Using product thinking to understand why Ding Zhen became so popular?

In recent days, the Kangba man " Ding Zhen " has swept the hot searches of major apps with his wild yet gentle face, and even dominated the screen of Douyin. Major television stations and news media also rushed to report on it, and it even became popular abroad. Today, Ding Zhen has become the tourism spokesperson for his hometown, Ganzi, Sichuan. This article uses product thinking to analyze why Ding Zhen became so popular.

1. Introduction

I just finished reading the book "Tencent Product Law" not long ago, and I was a little inspired by it. I want to write this article to help myself review some of the contents of the book, and share it with you while I think about it.

The book talks about five aspects: product thinking, demand, design, operation, and strategy. The product thinking part mentions five basic thinking modes, namely: essential thinking, relative thinking, abstract thinking, system thinking, and evolutionary thinking. Students who are interested can take a look at it themselves.

In this article, I would like to use these five product thinking methods to look at Ding Zhen, the most popular person at the moment, and what makes him a traffic "beast" that major platforms and provinces are competing for.

2. Essential Thinking

Essential thinking, also known as the first principle. It is not difficult to understand that thinking about problems requires thinking deeply and thoroughly at the deepest level.

As a product manager, most of the time you are a solution provider. Whether it is user research, demand analysis, data analysis, etc., you are here to help you come up with the best solution.

Of course, the optimal solution is a relatively ideal state. In most cases, product managers only provide the "greatest common solution" or even the worst solution. The reason why this happens is that you don’t have essential thinking and don’t see the essence of the problem.

I feel like Elon Musk’s examples of first principles have been given so many times that I won’t cite them again.

Let me give you another example: Xiao Ming rides a bike to school every day, and he feels that his current bike is not fast enough, so he wants to buy a faster bike. Then you replace it with a racing bike, thinking that you have met his needs, but this solution has come to an end.

As a result, another person gave Xiao Ming a car and taught him how to drive, and Xiao Ming was extremely happy about it. Without essential thinking, you will definitely think that the other person has made a foul and that the solution is beyond the scope.

But in fact, it is not, because you did not see the essence of the problem. Xiao Ming's essential problem is that he wants to get from home to school faster, not that he wants the fastest bike. So the solutions given will naturally have different advantages and disadvantages because of the different latitudes.

Sometimes asking a few more whys may help you see the essence of the problem. Only when you can see the essence of the problem can you give the best solution from a higher dimension.

Back to the title of the article, looking at Ding Zhen from a product perspective, is Ding Zhen’s popularity entirely due to his handsome appearance?

Of course not. I don’t know if anyone has seen foreigners’ reactions to Ding Zhen’s videos. Let’s just talk about the Asian group with similar aesthetics. Most of them think that Ding Zhen is not handsome, not particularly outstanding, and even very ordinary. They find it hard to believe that he has become so popular.

If handsome looks are not the key factor for Ding Zhen’s popularity, then what is?

As everyone knows, Ding Zhen became popular on Douyin. Although Douyin has been continuously enriching its content in recent years and trying to break through its user base, domestic short videos are ultimately a rivalry. No matter how strong Douyin is, it will not affect Kuaishou's basic base at all, so Douyin's main user group is still young people in cities.

Imagine their status: workers at work, eat after work, living in a jungle of steel and concrete, and maneuvering in complex interpersonal relationships.

Ding Zhen, a 20-year-old horse racing prince with a simple smile and clear eyes, who lives on the snow-capped mountains and grasslands, is about the same age as them, but lives a free life that they have longed for all their lives. In addition, with the icing on the cake labels such as "handsome" and "Kangba man", he has gained the attention of many fans.

In essence, it is as if someone has lived the way you imagined. At the same time, the clarity and simplicity of the imagined character has touched your real self, making you want to continue to protect this beautiful imagination and thus protect Ding Zhen. Based on these, this group of working people and people who eat and work continue to push Ding Zhen to the throne of top traffic.

3. Relative Thinking

The so-called good or bad, and the distinction between primary and secondary, of any thing are all preset by us in advance. Objectively, these distinctions do not exist. All things exist equally and constitute a complete thing. The objectivity of things will not change due to our will to observe.

Therefore, "primary and secondary" are equal and equally important. When you set one part of a thing as primary in your mind, the other part naturally becomes secondary. But precisely because primary and secondary are subjective, they are constantly interacting with each other and will change with factors such as thought and time.

As a product manager, you must be able to see this relativity. You must never look at things in an absolute sense, or only look at the main part and ignore the secondary part, because the secondary part may become the next main part at any time.

Differentiated competition, or misaligned competition, which is often discussed in product competition, is actually the most direct application of relative thinking.

Let’s talk about Ding Zhen again. If you look at his popularity with relative thinking, you will find that everything is natural.

Ding Zhen was born in the remote Litang, Ganzi. He has never been to school at the age of 20 and has missed the nine-year compulsory education. He usually herds cattle at home and has no contact with society. His skin is rough and dark, with some sun spots on his face, not to mention how to dress.

In terms of handsomeness, there are probably countless boys who are more handsome than him on Douyin. It seems that he has no advantages. Why can he stand out in Douyin, a time melting pot full of handsome men and beautiful women?

Obviously, as a product manager, you need to use relative thinking to see Ding Zhen’s unique advantages.

Compared to the mainstream aesthetic of handsomeness, Ding Zhen's "handsomeness" is definitely non-mainstream. Among the stereotyped handsome guys on Douyin, you who are a little aesthetically fatigued are more likely to pay attention to the original handsomeness of this Kangba man.

Born in a remote area, never going to school, and having no contact with society, the eyes of a 20-year-old boy show the clarity, simplicity and kindness of a 16-year-old child; his rough skin and plain clothes further highlight his naturalness and simplicity.

Among the handsome men and beautiful women created by the beauty filter of Douyin, Ding Zhen without the beauty filter can be regarded as an outlier, but it is precisely his outlierness that makes him more like a breath of fresh air. The various "disadvantages" listed before are also his unusual advantages that enable him to become an instant hit.

4. Abstract Thinking

Abstract thinking cannot be explained in just a few words. It is indeed a bit confusing, so I would like to share it with you from Baidu Encyclopedia. However, the abstract thinking ability in product design, to put it simply, is the thinking method and ability to find commonalities between things.

Only by abstracting the commonalities between individuals can product managers think about problems in higher dimensions anytime and anywhere. This way, when you are faced with a bunch of demands, you will not mindlessly pile up functions, but will be able to find commonalities and use limited basic capabilities to flexibly combine and apply them to achieve high-satisfaction and high-value functions.

Ding Zhen’s unexpected popularity and the tourism boom in Northwest China in recent years, it is not difficult to find that there is a certain commonality behind these seemingly independent concrete events. It is the discovery of this commonality that will make you see that there is actually a huge market demand behind this.

With the development of social economy, material life is becoming increasingly abundant, and people's pursuit of spiritual life is also gradually improving.

This year is a very special year, especially in the first half of the year, the epidemic has affected travel, events, and various spiritual and entertainment life. While spiritual supply is suppressed, spiritual demand has increased instead of decreased.

In addition, contemporary workers have an infinite yearning for a beautiful, simple and free life. Whether it is Ding Zhen or the grasslands, glaciers, forests, etc. in the Northwest, they all represent freedom, purity and beauty, which happens to meet the spiritual needs of contemporary people for a dream life.

5. Systems Thinking

System thinking is global thinking and holistic thinking. It is a basic product thinking. Of course, the focus of system thinking is to help you grasp the key to the problem through overall thinking. If you cannot grasp the key to the problem, it will be absolutely useless.

Let me give you a negative example of my own. In the paid social product I am responsible for, there are two roles: payer and charging party. The permissions and functions corresponding to the roles are slightly different. Recently, the charging party has been severely harassed, and the decline in service quality has been reflected at the data level.

Payers have been reporting that a delete friend function is needed to solve this problem. If we were to simply treat the symptoms without addressing the root cause, we would have to immediately launch the delete friend function.

I handled it so roughly at the time, but you will find that the problem did not seem to be solved, but instead brought even stronger sequelae.

Although the friend deletion function did alleviate the harassment problem to a certain extent, the bigger problem it brought with it was the abuse of the function, which resulted in many ordinary users who were not harassing being deleted and the number of retained friend relationships dropped sharply. This was precisely because I only had a superficial understanding of the problem and did not use systematic thinking to grasp the key to the problem.

If you use a systematic way of thinking to examine Ding Zhen’s popularity, you will find that all this is not just the result of many accidental collisions, but is the result of the interaction of a feedback system.

Ding Zhen's clear eyes and innocent smile made him stand out from the crowd of heavily made-up internet celebrities, and he soon attracted the attention of young people on Douyin.

Today's young people, who have been trapped in the cage of social pressure for a long time and are aesthetically fatigued by the current mainstream handsome guys, are impressed by the "handsomeness" of this most primitive and simple man who lives in a completely different environment from them.

This prompted them to continue paying attention and spreading the message, allowing Ding Zhen to quickly break out of the circle, from one platform to another, from one group to another, and soon attracted attention from all aspects of society.

This in turn promoted more and more interviews and exposure of Ding Zhen, allowing more people to participate in this phenomenal event and enter into a circular system of reinforcing loops, and Ding Zhen happened to be an important starting point in this system.

Of course, if we look at the Ding Zhen incident from a broader perspective, from the initial Douyin to the hot support from major provincial satellite TV stations and even CCTV, Ding Zhen's subsequent steady flow of traffic and his employment in state-owned enterprises and becoming a tourism ambassador for his hometown are actually riding on the wave of the country's poverty alleviation and ethnic policy background, which has created this annual breakthrough event.

6. Evolutionary Thinking

Evolutionary thinking, I prefer to call it iterative thinking.

The success of product design is certainly not achieved overnight. Many successes are the result of countless failures and attempts, just like a blind person walking, using a guide stick to tentatively move forward little by little, pausing when encountering obstacles, changing paths and moving forward again, repeating this cycle over and over again until he reaches the final destination.

Of course, since evolutionary thinking requires trial and error, it is necessary to try the greatest possibility at the lowest cost, so MVP naturally becomes the key point of evolutionary thinking.

However, evolutionary thinking does not mean digging a little here and there. The so-called evolution, or iteration, must be based on a big goal or direction, and constantly adjust and optimize the specific implementation path, rather than turning around if this road is blocked. This is the biggest misunderstanding of evolutionary thinking.

Finally, let’s go back to the question of why Ding Zhen became so popular. Ding Zhen became so popular because a photographer took a short video of Ding Zhen who had just bought instant noodles and was about to go home and posted it on Douyin. As a result, he unexpectedly gained unprecedented traffic and attention.

Why did this photographer take pictures of Ding Zhen?

That’s because this photographer often photographs Tibetans in Ding Zhen’s village. He has previously photographed Ding Zhen’s uncle and younger brother. The photos of Ding Zhen’s younger brother have already gained a good number of views on Douyin, so the photographer wanted to continue photographing Ding Zhen’s younger brother to see if he could gain more attention.

As a result, his younger brother was not at home, and he took a photo of Ding Zhen buying instant noodles. By this coincidence, Ding Zhen unexpectedly became popular.

From this perspective, Ding Zhen’s sudden popularity is unexpected but reasonable, because the short videos he shot in the early stage can get a certain amount of views, which has already demonstrated the potential of this type of work, and there is a certain viewing demand for young people on Douyin.

Ding Zhen is just a breaking point in an evolutionary process, where quantitative change leads to qualitative change. Even if there is no Ding Zhen, as long as photographers continue to shoot, and as long as this type of content reflecting the natural beauty of ethnic minorities continues to be shot, there will still be popular Azhen, Bzhen and Czhen.

VII. Conclusion

By thinking about the question of why Ding Zhen became so popular, I just want to illustrate the importance of using these basic thinking methods to think about problems in product design. In fact, these thinking models can be used not only in product design, but in any thinking.

Of course, as a product manager, when looking at the reason behind Ding Zhen’s popularity, we should return to the user’s perspective and user needs.

In essence, the phenomenal event of Ding Zhen has hit the itch point of modern people's needs. The so-called itch point is people's yearning for beautiful things, a feeling of "wanting". If they get it, they will feel satisfied, and if they don't get it, they will not feel lost.

Ding Zhen really satisfies all people's fantasies about Kangba men, about manliness, and about primitive handsomeness. He is even some people's ideal boyfriend or ideal self-image, so he has received so much attention and exposure.

Author: William the Lost

Source: Product Lab (ID: championidea)