Behind Kuaishou’s entry into cities, how to promote in the rural market?

The rural market gives you a long time, and you have to grit your teeth and grind slowly; but the time is also very short. If you cannot make the model work first, and cannot guarantee basic gross profit margins and healthy cash flow, any ambitious team will be killed in minutes.

This year, I started to engage in cross-regional field crop harvesting services using agricultural machinery and served as the person in charge of the "Bang Nong Mang" brand operations. This article will use what we have done to explore the promotion issues in the rural market.

This article has 3,900 words.

1. Kuaishou’s “Transformation”

After receiving US$350 million in financing led by Tencent, Kuaishou , which has 400 million users and an astonishing number of people in third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas, began to aggressively place advertisements in large areas of residential office buildings in Beijing and Shanghai in July.

Kuaishou’s slogan goes like this: “There is no high or low in life, and everyone deserves to be recorded. Kuaishou APP records the world and records you.”

The brand campaign goal of this move is high-profile and eye-catching, and Kuaishou’s intention of “surrounding the cities from the countryside” is even more obvious.

This made me, a non-Kuaishou user, break out in a cold sweat: Why don’t they just focus on operating their own rural users properly, but spend so much money on advertising in cities? Is the conversion rate really good? Is it just because they have money and want to whitewash themselves from being labeled as "vulgar", "low", and "third or fourth tier"?

Someone once asked: "Why do I think Kuaishou is not fun?" The answer given by Kuaishou is: It’s not that you can’t understand Kuaishou, it’s because you don’t understand Chinese society yet.

It seems that Kuaishou has never said that it wants to enter the rural market, but under the product mechanism, it naturally attracted this group of users to gather first. This advertisement looks more like Kuaishou is repositioning its brand and expanding its user base.

This path of "repositioning" is a must for Kuaishou: once a label is tied to a brand, it will be difficult to reverse public perception. However, the average monetization value of existing rural users is too low. If we want to create monetization space and give investors an explanation, we must attract more high-income user groups. If we want to realize the beautiful ideal of "everyone deserves to be recorded", we need more users who are willing to pay.

At this time, if you are interested in the rural market, you should ask yourself again:

Should “rural users” be included in the scope of consideration for entrepreneurship?

2. 900 million farmers, in fact, is not simple

900 million, in terms of scale, it is definitely a market that cannot be ignored. However, the economic base determines the superstructure. The reality is that rural users are still a low-value group. Coupled with the layers of agency channels, the intricate interest chain, and high price sensitivity, it is even more difficult to obtain commercial benefits.

Directly cutting into the entertainment and consumption of the rural market, the difficulty and space for profit can be imagined. Although Kuaishou has no problem with its own profitability, most of the Kuaishou influencers only have fans. If they don’t allow higher-value users to come in, how can they make a profit?

However, if you don’t focus on entertainment and consumption, and your product/business becomes part of the agricultural production process, things will be different.

Because the roles of producers and consumers have a natural, high degree of unity and simultaneity in them. The development of consumption concepts and social habits are slow and vary according to region, but "agricultural production" happens all the time, throughout the year.

So what are the difficulties for rural users?

They are like ToB, because they are production and operation entities, like a small production service company in the middle. The production process has high capital flow, a competitive service market, a production cycle of several months or even a year, and they pursue maximizing profits and reducing costs.

But at the same time, they are all small Cs. Don't test their human nature when doing business with them. You can often only pity their misfortune and be angry at their lack of fighting spirit.

3. Three major difficulties in rural market operation and promotion

The Internet has greatly improved the efficiency of information and capital circulation. However, as far as the agricultural market is concerned, it is naturally geographically dispersed and has a long agricultural production cycle. Even if there is a clear demand and the Internet can improve the business model, it faces three major difficulties in promotion :

As far as my project is concerned, I also face these three problems.

Agricultural products are divided into planting, harvesting, selling and other links, and our project focuses on the "harvesting" link. Every year, 360 million mu of wheat, 450 million mu of rice, and 550 million mu of corn are planted across the country (data source: National Bureau of Statistics’ announcement on grain output in 2016). With the acceleration of land transfer and land trusteeship, land has gradually been concentrated in the hands of large households and cooperatives.

The time and number of "harvesting" each year are actually very limited. For professional farmers, if they buy a harvester themselves, not only will the fixed cost be high, but it will also depreciate quickly and have high maintenance costs. As a result, many large farmers no longer have harvesters, but instead hire specialized harvesting service providers - wheat harvesters (wheat harvesters).

A few years ago, Japan's NHK first paid attention to Mike and filmed a documentary; recently, Caixin Video also reported on related cross-regional operators.

Every year, wheat pickers travel from south to north, following the maturity of grain crops in our country, driving harvesters and undertaking most of the grain harvesting services in this vast land. Our project serves these cross-regional service providers from south to north and those who need the services.

The three major difficulties mentioned above are as follows in our project:

1. How to efficiently achieve conversions for geographically dispersed users?
2. Can we define and improve the value standards of the mobile phone industry?
3. How to control easily broken cooperative contractual relationships?

Let’s look at them one by one. The first thing is how to achieve conversion .

The "cross-region mobile phone operators" at both ends of our link are relatively more concentrated and easier to obtain; and because of the particularity of their work content, these people have very good Internet habits. We can quickly accumulate users by operating WeChat communities and official accounts.

On the other hand, our biggest challenge is how to reach the growers scattered across a vast area of ​​9.6 million square kilometers. The high offline costs have greatly squeezed our profit margins, which means that if we don’t want to spend money on charity, we must go online.

So where are our users? How can we reach them? On Kuaishou or Toutiao? In local tabloids and on radio stations? Before and after CCTV’s weather forecast?

We start with the new media with the lowest cost. We opened Toutiao and a public account for agricultural information services. Over the course of a month, we tried to publish articles from various angles, attempting to gain the attention of target users through topics that farmers care about.

Then, we set up a WeChat subscription account for farmers, collected information from the entire network, and pushed agricultural news. We hope to become a window that can provide agricultural assistant-related services and explore new demand points.

We have established a radar chart for content with four dimensions: spread, forwarding, active demand, and conversion, and screened high-quality content.

For those of us who are not from an agricultural technology background, these are not easy, but there is always a way to achieve success. Focusing on core business needs and having a clear positioning of content in a certain vertical field, trying to accumulate users through online services is a good way to reach them. If you are interested in the content operation of Toutiao, we can talk in detail later.

The second point is how to define and enhance service value.

Agricultural products are naturally non-standard products, and the service itself is difficult to quantify and measure. If it is not an administrative order, I don’t think this can be accomplished by one person alone in a day or two. It requires joint education of practitioners in the entire industry.

Nevertheless, we established a farmer satisfaction model, attempting to divide the value that the platform can provide to both parties into three levels in order to improve customer satisfaction.

If we design this set of service standards and evaluation system so that the gap between "user perceived value" and the "service value" we think we can create becomes smaller and smaller, such a design will be effective.

However, some core users of the platform still joked that we are like "a scholar meeting a soldier, unable to explain our reason clearly."

For example, we hope to create more standardized harvesting quality, use the "Five Gap Model of Service Quality" to standardize platform services, and try to enhance the platform's brand effect.

For example, we hope to have a smoother process in docking and settlement, so we have productized the display of order information, calculation of the number of acres harvested, and settlement of harvest payments, in an attempt to improve operational efficiency.

However, due to factors such as the invisible service, long cycle, and weak reference, it is necessary to consider whether there will be any uneconomical phenomena. Because the rural service market is very likely to be a "lemon market", the phenomenon of bad money driving out good money will occur.

The Market for Lemons is also called the defective product market, also known as the Akerlof model.

The lemon market exists because one party to the transaction does not know the true value of the goods and can only judge the average quality by the average price in the market. Since it is difficult to distinguish the good from the bad, they are only willing to pay the average price.

Since goods are good and bad, with respect to the average price, those who provide good goods will naturally suffer a loss, while those who provide bad goods will benefit. As a result, good products will gradually withdraw from the market.

As the average quality decreases, the average price will also decrease, and goods whose real value is above the average price will gradually withdraw from the market, and finally only bad goods will be left.

In this case, consumers will think that all goods on the market are bad. Even when faced with a good product with a higher price, they will be skeptical. In order to avoid being cheated, they will eventually choose the bad product.

When looking for services, farmers are small Bs. They have a businessman's mindset and tend to avoid risks, delay payment, and reduce costs. Therefore, we can only provide services above the market price at extraordinary costs.

But when it comes to integrity, long-term interests, etc., farmers suddenly become C again. The imperfect trust mechanism and low default risk have caused the value standards we have defined to return to their original form.

Finally, let’s talk about the third point. Since cooperation contracts are easily broken, extraordinary measures must be taken, and that method is finance.

This is our unexplored area, and the rural market is an area full of imagination. Perhaps in the end, the financial companies will be the ones who win in all rural markets. Because the demand for cash flow from means of production is far greater than any other demand.

4. Paying attention to brand concepts and operating methods is not as good as paying attention to users

We are too far away from them. This is my most intuitive feeling after entering the agricultural market.

Of course, we also tried to do brand activities and conducted research again and again to try to understand them better——

For example, mobile phone product launch conferences and early user communication meetings:

We have established the first and largest cross-regional fleet in Sichuan:

In such a harsh communication environment, a brand’s education is rough, many techniques are not feasible, and the feedback received may be the most realistic.

However, if all the skills that can be discussed on the Internet cannot be copied, is there nothing we can do in brand operations?

If rural Internet is developed according to the ToB approach, then it will be competing with traditional channels . Although it is bloody, the profits that can be generated are also considerable, such as the "Agricultural Installment" that entered the field of agricultural finance, and the agricultural supplies e-commerce "Dafengshou" that deals in pesticides and fertilizers.

But if production and consumption are so closely linked, is it possible to create a living circle first based on ToC? This makes it easy to fight against certain deep-rooted ideas and the mentality of taking advantage of small profits.

Kuaishou has succeeded because its product logic does not involve any value judgment. There is no threshold for all the content, and a consumer group with no threshold has been found. This is a carnival without a set reference system.

After all, being a brand and user of the agricultural Internet is a tough job, because: as you go along, you have to turn yourself into a farmer.

5. Final Thoughts

I was wondering, is it true that what farmers like to read are just those rustic and down-to-earth agricultural information? Can the superstructure build itself without rapidly changing the economic base?

The desire to be valued, the concern for national economy and people's livelihood, and the sense of superiority in comparison within a small circle, aren't these also simple psychological needs?

In addition to leisure time, there is also family matters and children's reading. Do they use their time the same way we do?

What the outside world is like and what changes it can bring to their lives, will they care?

What if the content we provide is not just business-related?
…

Do we really understand the people who are closest to the land?

At this moment, I suddenly realized that to understand "rural users" is to understand the operating mechanism of a world without the Internet or even without much industry and commerce. Instead of using the Internet’s thinking to nest, change, and spread, we should first treat them as rich and three-dimensional people.

It is definitely not you and me who will change the rural world. At least not you and me now.