There are three levels of product marketing. Which one are you in?

I have also mentioned in previous articles that studying anything can be divided into four steps, namely "classification, sorting, finding patterns, and application." This method can help you clear the fog and get to the essence.

Today's topic is to classify marketing and divide it into several levels.

Of course, classification inevitably involves classification standards and dimensions. Obviously, those old-fashioned division dimensions such as "print/video, online/offline, traditional media/ new media " do not touch the essence of the problem.

So how do we divide it?

Next, we will find the correct classification criteria from two core issues in the marketing field: "the results of communication" and "people's focus".

• Searching for the criteria for division
  
• First, let’s look at the results of the dissemination.

2016 is already far away. If we look back at the most impressive things in this year, these people, events, products and marketing activities probably come to mind:

WeChat red envelope photos, Alipay collects five blessings, the boat of friendship, Papi Jiang, Zhihu , National Live , AlphaGo, Mi Meng , G20, the power of the wild, Wang Baoqiang and Ma Rong, set a small goal first, Durex live broadcast with 100 people trying it on, Lei Yang case, Pokemon Go , Mobike, Song Zhongji , Guo Degang and Cao Yunjin’s master-disciple feud, escape from Beijing , Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours, Ge You’s paralysis, Apple Fengweilong spicy strips , US election, Fenda , " Luo Yixiao , stop right there", book throwing campaign, Alipay circle , Beijing seized pornographic clubs...

Everyone can recall on which platform you came into contact with these hot spots.

I think most of them were seen, spread and discussed on social platforms such as Weibo and WeChat . In other words, its influence gradually increases through the spontaneous discussion, sharing and forwarding of thousands of people, and eventually becomes a screen-sweeping, phenomenal, and nationwide product, event, and activity.

At the same time, in the past year, in China, countless televisions, newspapers, radios, movies , subways, buildings, and the Internet were still filled with thousands of various advertisements. However, their influence was far different from that of the above-mentioned events that could inspire spontaneous dissemination.

Why is there such a big difference?

The reason is the second issue we want to talk about - people’s focus . Today, everyone's attention has basically shifted to mobile phones, and no longer to newspapers, television, and billboards.

Where people spend their time determines which form of communication becomes dominant in the era.

In daily life, at a glance, we can see people everywhere, concentrating on playing with their mobile phones.

I once did a test and found that I "picked up and unlocked my phone 77 times and spent 5 hours and 20 minutes on it" in one day, of which more than 60% were spent using WeChat.

WeChat and Weibo are typical self-propagation platforms - only information that everyone is willing to share and forward can have a huge impact.

Therefore, judging from the results of communication and people’s focus, we can conclude that only products and marketing that trigger self-propagation and go viral on Weibo and WeChat can attract attention and have influence.

Since "self-propagation" is so important, it means that this is the standard for marketing classification we are looking for.

From the perspective of self-propagation: 3 levels of marketing

From the perspective of "whether it can stimulate self-propagation", let's rethink marketing and divide " broad marketing " into the following three realms:

Three realms of general marketing

The reason why it is called "broad marketing" here is because we also include products that have self-propagation capabilities and can speak into the category of marketing.

Next, let’s look at this marketing pyramid from bottom to top.

The first level: marketing without communication power

In the hundreds of years since the birth of the advertising industry, whether it is domestic or foreign, big brands or small brands, traditional industries, IT Internet industries, or today's online and offline advertising, it can be said that 99% of them have no spreadability.

Most advertisers and advertising agencies are at this level, working together to produce "marketing without communication power."

This type of marketing advertisement is characterized by "three difficulties", namely "difficult to attract your attention, difficult to make you remember, and difficult to inspire you to spread it" .

What you lack in creativity, you make up for in budget.

If you want to achieve the effect of this kind of advertisement that has no highlights, you have to spend a lot of money and rely on "forced viewing and highly repeated" money-burning investment to achieve it. This is true for most of the television advertising that was once extremely strong before the advent of the Internet, or for the building elevator advertising that is still thriving today.

The channels and programs on TV are all arranged, and you have no choice but to watch the commercials. When waiting for an elevator, or especially when sitting in an elevator for a few minutes, everyone has nowhere to put their awkward gazes, so it's easy to stare at the commercials.

“A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth,” not to mention that this is an advertisement that has some real evidence.

In addition to the "compulsory viewing" media feature that allows these marketing campaigns with no dissemination power to survive, the huge budgets of advertisers also add fuel to the flames. This is because once they have a lot of money and guaranteed coverage, the team will become lazy and no longer work so hard to come up with creative ideas, or even just hand it over to the 4A company. You see, sometimes having money can be a bad thing.

Of course, many people are now keeping up with the times and "actively embracing Internet thinking", thinking that this will eliminate marketing without the power of dissemination.

As a result, they rushed to open official Weibo and WeChat accounts, and worked day and night on the so-called " viral marketing , leveraging marketing , and social marketing ." However, they did not realize that this was just the superficial appearance of "Internet thinking," so they would inevitably end up with a bleak situation of "very few readings, reposts, and PVs."

The reason is that they fail to grasp the essence and confuse the relationship between content and channels . In other words, as long as the content is creative, it will spread on its own when it is put on traditional media. However, if the content is mediocre, no new media marketing will help.

The second level: Marketing with communication power

Although most advertisements are mediocre, there are some extraordinary and creative masterpieces in the history of marketing. A small number of advertisers and advertising companies have achieved the level of "marketing with influence" by relying on their outstanding strategies and planning capabilities.

For example, the several creative competitions between Coca-Cola and Pepsi , and the multiple marketing competitions between Mercedes-Benz and BMW. In today's era of information explosion and ever-changing mobile Internet , marketing with self-propagating capabilities is emerging in an endless stream.

Blendtec, an American blender brand, took a different approach and achieved great success by releasing a series of creative viral videos to promote its products. They dressed up as scientists and put strange things such as "new iPod, iPhone, lighter, golf clubs, oysters" into the blender and ground them into powder. Such novel videos inspired self-propagation, causing the number of views of a single video to quickly exceed millions.

These two days, I saw someone in my circle of friends forwarding “A Mysterious Customer” posted by “Genius Red Panda ” on April 21. It turned out to be an advertisement for Bangxianyu. The article tells about the author's strange experience of posting worthless items such as "a sofa with holes, a model with a strange shape, and a pair of red underwear" on the Xianyu App, and soon someone bought them. Finally, the mystery is revealed at the end of the article.

This article has been read over 100,000 times and received over 20,000 likes in just a few minutes. What is even more exaggerated is that the WeChat index of "Xianyu" soared from 11w on April 20 to 4.7 million on April 21 and 23 million on April 22. This effect may also be achieved through the combined efforts of other marketing activities, but the power of advertising experts should not be underestimated.

In July 2015, a piece of news that “300 Spartan warriors were pinned down/KO’d by Beijing police” went viral on the Internet.

It turns out that this is a marketing campaign launched by a business called "Sweetheart Rock Salad" on the occasion of its anniversary celebration. They originally planned to have the "300 Spartans" appear in Sanlitun , Guomao and other places in the form of flash mobs. As long as the public came forward to interact closely with the models, they could try the salads in their hands for free. These warriors attracted a large number of onlookers, and the police intervened for fear that they would affect the surrounding order. Unexpectedly, persuasion was ineffective, so he decisively used his ultimate move to knock him out. The sudden change in style is hilarious.

On the eve of National Day in 2016, when many people were anxious to celebrate the motherland's birthday and had no time to work, the "poisonous story" of Black Pineapple was all over the WeChat Moments, helping everyone to kill time.

These jokes can be used to tease colleagues or friends by name, or to express smug self-esteem and show off, which greatly stimulates self-propagation. Although everyone was having a great time, most people didn't notice the Black Pineapple brand, and even fewer knew that Black Pineapple was a "social app for private relationships."

The above four marketing methods can all be regarded as marketing with spreadability, but we should analyze them more deeply.

That is, marketing can be further classified based on how closely it is related to the business. In other words, it can be classified based on whether the core creativity of marketing is related to the business itself: related to the business or not related to the business.

Why further analysis? This is to avoid the tragedy of “marketing is popular but the brand is not”.

In both the "Blendtec Viral Video" and "A Mysterious Customer", business is reflected from beginning to end: one is repeatedly demonstrating the blender's super crushing ability, and the other is repeatedly talking about how to sell idle or even worthless second-hand items on Xianyu for money.

However, the two marketing campaigns, “300 Spartans” and “Black Pineapple Poison Story”, were divorced from the business, that is, the core creativity of the marketing had nothing to do with the business itself. In other words, the brand's presence is too weak, either being held in the hands of models or reflected in logos and QR codes in corners.

Obviously, we should pursue marketing with spreadable power, and we should pursue marketing that is closely related to the business.

Because "if you only rely on the logo to make your advertisement feel felt, then your advertisement is basically doomed."

The third layer: Products with communication power

The above two levels are essentially still within the scope of marketing.

A higher level is cross-border, which is to integrate marketing into products to create products with spreadability.

By achieving this, we can achieve the goal of “letting the product speak for itself”. Therefore, there is no need to do any additional marketing to achieve success. This is a bit similar to the martial arts state of "no sword in hand, but a sword in the heart".

To create a product with spreadability, there are two methods: "innate implantation and acquired addition":

Innate implantation

Congenital implantation means considering future dissemination at the beginning of product design and implanting the self-propagation mechanism into the core functions and main processes of the product.

CrushLink is an American social networking site that was founded in 2000. Its main user registration process introduced a powerful self-propagation mechanism.

When users register, they need to fill in the name and email address of their crush. After that, the system will send an email to this address, saying that someone has a secret crush on you, and display some detailed characteristics of the crush to increase credibility and stimulate curiosity, such as "the person who secretly has a crush on you has 6 letters in his name", "the person who secretly likes you has a name with the first letters between A and F", etc.

In order to get to the bottom of things, the person being secretly loved will easily register. Similarly, when registering, they will fill in the information of the person they secretly love. In this way, the information spreads from level to level, building an interesting "secret crush relationship chain".

Based on this clever and exciting design, CrushLink soon had 100,000 registered users. More than a year later, the number of users exceeded 2 million.

Xianlai Interactive Entertainment, a mobile game company that created the miracle of "established 8 months ago and sold itself for 2 billion yuan", adopted the "acquaintance mahjong" mechanism, which has both super monetization and self-propagation capabilities: you can buy a room card for a few dollars, and then use WeChat to invite friends and family to play a few games. Soon, the game went viral.

Founded in September 2015, Pinduoduo is a third-party social e-commerce platform focusing on C2B group buying. Users can purchase high-quality products at a lower price by initiating group purchases with friends, family, neighbors, etc. This product model, which naturally has the ability to self-propagate, has carved out a path in the red ocean of e-commerce.

Acquired Addition

If self-propagation was not considered initially, or self-propagation cannot be embedded in the main process, then it doesn’t matter. We can adopt the eight tactics of product self-propagation, such as “adding copywriting , planting easter eggs, visualization, sense of participation, customization, exceeding expectations, and catching hot spots”, to add the gene of self-propagation to the product.

Below, we will take "adding copy and planting Easter eggs" as an example to explain.

Copywriting is everywhere, and adding copywriting is the simplest, most feasible and most cost-effective self-propagation tactic.

An ordinary bottle of cola, juice and liquor instantly becomes different when added with interesting and sentimental copywriting. It can not only attract your attention, but also inspire self-propagation and take photos to post on WeChat Moments.

Most products are ordinary in themselves, but we can implant Easter eggs to make the products interesting.

The photo editing software Baidu Magic Photo and Tiantian Ptu have respectively introduced the easter eggs of "PK celebrity faces" and "Making elementary school student ID photos", which have greatly increased the fun of the products and stimulated self-propagation. Many people matched similar celebrities and made elementary school student ID photos, and then actively shared them.

Baidu Magic Photo even achieved amazing app activations of tens of millions in just a few days thanks to this Easter egg, which was truly amazing.

The benefits of creating self-propagation products

We should pursue marketing self-propagation, pursue marketing self-propagation that is closely related to the business, and we should pursue product self-propagation to reach the third level of marketing.

This is because there are many benefits to achieving product self-propagation.

Reduce promotion costs. Obviously, self-propagation is about continuously using intelligence and talent to achieve growth by improving the product itself, rather than spending money on hard advertising or new media marketing. So, there is no need to spend money or the budget requirement is extremely low, which is perfect for startups.

Strengthen user thinking. In order to add a self-propagation mechanism to the product, you need to always stand in the user's perspective and switch to fool mode to think about the problem. Have awe for the product, have a deep insight into user needs, and be concerned about user needs, rather than paying too much attention to the actions of competitors. This will greatly improve the team's user thinking ability.

Improve product experience. Every self-propagation point added to a product is a way to check for omissions, fill gaps, and improve the product experience. On the one hand, these achieve the goal of growth, and on the other hand, they achieve the goal of polishing the product. Therefore, a product with strong self-propagation ability must be a product with great experience.

Accumulate product value. It is undeniable that other conventional promotion methods such as advertising and cooperation can also bring growth, but the problem is that once the advertising or cooperation is stopped, the growth will stop. However, self-propagation is different. The self-propagation mechanism deeply embedded in the product will always work, often continuously bringing results at zero cost. It can be seen that self-propagation allows value to continue to be deposited into products.

Cultivate loyal users. Many of the means to increase self-propagation of products are to have deep spiritual communication with users, rather than cold tool use or placing orders. With the self-propagation mechanism, users may feel sharp and interesting, considerate, or eye-opening and touching. This will capture the hearts of users and continue to cultivate loyal users.

Build competitive barriers. Products with a complete self-propagation mechanism are also products that build competitive barriers. This advantage cannot be achieved in a short period of time simply by adding more staff or spending money on promotion. It requires sufficient time and patience to build.

Marketing from the perspective of self-propagation

Since self-propagation is so important to marketing, we can also observe the practices and methodologies of the marketing industry from this perspective, which will give us a different feeling.

For example, as we all know, Positioning, Li Jiaoshou , and Hua & Hua are all very powerful.

• Trout's positioning methodology has countless fans and is enduring. Recently, positioning implementation expert Gu Junhui even launched a course at a sky-high price of 58,000 yuan.
• Li Jiaoshou is young and promising. With his extraordinary strategic thinking ability, he has successfully created a popular marketing public account and produced many popular articles similar to "X-type and Y-type copywriting ".
• H&H's "super symbols are all super creative" methodology has also been quite successful, producing excellent marketing cases such as "Chef's soy sauce is delicious and fresh, sun-dried for 180 days" and "I love the Hebei Gu'an Industrial New City, 50 kilometers south of Tiananmen Square in Beijing".

…

But if we think about it carefully, we will find that most of the marketing methodologies on the market, including the ones mentioned above, do not address the issue of how to stimulate self-propagation .

Most of them may be solving the problem of positioning. Positioning is indeed very important and is the cornerstone of everything. But positioning is not a panacea. Positioning alone is not enough. We also need to solve the problem of dissemination so that people are willing to spread the content after seeing it. Or it is about solving the problem of "after we have users and traffic , how to use copywriting and creativity to correctly convey the benefits of the product and promote sales conversions ."

In other words, many methodologies are still traditional methods based on large-scale delivery - they will not work without large-scale exposure and traffic.

For example, the strategy of "drink Wanglaoji if you are afraid of getting a sore throat" is certainly powerful, but if you look through the marketing activities that spread this positioning back then, you will find that they were basically unable to stimulate self-propagation. Without hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment, the slogan “Drink Wanglaoji if you’re afraid of getting a sore throat” would not have been successful.

In contrast, Xin Shi Xiang , which has become famous in the past two years, is more adept at creating self-propagating marketing. It has planned screen-sweeping marketing events such as " Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours " and "Book Throwing Operation".

Conclusion

Self-propagation is the essence and core of marketing in today's era, and it is also the secret to product success and brand popularity.

From the perspective of self-propagation, we divide marketing into three levels from low to high: "marketing without communication power, marketing with communication power, and products with communication power."

Marketing with communication power can be further divided into two categories: "business-related" and "non-business-related". To create a product with strong communication power, it can be either "innately implanted" or "acquiredly added".

If you observe any marketing activities, product designs, and even those well-known marketing methodologies from the perspective of self-propagation, you will have new thoughts and gains.

In short, in this era, self-propagation is the end point and self-propagation is the starting point.

We should use the standard of "whether it can stimulate self-propagation" to re-examine all product designs and marketing plans and to divide the realm of marketing.

Okay, now think about it, among the three realms of marketing, which one are you in?