Advertising and marketing case analysis skills!

When it comes to learning methods, "looking at cases" must be one of them.

But many people read cases only to accumulate the number of cases and gain knowledge, but not to increase their insights.

After reading it, I thought I knew everything, but when I started to do the project myself, I had no idea where to start.

Then, it will be of no use to look at more cases, because you only "know what it is, but not why it is."

How to do advertising case analysis? The article "I'll tell you in three simple steps" has over 200 likes on Zhihu, which is the article with the highest feedback. I think there are still many people who need it.

It just so happened that I saw a lot of advertising cases on Shuying some time ago, and I have some new ideas that I want to share with you. Let’s talk about how to gain insight into the brand strategy behind advertising, that is, how this advertisement was created from 0 to 1, and let the ideas from the case be used by you.

An advertising campaign does not come out of thin air, it must be in line with the company's strategic direction. How do we find this direction?

This article will give you a glimpse of it.

1. For example, how would you analyze this advertisement?

https://v.qq.com/x/page/o3225xpbk46.html

This is an advertisement of Xiaohongshu before the 2021 Spring Festival. If you have read the previous article, you can probably summarize it in the order:

The short film was launched before the New Year. Taking advantage of the peak cooking time at home, it created eight cooking scenes to express love for parents, children, partners, and pets. Through highly contagious copywriting and shots, it touched people's hearts and called on everyone to cook a meal for their loved ones in the New Year, thereby increasing the user activity and content richness of Xiaohongshu.

Judging from netizens’ feedback and social media data, a very good communication effect was achieved. It's a very good commercial.

Your next action may be to put it in your favorites, and then take it out next time when there is a project theme about love and cooking. You can borrow the corresponding copywriting, scenes, and expressions from it and use them for your own benefit. This will count as learning a case. This is the normal routine operation.

But is that enough?

This is not enough, because you only know how Xiaohongshu does it, and you are still at the technical analysis level. You know what copywriting, scenes, and picture content are used, and what emotions of users are captured. But you don’t know why it made this ad.

This cannot answer a deeper question: Why does Xiaohongshu create food? Isn’t it a general reference book on beauty, makeup and fashion?

In this case, although the film is good, it does not fit the product positioning, and such advertising is ineffective - this will lead to another conclusion, right? Is it still worth learning from?

Let’s answer them one by one and tell you how to analyze an advertisement from three levels.

2. Three levels of advertising analysis

1. First layer: tactical layer

Focusing on the user communication angle is the execution layer.

As mentioned above, which insight point to start from, what form of expression is used, video, print or event, which characters, pictures, scenes are used, what media is selected, whether the communication link is complete and smooth, etc. That is the user-perceivable level.

2. Second layer: strategy layer

Strategy generally refers to:

• A collection of solutions that can achieve your goals
• Action guidelines and struggle methods formulated according to the development of the situation
• Have the art of struggle and pay attention to methods and means

In advertising strategy, it can be understood as the countermeasures and methods and means taken to achieve the advertising strategic goals.

We try to analyze Xiaohongshu's advertising strategy: through advertising, it guides users of different ages to share multiple types of content, enriches the platform's content resources, changes the impression of "Xiaohongshu = showing off beauty makeup", and shapes Xiaohongshu's platform image as a multi-faceted and wonderful life record.

The epidemic has accelerated the development of online communities. Xiaohongshu is a good content platform that can attract new users through online cooking records and cooking tutorials, while enriching content types.

Under the above advertising strategy, we can see that Xiaohongshu has also made many other advertisements recently: trendy wear, game crossover, value proposition, acquaintance community... They are diverse and have gone beyond the scope of beauty.

What’s more important is that at the end of most short films, people are called upon to discover and record life through videos.

There are two problems here:

1. Why does Xiaohongshu want to become a diversified content community targeting a wider audience?
2. Why make videos?

This goes deep into the corporate strategy level, so let’s try to do an analysis.

3. The third layer: strategic layer

Strategy can be understood as a series of war strategies and guidelines formulated after analyzing the overall factors of the environment.

There are two key points:

1. Environmental Analysis
2. Strategic Strategy and Guidance

Let’s look at them separately.

What kind of environment does Xiao Hongshu face?

Use Porter's Five Forces Model to make an analysis (Xiaohongshu has both content community and e-commerce functions, so here we only analyze from the content perspective):

Suppliers : content producers, such as KOLs, experts in their field, and ordinary people.

The demand of influencers is to monetize traffic. Now video content has traffic dividends, and many short video platforms have subsidies and monetization channels. High-quality content will tend to such platforms. High-quality content producers have always been the key resource that content platforms strive for.

Competitors in the same industry : If we start from the perspective of beauty and female positioning, her competitors are Meipai, Mogujie, etc.; from the perspective of content consumption, her competitors are wider, such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Video Account, Bilibili, Official Accounts, etc. Because either they are looking at you or at him, they both belong to content consumption.

Potential entrants : Whether it is a beauty or other vertical content platform, or even an e-commerce platform, there is the possibility of turning to mass content consumption. For example, Jike and Zhihu can start making short videos; e-commerce platforms such as Taobao have already started live streaming and short videos; even second-hand trading platforms such as Xianyu have their own content communities, and the video browsing experience is no different from that of Douyin and Kuaishou, and they seem to have mastered the password to traffic.

Xianyu's video section

Alternative products : Alternative products for online content consumption mean that instead of spending time watching videos, you can spend time playing games, reading, exercising, traveling, shopping, etc.

And these scenarios still have content attributes : when playing games, you want to watch live broadcasts and tutorials; when reading books, you want to find recommendations, book reviews, and one-minute explanations of X books; when exercising, you want to watch yoga tutorials, private lessons, etc.

Each item is strongly tied to online content, and video is the best carrier.

Customer negotiation ability : For ordinary users, the obvious trend is that the number and growth rate of users watching videos is much higher than that of consuming graphic content, so their choice logic is - watch whichever company has videos.

In summary, if Xiaohongshu wants to retain existing users and continue to attract new users, the transformation it must face is videoization. It relies on traffic subsidies and monetization channels to attract creators, and calls on ordinary users to post videos on the platform through advertisements in order to build its own video resource supply.

You may still have questions: Making videos is the trend of the times, so why doesn’t Xiaohongshu produce vertical content about beauty and women, but instead produces mass content?

Here I use a tool to analyze:

Sales revenue = number of people x average order value x purchase frequency

For content platforms, what they are trying to capture is the user's attention, and the measurement data is not the total transaction amount, but the total consumption time of users on the platform. So:

Total consumption time = number of people x single usage time x opening frequency

To increase the total consumption time, we need to increase the amount of each factor:

(1) Increase the number of people

It is not difficult to understand that expanding the user base and attracting users of different ages and interests with multi-type and popular content is the way to go.

(2) Increase single-use time

No matter how beautiful the video is, watching only beauty content will cause aesthetic fatigue, so it needs to be balanced with food, music, jokes, beauties, sports, travel and other content.

ByteDance’s intelligent algorithms and personalized recommendations have been verified. They recommend different content that users like through data tags, making it hard for users to put it down. The longer they use it, the stronger their dependence on the platform.

(3) Increase the frequency of opening

In addition to operational means such as comments, likes, interactions, message notifications, points, and activities that can keep you opening the APP from time to time, enriching the content types is also a good idea.

For example, if you want to find food references when cooking, read a guide to Universal Studios, recommend places to go shopping on the weekend, or simply want to kill time while waiting in line, every offline scenario allows you to open the APP and find what you need.

Teacher Ma once said that every Internet company will eventually become a data company. The more user data you have, and the more accurate and multi-dimensional the data is, the higher the value of your company will be.

E-commerce platforms label users through transaction data, which enables accurate advertising and improved transaction efficiency. Content platforms label users based on their browsing histories. To make the labels more accurate, more user data and browsing time are needed, so general mass content is the only way forward.

As for when to launch what theme and what group of people to attract, that is something to consider in the operational strategy.

3. Let’s look back

Now look at this ad again, do you understand it better?

https://v.qq.com/x/page/o3225xpbk46.html

In addition to seeing Xiaohongshu promoting cooking videos, we also saw a variety of content other than beauty on Xiaohongshu, as well as the territory competition, fighting and trumpets among major content platforms behind it.

Finally, I would like to say that video advertising, print advertising or event events are just tactical behaviors of the company, and they must be in line with the company's strategy.

When we analyze a marketing action, if we don’t understand the strategic intention behind it, we won’t be able to see the full picture. The "case study" you did was just a superficial study with little effect.

For example, there are articles analyzing that it is inappropriate for Gu Ailing to endorse certain brands because the brand tone is weakly associated with Gu Ailing. This is looking at it only from a tactical perspective and not seeing the strategic design behind it.

Sanke Trees and Kohler may have less online advertising during the Winter Olympics, but in offline stores, spokespersons play a very important role. Even just a photo can promote consumers' purchasing decisions.

Moreover, another purpose for these brands to find spokespersons is to increase dealer confidence and let the channels see the brand's strength.

Bantian Yao is a Shandong regional brand. Since Zhang Yishan became its spokesperson, the resistance to entering mall stores in first-tier cities has been much smaller.

When you understand the company's intention and then look at the spokesperson, you will understand the real reason for doing so.

Then it will be meaningful to learn from it when doing case analysis or similar projects next time.

Strategies and tactics cannot be seen with the naked eye like graphics and videos, but things that cannot be seen by the naked eye are often the key.

Author: Su Laoshi

Source: Su Lao Shi