The Internet's Imitation Game

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Hold on, what we are talking about today is not "plagiarism", but the "imitation game" that everyone on the Internet is pursuing and participating in.

Two years ago, Chinese Internet projects could basically find a model to imitate abroad. The C2C (copy to China) model has low risk, high success rate, and is also loved by investors. Many older generation Internet revolutionaries made their fortunes with this model, and they became giants among giants and portals among portals.

But we have a talent of "learning from foreigners and surpassing them". With the help of the world's largest mobile market, we have become the leader of the global mobile Internet. Now we "disdain" to imitate foreign projects and have created many business model concepts. The situation has become mutual learning and reference, which is called "micro-innovation".

The fierce competition in China means that once someone's model or method is successful, a lot of people will rush to copy it. A keen sense of smell is of course an excellent survival quality, but a huge problem that many followers do not realize is that the success of the "first-mover model" is often only effective in the early stages of the market.

The Xiaomi model is a classic case, which has been repeatedly analyzed from various angles by experts. Maybe I am ignorant, but I have not seen anyone pay attention to the fact that, in addition to the leading model itself, the market is stimulated by the new model (this sentence is really hard to describe).

Before Xiaomi, many manufacturers had always used old-school marketing language, releasing flagship products every year, using a bunch of high-end and luxurious descriptions in advertisements, and the copywriting was so extravagant that consumers were bored. Suddenly, a new company came in, using a bunch of detailed running points and geeky descriptions to package its products to be extremely "feverish", and then used the rush purchase mode to stimulate consumers' buying impulse. *** also did not forget to use the trick of "sold out in X minutes and X seconds" to give non-participants a strong stimulus and create their own "hot" impression.

This model has never appeared in the market before. Consumers have never seen it before. It is fresh, lively and exciting. It has been tried and tested in the three generations of Mi 1-Mi 3 from 2011 to 2013. After two years of disdain, ignorance and fear, other manufacturers finally realized its power and quickly followed and imitated it, from invitation letters, press conferences, to rush purchases and sold out. They learned every step very well. However, it is not as Lei Jun said, "Those who imitate me will die, and those who imitate me will live". To this day, there is no other emerging manufacturer that has survived with the Xiaomi model.

Many people may be confused as to why Xiaomi's tactics are no longer effective. However, they do not know that during the five consecutive years of rapid shipment growth, dozens of mobile phone brands have "repeatedly bombarded" the market with Xiaomi's marketing tactics, and consumers have long been tired of them. They are no longer sensitive to marketing stimuli such as parameters, performance, and selling out of hundreds of thousands of units. They are even tired of them and have "aesthetic fatigue".

"Aesthetic fatigue" is explained by the principle of psychology, that is, when the stimulus is repeatedly presented in the same way, intensity and frequency, the reaction begins to weaken. In layman's terms, it is a kind of boredom caused by repeated appreciation of a thing.

The pursuit and imitation of Xiaomi's marketing finally exhausted the advantages of this model after the general consumers' curiosity cooled.

It’s not only the marketing parties who pursue novelty and difference who “squander” users’ curiosity; product makers also do this a lot.

The waterfall flow of Pinterest has triggered imitations from websites around the world. At first, people were still fresh to this page layout and were eager to explore it. They could keep scrolling. In the early days, many products even used this design to flaunt their uniqueness. Until now, no product is proud of the waterfall flow design, and few users find it interesting just because of the waterfall flow. In Fei Liu's words, "It's not fun!"

I don't know which public account first played the "someone @ you" meme, but many operators started to post information in this way. It was a low-level operation technique, which was a good reminder for users in some special scenarios. However, due to the disgusting imitation of the virus, this meme was quickly abandoned by users and became ineffective.

Imitation behavior is not just the behavior of certain professionals. When WeChat first designed Moments, it probably didn't think that it would be dominated by photos of food. In the early days, Moments was a new thing, and people didn't know what to post at first. Every place has a group of "early adopters". These people were the first to try posting photos of their own food in Moments. After receiving a lot of feedback and interaction, others found that this kind of content would be popular and started posting food photos. For a while, the entire Moments was filled with delicacies from land and sea. As soon as the dishes were served, just when you were about to reach for your chopsticks, someone would yell, "Let the phone eat first!"

Psychological curiosity is the driving force of psychological cognition and perception. It is this very valuable "curiosity cognitive resource" that gives new products the opportunity to gain users and survive. Early adopters then pass on the new food to followers, and thus spread it.

However, commercial activities like to take advantage of people's tendency to "get bored with the old and like the new", accelerating the arrival of the marginal perception critical point of "Weber's Law", causing these "curiosity cognitive resources" to be quickly consumed. In addition, in the new media era, the speed of information dissemination decays faster, leading to the following situation:

The curiosity and cognitive resources that the first movers could originally use have their effective window period shortened due to a large number of imitators quickly following up and consuming them. For weak innovators, this undoubtedly raises the threshold for entrepreneurship, making it increasingly difficult for startups to survive.

This imitation game will push all players into an embarrassing situation with increasing difficulty...