How can new brands break the curse of “explosion means peak performance”?

Nowadays, various new brands have emerged. Young people’s choice of brands is not limited to their uses, but more to their pursuit and love of the consumption trend of the new era. The popularity of brand traffic can be detonated at any time. How to retain traffic has become the key to new brands.

For every new brand, summarizing the methodology of successful people and learning from the best ones will surely achieve twice the result with half the effort in marketing practice.

Compared to the past when “it was difficult to succeed without spending money on advertising,” brands now living in the fragmented social media era obviously have more possibilities to become an overnight success.

With the rise of social media, new internet celebrity brands are emerging one after another, and it seems hard to predict which concept or product will become a hit instantly.

Yuanqi Forest has quickly become popular among young people with its so-called "0 sugar" and health-oriented products. Nayuki Tea has captured the hearts of young girls with its fashionable and good-looking appearance. Perfect Diary has won the enthusiastic pursuit of Generation Z with its "national trend". There are also Pop Mart, Hua Xizi, Zihaiguo, Zhong Xuegao, Wang Baobao... A large number of Internet celebrity brands are firmly occupying the C position in the new consumer market.

However, if we extend the timeline to the 10 years of the entire social media transformation, there are not many new brands that can truly continue to be popular, and most of them "peak when they become popular immediately."

Huang Taiji, Diaoye Beef Brisket, Instant Noodle Canteen, Answer Milk Tea... These internet celebrity brands that once created a myth of instant popularity and attracted countless followers to imitate them and were overused by marketing lecturers have now almost disappeared.

Why do they fall into the curse of "peaking when it becomes popular suddenly"?

Analyzing the paths to fame for both new and old internet celebrity brands, we can see that social media promotion and traffic harvesting are the only way forward. However, a cruel reality is that traffic increases quickly but is difficult to sustain.

Just like the more fleeting a love is, the more likely it is to pass away. If you want to grow old together, you must continue to work hard to maintain it. For internet celebrity brands, if they want to survive for a long time, in addition to achieving a short-term explosion in the "traffic pool", they must also turn to the "trust pool" for long-term brand operations as soon as possible. Doing both is the hard truth.

Today, with the explosion of social media and the rise of heavy users of social media - Generation Z consumers, every new brand not only has to think about "how to build brand influence on social platforms while reaping the benefits of traffic", but also has a new topic, which is to quickly capture the minds of young people through social media, thereby achieving a win-win situation for both brand and effect.

Although it is difficult to completely replicate the strategies of different brands, in terms of methodology, the experience of successful brands is worth learning from. From the practical operation of hot products on social media, we can summarize several efficient templates for building lasting vitality of a brand.

01 Build brand personality, lower your profile, and win the favor of users

Compared with the lofty, one-way cramming marketing of the past, the biggest feature of marketing in the new era is probably the willingness to humble oneself, make friends with users, and be like a real, emotional "person".

This is called brand personification.

NetEase Cloud Music attracts more and more young people to express their feelings with the heartfelt comments contributed by users in the comment section; the cute Xiao Ming classmate successfully made the concept of cold brew popular with the jokes on the bottle; Durex, which is both dirty and erotic, always makes young people understand, and has become the marketing king in the social media era...

Why is brand personification so important today? It's simple. Today's new consumer market is dominated by young people, who refuse to be preached and yearn for equality and respect.

Sandunban cold brew instant coffee, which was previously listed on Weibo's "Hot Products List", can be said to be well versed in brand personification. As a new brand with big brands like Nestlé blocking its way in front and many peer brands eyeing it from behind, Sandunban has been able to repeatedly win the favor of capital and become a well-known Internet celebrity brand, which is inseparable from the shaping of its highly personalized brand personality on social platforms.

If you open Sandunban’s Weibo homepage, you will find that their blog posts are rarely promotional advertisements for pure product promotion and marketing sweepstakes. Instead, they are more like a quiet, literary and delicate friend who doesn’t seem to talk much, but every word he says is heartwarming.

Santonban, which is highly favored by users, is also well aware of one of the characteristics of Weibo, which is that Weibo, which mainly uses text and pictures to communicate, is particularly convenient and easy for ordinary users to express themselves. It can be seen that the fan blog posts that are liked and forwarded by the official Weibo account all contain Santonban Coffee’s life insights and interesting sharing copy. The exquisite and fashionable product packaging is an indispensable element of the pictures.

With the help of its amateur fans on Weibo, Santonban can not only attract more people to consume, but also often inspire more "tap water" to join the army of photo-posting, thus achieving more extensive promotion. In this way, Sandunban has formed a complete closed-loop sales ecosystem of "browsing/purchasing - taking pictures and posting photos - return purchases".

This is exactly the brand interaction posture that young people love most. Compared with short-term traffic explosion, a close and warm brand official WeChat image can easily make people trust it, and the loyal fans accumulated based on this gradually build up the brand's "trust pool".

Another example is Luobawang, which specializes in snail noodles.

River snail noodles were originally a favorite of niche enthusiasts, but after being on the hot search list on Weibo for more than a dozen times during the epidemic last year, it has long become a well-known online celebrity product. Among them, the online celebrity brand Luobawang stood out with its heartwarming videos and attracted a large number of young fans online.

During this year's Spring Festival, Luobawang, which had just signed the new generation popular star Peng Yuchang, released a Spring Festival short video on Weibo, inviting users to bring the taste home with Peng Yuchang. The first half of the video lists various scenes that directly hit the pain points of young people, such as moving, overtime, and road closures. The second half introduces snail noodles with the sentence "Life doesn't always move forward, but the direction of home never changes." The natural turn subtly stimulates users' emotions and increases consumers' favorability.

In daily marketing, Luobawang is also good at using a more humorous, more equal and more down-to-earth attitude to integrate with young consumer groups. By reading every blog post on Luobawang’s Weibo homepage, it is easy to sense the attitude of the “people” behind the brand, and you will naturally develop a sense of closeness and trust.

With high-quality content full of humanity as the "soul", supplemented by precise fermentation on social platforms such as Weibo, a brand image with delicate and humorous emotions and a strong sense of the Internet has been established.

Philip Kotler, a modern marketing guru, once said: "A successful personalized brand image is its best public relations, which can promote a closer relationship between the brand and consumers and gradually deepen consumers' feelings for the brand and its inherent culture. Ultimately, the image of the brand in the minds of consumers is no longer just a product, but gradually evolves into a full-fledged person, even with his own image, personality, temperament, and cultural connotation."

This is the unique value of brand personification.

02 Find cultural resonance within the circle, move people with emotion, and complete user sedimentation

Among a host of emerging brands, if we were to say which one is the most "unbelievable", Pop Mart is definitely one of them. It has successfully gone public in just five years after transforming into the trendy toy market and has a market value of nearly 100 billion yuan. It has extremely high social topic views and sales growth, and has truly broken the "explosive popularity means peak" curse. And exploring its secret to success, accurately hitting the culture of young people's circles, arousing emotional resonance, and then completing user sedimentation is extremely important.

In today's new consumption wave, Generation Z, with a population of nearly 300 million and a spending power of 4 trillion yuan, cannot be underestimated. As natives of the Internet, Generation Z has strong characteristics of the times: they have a strong desire to share, pursue interests and individuality, and at the same time pay attention to a sense of belonging and emotional identification. They prefer to make friends in their favorite circles, such as the two-dimensional world, trendy toys, sneakers, etc., and have their own specific social circles.

Among Pop Mart's consumer groups, those born after 1995 account for about 70% of the share. This group with common interests and hobbies has also formed its own "gathering place" on the Internet. The Weibo super topic #"POPMART泡泡Mart" has a very high popularity. In this online community, fans can not only learn about official information, but also post, share photos, recommend products, and avoid risks related to all aspects of Pop Mart with like-minded friends.

As of now, the super topic "POPMART" has accumulated 68,000 fans, 147,000 posts, and 720 million views. It can be said that Pop Mart has found its own social attributes on Weibo, which also has a large number of active Generation Z users.

In circle topics, fans will exchange their hobbies with each other, share and even exchange trendy toys. It can be said that consumers have used Pop Mart as a kind of social currency, as a key to open up social topics and increase social stickiness within their circles. In this process, the ultra-high frequency of communication and transaction information has brought Pop Mart an extremely high user scale and social voice.

In this process, users in the circle have built an increasingly solid foundation of trust in Pop Mart, thereby continuously adding to the latter's "trust pool" and continuously consolidating its brand barriers.

03 Accumulate brand potential and accumulate brand social assets through long-term operation

Xiao Mingchao, CEO of Zhimeng Consulting, proposed the concept of "brand social assets" at the "Weibo Brand V Power Summit". It is composed of user assets, voice assets, and content assets, and is a comprehensive value of consumer trust and relationship accumulation.

The construction of brand social assets is a three-dimensional, diverse and interconnected process. New brands must not only achieve rapid explosion, but also carry out long-term brand building, continuously accumulate brand potential, and precipitate brand social assets.

Therefore, it is crucial to try to use more marketing techniques, combine them organically, and continuously penetrate the three dimensions of users, voice, and content, so as to build a solid brand moat.

Take Ozark’s three-step matrix marketing combination as an example.

Founded in 2013, Ozark is not a new brand, but from the perspective of social media marketing, it did not "get the hang of it" until 2019, so it can be considered a new player.

In 2019, Ozark collaborated with the movie IPs "Midnight Diner" and "The Climbers" and launched a Weibo welfare lottery event before the movie was released to attract fans to forward and participate in the event; during the popular period, it deeply bound the movie and the brand, carried out joint marketing, and generated content topics through the movie plot, which aroused user resonance and interaction, and accumulated a large number of user private domain assets.

Since then, Ozark has turned its attention to variety show IP marketing, and has successively cooperated with variety shows such as "Sunny Sisters", "OMG Play Beauty", and "OMG I'm Your Blue Friend". At the same time, it has used variety shows + celebrity topic traffic to create the concept of "celebrity same style", deeply interacted with users on Weibo, and strongly promoted the brand.

Ozark's big move this year was signing Xiao Zhan as its brand spokesperson in April and officially announcing it on Weibo. The endorsement information was detonated along the entire chain of Weibo users' browsing paths, helping Ozark to "show off" its strength and gain fans in circles such as variety shows, entertainment, and music. In less than 3 days, the number of reposts of this official Weibo announcement reached over 1 million, the number of comments reached over 130,000, the number of fans of the official Weibo account increased by over 200,000, and the exposure of the Weibo topic also reached nearly 600 million views.

The extremely high volume and traffic on social media instantly stimulated Ozark's top-level popularity. Just 40 minutes after the official announcement of Xiao Zhan's endorsement of Ozark, the number of people who purchased the gift box alone on Taobao's platform had exceeded 220,000.

With the combination of movie & variety show IP collaboration + top celebrity endorsement + social platform fermentation, Ozark has successfully achieved brand upgrading on Weibo. Moreover, by deepening its grass-roots power and brand power, it has occupied the consumer minds of more and more young users and achieved the accumulation of brand social assets.

To sum up the marketing experience of Internet celebrity brands such as Sandunban, Luobawang, Pop Mart and Ozark, the two things are nothing more than: first, they know how to capture the hearts of young people; second, they know how to continue to deepen brand influence after increasing traffic on social platforms that are in line with the brand.

In today's era, as the experience value and social value of products become increasingly significant, it has become an important issue in new brand marketing to accumulate high-quality social assets by carefully managing the needs of young people, constantly polishing users, voice, and content.

For every new brand, it will inevitably face various challenges when it actually operates, but summarizing the methodology of successful people and learning from the best ones will definitely achieve twice the result with half the effort in marketing practice.

Author: Yinuo

Source: Entrepreneurship Frontline