Why was the Melatonin advertisement successful?

"I won't accept any gifts this year, the only gift I'll accept is Melatonin !"

Over the past decade or so, we have been hearing this advertisement for Melatonin almost every holiday season. It was with this product that entrepreneur Shi Yuzhu successfully turned his fortunes around.

This successful product marketing case has always been used as a classic case teaching material, and people have repeatedly studied it, learning about its timing of advertising, advertising channels, advertising positioning, etc. However, from a user research perspective, it is more than just a marketing case.

Why was the Melatonin advertisement successful?

01. Are you a customer or a user?

This product is essentially more of a health care product for the middle-aged and elderly, and is positioned as a gift to honor parents.

In this case, you will find an interesting phenomenon that the buyers and users of the product are not the same group. The buyer is the person who gives the gift, usually children, relatives and friends, who pay for the product; while the user is the parents or elders, who are the recipients of the product and ultimately use it.

It is said that the customer is God. So who is our God in this case? Should we focus on the buyers or the users? Back to our question above, the buyer and the user, who is the customer and who is the user?

What is the difference between a customer and a user?

The English word for customer is Customer; the English word for user is User. Traditional enterprises refer to all businesses as buying and selling, so they naturally think that the target group that the enterprise faces is the customer. The so-called customers are the people who have actual transactions with the company. Users refer to all people who have established a relationship with the company. Both are related to business, but their meanings are very different.

Some people would say, "There is no gain without pain. We will not do anything that does not involve revenue or profit, so in the end we can only deal with customers, not users." Is this really the truth? Do we only deal with people who generate transactions?

The concept of "user" is very common in life. For example, we often use QQ and WeChat, but most of us have never paid for using these software, so for QQ and WeChat, we are just users, not customers.

Another example is various super luxury cars, such as Ferrari, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, etc. I believe that many people are their fans, but only a few people actually own them. However, this does not prevent every fan from following it, praising it, and participating in various activities of the car brand.

For these luxury cars, fans did not actually purchase them, but still established a relationship with them, so are these fans customers or users?

Let’s take a more common example.

Suppose there is a barbecue restaurant on the food street, and we want to do a barbecue business analysis on it. If it is a traditional businessman, it may focus on its direct customers. To analyze these customers' spending power, preferences, table turnover rate, positive reviews, return rate, etc. These are all traditional and conventional research. Although they are not wrong, they do not reveal any new opportunities. In fact, this perspective may make our business possibilities extremely narrow.

If you broaden your horizons and observe the barbecue restaurant from a user's perspective, you will find that the people related to the barbecue restaurant business are not just the dozens of diners every day.

First of all, there may be hundreds of users who search for this store on Dianping.com every day.

Secondly, people who dine in the restaurant will also indirectly affect their colleagues, friends and family. Although this group of affected people have never been to this restaurant, they may also be full of expectations for this restaurant. This group of affected people may be as many as hundreds of people.

There are also the service staff of this store, as well as the upstream and downstream suppliers of the barbecue restaurant, who probably add up to about a hundred people.

Finally, there are the many people who pass by this store on a daily basis, about two to three thousand people every day. Looking at the problem from this perspective, we will find that there are not many people who purely trade with barbecue restaurants, but the number of people who have inextricable connections with them is very large.

This evolved from a scale of hundreds of people to a scale of thousands of people. These are goals we can pursue.

02. Business Tips in the Experience Economy Era

The concept of "user" is not unique to the Internet industry. The theoretical system behind it comes from the "stakeholder" concept in management. Let’s first look at the classic definition of “stakeholder” as follows.

Stakeholders: Any relevant person in the external environment of an organization who is affected by the organization's decisions and actions.

Stakeholders include not only a company’s shareholders, creditors, employees, consumers, suppliers and other trading partners, but also government departments, local residents, local communities, media, environmentalist and other pressure groups, and even the natural environment, future generations of mankind and other objects that are directly or indirectly affected by a company’s business activities.

Why should we upgrade from focusing on customers to managing the entire user group?

First, operating the entire user group is in line with the goal of building user assets mentioned in the previous article; second, in the new economic model of the future, buying and selling are not the only connection. The relationship between enterprises and target groups has become more multidimensional, and operating users is very consistent with the characteristics of the future new economy.

In the case of Melatonin, if we only consider it from the customer's perspective, then the traditional approach only requires understanding the health care needs and purchasing power of middle-aged and elderly people. But in the new open perspective, we will find that middle-aged and elderly people have some important stakeholders in their lives, that is, their children or relatives.

Although they are not direct users of Melatonin, by analyzing their demands, we can discover a typical Chinese scene of "gift giving", which makes a big difference in Melatonin's marketing activities and advertising audiences. This change allowed Melatonin to find a new path in the crowded health care product market and successfully open up a blue ocean.

There are many business models similar to Melatonin, such as the huge children's market: children's learning and education, children's physical training, children's parent-child activities, etc. In a large shopping mall near my home, there are two famous children's English training institutions. A discussion started in the homeowners group of my community: "Which institution should children be enrolled in?"

Both institutions have been in operation for many years, and their teaching quality and courseware are similar, and even their fees are very close. This has caused a headache for parents in the community, as they don't know how to choose. In this situation, some parents put forward their own selection references: Brand A's parent waiting area is more spacious, with books, drinks, Wi-Fi and other things available, unlike Brand B's campus, which has no waiting area and parents have to squeeze in the lobby when picking up and dropping off their children, which is crowded and messy...

In this way, under the influence of this "favorable" factor that seems to be irrelevant to teaching, many owners in the community chose Brand A. In this example, although the direct target of the service is the children, because the parents are always inseparable, the response and care for the parent group in the whole process has also become a very important business design.

From "customer" to "user", this is the evolution of business model in the era of experience economy. If companies want to gain more energy in the market, they have to break out of the old circle and think about who your users are. This is the future evolutionary path of the company.

03. Users with multiple identities

There is a famous "Law of Thousands", which basically means that as an individual, as long as you have 1,000 people who cooperate with you, including friends, classmates, relatives, strangers, you will have no worries about food and clothing in your life.

If a salesperson has 1,000 customers, he must be a top salesperson in the industry; if a researcher has 1,000 supporters, he must be a well-known expert in the field; if a team has 1,000 external cooperation interfaces, it must be a team with outstanding performance...

In the past, companies wanted to do all the work themselves and hoped that target consumers would only focus on the “buy, buy, buy” process. It is different in the era of experience economy. Companies set up the stage to perform and gather many users on the company's business stage. It is time to arrange different roles for them on the stage.

An ecosystem is being built between companies and users. In this ecosystem, there are people who directly consume, people who participate in and enjoy services, people who only look but do not buy but can help spread the word, and there are also loyal fans who have deep feelings for the company. Users with different roles have different missions in this enterprise ecosystem.

Video live streaming platforms that have become popular in recent years, such as Kuaishou, Douyin, Huoshan Video, etc., have all launched live streaming sales functions. There are many internet celebrities on the platform who use their popularity to promote and sell products and are known as “experts in selling products”. Products like Peppa Pig candy watches and pancake machines were sold out. This powerful sales capability is actually a process of building corporate user power.

Companies do not directly face end users. Instead, they cultivate internet celebrities on live streaming platforms and let them influence direct buyers from different circles according to their respective characteristics. These internet celebrities are actually also a type of users of the platform, but the mission of these internet celebrity users is no longer to watch and pay, they also take on the mission of promoters. Internet celebrities have become an indispensable force in the live streaming platform landscape. Enterprises do not need to train their own terminal channel promoters, and there is no employment relationship between them.

Past experience has always told companies that users are the direct creators of profits. Companies provide them with products and services in exchange for compensation, and then deduct costs to generate profit. But now users no longer only bring money to enterprises. Sometimes users do not even directly create profits for enterprises. Instead, they provide some potential value that enterprises need to use themselves.

There is an idiom in ancient times called "安车蒲轮" , which means that before Emperor Wu of Han ascended the throne, he valued the scholar Mei Cheng very much. As soon as he ascended the throne, he ordered people to wrap the wheels of the carriage with cattail leaves (to prevent the vehicle from shaking) to summon Mei Cheng to the court and promised him the position of imperial teacher. Mei Cheng went there happily, but because he was old, he fell ill and died on the way.

Emperor Wu of Han might not be unaware of Mei Cheng's situation. Even if such an old man had not died of illness, he would probably not have been able to do anything if he was invited to the court. However, Emperor Wu of Han still summoned him with a high standard. His purpose was not actually because of Mei Cheng's talent, but because he needed the effect caused by Mei Cheng to let the world see Emperor Wu of Han's eagerness to seek talents.

Sure enough, the kindness shown to Mei Cheng made scholars look at the young emperor Han Wudi with new eyes. Many people took the initiative to join him, and Emperor Han Wudi quickly formed his own political team. Similarly, business operators also need to distinguish which users are your "multipliers". These users may not contribute much to your profits on the surface, but taking good care of them can bring you unexpected extra benefits.

In addition to being able to take on the missions of promoters and traffic generators, users can also take on a variety of roles such as service providers, researchers, designers, etc. In the arena of business operations, the richer the role of users, the stronger the company's sphere of influence will be.

Today, when considering how to build a company's business model, we need to break away from the traditional "buying and selling" business thinking. While striving to expand new user families, we also need to think about the mission transformation of each traditional role. Let our business no longer be a one-sided shouting at the top of our lungs. We should try to let users become service providers, communicators, designers... These are the forces that companies can leverage to grow rapidly.

It is completely feasible to let users work for you happily!

Author: Economics around us

Source: Economics around us