The underlying logic of hot products and traffic

There are three characteristics of explosive products: high demand: the matching efficiency of products and demand; high spreadability: the amplification efficiency of encoding and media; high conversion rate: the causal efficiency of decision-making and motivation. Today we will talk about the second part of high spreadability, that is, the traffic logic of explosive products: how do traffic and audience produce a chemical reaction?

1. What are highly contagious products?

Highly contagious products have three main characteristics: strong radiation, many ripples and self-propagation.

The first major characteristic of highly transmissible products is strong radiation.

This is measured based on two dimensions: high kinetic energy or high potential energy.

What does high kinetic energy mean?

It's similar to setting up a large loudspeaker in the village to play something in a loop so that all the villagers can hear it.

Advertising on CCTV also belongs to this type. As long as enough money is invested, it can cover more people. This is called high kinetic energy.

What does high potential energy mean?

For example, the news about Sanxingdui has been very popular recently. It didn't spend any money on advertising, so why is it so popular?

Conventional archaeology is to explain something clearly. The cultural relics unearthed from Sanxingdui are not only difficult to explain clearly, but also bring a lot of suspense, becoming a topic of concern to the whole society. This is the type with great potential energy.

The second major characteristic of highly contagious products is that they have many ripples.

Throwing a large stone into a small pond will make a loud noise at first, but the ripples will quickly dissipate.

When it rains, the kinetic energy and potential energy of each raindrop are not large. Tiny raindrops hit the water surface, forming a ripple, and you will find that the entire surface of the pond is covered with ripples.

This is the case where the individual kinetic energy and potential energy are not very large, but the density covered within a certain spatial range is high.

Focus Media’s advertising is characterized by high density and many ripples. Because Focus Media covers many buildings, you can often see it.

The third major characteristic of highly contagious products is self-propagation.

Advertising on CCTV does not constitute self-propagation. Although these advertisements have great kinetic energy, their potential energy may not be great.

If an advertisement, product or brand can become a social topic, countless people will take the initiative to discuss it.

Although no one has advertised or spent money to spread the news about the discovery of new cultural relics in Sanxingdui, you will find that countless people are actively discussing it.

Because everyone thinks that Sanxingdui is related to us, and these cultural relics are related to the early source of our Chinese civilization. How could such advanced smelting and welding techniques appear? Is it the Chinese civilization, an alien civilization, or aliens?

These questions arouse a lot of curiosity among people and trigger more discussions, and are highly self-propagating content.

What kind of content has the property of self-propagation?

The first type is emotional consumption. A welcome emotional effect.

The second type is emotional consumption. The emotional effect of empathy.

The third type is utilitarian consumption. The utilitarian effect of seeking benefits and avoiding harm.

To summarize, products with high spreadability often have the above three characteristics: strong radiation, many ripples, and self-propagation, which correspond to large source energy, high coverage density, and large autonomous inducement.

2. The relationship between traffic and media

We generally have a very superficial understanding of traffic, and usually think of it as the flow of people or attention on the Internet.

What is abortion?

I opened a store on the roadside, and 1,000 people passed by my store every day. This is the flow of people.

What is attention flow?

If an article is read by 1 million people, it will attract huge attention. This is not real human traffic, but a flow of one million attentions.

Traditional traffic, in a narrow sense, refers to these two.

What is the essence of traffic?

We believe that the essence of traffic is business opportunities.

Traffic can only have an effect when it is combined with certain media.

What is medium?

The medium is the container in which the flow reacts with the product.

We see several types of media in our daily lives. Let me give you a few examples.

The first one is the founder’s speech.

For example, when a company founder speaks at a forum, this is a medium.

The founder is a social identity. When he speaks, people do not think of him as an individual, but as the legal representative of the company.

In this way, the information about the entire company, products, or brand can be disseminated to the outside world through the founder's speech at a forum.

The second type is the restaurant facade.

The restaurant storefront is a very good medium. Some restaurant storefronts are very well done and very attractive to passing customers. The eye-catching rate is high and the conversion rate into store visits is also high.

The third type is public welfare.

Some companies actively engage in social welfare, support Hope Primary Schools, support local poverty alleviation construction, etc., and have a very good social reputation. This is also a medium.

At this point, it may be a bit confusing. How many types of media are there?

We believe that there are three main types of media that can promote traffic and product reactions: advertising, word of mouth, and public relations.

From the perspective of a merchant, how are these three media defined?

Advertisements are written in the first person, where you speak well of yourself;

Word of mouth is the second person, customers say hello;

Public relations is the third person, the third party in society says hello.

Along these three dimensions, traffic and media can produce many reactions.

Here we give a brand formula:

Brand = two-way traffic (communication symbol + memory awakening) + two-way value (commercial value + social value)

For example: Kung Fu brand = Bruce Lee (communication symbol) + Chinese nutritious fast food (memory awakening) + steaming (commercial value) + de-frying (social value)

Zhen Kung Fu has a super-spreader symbol. Taking the image of Bruce Lee as the visual prototype and adding the three Chinese characters "真功夫" (real kung fu) form a symbol recognition system that can be spread among strangers.

Because after customers consume at Zhen Gongfu, they can describe Zhen Gongfu to others in a few words. Even if this person has never seen the Zhen Gongfu brand, he can still have a general understanding and remember it through his friend's description.

This is a one-way traffic that a merchant can use to penetrate toward the customer side.

How does the traffic return from the customer?

We have said it many times: sales is when businesses take the initiative to find customers, and marketing is when customers take the initiative to find businesses.

What is the reverse traffic that customers actively come to me for? What is this opposing force?

The counter force is that we set up a category for Zhen Gongfu: Chinese nutritious fast food.

When customers think of nutritious Chinese fast food, they may instead think of Zhen Gongfu.

This two-way traffic includes one direction from the merchant to the customer and the other direction from the customer back to the merchant.

Traffic alone is not enough; it also requires a certain medium to produce a physical or chemical reaction with the product or brand.

There are two main types of media: one is commercial value and the other is social value.

What is the business value?

When you come to me to consume, I will provide you with corresponding goods and services. I am not cheating you and I feel at ease. According to the previous classification, is this advertising, word of mouth, or public relations?

You get what you pay for, that's definitely advertising. This is business value.

At the media level, if there is only advertising, the potential energy of the corporate value is not large, the radiation source is not large, and there are no ripples and self-propagation, what should we do? We also need to increase the potential energy.

Public relations is reflected in social value.

Zhen Gongfu is a commercial brand, what is its social value?

Zhen Gongfu is a steamed dish, a nutritious Chinese fast food. In the Chinese perception, steamed dishes have nutritional value and are authentic. There is no need to spend money on education, so the cognitive cost is very low.

However, steamed dishes are found in all major cuisines and are not a single decision point that can drive consumers to make consumption decisions.

It is at this time that Zhen Gongfu consciously proposed to put "steaming" in opposition to "frying".

When it comes to fried food, the first thing that comes to mind is foreign fast food represented by KFC and McDonald's.

Zhen Gongfu defines them as bad, non-nutritious fast food preferred by the previous generation. We must be responsible for the health of all Chinese people, especially children. Children like to eat fried foods from KFC and McDonald's. Zhen Gongfu is a new generation of Chinese nutritious fast food that meets the needs of consumption upgrades.

This has social value. Ripples and self-propagation are all here.

Originally, your opening of a restaurant has little to do with us. Now it has become a new generation of consumption upgrade, and healthier and more nutritious fast food has become closely related to most of us.

In the end, big companies like KFC were forced to come out and declare that they wanted to make Chinese fast food, which had a huge impact on the industry and society.

To summarize:

The essence of traffic is business opportunity.

Traffic must be combined with suitable media to react to the product. Such media are usually divided into three types: advertising, word of mouth, and public relations.

Advertising is a rigid redistribution of traffic resources.

Word of mouth is the reconstruction of pre-transaction traffic after the transaction.

Public relations is the re-aggregation of traffic based on social topics.

As for business opportunities, we also give a formula:

Business opportunity = Ability to seize opportunities * Energy enhancement * Media carrying capacity * Traffic response

We can no longer just talk about traffic. We must reconstruct traffic from the perspective of business opportunities.

3. The relationship between traffic and demand

The relationship between flow and demand is also divided into three types: single-structure flow, double-structure flow and quad-structure flow.

The first type is single structure traffic.

Single-structure traffic means opening a transactional store online or offline. People who come from transactional traffic are often high-desire consumers.

For example, you can open a store on Tmall or in a shopping mall, intercept traffic online and offline, and convert passers-by into customers.

The second type is dual-structure traffic.

Many new internet celebrity brands have dual-structure traffic.

For example, Ramen Says is promoted on Bilibili, Santonban Coffee is promoted on Xiachufang, and Perfect Diary is promoted on Xiaohongshu.

Bilibili, Xiachufang and Xiaohongshu are not transaction platforms themselves, but content platforms.

The domestic Internet celebrity brands that have emerged in China in recent years are all good at creating dual-structure traffic.

On the one hand, the trading platform itself, such as Tmall and JD.com, intercepts traffic, makes conversions and conducts transactions (customer relationship management);

On the other hand, it spreads on content platforms where its target customer base is located, attracting fans to complete content transactions (customer awareness management).

The third type is four-structure traffic.

Dual-structure traffic refers to traffic during transactions and traffic without transactions. Even better than dual-structure traffic is quad-structure traffic, which includes traffic before transactions, traffic during transactions, traffic after transactions and traffic without transactions.

Lei Jun of Xiaomi said, we produce the best-performing mobile phones in the world and sell them at half the price. This is a product logic and belongs to pre-transaction traffic.

Why is product logic called pre-transaction traffic?

After this kind of cognitive education, people will mistakenly believe that everything Xiaomi produces has the best performance in the world, but only costs half the price. As long as it is produced by Xiaomi, the traffic will be intercepted.

Even if he sees a power strip produced by Xiaomi, he will buy it first.

Intercepting competitors’ traffic before a transaction is called pre-transaction traffic.

What is flow in a transaction?

Xiaomi will certainly emphasize that its products are cost-effective in transactions, and this is the method of intercepting traffic in transactions. When customers make decisions, use product selling points to match customer buying points.

Post-transaction traffic means: Xiaomi was originally just a manufacturer, but now it has become an e-commerce platform.

The e-commerce platform is actually not one that is in the process of a transaction, but one that is after the transaction. The only difference is that it can penetrate from after the transaction to before the transaction and during the transaction. In essence, it is first the post-transaction traffic.

Why? Because a large number of fans have been deposited in Xiaomi Mall.

What is No Transaction Flow?

Lei Jun often makes comments on Weibo. There may be a correlation with the product, or there may not be a correlation. As the founder, he often speaks out and becomes a medium for the company.

When many people have no desire to consume Xiaomi, user contacts with Xiaomi often occur through Lei Jun. This is no-transaction traffic.

Among the single-structure, double-structure and quad-structure traffic, the most powerful is obviously the quad-structure traffic.

These structures are actually differentiated based on the degree of desire for consumption. No transaction flow corresponds to no consumption desire or ultra-low consumption desire.

The flow in the transaction obviously has the highest consumption power, corresponding to high consumption desire.

Before a transaction, we may not know which company to buy from and will go to someone for consultation. Or if there is a problem, we can also look at the solution, which belongs to the middle consumption desire.

Logically, you should have no desire to consume after the transaction. It is difficult to eat another one immediately after finishing a meal. Therefore, after the transaction, it also belongs to a kind of low consumption desire.

For each different type of traffic, and the different consumer desires and demands behind it, we should use different methods to intercept it in different scenarios, establish different customer relationships, and manage different customer perceptions.

4. What is the essence of traffic?

What are the three characteristics of popular products? We got it.

What are highly contagious products? We got it.

What is the relationship between traffic and medium? We got it.

What is the relationship between flow and demand? We got it.

However, how to actually implement traffic? (The specific content is not expanded)

Here, we give another formula:

The essence of traffic = traffic operation + content operation + retention operation

Traffic operation means that transactions come first and then becoming a member. It is difficult to label and difficult to reach people repeatedly at low cost.

Retention operation is user operation. First, you have users, then you build empathy, build relationships, and then monetize them.

Obviously,

Traffic operation is more sales-oriented, with consensus as the main focus and empathy as the secondary focus.

Retention operations are more marketing-oriented, with empathy as the main focus and consensus as the secondary focus.

Content operation means that content can reversely attract traffic, which is not only beneficial to traffic and retention, but also can promote conversion efficiency in every conversion link of traffic and retention.

So, the new economy:

• Every company is a product developer.
• Every enterprise is a traffic operator.
• Every enterprise is a customer operator.
• Every business is a content producer.

Author: Grayscale Cognitive Society

Source: Grayscale Cognitive Society