Domestic products do not need Xiaohongshu-style marketing

Xiaohongshu has started to take the black-and-red route.

The previous "Pink Beach" craze has not yet passed, and the hot search for "4 yuan for a recommendation note" has once again plunged Xiaohongshu into a crisis of trust.

There has always been a saying in the industry that if you want to successfully build a new domestic consumer brand, you should first post 20,000 articles on Xiaohongshu, then 8,000 articles on Douyin, 1,000 articles on Bilibili, and 800 articles on Zhihu. If you choose one of Viya, Li Jiaqi, and Luo Yonghao, the brand building will almost be successful.

Although it is a joke, it also reflects the netizens and user groups' ridicule of the overly crude way of brand building of domestic products.

As the first stop for building a new brand, the importance of Xiaohongshu is evident. However, recently, Xiaohongshu has been repeatedly exposed to excessive and false marketing incidents such as Buddhist girls, scenic spot filters, and paid recommendations. A problem that was originally in a gray area has been placed in front of domestic products.

Marketing involution is the norm for new domestic products. Excessive and false marketing is common in this circle, and it is far from being a problem of a certain brand or a Xiaohongshu. After all, marketing efforts mean the size of the market, but can rough marketing methods enable domestic products to increase repurchase rates and enhance brand premiums in the next stage?

Or, might it become a stumbling block for domestic products to enter a new era?

The inexhaustible Little Red Book

In 2013, Xiaohongshu was still a sharing community that provided basic shopping guides for Chinese consumers traveling abroad. It became a favorite of returnees because of an article titled "Xiaohongshu's Overseas Shopping Guide."

At that time, there was an inherent perception that foreign products were good. These consumers who went abroad for shopping were at the top of the consumer pyramid and were among the most skilled shoppers.

Whether it is the overseas shopping methods or the purchased products, the word "high-end" is written on them, which has a great influence on the shopping choices of ordinary consumers.

Compared with platforms such as Zhihu and Douban, Xiaohongshu focuses on picture and text notes, with fewer words and a lower threshold for content creation. In order to increase the customer conversion rate, it is common for bloggers to exaggerate the efficacy of products, resulting in polarized content tone.

As the number of users increases, the requirements for content quality and quantity become higher, but the content produced by the original high-quality KOLs can no longer meet the growing user needs.

High-quality KOLs have been diluted, and the ability to produce high-quality content no longer exists, but the tone of requiring high-quality content has continued. The imbalance between supply and demand has given content producers room to falsify content.

If it is just a simple sharing, there is no harm in editing the pictures, but the fact is that there are often purchase links under these grass-roots notes.

This is not just Xiaohongshu's fault. You can also see advertisements everywhere on Tieba, Weibo, Douyin, and Kuaishou. Recently, Douyin and Kuaishou were fined 200,000 yuan for violating the Advertising Law. The fundamental reason was the excessive promotion of consumer video advertisements.

Every once in a while, a new internet celebrity product will emerge from Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc., but due to their own quality issues, the product life cycle is short.

After a brief boom, consumers will immediately see all kinds of weeding out videos. Even some popular concepts on the Internet platform, such as "acid peeling" and "stem cell cosmetics", require the State Food and Drug Administration to personally step in to weed out.

This also seems to indicate that the brutal strategy of relying solely on promoting products and leveraging the influencer effect to gain long-term stable traffic is no longer feasible.

New consumer companies are iterating rapidly and occupying the daily lives of young consumers.

Now that new consumer brands have completed the first stage of "laying out", how to improve the brand, brand concept and efficient supply chain will become the focus of new consumer brands in the next stage.

The fundamentals of the new consumption era are very good, but there are too many bubbles. Some new consumer products cannot correctly understand the hearts of consumers and make incorrect interpretations of consumer behavior, making it difficult for long-lasting products to emerge.

Faced with a complex market environment, how domestic brands can avoid being hurt by excessive marketing will be a new round of test.

Domestic products should carry culture

In recent years, there has been one wave after another of revival of domestic products, and the general environment has been of great benefit to the development of domestic products.

According to the "2020 China Consumer Brand Development Report" released by the Alibaba Research Institute, the online Chinese brand market share reached 72% in 2019, and domestic brands in many fields such as large and small appliances, and entertainment have developed rapidly.

Consumers are crazy about domestic products, which is reflected in the brand marketing. As long as they add the word "domestic products", they can gain a lot of traffic.

There was heavy rain in Shanxi some time ago, and Erke rushed to provide assistance in times of crisis. Its live broadcast room was crowded with netizens, giving many domestic brands a vivid marketing lesson.

For example, after the "Xinjiang Cotton Incident" broke out in March this year, the online sales of overseas brands were hit hard, while the sales of local brands soared.

From March 25 to March 31, Li Ning's sales increased by 383% year-on-year, Anta's sales increased by 174% year-on-year, and 361 Degrees' sales increased by 212% year-on-year.

It is not difficult to find that the popularity of domestic products always coincides with the time of major domestic events.

This further illustrates that when consumers purchase domestic products, they are deeply binding their national identity with domestic brands, and that domestic products are a vehicle for consumers to realize their national pride.

The 2020 Chinese Brand List pointed out that the time for some emerging domestic brands from the opening of their Tmall flagship stores to achieving sales of over 100 million yuan has been shortened to as little as 7 months, and more than half of their consumers are born after 1995.

The "2019 China Consumer Brand Development Report" shows that those born after 1995 recognize domestic products more than imported brands.

The post-95s generation who are eager for innovation and change buy domestic products not only based on cost-effectiveness and rational decision-making, or even impulse shopping in the traditional sense. It is based on identity support for "domestic products".

Domestic products that can go abroad must be the ones that understand Chinese people the best, and will reflect this "understanding" in their marketing strategies.

Domestic brands have a profound traditional cultural heritage of 5,000 years and huge room for development. If they want to stand out, they must have cultural support, which is the key to the core competitiveness of domestic brands.

The rise of domestic products is timely, and the new generation of consumers currently has the patience to wait for them to thrive.

But this patience will not be unlimited. For contemporary young people, spiritual satisfaction is more important than material satisfaction. They will not tolerate any stain on the carrier of national self-confidence.

However, in fact, excessive marketing and quality stains of domestic brands objectively exist.

How to respond to consumer expectations will be a profound topic for all domestic brands.

Marketing should also be based on martial ethics

For any brand, word of mouth is a vital part.

Many domestic brands now have an inexplicable superstition about soft advertising, believing that soft advertising leaves less traces of promotion and is more acceptable to consumers.

But that's not the case.

Users may have become tired of or even resistant to the current situation of soft ads flying everywhere, because they have no way of knowing which ones are real grass-roots ads and which ones are advertisements. When consumers find it difficult to distinguish advertisements on grass-roots ad platforms, they will treat all Amway ads as advertisements with the mentality of rather killing a hundred by mistake than letting one go.

Not treating consumers as fools is the first step to ensuring good reputation.

Is hard advertising really inferior to soft advertising? That may have been true a year or two ago, but it is a different story now.

On October 17, Mr. He, a UP host in the technology section of Bilibili, released a video titled "I made the product that Apple gave up." In the video, he made an AirDesk full of black technology, and the number of views on Bilibili has reached 10.092 million.

But what is really worth talking about in this video is not the product itself, but the Leckey advertisement inserted in the last minute of the video. It was a traditional hard-core advertisement, but it led to a rise of 550 million yuan in Lechuang’s share price, a 13% increase.

If domestic products want to seize the opportunities of the times, it is not advisable to rely on Xiaohongshu, which sells articles at 4 yuan per article. The key is to truly grasp the needs of consumers.

When this generation of consumers buy things, what impresses them more than quality is novelty. This means that domestic brands must rely on marketing, authenticity, fun, romance and other seemingly thankless methods in order to win the hearts of post-95s.

It is not impossible to come up with new ideas for traditional advertising. Letting your imagination run wild and treating brand building as a story, rather than issuing press releases everywhere and placing advertisements wholesale, is the second step to building a good reputation.

The best way to break out of the circle is to cross borders. During the 2019 Spring/Summer New York Fashion Week, Lao Gan Ma's hooded sweatshirt really amazed everyone. Regardless of aesthetics, it does have the effect of expanding influence.

Black and red are also red. As long as it doesn’t disgust consumers, it is good marketing.

Similarly, Wuling Motors sells snail rice noodle; Liushen Floral Water and Rio launch co-branded cocktails; Tsingtao Beer and the upcoming Winter Olympics jointly launch a national beer...

Of course, there must be a limit to innovation, and you should avoid overdoing it.

Runbaiyan, which has recently become a hot topic, is a typical example of overdoing it. As a skin care product mainly targeting female users, it invited the gaming blogger "Big Brother Daidai" Sun Xiaochuan to promote it, and the promotional copy also imitated Sun Xiaochuan's tone: "The earth dog turns into a water dog."

The most interesting thing is that this spokesperson has been criticized many times by female netizens for using disrespectful terms to refer to women.

This kind of witty marketing method is not an isolated case of failure. Previously, Intel hired Yang Li as its spokesperson, which also caused dissatisfaction among male compatriots.

Xiaohongshu, which is mainly used by female users, has turned female users into resources and used their photos as advertising materials to attract new male users, which has been collectively accused by Xiaohongshu users...

Marketing also requires ethics. It is basic ethics to serve whoever makes money from you. Correctly understanding user demands is also an important factor in preventing the collapse of word-of-mouth.

Of course, giving back to users is also part of building a good reputation. Make good use of sunk costs to let consumers develop habits, and be driven by habits, becoming addicted to the product. This cycle will produce a sunk effect.

In the addiction model, users can only invest time and energy by being rewarded at fixed nodes.

When it comes to brand building, only by giving consumers real discounts from time to time can consumers be encouraged to repurchase, thus forming a complete and healthy consumption closed loop.

Whether it is marketing or feedback, it is crucial to let consumers see the brand's sincerity. Taobao’s Double Eleven red envelope gameplay is a typical negative case. When building a reputation, you must not play with empty words, otherwise you will spend money but not get good results.

As for false marketing, it is even more unacceptable. Consumers' goodwill needs to be accumulated bit by bit, but it only takes one advertisement to make them hate you. It is easier to fail than to start over. To make good domestic products, we must start by staying away from all false marketing.

The decline of a brand begins with the loss of creativity; the silence of a brand ends with mistaking marketing for simple photo-editing.

Author: Jiang Yue, Editor: Sai De

Source: Ginkgo Finance (ID:yinxingcj)