The underlying logic behind Jiang Xiaobai's marketing breakthrough

This article introduces the three major driving forces of marketing, Jiang Xiaobai’s marketing strategy and underlying logic, as well as the underlying logic of user touchpoints, and shares them with you!

Today we will talk about a case of how Jiang Xiaobai does cognitive marketing.

Jiang Xiaobai has created a new category of liquor.

• How was it created?
• What is the relationship with user touchpoints?
• What is the relationship with cognitive marketing?
• That’s what we have for today.

1. Three driving forces of cognitive marketing

1. Definition of cognitive marketing

Cognitive marketing is reverse marketing that is close to the cognitive laws of target users.

Selling products is positive marketing; selling knowledge is reverse marketing.

2. Two principles of cognitive marketing

1) User touchpoints

Some people are very good. They can convert traffic as long as they capture it, directly from user touchpoints to user decisions.

2) User decision

Some are converted after a period of time, so how do they get converted?

3) User scenarios

Some have user scenarios that can help with conversions, and have high conversion rates.

We have extracted the three driving force models of cognitive marketing, and today we will focus on user touchpoints.

2. Jiang Xiaobai’s Marketing Strategy

1. Breakthrough starting point, bold assumptions

Jiang Xiaobai's starting point came from a bold hypothesis.

The founder of Jiang Xiaobai encountered a problem that he felt he couldn't solve.

Why is it that in many more relaxed occasions, young people like to drink foreign liquor and beer, but are unwilling to drink white wine? Weird, right? For example, when you go to a KTV to sing, those who have money may order foreign liquor; if you don’t have money, that’s okay, just order beer, but you would not like to order white wine. This shows that there is a natural application scenario that white wine cannot penetrate.

What is this scene?

The first is the scene for young people, and the second is certain leisure scenes for young people, or social scenes. That's strange.

So the question is, why can't my liquor get in? Assuming that I produce a liquor that can enter the market, what goal should I design it towards? How to break this situation?

2. The underlying logic of the breakthrough

People in the liquor industry are very capable, otherwise the market size would not have reached more than 500 billion. Why can't so many capable people think of a way out?

If you want to break the impasse, you must come up with a logic that is different from others.

It is very likely that young people think that drinking white wine in such occasions is a bit rustic; it is also very likely that young people do not like to drink the existing white wine.

If the existing liquor is taken out of the dining atmosphere and drunk by young people, they will find it very rustic. So soil becomes the starting point for solving the problem, which is a pain point.

What is the solution to this pain point?

Liquor is becoming younger.

Youngization is still a concept. Can it be further broken down?

Break it into two:

1. I let this group of young people who didn’t drink liquor drink it;
2. I want young people to like drinking white wine, and my brand tone should be suitable for more relaxed occasions, replacing some foreign liquor and beer.

One is to elevate the brand tone, while the other is to penetrate the market segment and attract young people to drink it.

Because traditional liquor generally takes business and family routes, young people are not considered as the main consumers.

This is the underlying logic behind Jiang Xiaobai’s breakthrough.

3. Four directions for breaking the impasse

Good man, you want to go against the entire liquor industry, but how can you do that if you don’t have some skills?

Jiang Xiaobai starts from four aspects: products, brands, categories and markets.

1) What is a product?

Products are solutions to specific needs of target customers.

That means we have to produce a wine for young people that can replace foreign liquor and beer and meet their needs for social leisure.

What characteristics might this liquor have?

There must be significant changes to the product. Chinese people generally know that if they want to drink liquor, they should either not drink it at all or try to drink strong liquor. Because low-alcohol liquor is blended more, strong liquor is less harmful to the body.

But what should young people do if they want to be a little tipsy but don’t want to get drunk?

Start with the alcohol content. Which traditional liquor manufacturer has produced liquor with an alcohol content below 35 degrees? Jiang Xiaobai produces liquor with an alcohol content below 35 degrees, and has even produced liquor with an alcohol content of 25 degrees, called Qingkou liquor.

To make a light-tasting liquor (light fragrance + low alcohol content + liqueur), the entire product line has to be changed. It is not possible to use traditional production techniques for sauce-flavored or strong-flavored liquors.

Jiang Xiaobai's products have changed and are now specifically produced for young people.

2) What is a brand?

Brand is customer willingness to pay.

When people choose wine for business purposes, they all choose high-end brands: brands with hundreds of years of heritage; wines that generals love to drink; wines used in state banquets, and so on. Everybody's hitting these things.

We have said many times that sales have three major pain points:

Who are your target customers? Why are young people willing to buy you? What do young people buy?

Alcohol and beverages have a relatively large gross profit margin in the catering industry, and the distinction between alcohol and water is very clear. Wine is wine, and drinks are drinks.

Jiang Xiaobai's light wine is popular among young people in casual occasions, and it goes closely with water, so customers' willingness to pay is pulled towards wine and beverages and casual occasions.

When it comes to wine that young people like, is the focus on the young people or the wine? Certainly in young people. Young people agree that they are willing to buy whatever you produce. If young people do not approve of your wine, no one will buy it even if the quality is indeed better than Moutai.

What Jiang Xiaobai wants is a brand that young people identify with. First, young people identify with me, and secondly, young people like to drink me. These are two different things, and brand willingness to pay is here.

3) What is category?

Category is the customer decision path. How do customers make decisions?

Traditional liquor decisions fall into three categories:

1. Region: Your first reaction is, are you drinking from Guizhou, Sichuan, or Anhui?
2. Craft: What is your craft? Sauce-flavored or strong-flavored?
3. Raw materials: What raw materials do you use? What kind of food is used?

Traditional liquors make decisions based on these three dimensions, but Jiang Xiaobai does not.

Jiang Xiaobai said, I want to produce a wine for young people to represent the identity of young people, so my product category is different from others. This category is innovative, and I want to create a new category.

4) What is a market?

The market is the commercialization path and user touchpoint.

There are 1.4 billion people in the country. What percentage of this base are young people? 300 million. With such a huge target customer group, if I produce a wine for them, should I still worry that no one will buy our product? Wrong, that is market analysis.

There are 1,000 people in the community opposite. Given this number of people, if I open a restaurant next door, they will definitely come over to eat. Because eating is a basic need, a high frequency, and a pain point. So if I open a restaurant, why wouldn't they come to eat?

Assuming you're the only restaurant around, you're absolutely right.

But if there are 50 restaurants nearby and people come to your house to eat, it becomes neither a rigid demand nor a pain point, nor a high frequency, so this kind of market analysis is meaningless.

Similarly, you said there are 300 million young people in the country, and I produce a wine for them. Where do you find them? Where are they? How do they recognize you?

Coming back to the previous point, first I have to make young people identify with me. There must be contact between me and young people. If there is no contact, how can young people identify with me?

The path to commercialization is that I have to embrace them first, and they have to be familiar with me before they buy my wine. I want to find my commercialization path beyond the traditional wine wholesale sales scenario.

Jiang Xiaobai’s solution to the problem lies in four aspects: products, brands, categories, and markets.

There is also an interesting German wine called Jagermeister. It is a medicinal wine that will make your body hot after drinking it. It is a liqueur specially sold in nightclubs. Two years ago, its sales revenue quietly exceeded 500 million yuan.

It plays with young people and often comes up with many ways to play with it, such as mixing Red Bull and Jagermeister together.

Young people like it, they think it's cool. As for any changes in nutritional content after the mixture is added, they don’t care. They just think it tastes cool, so the wine sells very well. That means there is a commercialization path.

4. Solutions to break the impasse

Young people like wine, young people are the primary thing and wine is secondary. So first you have to get young people to identify with you. So they created an IP: I am Jiang Xiaobai, life is simple.

What's the point of having a spokesperson? Super symbol.

1. Everyone can recognize this symbol at a glance.
2. Does this symbol bring young people closer together?

There is a huge difference between the image of an IP and that of not an IP. How to produce something around this IP and connect it with its customer base? mood.

Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting expresses emotions very well. That sentence is just a representation, what is the logic behind it?

Confront the emotions of youth. Every copy must have emotions, and I have to tell you that you have to face this emotion directly, don’t avoid or fear it. This is the principle of Jiang Xiaobai’s copywriting design. Instead of tormenting your emotions, it is better to release them.

This is Jiang Xiaobai’s solution to break the impasse.

Starting with content marketing and cognitive marketing, I first need to establish an emotional connection with my target customers and embrace them before I sell anything.

Among user touchpoints, user scenarios, and user decisions, which one should be attacked first? It’s the user touchpoint.

The product is the communication, and the copywriting is the shopping guide.

1) Product is communication

Communication means the ability to communicate, so there is no need for explanation between me and my clients.

What is the difference between good and bad communication?

Suppose after I say an advertisement, I have to add three more sentences to explain it, or even add another sentence to explain the previous sentence, which means that the previous sentence is a waste and redundant. The best communication is when you finish a sentence and don’t need to say a second sentence.

If you can show your product to others without the need for a product manual or any words of explanation, then your product communication skills are particularly strong.

Therefore, products are communication, which is a very important breakthrough in new retail and new consumption.

2) Copywriting is a shopping guide

The copy itself will trigger your emotions, emotions themselves will produce very strong memories, and memories can promote decision-making, so this is where Jiang Xiaobai’s solution lies.

Let’s see how to crack it? Look at these, the expression bottle is really good. I feel very impressed by its expression bottles and I have the urge to buy them.

We should not always put ourselves in the position of experts, but put ourselves in the position of novice users. Although I may not be Jiang Xiaobai’s target customer, it does not prevent Jiang Xiaobai from selling more than 2 billion yuan a year. As long as its target customers like it.

There is no national-level product that is liked by people all over the country. It is extremely difficult to have 200 million people out of 1.4 billion like it.

The words I want to say most are in my eyes, in my drafts, in my dreams and in my wine.

It seems like an emotion that I want to express but am hesitant to express. I have a lot of things stuck in my heart, what should I do if I want to express them? Express it through wine and drinking. This is facing emotions head on.

I hope I can still pour you wine ten years later. I hope we will still be old friends ten years later.

What's the meaning? Ten years later, we are still good friends and we cherish each other. Such an emotion.

Some people have nothing to say, while some people have something to say but no one to talk to. That is loneliness.

What to do when you feel lonely? Have a drink.

Only when you are inner rich can you escape the repetition of life.

It seems like this character is expressing his own emotions, and this emotion is easy to resonate with its target customers. This is a typical emotional consumption.

Is Jiang Xiaobai the pioneer in expressing emotions through wine? Is it the only one that produces culture bottles? Don’t other brands produce copywriting?

They also produce. But they don’t necessarily put the copy on the bottle like Jiang Xiaobai does. They put it on advertisements and posters.

5. Red Star Erguotou VS Niulanshan Erguotou

The copywriting of Red Star Erguotou is similar to that of Jiang Xiaobai:

Use bullets to knock down the enemy, and use Erguotou to knock down your brothers. The wine that brothers drink between is also a kind of emotion.

Red Star Erguotou sold very well for a while. However, despite such good copywriting, it has not formed a national brand penetration like Jiang Xiaobai.

Many people don’t know that Jiang Xiaobai is a Chongqing wine, nor do they know what raw materials and production processes it is made of. Instead, it has escaped regionality.

In the minds of outsiders, Red Star Erguotou is a symbol of Beijing, just like the Great Wall, Quanjude and the Forbidden City. Beijing is a regional symbol. There are both advantages and disadvantages when you focus on this positioning.

Red Star Erguotou was confused for a while and positioned itself in many ways:

• Clean and refreshing fragrance, 52% Red Star Treasure Blue Flower Porcelain Erguotou;
• Ten-year cellaring (vintage wine);
• A high-grade light-fragrance liquor that is both mellow and aged.

Wow, mellow means you won’t get drunk, aging means it takes a long time, light fragrance means it’s made with craftsmanship, and high-end light fragrance is expensive. These are all different business concepts, but they appear on the same packaging box.

Later, there were more concepts being promoted. The reason for the confusion was superficial. The real reason was that competitors emerged. Originally, Red Star Erguotou was the best-selling Erguotou in Beijing.

It has a rival called Niulanshan Erguotou, which promotes the authentic Beijing flavor of Erguotou and also incorporates Beijing symbols.

Through these cases, we can see that in order to manage user cognition, cognitive marketing must be as close as possible to user cognitive laws.

Jiang Xiaobai is carefree and free, a barefoot person is not afraid of those wearing shoes, and there is no cognitive burden on customers. It is completely new from the start. On the one hand, no one knows you, so the cost is high; on the other hand, you have no historical burden or baggage.

The advantage of Red Star Erguotou's expression bottle concept is that everyone is familiar with it. The disadvantage is that many people think you are a symbol of Beijing, and using the expression bottle weakens this symbol, allowing your competitors to seize the user's mind.

Niulanshan Erguotou now sells better and more than Red Star Erguotou, both selling for tens of billions.

This is an episode. It does not mean that cognitive marketing has only advantages and no disadvantages. We also need to see the pros and cons of the choice.

Jiang Xiaobai wants to increase its touchpoints with young people, so it organizes many activities.

For example, by holding music festivals every year, Jiang Xiaobai can have more contact with young people through music, and have a strong sense of ritual. It can also use many well-known singers to enhance the brand tone of Jiang Xiaobai.

Jiang Xiaobai also does music MV marketing. In addition, there are many other touchpoints, such as drinking parties in the same city, which are offline activities.

You may have never tasted my wine, so let's organize an event together, chat, have fun, and then try Jiang Xiaobai.

Wine tasting conferences are more in line with the characteristics of young people, and if they become drinking parties, there will be more touchpoints. Come and have a taste of me. You’ve never seen me before and you don’t know me. Let’s have a formal experience of me.

Jiang Xiaobai also sponsors the growth of young artists and organizes a friends' club.

Bastard Plan, we think the word "bastard" is not good, and it also lowers the brand for the tone of the wine. Actually not, young people like it. It seems a bit nonsensical, but it is easy for young people to remember and trigger their memories. This is Jiang Xiaobai’s user touchpoint.

3. Jiang Xiaobai's underlying logic

1. Small logic: the four-wheel drive of content marketing

1. Product: When I design a product, it would be great if I could inject content genes into it.
2. Content: It is best to inject social genes so that it can be spread.
3. Social: It is best to inject business funds so that it can be monetized.
4. Business: It is best to launch a hit product so that you will have the largest user traffic point.

With four-wheel drive like this, it would be amazing.

I remember that I once wrote an article in the Economic Observer titled "Behind the Popularity of the Cat's Paw Cup: The Business Logic of the New Beverage and Catering Era". When analyzing Starbucks' cat's claw cup, I found that it also conforms to this four-wheel drive, and the same is true for Jiang Xiaobai.

Jiang Xiaobai expression bottle, the wine is still wine, there is no change in any function. Paste a text on it, and you can also produce and customize this text yourself.

The content is a kind of emotion, it is young people facing their own emotions, so this emotion must be something common among young people and can resonate with them.

We two brothers drink together and are still old friends ten years later. Maybe you are going to work in another place. We are classmates, so let's have a drink when you leave. The expression bottle says all the words for me, so I don’t have to say anything.

This kind of content has social attributes and will spread by itself. A large amount of Jiang Xiaobai's content is self-spread.

Traditional liquor spends about 25% on marketing. In the early days, Jiang Xiaobai’s marketing costs accounted for only about 5%, which was very efficient, and its content was self-propagating.

Offline channels must also keep up with the distribution and ensure continuous exposure. You can also see this brand of wine in convenience stores and restaurants. At this time, there are bombings in the air and distribution of goods on the ground. When these two intersect, the commercial integration point emerges, so Jiang Xiaobai has always been promoting hot-selling products.

In addition to the expression bottle, Jiang Xiaobai has launched several products:

Shi Ren Yin is known as a wine for team building. It is said that Three Squirrels does team-building activities with them every year.

A few close friends, mainly giving gifts.

There is also a gold medal youth version.

It can be roughly divided into these types, which is very simple. Unlike other wines, it is hard to tell how many brands there are in a series.

It is said that in its heyday, Moutai had 400 to 500 sub-brands, and Wuliangye had more than 1,000. This is the number of brands, not the number of products. If all products are counted, there would be 3,000 to 4,000 SKUs.

Jiang Xiaobai only has these few models, they are very simple and can be distinguished by just looking at the bottles.

This is the logic behind Jiang Xiaobai's four-wheel drive content marketing, four genes: injecting content genes into products, injecting social genes into content, injecting business genes into social, and injecting product genes into business. This is typical thinking about creating a hit product.

2. Big Logic: The Growth Path of Being the First in the Category

I just introduced earlier that Jiang Xiaobai is a single-handed challenger in the entire liquor industry.

Liquor is a world of its own and you can’t make it just because you want to. The waters in the world are very deep. If you are not in the world, you will find it difficult to sell. Many channels may not cooperate with you, and many advertisers may not cooperate with you. Not only channels, but also regions, processes and raw materials have thresholds.

What kind of wine is Jiang Xiaobai? How did Jiang Xiaobai’s product categories come about?

It has a large number of user touchpoints, behind which is content marketing, and in the content marketing there is a lot of emotional content, so customers can easily remember it.

As soon as the customer saw Jiang Xiaobai, they felt very friendly:

Jiang Xiaobai is me, that person is not Jiang Xiaobai, that is me. This is who I am, and Jiang Xiaobai is the symbol of my identity.

Therefore, its category was not advocated at the beginning, but rather settled down.

Many wines start with a value proposition, saying, "I am a certain kind of wine. What do we want to do?"

What kind of wine is Jiang Xiaobai? What is its category?

Wine for gatherings of young people in small towns.

It is not a first- or second-tier city, but a third-, fourth- or fifth-tier city. When I went back to my hometown, my relatives all asked me to drink this wine. When I first heard it, I felt that the wine was very famous and delicious. I tasted it and it wasn't quite to my taste.

A question arises: if you don’t like drinking wine very much, does it mean that it will not sell well?

How many Chinese people are used to drinking foreign liquor? Why are foreign liquors selling so well? Is it true that the sauce-flavored liquor is the most popular type of liquor among Chinese people? Otherwise, why would it be so expensive?

The sauce-flavor type only accounts for 5% of the national market share, and the strong-flavor type is the Chinese people's favorite wine. Sometimes, many people don’t like to drink, but that doesn’t mean they don’t consume. These are two different things.

Suppose we remove the three words "Jiang Xiaobai" and translate it into English as LV wine, it will still sell at a high price and in large quantities. Why? Although foreign liquor itself does not suit the taste of us Chinese, it does not affect its sales.

From this perspective, some people saying that Jiang Xiaobai's wine is not very tasty does not actually have a direct causal relationship with its hot sales. It is a kind of wine for young people in small towns to drink at gatherings, and it is an emotional consumer product.

Content marketing has a large number of user touchpoints and can evoke people's emotions.

After leaving the user touchpoint, people still remember it. When I went into the supermarket, I saw that this was Jiang Xiaobai. Saw it two days ago. Then I looked at the copywriting bottle, and this sentence really touched me.

Before I saw the sales scene, I was actually impressed by Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting, so of course it was natural for me to pay for it.

The wine used by young people in small towns at gatherings is completely outside the conventional wine category. In the future, a large number of such fast fashion brands will rise rapidly in China.

4. The underlying logic of user touchpoints

What is the underlying logic of user touchpoints?

The basic theory of advertising or marketing in the past believed that we had to increase customers' desire to consume. The reason customers buy from me is that their desire has reached a certain level, so high-desire consumption is the mainstream.

Not now. Why do many people consume in non-shopping scenarios? I will give you a simple example and you will understand.

For example, my good friend posted a status on WeChat Moments saying that he watched a movie called "Life is Beautiful" today and it was really touching. It looks like a comedy, but it's actually very sad.

Maybe I don’t have the desire to watch the movie, maybe I don’t know what “Life is Beautiful” means.

If I want to watch a movie recently, I will take the initiative to check what movies are being shown recently. Among these movies, I have to choose from a group of dwarfs. Which one should I watch? This is the decision-making path for high-desire consumption.

What is low-desire consumption?

I saw a good friend on WeChat Moments say that "Life is Beautiful" is very good, so I might ask him, is it playing now? He said it was being shown. Okay, I'll go tomorrow.

In fact, I had no desire to consume the movie "Life is Beautiful", nor did I have the desire to watch the movie, but when it triggered me, I consumed it. How did this trigger come about? It happened in a non-shopping scenario.

Jiang Xiaobai creates a large number of user touchpoints even when consumers are not in stores or restaurants where alcohol is available. These user touchpoints create connections between users and target customers, inspiring the emotions of target customers.

When he consumes in the future, this emotion may be awakened again, and a decision will be made after being awakened, so it is a low-desire consumption.

This is also why many people say that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do business on Tmall, Taobao, JD.com, Meituan, and Ele.me. Because online traffic is becoming increasingly difficult to buy.

If you ask them to buy keywords, aren't they just buying high-desire consumption? Everyone goes to buy, but there are actually very few scenarios of high-desire consumption.

Think about it, in one day, you want to go shopping, and while you are in the store you want to buy a few things, can this factor or desire account for 10% of the day? Impossible, a few percent at most. In more than 90 percent of cases, you have no desire to consume and are just wandering around.

You meet someone at that point in time and fall in love at first sight. Then when you go shopping again, you will inevitably think of him. It's that simple and the logic is not complicated.

It’s easy to say, but very difficult to do. After all, there are many people who want to make youth wine, but very few can achieve the same scale as Jiang Xiaobai. It can be said without exaggeration that it only takes 2 to 3 years to achieve the sales performance of traditional liquor that takes 10 years.

We have also seen some traditional liquor companies launch some youthful liquors, with a variety of copywriting and expressions, and larger advertising budgets, but they still don’t sell well.

V. Summary

1. Three driving forces of cognitive marketing

Cognitive marketing has three major driving forces. The one we will introduce today is user touchpoints. Through a wide range of user touchpoints, we can make users remember us and inspire them emotionally.

In the drinking scenario, this emotion is easily aroused, and once aroused, it is easy to make decisions, which is how to lock in target customers.

He is indifferent to non-target customers. Those who think that Jiang Xiaobai liquor is particularly unpalatable will not be impressed when they see Jiang Xiaobai's advertisement.

2. The underlying logic of the breakthrough

Why are young people reluctant to drink liquor in casual occasions? This is a brand new market to be developed.

This is not just a pioneering new marketing category and new name, but also a real entry into a new incremental market.

3. Solutions to break the impasse

Why are young people unwilling to drink liquor? It works hard in four aspects: products, brands, categories and markets to break through.

4. Small logic: the four-wheel drive of content marketing

The four-wheel drive in content marketing, namely product, content, social and business, is widely disseminated, and the marketing cost is greatly reduced to only 1/5 of that of traditional liquor.

5. Big Logic: The Growth Path of Being the First in the Category

As a result, it broke the three decision-making dimensions of traditional liquor, and its own category was settled.

What is its category? Wine for gatherings of young people in small towns. This is a status wine for young people, and this is its category positioning.

6. The underlying logic of user touchpoints

How can I have more contact with customers in non-shopping scenarios so that they can remember me after the contact and think of me next time they have shopping needs. How to get customers to consume under low desire conditions is the real logic behind it.

Author: Cao Sheng

Source: Grayscale Cognition Society (ID: HDrenzhishe)