Event promotion: Analysis of the purpose and routine of Baidu’s card collection event!

Following the Alipay card collection activity, Baidu also started a card collection activity this year. Many of the routines are the same, but there are some innovations in the gameplay mode. Let’s take a look at the author’s analysis:

An indispensable part of every Spring Festival is the red envelope activity. In previous years, Tencent and Alibaba have reached exclusive interactive cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala. After you finish your performance, I will take the stage. This year, Baidu will participate in the red envelope interactive session of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala for the first time!

As pre-event warm-up activities, the first three activities launched in the early morning of January 28 were "Collect good luck and share 100 million", "Red envelopes for team members worth one million per show", and "Watch the Spring Festival Gala and share 900 million on the same day".

Let’s talk about the first hot event here: “Collect good luck and share 100 million”.

The "Collect Good Luck and Share 100 Million" activity should be the most familiar gameplay mode for everyone. This is a variation of Alipay's "Collect Five Blessings".

There are two main changes in Baidu's card collection:

1. Alipay previously had five cards with the five blessings, but this time Baidu has ten cards with the words "福", "财富", "寿", "喜", "财", "好", "运", "中", "国", and "年".
2. The cards are directly divided into common cards and rare cards. Rare cards have clear descriptions, namely [Good], [Luck], and [Year].

1. How to obtain the card

1. The system gives you 3 chances to draw cards, and you get a text card each time.

2. Complete tasks to get a chance to draw cards. There are 7 tasks in total for novices. The tasks are as follows:

• 2.1 Daily participation in activities (+3 chances to draw cards)
• 2.2 Share duplicate cards with friends (+1 chance to draw a card)
• 2.3 Your friend successfully receives the card (+ 2 chances to draw a card)
• 2.4 Go to Haokan Video to watch recommended videos (+ 2 chances to draw cards)
• 2.5 Participate in the member red envelope activity (+ 2 chances to draw cards)
• 2.6 Open Kuaishou and watch a video (+ 2 chances to draw cards)
• 2.7 Search for popular New Year content (+ 1 chance to draw a card)

3. Invite friends to increase the probability of obtaining rare cards.

2. A brief analysis of the card issuance routine and purpose

1. The system gives you 3 chances to draw cards, lowering the threshold, and you will definitely win a card each time

Compared with the familiar Alipay Five Blessings Collection, Baidu Card Collection this time uses the form of ten text cards. Lowering the threshold ensures that a large number of novice users are not blocked from the door, and they are sure to win every time. Compared with Alipay's collection of five blessings, the situation where the result of the draw is a New Year's blessing is eliminated, making users think that collecting cards is relatively easy, and thus generate interest in continuing to collect cards.

1. Daily activities

Sprint to warm up for the Spring Festival activities. Habit formation. Let users' silence cost increase continuously in the early stage until the Spring Festival, pushing the activity to its climax.

2-2 and 2-3 are actually one step, sharing the card. Breaking it down into two steps is to allow users to get a chance to draw a card as soon as possible. It is also a common timely incentive in the task system. The benefit of timely motivation is that every small step is rewarded. This constantly induces the completion of relatively large tasks.

2-4, 2-6 You can get 2 chances to win the lottery by watching the video content in the "Haokan Video" and "Kuaishou" apps respectively.

With the popularity of video social applications, the most obvious thing is the fierce competition between Toutiao and Tencent. Representative works of Toutiao: Douyin, Xigua Video, Huoshan Video, Duoshan, etc. Representative works of Tencent: Weishi videos, NOW live broadcast, etc. In addition, WeChat 7.0 has two actions. One is the addition of video social networking [Moments Video] with multiple entrances; the other is a recent rumor that the public account owners planned by Tencent Live can interact with fans through live broadcasts.

So what about Baidu?

Baidu is actually not as calm as Robin Li appears to be. There is a huge search traffic entrance, but there is no good promotion scenario. During the Spring Festival, as the largest cultural festival in China, Baidu focuses its efforts on promoting its video products, which shows its urgency in competing for the video scene product market.

Baidu actually has a social plot. Tasks 2-2, 2-3, 2-5, and 3, acquiring user relationships, are just part of the preliminary preparation. In the task system of this event, 2-4, 2-6, and the concentrated fire promotion video are only part of it.

2-7. Set a group of keywords around the New Year to create an atmosphere and guide users to search. Baidu has the final say on what specific results to display. After all, there are no advertisements on each of the ten text cards this time.

3. Design mechanism of the tipping point

Now we see that people are asking for cards everywhere, it is very popular. Is it because this is Baidu's activity? Is it because of the Spring Festival Gala?

Yes, but it is only part of the factors. The most critical thing is the design mechanism; users only care about their own small part, that is, the impact on themselves.

Mechanism 1: Sunk Costs

Users are more afraid of losing than gaining rewards. If lost, the initial investment will be meaningless - this is the sunk cost.

When people decide whether to do something, they not only consider whether it is good for them, but also whether they have invested in it in the past. We call these irrecoverable expenses, such as time, money, and energy, "sunk costs" - Baidu Encyclopedia.

For example, there are two milk tea shops. One of them gives users a blank card. Every time the user makes a purchase, the card is stamped with a small stamp. If the user collects five, he can exchange them for a free cup. Another milk tea shop allows consumers to poke ten small stamps on the card. Consumers are given six small stamps for the first purchase, and one small stamp each time thereafter. When the number reaches ten, you can exchange it for a free cup. In essence, you are buying six cups for the price of five. According to experiments, the latter is much better than the former - because the user experience of the latter is 60% complete from the beginning, while the former is only 20%.

In this card collection mission, everyone can easily obtain 7-8 different cards through the mission. Everyone can basically obtain 9 different cards through exchange. There will definitely be a rare card that you cannot get.

Is there a feeling of dedication to one’s work?

Can this type of card collection mission be stopped after 90% completion? Most people simply can't stop. Just like watching a drama, you have to watch the ending until the end. Because the silent cost invested in the early stage affects the current judgment.

Mechanism 2: Strictly limit acquisition and gifting

There are three rare cards: [Good], [Lucky] and [Year]. Because there are rules when distributing cards, each person can only have one of each rare card, and many people cannot get any of the three rare cards, which creates scarcity.

Some people hope to register multiple accounts to get more and then give them to themselves. Don’t try it, it doesn’t work. Compared with Alipay's "Five Blessings" activity, Baidu's card collection strictly limits user identification, that is, the correspondence between device and account, and one device can only participate in one activity. In addition to device and account restrictions, two additional restrictions are added to gift circulation:

1. Only duplicate text cards can be given to other users. To a certain extent, it can reduce the phenomenon of "swiping" cards.
2. If you already have a text card, you cannot receive a gift of the same text card. This can prevent cards from being hoarded in "large quantities" by some users.

These restrictions do not exist when collecting the five blessings through Alipay.

Mechanism 3: Extra rewards for early users + luck

Unlike the Alipay collection of five blessings, after Alipay collects the five blessings, you wait for the prize draw, and everyone shares the prize pool equally, and the rewards received are the same.

But if you make a slight change in Baidu Card Collection, the effect will be very different.

The card collection page shows: There are extra rewards for the 1st to 888th place, limited edition golden pigs. Plus, most users can get 8-9 different cards. This will allow most users to frantically request the card during the warm-up period.

Can you ask for it? As analyzed above, it is almost impossible for every user to have the same scarce card. In addition, the acquisition and gifting of cards are strictly restricted, so of course, it is impossible to obtain them by asking for cards.

In one day, less than 200 users collected all ten cards, which is still a long way from 888, but everyone thinks they might be the lucky one. So I asked for cards everywhere - history always repeats itself surprisingly, I remembered the Jingyefu of that year.

Therefore, smart users started to sell text cards, with ordinary cards ranging from 1 to 10 yuan, and users who were looking for scarce cards offered astonishing prices.

Everyone will do the math and think about how much they can gain by collecting all the cards before the 888th person and getting the "Limited Edition Golden Pig". That is basically the upper limit of the price they are willing to pay for the scarce cards.

Since everyone's valuation of the "limited edition golden pig" is inconsistent, the bids made by users seeking scarce cards are also ridiculously high.

4. Temporary scarce cards

Scarce cards will not always be scarce. This is the lesson learned from Alipay’s five-blessings collection. Baidu’s card collection will not make the same mistake again. In Alipay's first Five Blessings campaign, less than 4% of people collected all five blessings. Considering such a huge amount of traffic, more than 96% of people came back empty-handed. What an astonishing number! It is extremely undesirable to make so many people unhappy. But later, starting from the second time of collecting the five blessings, everyone could basically collect all the blessing cards quickly.

Baidu's card collection service is a latecomer, and with the experience and lessons of its predecessors, in theory it will not upset most people, and the scarcity is also temporary, at most one or two days, and the scarce cards will soon be available on the page. Doing this in the early stages prevents most people from collecting all ten text cards, which is a form of hunger marketing with only one purpose: to allow everyone to form interactive discussions, expand the influence of the event, and pave the way for the climax of the Spring Festival Gala.

Once the goal is achieved, rare cards are no different from ordinary cards and can be easily obtained.

V. Conclusion

Three points to summarize:

1. The event cooperates with the Spring Festival Gala, which is the biggest cultural potential festival and can bring huge traffic to Baidu.
2. In addition to promoting Baidu Mobile, Baidu is also working hard to pave the way for social networking, with video social networking being the most prominent.
3. By designing various rules, we can warm up for this event and strive to achieve maximum benefits.

As a technology company that relies on search to conquer the world, it remains to be seen whether Baidu can get a share of the social networking pie through the Spring Festival Gala activities.

Source: The Great River Flows East (ID: amazingdahe)