5 strategies to solve the user growth dilemma!

Preface

Before we get into the topic, let me share with you some consumption scenarios of young people that are considered “nice to have but not necessary” by their parents:

In Shanghai Joy City, six or seven people sat together, playing roles full of love, hate, and confusion according to the scripts in their hands, and then spent 3-5 hours to complete a reasoning game to find the murderer. They have only one goal, to become "Detective Conan".

At Universal Studios Beijing, young people from all walks of life lined up to check in and interact with "Chatterbox Megatron". Even though they were mocked as "stupid human beings", they enjoyed it and were willing to be Megatron's fans.

…

In addition to the above-mentioned consumption scenarios, in fact, many new consumption behaviors are becoming increasingly popular, such as the gamified experience "King of Fighters Experience Class" launched by KEEP, and the maids playing board games in the Flipped cafe.

If we think about the logic behind these business behaviors from the perspective of "existence is reasonable", whether it is a marketing gimmick or an immersive consumption scenario, the above-mentioned brands and merchants are actually aiming at the next mainstream consumption trend - the experience economy. If you can understand and want to try these happy consumption behaviors, then welcome to the "experience economy era".

The picture comes from the Internet

In fact, the experience economy is nothing new; the concept has been around for more than 20 years. However, as my country's per capita GDP has reached the 10,000 US dollar mark, the level of mass consumption has been significantly improved, especially the younger generation Gen Z, whose consumption level is already at the top of Maslow's pyramid, and the experience economy has become increasingly popular. They are no longer satisfied with the single functional needs of products, but consume for the experience, for the happiness, and in pursuit of social recognition.

Of course, the new consumption behaviors mentioned above are only the narrowest manifestation of the experience economy. What is the true connotation of the experience economy? How to apply it to long-term brand growth? These two major questions are the topics we are going to discuss with you next.

At the same time, focusing on the value research of the experience economy, we screened the growth marketing cases of brands such as L'Oréal Group, New Hope Huaxi Dairy, Tongcheng Travel, Cha Xiaokong, and Cai Shiweng, and combined with the research and observation of the growth black box, we refined and summarized the five popular growth strategies in the era of the experience economy:

Online interactive shopping guides replace traditional monotonous shelves

Skinner Box Gamification Random Rewards

Subscription-based cycle purchase "feeding strategy"

Deeply connect with users using metadata

The ultimate fusion of online + offline user journey

Although these strategies are reusable and common, readers also need to evaluate the "effectiveness" of the strategies based on the characteristics of the industry track and the differences in business models. After all, it is difficult to have a "unique trick" in the business world, let alone in an era of traffic involution.

From "traffic is king" to "experience is king"

In 1998, Harvard Business Review published an article titled “Welcome to the Experience Economy” by two American scholars, Pine and Gilmore, which formally proposed the concept of “experience economy”:

The experience economy takes service as the stage and commodities as props. It starts from life and situations to shape sensory experience and mental identification, so as to capture customers' attention, change consumption behavior, and find new survival value and space for commodities. [1]

In other words, if we only focus on the products and services themselves, we will inevitably fall into homogeneous competition. However, if we can create sensory experiences based on life and situations, allowing customers to feel great pleasure during consumption, it will hopefully help companies break away from the homogeneous competition landscape, and then find new profit growth points and realize the vision of finding incremental growth in existing assets.

If we use this to deduce the evolution of economic forms, the experience economy belongs to the fourth generation of economic forms after agriculture, industry and services. In the experience economy, brands pay more attention to the user's feelings, and at the same time play the role of "atmosphere creator" of user experience, delivering a pleasant experience to users. For a specific comparison, please refer to the figure below:

After looking at the upgrades and iterations of the four generations of economic forms, let us now analyze the development of the experience economy in China.

China's experience economy era began almost at the same time as the service economy era, with the experience economy serving as a subsequent extension of the service economy. In 2001, we entered the service economy era. The service economy contributed 48.22% to GDP, and the industrial economy contributed 46.7% to GDP. For the first time, the service economy's contribution to GDP surpassed that of the industrial economy. [2]

It was also around 2000 that the earliest group of entrepreneurs who devoted themselves to the Internet began to embrace Internet technology. At that time, China's experience economy was still limited to the experience of building digital touchpoints. In the following 10 years, we began to shift from traditional Internet to mobile Internet. At this time, the experience economy began to mature with the development of communication equipment, mobile payment and big data technology, mainly reflected in the instant consumption convenience experience brought by the integration of online and offline.

It was not until around 2018 that the experience economy officially entered the mainstream development path with the introduction of new concepts such as new retail, smart retail, and borderless retail.

It was during this period that content platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu emerged, and with the rapid penetration of e-commerce, the main battlefield of Chinese consumer brands began the war in the traffic field. Even now, a starting formula has evolved in the new consumer industry:

5,000 Xiaohongshu posts + 2,000 Zhihu Q&A posts + Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi’s product promotion = a new brand

However, as the demographic dividend and the Internet dividend have gradually peaked, brands that used to rely mainly on traffic have begun to suffer backlash. The extreme prosperity of new consumption in the past two years and its decline and cooling in the second half of this year have also made people see that the bubble of new consumption is beginning to emerge.

But in the trap created by traffic growth, how can brands achieve endogenous growth?

Our answer is that driven by the "user-centric" strategy, we need to shift our strategy from "traffic is king" to "experience is king". Its strategic significance includes two levels:

First, the “experience economy” can transform stock into incremental value and create new profit space;

According to a McKinsey research report, companies that provide the best customer experience in the industry tend to have better customer insight and customer stickiness. In two to three years, corporate revenue can increase by 5-10% while costs will be reduced by 15-25%. [3]

Secondly, the two-way interaction generated by the experience economy is more conducive to occupying the user's mind than one-way output.

In the Internet age, what brands need to strive for is not one-way purchasing behavior from consumers, but rather, through interaction and interaction, let consumers gradually build trust in the brand, and then through the construction and optimization of user journeys, let users actively participate in brand building and generate repeat purchase behavior.

In other words, while creating business experience (BX), we also need to focus on upgrading the customer experience (CX) system to achieve dual-wheel drive.

Source: Tencent Cloud & Qidian Customer Service

In order to help brands break free from the growth dilemma of the "traffic pool" and move towards the healthy operation of the "retention pool", we will now break down the five major growth strategies under the experience economy, hoping to provide brands with inspirational thinking on the underlying principles and find the compound interest of strategic application.

Five Growth Strategies in the Experience Economy

1. Online interactive shopping guides replace traditional monotonous shelves

For a hundred years since the birth of the retail industry, brands have been racking their brains to figure out how to get customers to "pick up items from the shelves" and proceed to the payment stage as quickly as possible. The most frequent touchpoint between consumer brands and customers is the merchandise shelves.

In an environment with unlimited product choices and similar functions, it is becoming increasingly difficult for products on shelves to attract users' attention. Whether online or offline, simply increasing the number of product exposures cannot solve the problem. It still depends on the efficiency of single exposure - the form of the shelf becomes one of the key factors.

Early shelf displays started from primitive street stalls, gradually developed into product shelf displays in supermarkets, and graphic detail pages in the e-commerce era, and have now evolved into "interactive shelves" for short videos and live broadcasts.

Under the interactive shelf strategy, the product has evolved from the original single visual display to a multi-dimensional three-dimensional display of hearing + vision, and from a single-sensory call to action (CTA) to a multi-sensory CTA.

On mobile interactive shelves, shopping guide live broadcasts and interactive services create a user experience that goes beyond the shelves themselves, which can more effectively attract and retain customers. We can also understand that in the era of experience economy, "people are the shelves" and products are relegated to the auxiliary role of "props".

The upgrade of shelf format ultimately led to a shift in user attention, with the brand moving from point exposure to time period exposure, and increased opportunities for interaction with users, ultimately leading to an increase in conversion rate. Therefore, brands are paying more and more attention to CPE (cost per engagement) instead of simply chasing CPM and CPA.

Let’s take Cha Xiaokong as an example to explore how he uses interactive shelves to amplify product advantages and achieve efficient conversions.

First, let me briefly introduce the brand background: Cha Xiaokong is a tea bag DTC brand that was only launched in Q4 2020. The core of the product is super extraction technology, which allows cold water tea to be brewed anytime and anywhere.

In the marketing process, Cha Xiaokong must also focus on the core selling points of the product, focusing on creating the original scenes of "brewing tea outdoors, brewing tea in the office, and brewing tea in a bottle", and giving away a "portable cup" with the combination product to strengthen the concept of convenient brewing. In terms of exposure form, we also clearly observed the gradual upgrading process of the brand.

During the testing period, Cha Xiaokong mainly adopted the card advertising format, which was subsequently gradually upgraded to a native multi-image format. At that time, Cha Xiaokong's shelf displays were still mainly based on pictures and texts. After two months of stable growth, the ROI reached more than 1, and the delivery model was successfully implemented.

After initially exploring the production data, Cha Xiaokong began to experiment with a new form of authorized reuse of celebrity-themed video segments. It is the first brand in the tea bag industry to explore the use of vertical card segments for video delivery. At this time, Cha Xiaokong began to focus on upgrading the interactive shelves from single-sense CTA to multi-sense CTA.

During the period of rapid growth, Cha Xiaokong tested the effectiveness of "people are the shelves" through celebrity endorsements, and began to focus on the normalized operation of multi-sensory CTA, upgrading the exposure format to video live broadcasts again, providing "interactive shelves" operations to expand new customers. During this period, their new customer UV accounted for 85%, accounting for 42.5% of the overall live broadcast room, and broke the saying that video accounts can only "serve old customers".

What’s interesting is that at that time, Cha Xiaokong’s traffic optimization goal was changed from optimizing clicks to optimizing key pages, which is very consistent with the upgrade transformation logic from CPM→CPE that we mentioned earlier. The final result is that the cost of live broadcast viewing with "key page visits" (i.e. live broadcast viewing on video accounts) as the optimization goal decreased by 32%, the cost of live broadcasts in May decreased by 30% year-on-year compared to April, the total UV increased by 4 times, and the ROI reached 4.

Tea Xiaokong advertising is based on "key page visits"

(i.e. live video viewing) is the optimization goal

The upgrade of Cha Xiaokong’s display on the WeChat ecological shelf has allowed us to see the potential of mobile shelves to attract new customers. It has also helped Cha Xiaokong take the first step in accumulating user assets and achieving long-term conversions.

At this point, you may also ask, Cha Xiaokong is a high-frequency, standardized product, and the interactive shelves can take effect quickly, but low-frequency, high-order products may be another matter.

Actually, it is not. Here we would like to share with you how Caishiweng, a jade brand with little reputation, made a fortune in silence in the WeChat ecosystem through interactive shelves.

Logically speaking, as jade is a high-priced, non-standard product, it is difficult for users to distinguish the authenticity of the product, and the cost of trust is extremely high.

To this end, Cai Shiweng did not rush to establish strong links with new users during the account cold start period, but instead introduced old users in the WeChat private domain into the testing period. The cold start is completed by bringing in new customers through old customers and encouraging loyal customers to share, like, and spread the word. During the initial stage, they also targeted video account live streaming, and directly connected to video account live streaming through Moments ads.

We all know that many brands are mostly trying out video live streaming. But this jade brand is getting serious about this. They have set up a full-time operation team, which broadcasts live non-stop every day and is online for 20 hours. Most other brands operate in two shifts, but they operate in three shifts.

At the same time, they have established a matrix of multiple live broadcast accounts in the video account, and through the shopping guide’s vivid and emotional live broadcast explanations, they provide a full-scale and personalized display of each product to encourage users to place orders. Of course, in addition to live streaming on video accounts, they have also accumulated users in the private domain, and gradually promoted repeat purchases through 1V1 interactive communication with shopping guides.

At present, Caishiweng's return rate is less than 30%, which is much lower than the 70%-90% return rate of its competitors, and it has achieved an extremely high repurchase rate with an average customer ordering 3-4 times.

Through the case of Cai Shiweng, we see the charm of online interactive shelves. They bring the brand a sense of trust that was originally only available offline, but they greatly enhance the interaction and interactivity with users, optimize the user experience, and improve conversion efficiency.

2. Skinner Box Gamification Random Incentives

In 1938, Harvard University psychologist Skinner designed an experimental device (Skinner box): when the mouse in the box pressed the lever, food slipped out (reward was redeemed). When mice are given fixed rewards, they lose interest after a period of time; but if the reward is replaced with a random probability reward (pressing the joystick will randomly determine whether food will fall), the mice will keep pressing the button as if they are fascinated.

This highly random mechanism also affects humans. Unknown rewards are more likely to stimulate humans to produce more dopamine, causing them to develop a sense of dependence, which is addiction.

This is also the underlying principle that the "blind box economy" can be traced back to. By setting the rules of the game and using uncertain rewards to build a growth path, brands can ultimately allow consumers to achieve a certain level of achievement and create a "Wow Moment" for users that exceeds expectations. Random rewards are often used to cultivate a chain of user behavior that encourages continued consumption.

In fact, we are not unfamiliar with the use of this kind of random rewards in the business field. Surprise eggs, Pokémon and Raccoon "Hundred Generals" award cards on the shelves of convenience stores and supermarkets are still places where children are willing to throw a tantrum to buy them.

The picture comes from the Internet

In the adult world, blind box economy is also a popular preference among contemporary young people. According to the "2020 Generation Z Insight Report" released by QuestMobile, young users of Generation Z, while pursuing high quality and high cost-effectiveness, also pay more attention to consumer experience and are willing to pay for the fun of the experience. The blind box design makes the purchasing process an interesting experience. [4]

Let’s take Tongcheng Travel as an example to see how it caters to young people’s consumption experience preferences and grasps the secret of “random rewards” to break the growth dilemma.

From the supply side, domestic and international travel has been closed for a year due to the epidemic, the OTA (online travel) industry has been hit hard, and major airlines have a large number of surplus tickets. At this time, Tongcheng Travel saw a business opportunity and obtained a large number of air tickets from the airline at a low cost.

From the demand side, although short-distance travel and self-driving tours have begun to recover, the OTA industry remains weak. In order to sell a large number of tickets, Tongcheng Travel adopted the innovative form of "blind box of air tickets" to stimulate young people's demand for flight travel that was suppressed by the epidemic.

In fact, special air tickets and hotels have always been available, but why do they become so popular when they are turned into blind boxes and make young people "heart-beating"? This is consistent with the random rewards brought by the Skinner box gamification we described earlier.

As for how Tongcheng Travel is about to make the air ticket blind box a hit, we will analyze it from the ASAS model that summarizes the growth black box.

Attention

Tongcheng Travel chose two advertising methods: online circle of friends advertising + offline outdoor advertising/landmark buildings, and simultaneously carried out promotion in its own private community.

Specifically, on March 4, the "Tongcheng Air Ticket" official account published a tweet titled "Open the 98 yuan air ticket blind box, don't like it? Full refund!", and Tongcheng's 98 yuan air ticket blind box was officially launched on the mini program. After the product was launched, the effect was not ideal.

The reason is that at that time, the blind box for air tickets adopted the fission mechanism of "friends' help", but now young people are disgusted with "forced socializing". After discovering this problem, Tongcheng Travel cancelled the fission gameplay. Their new strategy is to upgrade the air ticket reward mechanism of the blind box - in the blind box, they have newly added "hidden versions" such as two-person tickets, round-trip tickets, business class tickets, etc. that are most popular among users to increase the incentive.

After the product upgrade, on April 2, a short video with the caption "Others buy tickets to Sanya, Qingdao and Shanghai for 98 yuan, but I go from Chengdu to Daocheng!!" went viral on Douyin. This video seems to be a complaint, but in fact it is a "Versailles-style" show-off. Subsequently, more young people began to share their "unboxing experience" on social networks, and some even released blind box tutorials. At this point, the air ticket blind box officially began to become popular on the entire Internet.

In addition, we observed that in the exposure of Tongcheng Travel's offline advertisements, in addition to placing the mini-program QR code to guide users to scan the code directly to follow, they also specially brought the "Search" VI, which is obviously a conscious attempt to guide users to search.

Why is SouYisou so valued and has it received special exposure support from brands? Let’s take a look at how Tongcheng Travel plays in the Search stage.

Search

Essentially, travel products represent users’ travel decisions and are not products that can be converted into purchases instantly. Whether it is an online or offline exposure scenario, it is essentially more inclined to the brand planting link, guiding users to actively search and go to the mini program to learn about the gameplay and rules in detail before buying them. This link is reasonable and efficient.

In addition, the gameplay of the air ticket blind box is very novel, and users need to fully understand more rules and information. We mentioned earlier that after Tongcheng Travel’s air ticket blind box became popular on social networks, naturally many users began to actively enter WeChat to search for Tongcheng Travel.

Therefore, in the search stage (Search), Tongcheng Travel makes full use of WeChat's "Search" to take over the traffic brought by various exposure channels, including natural traffic, and deposit it into the mini program.

Offline, in Tongcheng Travel’s outdoor advertisements, in addition to placing the mini-program QR code in the hope that users will scan the code directly to follow it, they also specially include the “Search” VI, which is obviously intended to consciously guide users to search.

Online, precisely because of the importance of the search link, the brand has made great efforts to "decorate" it, setting up a Top bar and significantly highlighting event information in the core position of the operation card. A striking button leads directly to the mini program with one click, and the number of participants is also marked to stimulate user clicks.

The official area sets up prominent operation card data

Data shows that during the entire air ticket blind box event, the UV click-through rate in the official Souysou area exceeded 90%, 30% higher than the industry average; data displayed on the operation card showed that more than 350,000 people clicked "Go find out" to enter the event page, an increase of 75% compared to the first period.

Action

In the action phase, Tongcheng Travel first simplified the activity links to the extreme.

Specifically, users open WeChat, search for the [Tongcheng Travel] mini program to enter the relevant interface; slide on the homepage of the mini program, find [Destination Blind Box], click to enter and fill in the blind box information, and wait for the blind box results after payment.

Secondly, Tongcheng Travel eliminates the "action barriers" for users in the last step. That is, if users are not satisfied with the target city results of the blind box, they can directly apply for a refund. If you are satisfied, you can choose to lock the ticket and share it on major social platforms to show off.

Share

During this stage, Tongcheng Travel made full use of UGC content to spread spontaneously on public traffic platforms.

Because the "blind box economy" itself has the natural social attributes of novelty and fun, the moment the random rewards are redeemed triggers a competitive and sharing mentality among users. The huge loss of flying to the same province or the huge profit of flying to Sanya or Shanghai will cause users to complain or show off.

This sentiment will dominate user groups in expressing their opinions on social platforms. In the more private circle of friends, countless users spontaneously promoted the air ticket blind box, and in a short period of time, Tongcheng Travel’s air ticket blind box successfully broke the circle.

In terms of effectiveness, this campaign was exposed 1 billion times across the entire network, with a WeChat index of nearly 100 million, a 450-fold increase year-on-year; the peak daily search volume of the WeChat precise search term activity exceeded 1 million, and the click-through conversion rate of the search results page was as high as 92.5%.

It is reasonable to predict that these spontaneous and free social media exposures will eventually lead more users who have not previously known about the event to search for it, thus completing the closed loop of the above link.

In summary, Tongcheng Travel has targeted the mismatched profit space on the supply and demand sides, and at the same time used the random rewards of air ticket blind boxes to encourage young people to participate in interactions, turning the originally unsellable air tickets into the industry's imagination and hot products. Therefore, don’t underestimate the reuse arbitrage of random rewards and the benefits of young people’s focus on experience.

3. Subscription-based cycle purchase "feeding strategy"

As the pace of life quickens, contemporary young people no longer like complicated product ordering and prefer a simple and rough decision-making process. Driven by consumers’ fear of trouble, brands have no choice but to adopt a “feeding strategy” and do everything they can to pamper their fans. Subscription-based periodic purchases are one of them.

From a business model perspective, subscription is a channel that allows brands to connect directly with users and users to provide direct feedback to brands. The subscription economy is a user-centric DTC model.

Source: Compiled from public information on the Internet

Fundamentally, the power of the subscription business model lies in the fact that it does not require users to continuously choose to "stay", but rather makes the default choice to "stay". If the consumer does not actively cancel, the service will continue by default. When a user chooses to order for the first time, a "weak commitment relationship" is formed with the brand.

The reason why it is called a "weak commitment" relationship is because the subscription system is different from the reservation system. Under the reservation system, users need to pay the merchant in advance, forming a "strong commitment" relationship with the brand.

Under the bond of "weak commitment" relationship, the subscription system can design the frequency of repurchases according to the RFM consumption model, improve user stickiness, and cultivate user consumption habits.

For users, the subscription system is to provide subscription services for users based on their purchasing habits, usage cycles, and product cycles. For users, this can reduce decision-making costs and provide an experience upgrade that is more in line with their usage habits.

Abroad, subscription boxes are also very popular among young people. As we mentioned in the previous case analysis, the American razor brand Dollar Shave Club began offering users online ordering for as little as $1 10 years ago, with a service that saw five razor blades shipped directly to their homes every month.

In order to bring more surprises to consumers in the unboxing experience during the delivery process, there have even been innovative ways of playing that combine blind boxes and subscriptions in foreign countries. For example, Stitch Fix provides women's clothing subscription blind boxes, where stylists help users choose a box of clothes every month, and then send them directly to their homes, creating endless expectations and surprises for users.

In China, the subscription-based "feeding strategy" is more common in the food and beverage sector, such as New Hope Huaxi Dairy promoting the "milk subscription cycle purchase" strategy during the 618 period.

The core strategy of New Hope Huaxi Dairy during the 618 period can be simply summarized into the following two points:

Improve wake-up efficiency for old users and increase volume to acquire new customers

Push different products and subscription cycles to new and old users

A. Segment users and arrange the delivery sequence

New Hope Huaxi Dairy has stratified its 700,000 old user groups. With the help of Tencent's data capabilities and its own resource package analysis, they analyzed the old users and divided them into the following three groups:

In the period of subscription

People who have stopped subscribing within one year

People who have stopped subscribing for more than one year

For these three groups of people, the order of delivery is determined according to their different levels of activity - priority is given to promoting renewal of people whose orders are about to expire; secondly, awakening and activating people who have suspended their orders; finally, by expanding the scale and attracting new customers, the delivery target is expanded to consumers who are interested in dairy products, fresh milk, etc., and delivery is carried out to pure new customers.

B. Accurately promote products and subscription cycles based on stratification results

Specifically, for new customers, they mainly promote star models, using new customer discounts to attract short-term users who order for 1-3 months. For old users, they mainly promote mid- to high-end products, with the main purpose of increasing the average order value.

In addition, their refined operations are also reflected in matching different advertising links for different products and target groups to more effectively guide conversions, for example:

Hot-selling celebrity items can be directly ordered on the mini program page to reduce loss;

The popular product aggregation page is mainly for new customers, giving them more choices and increasing their willingness to place orders;

For mid-to-high-end products, a product details page will be added to allow users to gain a deeper understanding and thus guide them to place orders.

Source: New Hope Huaxi Dairy Marketing Materials

From the effectiveness perspective, after a series of combined efforts, New Hope Huaxi Dairy achieved a conversion rate three times the industry average during the 618 promotion, with new customers based on pure advertising accounting for 60%, and private domain transaction volume within the WeChat ecosystem increasing by 46% year-on-year. After-sales customer service achieved zero complaints and zero negative reviews.

4. Use metadata to deeply connect with young people

Generation Z is a generation born on the Internet. They have been immersed in the Internet since childhood and are more easily influenced by social media and produce consumption behaviors. Therefore, their data records are like their consumption diaries. How can brands use metadata to accurately select their own consumer groups, and how can they use metadata to improve the efficiency of digital and refined operations?

First, let’s briefly introduce the concept of metadata: Metadata, also known as intermediary data or relay data, is data about data, mainly information that describes data properties.

By connecting digital native residents through data, more accurately selecting user circles and improving user operation efficiency, with the upgrade of privacy protection, metadata has become a more important cognitive asset for brands. It can help brands accurately define user circles, accurately perceive user needs, and ultimately improve conversion rates and communication efficiency between brands and users.

In terms of crowd insights, we take L'Oréal as an example to see how these giant companies, which are accustomed to traditional large-scale exposure, solve the problem of precision marketing in the process of moving online.

Specifically, the L'Oréal Group first integrated the user metadata assets within the brand, and after analysis, obtained model insights into different user portraits. It then used multiple data management methods and multi-dimensional combinations of target groups to deliver targeted materials based on the decision maker's portrait, in order to improve production efficiency.

Source: YSL Saint Laurent Beauty WeChat Moments Advertising Materials

For example, during the Chinese Valentine's Day, its YSL brand broke the traditional beauty marketing idea of ​​only targeting women aged 18-35. They realized that men also have the need for gift giving. Therefore, YSL carried out differentiated marketing for the same product based on the “male and female differences” portraits in WeChat Moments:

Targeting women: Posting materials in Moments to highlight the “seductive” effect of women after putting on makeup;

Targeting men: Taking advantage of the marketing atmosphere of the Chinese Valentine's Day, the product is presented in the form of a gift box to stimulate men's gift-giving demand.

By fully tapping into the cross-demands of male and female consumers, YSL began warming up in the first half month of the Chinese Valentine's Day. A week before Chinese Valentine's Day, they increased their investment and further increased the volume. Combining their previous metadata insights, they began to conduct concentrated exposure in Tencent Sports, an active scene for men, and carried out secondary marketing through oral broadcasts and creative inserts in NBA games. At the same time, the influence of the female anchor KOL was also used to gain social exposure on Weibo.

In summary, L'Oréal has leveraged its own brand's data insight advantages and combined multiple data integrations to improve its decision-making and insight efficiency, thereby strengthening its strong connection with consumers. Because we understand young people better, we have successfully filled their interest gap and further expanded our target consumer group.

5. The ultimate fusion of online and offline user journeys

Through the explanation of the above four strategies, we believe that we have a basic understanding of how to improve user experience in the era of experience economy. At this point, careful readers seem to have discovered that the previous four strategies emphasize more on the online perspective.

But in fact, based on the literal meaning of the experience economy, experience is inseparable from personal experience, which requires decision makers to expand their perspective across the board. The "seamless experience" online and offline is also the ultimate goal of the integration of the user journey.

Based on Nielsen’s insights, they believe that “in today’s new retail environment, we can observe a trend in which marketing touchpoints, information sources, and channels are increasing rapidly. The world of the new generation of online consumers will become more complex, fragmented, and ever-changing.”[5]

As decision-making and channels become more fragmented, brands need to improve their integration capabilities and glue together users’ “time fragments” so that users can enjoy “seamless integration” of heavy experience and heavy convenience.

In order to address the traditional problems of offline channel traffic efficiency, management efficiency, and delivery conversion rate that are not ideal, brands can migrate through the "location traffic" of online and offline user journeys and redefine the offline business model.

Online, brands can focus on exposure and traffic; offline, brands can focus on experience and service upgrades, and thereby bring users back online for continued exposure and service provision, guiding customers back offline and completing the user journey closed loop.

Let’s take Kidsland, which just went public on the ChiNext, as an example. As shown in the figure below, Kidswant has successfully achieved a closed loop of the user journey through digital marketing, digital stores, and digital shopping guides, coupled with more than one thousand store events each year.

Most noteworthy is that Kidswant upgraded offline store shopping guides into digital content distribution terminals, integrating them into the online and offline user journey, reaching consumers through all channels, maintaining long-term interactive relationships to promote their continued repurchases, and converting customers into loyal members, thereby increasing customer LTV.

When a user walks into a Kidswant store, the parenting consultant will immediately confirm their user profile and consumption needs. During the process of understanding, the shopping guide accompanies the users throughout and popularizes parenting knowledge to the users, recommends brands that meet the users' needs, and takes every opportunity to guide the users to download the Kids King APP, add the shopping guide's personal WeChat account, and push the Kids King public account to the users on WeChat, thus completing the task of reaching the "digital gift package" and thus building a repeat purchase system.

In our view, the essence of this link is that more than 6,000 shopping guides of Kidswant distribute electronic flyers in more than 400 stores across the country and provide action guidance for user cultivation. According to the data obtained from the Growth Black Box, the successful conversion rate of members in the cultivation step of Kidswant is about 40%.

After the cultivation is completed, a "one-yuan purchase for new customers" hook promotes first-time purchase conversion, and the shopping guide only takes 10 seconds to complete the first coverage of new customer users.

The most noteworthy thing is that Kidswant has seamlessly integrated the user’s out-of-store scenarios. When users leave the store, Kidswant will use online digital tools to encourage customers to repurchase. The APP makes extensive use of automated marketing and precision marketing technologies to provide appropriate discounts to appropriate users at the right time. Through the distribution of promotional content, it realizes online community operations and direct online transactions and repeat purchases.

On the private side of WeChat, Kidswant relies more on shopping guides using their personal WeChat accounts to push educational and service-oriented content to users, thereby establishing a trusting relationship with users, generating sufficient user stickiness, and ultimately achieving the distribution of activity-based content, prompting users to return to stores. Through this link, Kidswant successfully achieved the integration of online and offline scenarios.

In summary, the ultimate integration of Kidswant's user journey is mainly based on a system of more than 400 stores, upgrading more than 6,000 store shopping guides to digital content distribution terminals, integrating online and offline user journeys, reaching and serving consumers through all channels, maintaining long-term interactive relationships, promoting their continuous online repurchases and continuous return to stores, converting customers into loyal members, and thus improving customer LTV.

Global growth indicators, from ROI to ROX

Through the above case summary, we have constructed the cognitive system upgrade under the experience economy from five dimensions: exposure form, user incentive mechanism, user delivery experience, consumer behavior data insights and the ultimate integration of online and offline user journeys.

But we need to emphasize that the goal of experience strategy is to grow with people while continuously creating beautiful and valuable experiences for them, rather than simply obtaining financial benefits. Making money is a result, not a goal.

Here, we draw on the experience return model in the book "Experience Thinking" to share an insight with you: in the era of experience, the future growth indicator of brands will shift from ROI to ROX.

Source: Experience Thinking

Through the above model, we can see that Return on eXperience (ROX) is a dynamic model for analyzing the long-term benefits of experience, which consists of higher purchases, more people, deeper identification and longer-term relationships. Whether it is creating the overall brand experience or forming a symbiotic relationship between the brand and people, it is a long-term process and cannot be achieved overnight.

The familiar ROI is a static method for analyzing periodic investment returns, focusing on the short-term production effects of the brand. It may gradually become ineffective in the era of experience economy, and the challenges for brands to achieve a positive ROI will become increasingly greater.

So, how can we achieve global growth when switching from ROI to ROX? The user-centered underlying strategy we introduced earlier can be regarded as "Tao" and the five major growth strategies can be regarded as "skills", so the next thing is to find "tools".

We believe that from the perspective of AIPL link, Tencent Advertising will be the "device" of all global marketing. Its huge global resources such as WeChat (Friends, Official Accounts, Mini Programs), QQ, Tencent Hidian, Tencent News and Tencent Video have natural advantages. In addition, WeChat, which has a huge user, is the fundamental link in the ROX model to gain "more people", "deeper recognition", and "longer relationships".

While pursuing business growth, these brands have achieved endogenous growth through the ultimate integration of "Tao, Art, and Tool" through the ultimate integration of "Tao, Art, and Tool", and achieve endogenous growth in the long-term value retail system.

Author: Growthbox

Source: Growthbox