90% of “node marketing” is good idea, bad marketing

This article is reproduced from the public account author "Liang Jiangjun", ID-liangjiangjunisme

When doing node marketing , most brand owners and agents produce a creative theme around the node topic and try to communicate with consumers emotionally.

For example, during the peak travel season of the Spring Festival, Ganzi Culture and Tourism launched its own promotional video "Ding Zhen's World".

This should be the strongest advertising film in 2020. Because of the appearance of this film, netizens learned that Ding Zhen’s home is not in Tibet, but in Ganzi, Sichuan.

Although this film showed everyone the beauty of Ganzi, Sichuan, and even sparked an online craze, from the perspective of node marketing, "Ding Zhen's World" is a typical example of good idea and bad marketing.

Why do I say that? This starts with why we want to do marketing at the node.

Why do we do marketing at nodes?

Why does SK-II insist on telling girls to “not be afraid of age” on Women’s Day? Isn't February 6 a good day?

Why does Pepsi tell us to “bring the joy home” during the Spring Festival? Isn't it possible this afternoon?

Because only during certain festivals will people exhibit "spontaneous group behavior."

On Valentine's Day, brands don't have to persuade men to buy gifts for women; men all over the world will shop spontaneously. But on days other than Valentine's Day, if a brand wants to persuade a rational man to spend money on his girlfriend, it may have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising fees.

What is a festival? Festivals are repeated rituals of behavior. This "behavioral ritual" has become a habit that we do not think about because it has been passed down through countless generations.

Have you ever thought about why we set off firecrackers during this year’s Spring Festival? You won't. Buying and setting off firecrackers are natural things to you. The only thing you think about is where the firecrackers are cheaper? Which brand of fireworks looks better?

On New Year’s Eve, don’t we think about whether to play a game of mahjong or go downstairs to set off firecrackers? Setting off firecrackers has become the default option for the brain.

Back to the original question: Why do we do marketing at nodes? Because only during festivals can we use this "spontaneous group behavior" to guide users to consume.

So I think the key to node marketing is not to communicate emotions, but to shape user behavior.

Why do I think "Ding Zhen's World" is a good idea but bad marketing? Because this idea is just to use Ding Zhen to show the scenery of Ganzi.

Although the film has sparked heated discussions online, the topic of discussion is "Where is Ding Zhen's hometown?" rather than "How beautiful is Ding Zhen's hometown?" This heated discussion will instead offset everyone's yearning for Ganzi's scenery.

We can tweak this idea a bit.

If Ding Zhen left some private "clues" in this promotional video, such as Ding Zhen's earrings, childhood photos, blessings carved on the tree... then these "clues" would become opportunities for fans to check in at the Ganzi scenic area.

The key to good node marketing is to shape user behavior.

So, how to shape user behavior in the node? Here are three steps to share with you:

• Behavioral parasitism
• Behavioral expectations
• Solidification of behavior

01 Behavioral parasitism: Node marketing is to take advantage of people’s behavioral inertia

A festival is an endless cycle of certain behaviors. The inertia of these behaviors is so strong that people cannot "resist".

For example, eating rice dumplings and tying red strings on the Dragon Boat Festival and attending masquerade parties on Halloween.

People are naturally wary of sales pitches. When brands parasitize consumer motivation on these "spontaneous group behaviors," getting consumers to spend money becomes as natural as saying hello.

March 21 is International Sleep Day, and Baidu has launched a public welfare activity to care for people suffering from insomnia.

What do you do when you toss and turn in your bed in the middle of the night? I guess you are like me, and your habit when you can’t sleep is to check your phone.

"Checking the phone when unable to sleep" is a "spontaneous group behavior." But the blue light from the mobile phone screen will only make us more alert the more we scroll, increasing the burden of insomnia.

To this end, Baidu APP launched a "Voice Sleep Aid Plaza" and invited four B station UP hosts to customize voice packages. You can choose the UP host’s voice to read the news to you and use the voice to lull you to sleep.

Baidu’s approach is to parasitize consumption motivation on “spontaneous group behavior”.

In fact, "Voice Sleep Aid Plaza" is the AI ​​voice package function in the listening and reading mode of Baidu APP. Under normal circumstances, it would be extremely difficult for Baidu to promote the voice package to us. However, once the voice package is parasitic on the insomnia scenario, it becomes a piece of cake.

Therefore, the key to node marketing is to open your eyes, discover the unique behaviors in special periods, and use these behaviors to my advantage.

Let’s look at another mind-blowing example.

In 2020, Burger King had just bought a lot of big-brand outdoor advertisements, but then the epidemic came. The deserted streets made Burger King's outdoor advertising go to waste.

The Burger King team didn’t want to waste the advertising budget, so they came up with another way to display outdoor advertising.

People who work from home during the epidemic often hold video conferences. So, Burger King and Zoom teamed up to encourage people to use Burger King's outdoor billboards as virtual backgrounds in video conferences.

Then, you just need to upload a screenshot of the video conference on Twitter and add the hashtag to get a buy-one-get-one-free coupon at Burger King.

The epidemic cannot be considered a festival, but it is very similar to a festival; it is a special period of time when people will exhibit "spontaneous group behavior."

Burger King did not rack its brains to understand user psychology or stay up late to write touching copy, but simply found a place for its marketing activities to parasitize.

What marketers should do is not to try to change consumers’ behavior, but to give them a gentle push in their original behavioral trajectory. This is the first step - "behavioral parasitism."

It is not enough to just find a place to parasitize, we also have to find ways to make these behaviors more attractive, thereby amplifying consumption motivation.

02 Behavioral expectations: Node marketing does not trigger emotions, but awakens instincts

People often think that their behavior is driven by emotions and will. Therefore, advertisers always think that as long as they reach a certain emotional consensus with consumers, consumers will take action.

When I was in college, when I read Kobe's story "Los Angeles at 4 AM", I decided to get up at 5:30 every morning to memorize Level 6 vocabulary. As a result, the next day, I was woken up by my roommate asking, "What do you want to eat for lunch?"

In fact, humans have always been slaves to dopamine. Dopamine is a substance in the brain that helps cells transmit impulses.

What is the use of dopamine? Simply put, it is desire itself.

In 1954, two neurologists conducted a dopamine experiment on a mouse. They implanted electrodes in the brains of mice to block the release of dopamine.

What's the result? The mice were unwilling to eat, unwilling to mate, and lost interest in everything. A few days later, the mouse died.

This experiment tells us: If brand owners want consumers to make purchases, appealing to their emotions or convincing them with reason is not as good as making them secrete more dopamine.

The good news is that we don't have to give consumers a dopamine shot. We can manipulate consumers’ dopamine secretion using a simple method called “anticipated reward.”

The so-called "anticipated reward" means that when we expect something to have a chance to be rewarded, the dopamine in our body will rise.

For example, a gambler's dopamine levels will soar before he places a bet, but will drop after he wins.

Let us apply this principle to node marketing.

If you want to increase users' desire to consume at a certain point in time, creativity cannot just be about emotional massage, but you need to focus more on consumers' behavioral expectations and make them secrete more dopamine.

Last year on Chinese Valentine's Day, my wife and I went to a shopping mall to have dinner. There was a traffic jam that night, and we arrived at the mall at 7:30. There were long queues forming in front of all the restaurants.

The restaurant we chose was a newly opened Hong Kong-style hotpot restaurant called Xingyun Dabanlu. When I got my number, there were 10 tables waiting in front of me. But the waiter told us that the waiting time today can be directly converted into money, one yuan per minute.

That night, the two of us waited 55 minutes for our meal, but we didn't get impatient. When the waiter deducted 55 yuan from the bill at the time of payment, I felt like I had made a great deal.

On Chinese Valentine's Day, men and women come out for dinner, and it is common to have to wait for a table in a restaurant. Many couples will get numbers for several restaurants at once and go to whichever restaurant has the fastest queue.

The marketing of Xingyun Hotpot is very interesting. It turns the boring behavior of waiting for a table into a behavioral currency. It not only attracts more customers, but also allows everyone to queue with peace of mind, ensuring that customers are not lost.

IKEA has used a similar approach.

As we all know, IKEA stores are usually far away from the city center, and you have to drive a long way to go shopping. So, IKEA in Dubai collaborated with Google Maps to launch a campaign called "Buy with Your Time".

The travel time it takes customers to travel from home to IKEA can be calculated as shopping points. Every item in IKEA Dubai is priced in units of time.

Customers can simply show the Google Maps Timline data to the store clerk and redeem the products directly from IKEA.

Both Xingyun Dabanlu and IKEA set expectations for consumer behavior.

It takes 60 minutes for a Dubai resident to drive to IKEA, and he expects to exchange it for 60 yuan of shopping points, so his dopamine level increases; I expect that if I wait another 10 minutes, the restaurant will give me a 55 yuan free bill, and my dopamine level also increases.

Only by placing creativity on consumers’ behavioral expectations can we stimulate their desire to consume. This is the second step - "anticipation of behavior".

03 Solidification of behavior: The ultimate goal of node marketing is to enjoy the compound interest of time

Every year in the run-up to the holiday season, marketing departments and their agencies have a headache as they rack their brains to figure out how to top last year’s creative ideas.

In my opinion, this is the biggest misunderstanding in node marketing, no doubt about it. Node marketing should not seek innovation, but should be conservative.

I said that festivals are repeated rituals of behavior. Our behavior is solidified through repetition over and over again, and becomes a holiday biological clock in the body.

If a brand calls on everyone this Spring Festival to "go home no matter how far away you are" and next year calls on everyone to "anywhere is home as long as family is there", are you encouraging people to go home or to celebrate the New Year where they are?

The most important point of node marketing is to turn brand activities into brand customs, solidifying consumers’ behavioral habits year after year and forming the compound interest of time.

We mentioned above that Baidu’s project on World Sleep Day is actually a public welfare IP of Baidu called "Don’t Be Afraid, I’m Here", which has been running for four consecutive issues.

Baidu used the same theme to produce different creative ideas on World Mental Health Day, World Children's Day, International Hug Day and World Sleep Day.

My favorite idea is a short film released by Baidu on World Children’s Day, called “Unknown Parent-Teacher Meeting”. I would like to ask the parents here what the words "kowtow", "welfare girl" and "compensated dating" mean?

The result is that on average only 2 out of 10 parents know the answer. Baidu uses this method to remind parents to pay attention to children’s online safety.

But I said that the key to node marketing is not emotional communication, but shaping user behavior.

The creative short film "The Unknown Parent-Teacher Meeting" is not intended to "intimidate" parents, but to launch the children's safety knowledge live broadcast "Don't Be Afraid, I'm Here - The Battle to Protect Families with Children".

In every World Children's Day in the future, Baidu hopes that watching live broadcasts on children's safety knowledge will become a compulsory course for parents in the middle of the year.

Baidu’s creative material for World Sleep Day is actually a song called “I Really Can’t Sleep Well After Drinking”.

This song is not just to tell everyone that alcohol is useless in helping people sleep, but to encourage insomnia patients to visit the "Sound Sleep Plaza" and use reading sounds instead of alcohol to help them sleep.

By using the same creative theme for four consecutive nodes, Baidu wants to make "Don't Be Afraid, I Am Here" a real node IP.

"Seeking innovation and change" is difficult, but what is more difficult than "seeking innovation and change" is "seeking constancy".

"Seeking novelty and change" is like a man going out and having an affair with other women, while "seeking constancy" is like a good husband trying to maintain the freshness between husband and wife, which requires deeper love and higher wisdom.

In 2021, the milestone that just passed was Women’s Day. On Women's Day, the cases I appreciate most are the ones that are "small but insignificant, regardless of you or me", both internally and externally.

Neiwai found eight Asian women and asked them to tell their own body stories. The brand value that Neiwai wants to convey is: women’s body shape should not be defined by society, and every kind of beauty deserves to be appreciated.

The reason I like this case is not because it elegantly conveys the brand spirit, but because Neiwai has the courage to continue last year's creativity.

For Women's Day in 2020, Neiwai's creative theme was "No body shape is insignificant". At that time, we invited six "anti-white, young and thin" women to take a set of spring and summer photos.

However, if Neiwai wants to continue this high-quality creativity, it cannot just stay at the level of emotional communication, but must focus its creative focus on women’s behavioral motivations.

I want to "take the initiative" to adjust the landing point of this idea.

Internal and external creativity should move from "expressing" an attitude to "calling for" an action.

Note the word I used, it’s “call”. Neiwai can try to join hands with independent photographers to collect "body stories" from women all over the world, encouraging every woman to have the courage to show her body and make the body an aesthetic expression of herself.

The selected body stories will become the protagonists of domestic and foreign fashion blockbusters and enjoy more benefits.

A body with stretch marks is a story of sacrifice; a ballet dancer’s body is a story of forbearance and pursuit; a body that has grown to 180 pounds in three months may be a story of “being unable to get out”…

By doing this year after year, perhaps one day in the future, our female compatriots will believe that being selected by domestic and foreign media to shoot a "body story" is as fashionable as appearing on the cover of "Men's Health".

Simply put, this idea should not just be an advertisement, but a women's movement that uses body shape to express faith.

A festival is an expression of faith through ritualized actions. Therefore, when doing marketing at nodes, the purpose is to encourage everyone to express their attitudes through actions, rather than using attitudes to encourage actions.

The so-called "solidification of behavior" means that through repetition year after year, consumer behavior is solidified into a brand custom, and eventually this node is "privatized."

04 Conclusion

When doing node marketing, don’t always think about understanding users’ psychological needs, but rather understand users’ behavioral trajectories; don’t always talk about leveraging nodes, what we really need to do is to privatize the node.

In a word: the key to node marketing is not to communicate emotions, but to shape user behavior.

This article is reproduced from the public account author "Liang Jiangjun", ID-liangjiangjunisme

Author: General Liang

Source: General Liang (ID-liangjiangjunisme)