From 0 to 1, reshaping the Xiaohongshu "Internet celebrity" brand

In the past few years, Internet celebrity brands have been enviable, subverting the traditional image of "hype and short life". From Perfect Diary, Huaxizi, to Heytea, Ramen Says, Zhong Xuegao, Wang Baobao Cereal... These brands are all the lights of domestic products that people have paid attention to in recent years and emerging growth miracles.

01 The underlying logic of Internet celebrity brands

As the name suggests, Internet celebrity brands refer to brands that become popular quickly with the help of the Internet. They can use the traffic dividends of platforms such as Xiaohongshu , Douyin and Kuaishou for marketing at the fastest speed, and use Tmall flagship stores to receive traffic. In a relatively short period of time, they can become the top brands in the category and form influence within the circle.

In March 2018, the ice cream brand Zhong Xue Gao was officially established. On Double Eleven of the same year, 50,000 pieces of Zhong Xue Gao were sold within 40 minutes of its launch, setting a record of 4.6 million yuan in single-day sales and ranking first in sales in the ice cream category. On April 1, 2020, the "first-generation Internet celebrity" Luo Yonghao sold Zhong Xue Gao in his personal live broadcast debut, and eventually topped the list with sales of 198,000 pieces. In just two years, Zhong Xue Gao has become the hottest ice cream brand.

Figure｜Qiangua Data

With the arrival of summer, Zhong Xuegao ushered in another year of the main battlefield of brand marketing. Qiangua data showed that in the past 30 days, Zhong Xuegao had 1,195 related notes on Xiaohongshu, an increase of 86.43% year-on-year, and the total number of interactions was 127,500.

In the process of Internet communication, people's value is magnified and their functions are increased. For brands, a major factor in becoming an Internet celebrity brand is to master the underlying logic of celebrities, namely: communication power, interaction power, influence circle, conversion power, purchasing power, and retention power, and use their linkable and shapeable attributes and the ability to obtain traffic through content social networking to efficiently form brand explosiveness and influence.

It is precisely because Xiaohongshu has been deeply engaged in the UGC shopping sharing community that it has been able to grow into the largest consumer word-of-mouth community and community e-commerce platform in just a few years, with over 100 million monthly active users and a "grass-planting" artifact in the hearts of many young women.

02 The hard-core methodology for building an Internet celebrity brand: finding people based on “interests” and breaking through the circle

As traditional TA cognition is broken, consumer diversification has become a reality, and population classification has become more accurate. Brands can form brand product segmentation based on population classification, such as word-of-mouth party, brand party, price party, appearance party, following party, ingredient party, fan party, technology party, niche party, and curiosity party.

In my country's ice cream market, the high-end market has been occupied by foreign brands such as Haagen-Dazs, Nestlé, and Wall's, the mid-range market is dominated by Mengniu and Yili, and the low-end market is occupied by local private enterprises such as Deshi and Tianbing. If you want to enter the ice cream market, you need to have absolute advantages and highlights.

Picture｜Xiaohongshu-Zhong Xuegao

Therefore, Zhong Xuegao combined its products with mature cold chain logistics technology, positioned itself in the mid-to-high-end ice cream market, and tapped into the middle class's preference for high-quality ice cream and the need to enjoy ice cream at home at any time. It focused on the family warehouse consumer market and defined its products as low-sugar, low-fat, healthy ice cream.

The rapid development of e-commerce and cold chain logistics has led to new scenarios for online consumption and home consumption of ice cream. Coupled with improvements in ice cream craftsmanship, Zhong Xuegao has created a blue ocean market for home-stored low-sugar ice cream. In addition, Zhong Xue Gao, with its good looks, unique appearance and stick signature with great content attributes, perfectly fits the user portrait and sharing preferences of Xiaohongshu, and has been recommended by countless people on Xiaohongshu.

Understand the field and the language within it

When choosing a platform for advertising, brands need to understand the proportion of KOLs and high-quality fans with different fan sizes on each platform, as well as the distribution of likes/ratings from fans of different sizes, so as to quickly evaluate the value of the advertising. Secondly, the content that a brand delivers must match the tone of each platform in order to more accurately reach users and capture their minds.

The "2021 Xiaohongshu KOL Marketing White Paper" released by Qiangua Data conducted specific research on Xiaohongshu KOL.

Figure｜Qiangua Data

In the process of users influencing each other through real sharing, Xiaohongshu has gradually become the mini Baidu and Dianping in the hearts of young women. They have a strong desire to share, are good at imitating, and yearn for a refined life.

During the advertising process, brands need to deeply explore the platform model, understand Xiaohongshu's hot words, inclusions, etc., so as to optimize the operation plan.

Build relationships and trust with content

Form brand language through marketing content, create content scenarios to link brand with users and form brand impression.

1. Possessing personality IP, the personality is warm, and the brand-exclusive label arouses emotional resonance

2. Keep up with the trends, create new memes, and use humor to win users’ favor. Build stickiness and trust with users through high-frequency interactions to arouse fans’ enthusiasm.

3. Establish a fan welfare mechanism to provide users with ways to participate, start the "infiltration" mode, and "attract traffic", "pamper fans", and "retain fans" in one step

4. Learn to be a "celebrity", be good at combining forces, and make yourself a "hot search system" through cross-border and other means.

During the 2021 Spring Festival Gala, Wuling Motors became a hot topic thanks to the red masks it created in collaboration with CCTV, and received widespread attention and recognition from netizens.

Picture | Weibo

Looking back at Wuling's road to popularity, as early as 2020, when the epidemic situation improved and the government encouraged the "street stall economy", Wuling Motors launched two new models that "can sell goods as soon as they are opened", attracting the attention of a large number of netizens. They were called "street stall magic cars" and quickly spread on the Internet.

Wuling's move not only caters to national policies and consumer demands, but also allows Wuling Motors to return to its core business, better combine brand values ​​and products, deepen consumers' understanding of the car brand, and enhance consumers' trust in the brand.

KOL: Brand Incubator

KOL promotion is an important part of brand promotion and is an “amplifier” of brand voice and sales. It can directly convey information to fans through content, thereby achieving brand promotion or direct transaction conversion.

There is a positive correlation between a brand's voice and sales. Perfect Diary, a proud Chinese brand, has surpassed international brands with the help of KOLs on Xiaohongshu. Hua Xizi walked out of Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room and became popular on the entire Internet with its KOC tactics. When brands select influencers on Xiaohongshu, they can use Qiangua data to screen influencers with different attributes, analyze their account data, and select influencers with stable data and matching TAs to layout the brand delivery matrix.

Figure｜Qiangua Data-Expert Search

In addition to helping brands find influencers quickly, the systematization of tools can also realize detailed analysis of data, evaluate the effectiveness of a single collaboration with an influencer, understand the brand image in the minds of users, and thus optimize subsequent "content" output.

03 From “Internet celebrity” to “long-term success”

The era of China's rising consumption has already come to us. Internet celebrity brands are no longer a flash in the pan. After completing the journey from 0 to 1, the biggest challenge facing Internet celebrity brands is whether product innovation and supply chain can keep up with the pace of brand expansion as their brands gradually expand their markets and target groups, and whether the products can satisfy the needs of the general public while also satisfying the needs of more segmented groups.

The only way for an internet celebrity brand to become a long-lasting popular brand is, in addition to continuing to dig deep and create genuine, differentiated and self-selling products, constantly injecting new freshness-maintaining agents into the brand is the secret weapon for its continued popularity.

Figure｜Qiangua Data-Brand Ranking

Looking at the Xiaohongshu commercial advertising rankings, traditional brands such as Estee Lauder, MAC, and L'Oreal still maintain a large amount of monthly advertising, bringing new attention and interaction to the brands. By using KOLs to enter social media in the form of content, they can be turned into mental hits, thereby expanding the scale of consumers for the hits and extending the sales cycle of the hits.

In addition, brands can also clarify their brand positioning and starting point through corporate philosophy delivery and storytelling, breaking away from traditional category management and moving towards brand building, which is more conducive to sustainable brand development.

On May 11, large-cup bra brand Naitangpai, in collaboration with New World View and Tmall Treasure New Brands, released its first brand topic short film "I Have a Big Trouble", inviting 12 girls with large breasts to speak out their inner monologues.

Picture｜Network

Through this short film, Naitangpai speaks for big-breasted girls, telling people that behind every "trouble" related to big breasts lies the girls' unique courage, confidence, optimism and diverse beauty, highlighting the brand's spirit of helping big-breasted women face their bodies, abandon prejudice and build confidence.

As the cost of KOL/KOC rises, after public domain traffic diversion, building a brand's private domain traffic pool has gradually become a major trend for brands to increase user repurchase and extend the brand's front line. By providing fans with high-quality and comprehensive services, user experience needs can be met in multiple dimensions, helping brands to break through the circle and cultivate users.

04 Conclusion

In today's era of fast consumption, Internet celebrity brands can quickly grasp the preferences and needs of young people, gain space for brand growth, and master the fundamentals from 0 to 1 and continued popularity. Only then can they have endless vitality after becoming an Internet celebrity brand and create a long-lasting brand.

· Target the core circle, focus on differentiated innovation and segmented tracks, and ensure that content runs through the brand life cycle.

· Build brand reputation through continuous promotion by KOLs, focus on shaping brand concepts, grasp marketing trends, and implant the brand in consumers’ minds for a long time.