How to gain traffic from niche culture?

The brand 's attention to and pursuit of niche culture stems from its observation of young people's lifestyles. The development of the Internet has provided a platform for the development of niche culture and a channel for expression. Niche subcultures that naturally come with topics are particularly valuable in today's world where information is vast and attention is scarce. As the Internet traffic dividend gradually disappears, brands have turned their attention to the "niche" with greater explosive power.

In recent years, discussions about "mass marketing " and "niche marketing" have been going on one after another, and some people have even said that "the mass is dead", but there is no clear definition of what is "niche" and what is "niche culture", and the direction is unclear, so the giant ship of niche marketing cannot set sail immediately.

Niche culture is a cultural trend among young people today. Young people today have grown up in the tide of the Internet, are highly personalized, and have their own different preferences. The more niche they are, the more they can express their personality. How to better attract the attention of niche groups of people? How to transform the strong explosive power of niche into strong brand exposure? With these questions, we consulted brand marketing expert and Beijing general manager of Shiqu Interactive Liu Shuo to discuss the issues of niche cultural marketing.

Niche culture is not caused by material or physical differences. It is more reflected in the differences in spiritual values, beliefs, or the differences in approaches when encountering problems in life. Liu Shuo said that it does not necessarily refer to a specific number of people, but more to a group led by a certain set of values.

In recent years, there has not been much change in the number of people in subculture circles and in vertical circles. For example, there are very few examples of a subculture growing from a group of several million people to tens of millions. However, their channels for expressing their opinions and the content they produce have increased. With the development of mobile Internet , it is easier for everyone to see niche information around them today, and everyone is more open-minded to tolerate and accept these niche cultures.

We may feel that all kinds of niche groups and subculture circles seem to suddenly appear around us today. It is not necessarily because their numbers have increased, but because we can see them more easily. In fact, they existed when mobile Internet was not so developed, but we did not have access to them.

Nowadays, many people will post or forward what they like on their Moments , which makes it easier for others to see it, so naturally they think that subculture is popular. In addition, today's young people, especially those born after 1995, also prefer to realize themselves in subculture circles. When Shiqu was doing research on those born in the 1990s and 1995s, it found that for young people, self-cognition and self-awakening have become more important.

From historical origins, we can see that in the past 20 years, consumers have paid more attention to popular, mainstream, or sociable things, because everyone’s education and living environment are an organized and group-oriented era. Today's young people, especially the only-child generation born in the 1980s, have been living in their own world since they were growing up, without having to share with their brothers and sisters or consider their feelings. Many years ago, the media called the post-80s generation "little emperors" because each family at that time had only one child, so the family poured all their resources into one child, which suddenly made this generation's self-awareness stronger.

People born in the 1960s and 1970s always considered others, the organization and the overall situation more, but in the 1980s, people paid more attention to the awakening of self-awareness, and this became even more obvious in the 1990s. At the same time, with the development of the economy and the emergence of the Internet, it is easier for everyone to develop self-awareness. This is also why we feel that niche cultures and subcultures have suddenly become more numerous and more popular.

In the past two years, there have been many examples of niche culture moving towards the mainstream, such as hip - hop and rap culture after The Rap of China. This should be a phenomenal cultural change. Hip-hop is a popular culture with a long history, but it has never been widely popular in China before. After a series of variety shows, film and television dramas and other programs, it quickly entered the public eye and is a representative of the trend of niche subculture towards mainstream culture.

In the past one or two years, another area that has become more prominent is extreme sports. It is reported that starting from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the IOC will include some extreme sports, such as surfing, into the Olympic events. Therefore, the State Sports Commission now has a lot of investment and policy planning in the field of extreme sports. This may also be an opportunity for the incubation and development of niche culture in the next few years. As China's economy develops, more and more people will participate in extreme sports.

Others such as talk shows, street dance, two-dimensional animation, online literature, geeks (technology enthusiasts), Chinese style, etc., are all developing in different forms in their respective fields, and are also slowly entering the public eye.

The demand gap of niche groups has long shifted from matching basic needs to consuming spiritual needs. They are willing to spend a lot of time cultivating and immersing themselves in their own cultural communities . For brands, the attention of these consumers is the most important, and brands need to ensure that consumers think of it when using their products.

At the same time, in order to maintain the vitality of the brand in the long run, it is also necessary to connect with consumers on an emotional level. Then, appearing in the culture that young people love and establishing connections has become a compulsory course for many brands.

How to do brand marketing for niche culture? This proposition is actually quite interesting, because many brands have tried it in the past few years. For example, when trying to make their brands younger, they hoped to have better contact with young people through some niche culture.

Niche culture itself has a set of values, it is a spiritual thing. Therefore, when a brand hopes to reach out to subculture groups or niche groups, it must first share the same values ​​as them and cannot always use the banner of a legitimate business to engage in subculture. The reason why niche culture is niche is that they have their own set of values ​​and ideas and will not succumb to mainstream ideas. If you want to engage in niche culture, you must first be prepared to see whether the brand can converge with them in values, or whether they are willing to adhere to their values. This is a very important premise.

On the basis of recognizing the values ​​of subculture, we should do a good job in building our own brand, be more in-depth and professional, and then think about how to leverage this group of people. Niche culture is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when your values ​​do not match them, they will resist you or remain indifferent. But once your values ​​are very consistent with theirs, they will take the initiative to find you and will become your users or consumers autonomously.

Today we encounter too many large brands and ask what their brand vision is? They would say that they want to be number one in the world, number one in China, and so on. First of all, this is not a vision, but just a goal. Secondly, the bigger and more comprehensive a brand wants to be, the harder it will be to fully engage with young people in subcultures.

In the past, some brands wanted to make their brands younger, or hoped to use subculture to attract young people who share the same values ​​as themselves to pay attention to themselves. Usually, we would suggest that brands first create a young sub-brand, that is, create a dedicated young brand under the parent brand, and use this young brand to leverage the subculture market. This is one possibility.

Many brands, especially beverage brands, have made similar attempts. For example, Xiao Ming, a brand under Uni-President, uses an anthropomorphic image to launch a tea beverage that is actually not much different from others, but it has gained more popularity among young people.

Faced with niche cultural marketing that everyone is paying attention to but doesn’t know how to start, brands seem to face two choices: one is to change themselves to cater to young people, and the other is to do a good job in leading young people. In this regard, Liu Shuo said that it is difficult for a brand itself to influence a culture.

There are only a handful of brands that can influence culture. Coca-Cola represents American culture, and Apple represents innovative culture. It is very difficult for a brand to lead popular culture or even subculture. This may be a more macro concept.

If you can't influence the subculture, then should you change yourself? It is not necessary, because brands, especially some large brands, involve a very wide range of things and have to take into account many macro aspects. If they insist on catering to a niche culture, they will take great risks. Their market share will become smaller because the audience will become smaller. It is not appropriate to change from a popular brand to a niche one.

If a brand can integrate the characteristics of niche culture with the brand core through some changes, such as product renewal, or through cooperation with some IPs at the product level or marketing level, it can actually help the brand better gain the attention of a group of young people.

A big brand is like a huge battleship. If you ask it to turn around and go down a small stream right now, it simply cannot do it. If it wants more inland people to know about it, it can only send a small boat out to reach the target population, which may be a better option for the brand.

Telunsu x Jingxiu: Meet time, meet beauty

Mengniu has a product line under Telunsu, which is cooperating with many IPs of Chinese classical culture, such as Beijing embroidery. In the recently popular "Story of Yanxi Palace", the clothes worn by the actors are particularly beautiful, and the embroidery method used is Beijing embroidery, a craft that is about to be lost. Telunsu cooperated with Jingxiu to make a card about Jingxiu. This is actually an attempt at niche culture. It wins the attention of a group of people who pay more attention to traditional culture by paying attention to this more traditional culture.

Niche culture will not become popular because it has unique values. Once it becomes popular, new niche culture will emerge. On this basis, niche culture can always stimulate the better development of popular culture and give popular culture more perspectives, and the same is true for brands.

A report shared by Shiqu Interactive shows that middle-class urban families are willing to spend 100,000 yuan or more per person on personal hobbies, which includes some relatively niche activities such as skiing, skydiving, bungee jumping, diving, etc. Shiqu Interactive believes that a middle-class family with an average annual income of 500,000 to 800,000 yuan would be willing to spend nearly 10% to 20% of their income to delve into a hobby, which means they must care about it very much; they will study it in depth and have many of their own values ​​in it.

For brands, if they want to gain the recognition of core fans of niche culture, they cannot communicate superficially. Only by truly understanding the needs of niche culture and being even more professional than core fans, and becoming a powerful promoter of a certain culture, can a brand further deepen the core of this culture. For example, car driving. In fact, a car is originally a means of transportation, but with the gradual optimization of performance by car manufacturers, coupled with the profound superposition and accumulation of car culture, the driving experience has gradually become a new hobby. Today's new middle class in China has a good educational background, relatively high income, and is willing to try more challenging, personalized and enjoyable life experiences.

Through data, Shiqu has gained in-depth insights into the needs of new middle-class consumers, explored the life philosophy represented by the brand's genes, and broken through the original "supercar perception" of people who love driving. Together with BMW, it has created a new middle-class hobby label: "technical driving." By creating a technical driving system, we will shape driving training courses above L2 into a hobby with the attributes of a new middle-class high-end lifestyle, and use more professional training methods to promote it to the growing new urban middle class. "Technical driving", which was originally a niche hobby, has been perfectly integrated with the "driving pleasure" that the BMW brand insists on, making this niche hobby more professional, more interesting and more popular with consumers.

The recently popular star-development program has gained a large number of fans with high viewing volume and topic volume. The "Wang Ju" phenomenon that swept the circle of friends some time ago has also caused her personal attention to soar, achieving the marketing effect that many brands dream of. So, are the marketing methods that can cause crazy forwarding on social platforms worth learning? How to break the curse of having popularity but no sales, and having fans but no conversion rate ?

First of all, secondary dissemination through social media is indeed an important basis for intuitively verifying whether the dissemination is successful. In the past, before we had social media or mobile Internet, even if we did large-scale dissemination, we didn’t know what specific effects would be experienced after people watched it. Brands place advertisements, for example, before and after the news broadcast, but it is impossible to determine how many people have watched the advertisement, nor is it known what the audience’s feedback on the advertisement is.

Technological innovation has made it possible for anything we say today to receive feedback, especially in the field of niche culture, where people have a strong desire to express and protect the cultural phenomena they care about. An important intuitive criterion for judging whether the communication effect is good or bad is whether it has aroused social topics or attention from circles. If it is not done well and people don't like it or are unwilling to discuss it, then it is a marketing failure. For this industry, it is a form of "hooliganism".

Secondly, today we also come into contact with some relatively traditional brands, which are still relatively confined to traditional media when doing communication. In our opinion, this is a waste, and of course, waste is also a "crime". The brand has created a lot of great content and has many great propositions, but it doesn’t put them on social media, communicate with consumers about them, or allow consumers to have more feedback on the brand. This is actually a waste of resources.

For example, a brand spent 20 million on sponsorship during the World Cup , but it did not promote the event at all. The sponsorship ended after that, but very few people knew about it. In fact, the organizer gave corresponding rights and interests, and the benefits were not bad, but it was not promoted again. Wasting resources is also a "crime" to some extent.

In fact, "niche culture" and "brand" are essentially contradictory. The core of niche culture is personalization, which emphasizes being different. The birth of the brand is, to a certain extent, a symbol of scale and standardization in the industrial age. A brand represents standardized standards and quality, helping consumers judge the quality of products while sacrificing personalization.

Therefore, there is a dynamic standard for what type of brand is suitable for cultural marketing. The core of this standard lies in whether the brand can represent the personality of its consumers to a certain extent. Therefore, whether a brand’s marketing has secondary dissemination on social media is an important measure of marketing success, but it may not be suitable for all brands.

Source: China Advertising Magazine (ID: chinaadvertising)