Running" (you can experience the Pacific Rim mecha battle while running, which is amazing.

When the potential energy of the running product had accumulated enough, in October 2018, they shot a product advertisement for Keep Running - "Still Want to Run".

This advertisement conveys the joy of running on Keep. With its help, Keep's user circle has expanded from fitness enthusiasts to everyone who wants to run.

3. Brand Outreach Period

Continue to consolidate the core and link categories to lifestyle habits

To date, Keep has developed three business lines, with both online and offline attempts. Provide paid content and services online, such as paid courses on swimming, golf, etc. In addition to the Keep APP, two more scenarios, city and home, have been added. The Keepland offline sports space has been opened, and e-commerce sells clothing, light meals, smart bracelets, treadmills, body fat scales, etc. - it is developing towards leading a new sports lifestyle. In terms of users, Keep's monthly active users have reached 40 million, and the total number of users has exceeded 200 million. The main user group is concentrated under the age of 30, and users in first- and second-tier cities account for a large proportion.

At this stage, people who are interested in sports and will take the initiative to exercise have basically been attracted to Keep. The next challenge is how to get everyone moving, expand the fitness category, and get the "diehards" who have never been interested in sports to join Keep.

In my opinion, Keep’s latest advertisement “This is all Keep” is the clarion call for Keep to expand its territory - not only to occupy the minds of fitness people, but also to reach out to the people, into their lives, and create a “pan-sports”.

If the initial stage was to get "people who already exercise" to use Keep, this stage is to let "people who want to exercise" start to "understand exercise."

Last week I was chatting with Fan Bing, the author of "Growth Hacker", and I learned that fitness is actually a very anti-human category. Everyone wants to exercise, but human nature will make you resist.

The core of the brand is actually to plant a seed in your mind and produce behavioral changes. How to make association? It is to connect your existing knowledge with unknown brands.

Keep’s latest advertisement is actually a process of “redefining exercise” and “reducing the dimension of exercise”.

If exercise and life can be seamlessly connected, the psychological barriers to exercise will be reduced.

"All of this counts as Keep", using ten sets of life scenarios to "reduce the dimension" of exercise. After the dimensionality reduction, exercise is not limited to reducing fat and gaining muscle. Exercise is originally everywhere in daily life, covering all aspects of eating, drinking, housing and transportation. It may be on your way to work or while you are taking a shower. The first step is to reduce the dimension of the movement, and the second step is to break the ice for the people.

Since you are very agile in life, you might as well go to Keep to learn more. So we can see that at the end of each advertisement, you are given a search term. You can search for "weird exercises", "fat loss recipes", etc. on Keep - this is the associated conversion entrance.

This path reminds me of the "broken window effect" in psychology: if someone breaks the window of a building and it is not repaired in time after the break, others will be encouraged by the demonstration and break more windows.

Analogously to "this is all considered Keep", it means to first open a breakthrough and eliminate the psychological barriers between ordinary people and people who are unwilling to move and exercise. Don't be afraid of exercise, in fact, you are exercising every day.

In the past, Keep was like a serious sports coach, giving you the professional guidance you need and urging you on when you are lazy. It was a mentor and friend to fitness enthusiasts. Now, Keep is more like a laughing friend around you. You are easily influenced by it. It will pull you to participate in sports, and you will go.

At the same time, in order to get closer to the people, Keep cannot lose its core users. To do this, it released an advertising film titled "It's Right to Be Afraid" in May this year.

The insight behind this is: everyone has experienced fear during exercise, fear of getting tired when running, fear of soreness when doing yoga, and fear of lack of energy when lifting weights, so they will find excuses to avoid it.

Keep wants to tell existing users that it is normal to be afraid, and as long as you persist a little longer, you will overcome your fear. "If you are not afraid anymore, then go find the next fear."

In order to reach the masses, Keep has launched a combination of measures: if "It's right to be afraid" first gives sports enthusiasts a shot in the arm on the spiritual level, then "This is all Keep" breaks down the barriers to exercise at the life level and stimulates the general public's interest in sports.

4. Three steps to become a popular brand

For apps that focus on vertical fields, their user base is expanding as their business grows.

Keep's brand out-of-circle strategy can be summarized into three steps:

1. In the early stage of brand: extract the core driving force of users - from function to spirit;
2. Brand acceleration period: seize high-speed growth points and use marketing to help accelerate category expansion;
3. Brand out-of-circle period: continue to consolidate the core and associate categories with lifestyle habits.

See the following picture:

The most difficult part of the road to breaking out of the circle is actually the mutual exclusion between growth and original intention. Today, on the Internet, we often see that some APPs, in the process of brand expansion, have gradually deviated from their original intentions. In order to expand and sink, they suddenly change their appearance and abandon their core users.

Keep's approach can be used as a reference, because Keep takes each step steadily. Although several waves of campaigns have different directions, the brand tone has always insisted on "self-discipline gives me freedom", and it always represents people who love sports.

In July this year, Li Xian, a Keep practitioner, became popular. Every day in the circle of friends, there are many "Keep girlfriends" checking in for exercise. In fact, Li Xian has cooperated with Keep as early as 2017. Even when he was not paid attention to, he has always been a Keeper who keeps exercising.

When Li Xian talked about losing weight, he said, "I don't eat hot pot or drink Coke, I exercise every day, aerobic and anaerobic, and eat some extremely vegetarian food, only then can I become the person you see. This process will be very painful, but you will be very pleased with the results."

In August, Keep changed its style. After four years of continuous efforts in the sports field, it also wanted to reach more people.

Making products, building brands and being a person are all the same. Even if you fail to go viral and get noticed for the time being, you still have to accumulate step by step. Your efforts will not be in vain, and eventually every consumer will become your "current girlfriend."

Core users are always the most valuable. Although growth is good, we should not lose our original intention - this is the ultimate mission of brand marketing.

Author: Daojie Doris

Source: Daojie Doris