Analysis of Xiaohongshu promotion cases

As a marketer of Xiaohongshu, why should I talk about positioning theory? Because no matter whether it is a personal blogger or a business owner, when placing ads on Xiaohongshu, the ultimate destination is the word "brand", which occupies a certain position in the minds of users and achieves designated selection.

1. What is positioning?

Let’s talk about “positioning” first. The positioning theory was proposed by Trout & Ries in 1969. They believed that the core battlefield of business war is in the minds of customers, not factories and markets. Positioning is how to make you stand out in the minds of potential customers and explain the reason for your existence from an external perspective.

In other words, the reason you exist is because you exist in the user's cognition. For example, when you think of cola, you think of Coca-Cola. This is the power of the mind. Imagine that when your brand or account exists in the user's purchasing mental ladder, or your account exists in the user's choice of a certain category, mental pre-sale is achieved. The emergence of positioning theory is of great significance not only to the economic field, but also to brands and bloggers.

2. The significance of positioning

The meaning of positioning economics is division of labor. Adam Smith mentioned in "The Wealth of Nations" that the finer the division of labor, the larger the market scale, and the more wealth is created. In other words, your positioning is the social division of labor. After getting this division of labor, you have to think about whether you can do the job well.

For a brand, positioning means finding the reason for its existence, choosing the location for the company's decisive battle, and then gathering all resources and forces to invest in this battlefield, and never wasting resources in locations that are not decisive.

For bloggers, positioning explains who you are, what value you can provide, and how you are different from bloggers in the same field. Even if everyone is doing OOTD, the more obvious your differentiation will be whether you are in the workplace, a big internet company, or a designer OOTD.

3. Locating the underlying logic

So why does positioning appear? It is due to the explosion of communication, products and information. Users are exposed to a lot of noise every day. In this huge noise, it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to enter the customer's choice. At this moment, it is necessary to explore the customer's mental state. Mind is the key point for users to understand the world and make decisions, and its main attributes include seeking stability, simplicity and novelty .

Seeking stability: The mind lacks a sense of security, so if you want consumers to pay attention to you and buy your products, you need to have clear reasons for buying;

Seek simplicity: The mind hates confusion and complexity, so simple information is easier to enter the user's mind;

Seeking novelty: The capacity is limited, and the mind will classify and store things. Before positioning, the first step is to solve the problem of category affiliation. First check your homepage to see if it can let users know what you do.

Mental laws are also reflected in the promotion of brands and bloggers. For example, in the pursuit of certainty, in order to show professionalism, bloggers reflect professional attributes in the introduction and naming. For example, in the pursuit of simplicity, when creating selling points, it is necessary to choose selling points that users can understand, and it is best to have only one selling point to promote. In the pursuit of novel methods, when promoting new categories, they can use the original categories for promotion to reduce cognitive costs. How to use positioning theory to guide specific aspects mainly includes the following aspects.

4. How to use positioning to create Xiaohongshu

In the age of information explosion, the shortcut to entering the consumer mind is to become first. In the contest of minds, victory often goes to the first person, the first product, and the first politician who enters the mind of a potential customer. Whether you are a brand or a blogger, make yourself number one in the category and truly make users remember you. How to use positioning theory for positioning mainly involves the following four steps.

Step 1: Competition Analysis

Brands competing on Xiaohongshu need to analyze the competitive environment in the minds of potential customers. They can use category drop-down words, keyword planning tools, and search terms to see which brands have already occupied a position and whether they have an opportunity. If they have a position and have also occupied it on Xiaohongshu, they can use new breakthroughs and renewal strategies to solve the other three types in a targeted manner.

Figure 2: How different types of companies occupy and position themselves

For bloggers, the first thing to do is to choose their own field. Food, beauty, fashion, travel, and mother and baby are all good fields. If you are not sure, look for it around career, hobbies, and life.

Figure 3: Xiaohongshu’s sub-categories

Occupation: Your current occupation and the knowledge you can output. For example, if you are in operations, you can write about operations knowledge; if you are in finance, you can write about finance-related matters; if you are in psychology, you can do positioning around psychology.

Hobbies: What do you personally like and what are you interested in. For example, if you are interested in dressing, makeup, calligraphy, dancing, writing, music, etc., you can develop your plan around your hobbies.

Life: the living conditions of different groups of people, such as students, househusbands, office workers, models and other life areas.

For personal bloggers, when choosing reference accounts, they are divided into the Big V level, with more than 200,000 fans, which is the ideal goal, 20,000-100,000 fans for serious study, and 0-20,000 fans for key reference. When we first started operating Xiaohongshu, 0-20,000 fans were our main reference, and we used them as benchmarks in terms of personality, content, topic selection, popular products, and monetization methods.

Step 2: Clear positioning

By leveraging competitors' strengths in customers' minds, or taking advantage of inherent weaknesses in strengths, brands can refine their own positioning when launching campaigns, and form selling points based on the positioning. On Xiaohongshu, selling points are divided into interest, function, and scenario-based selling points, and then the selling points are arranged according to different groups of people, scenarios, and types.

Figure 4: Xiaohongshu selling point toolkit

For bloggers, choose what kind of blogger you want to be. As mentioned above, even if you are an OOTD blogger, we should be able to become the number one in the OOTD sub-category.

Step 3: Support positioning

After finding the concept of positioning, support this positioning from the perspectives of naming, positioning language, visual hammer, brand story, trust story, etc.

For example, the Feihe brand is positioned as an infant formula powder that is more suitable for the physique of Chinese babies. In its brand advertising and expert selling point promotion, it shapes the formula powder as being suitable for the physique of Chinese babies to consolidate the mental perception of the formula powder that is more suitable for babies.

Figure 5: Interpretation of the positioning of Feihe milk powder official website

Figure 6: Details of Feihe’s Xiaohongshu influencer placement

Personal blogger: Wake up and drink tea

Positioning as a tea blogger, naming: brand + category naming, highlighting the attributes of tea, high recognition, and its introduction is also a strong positioning, a guide to avoiding scams with good tea, a master's degree in tea science + an ordinary office worker, highlighting the professional strength of tea. According to the backend of Enlighten, its followers increased by 65,000 in 6 months.

The core of the notes revolves around drinking tea, recommending good tea, strategies to avoid pitfalls when buying tea, and strengthening the positioning of professional tea drinkers.

Figure 7: Wake up and drink tea homepage

Step 4: Occupy your position

According to the positioning, all aspects of the company's internal matching are sorted out, the positioning is strengthened, and support is provided from matching resources and operational matching, ultimately occupying this position in the minds of customers.

The criterion for judgment is that when users want to find a certain category, they think of you first. For brands and bloggers, it means firmly publishing notes around the positioning, ultimately occupying this positioning, and driving the development of the entire category.

Figure 8: Brand strategy positioning introduction process

This article talks about Xiaohongshu marketing from the perspective of positioning theory. There are many more knowledge points about positioning, and there is still a lot of room for extension.

Although the market has mixed opinions on positioning theory, it is indeed the clearest theory for branding. Regardless of whether it is for bloggers or brands, it is important to find their own positioning in the early stage, and then make valuable and meaningful notes and content around the correct positioning. This will eventually make the entire category bigger and bigger and represent the entire category.