The key points of KFC’s “Crazy Thursday” marketing!

A day or two ago, KFC successfully registered "Crazy Thursday" as a trademark.

The popularity of "Crazy Four Literature" is a decisive supporting point in KFC's festival-building process.

With "Crazy Thursday" as the core keyword, countless netizens used their imaginations to create a large number of jokes with unique ideas, twists and turns in plots, and rich forms.

KFC officials naturally would not miss such a good opportunity. Not only did they continue to fan the popularity of the "Crazy Thursday" meme, but at the end of last year, they also launched an annual grand tasting conference for "Crazy Thursday Literature."

The most important significance of the "Crazy Thursday Literature" that triggered a frenzy on the Internet is that it helped KFC create a successful festival, making countless people remember the existence of KFC's Crazy Thursday every Thursday.

As a hot topic supported by a large number of secondary creations, the popularity of KFC's "Crazy Four Literature", like the explosive popularity of "Huaqiang Buys Melons" and "Chicken Soup is Coming", has certain accidental factors and is difficult to achieve perfect replication.

But from the "Crazy Four Literature" and the process of similar online hot spots fermenting, becoming popular, and then deeply rooted in people's hearts, we can also see that there are some objective laws in human memory. Just being able to touch them is enough to leave a lasting impression.

1. Deep processing of information

When we see a picture, hear a sentence, and then remember this picture or sentence, we go through a process of understanding and processing.

The more complex the process is, the more brain cells are involved, the more active the brain is, and the easier it is to remember.

This is the deep processing of information.

For example, try to memorize this string of numbers for a few seconds: 184019211949.

Close your eyes and think about it. Even if you can recite this string of numbers aloud, do you still lack a clear sense of certainty about each number?

If we look at this set of numbers in a different way:

1840-1921-1949

• In 1840, the Sino-Japanese War broke out;
• 1921 was the party’s birthday;
• In 1949, the People's Republic of China was founded.

These are the years in which major historical events in modern China occurred.

Close your eyes again and recall these numbers. Do they seem much clearer and more certain?

In the process of understanding and memorizing just now, the new number you came into contact with established a connection with the information you already knew in your mind, which is equivalent to understanding 1+2 based on knowing 1+1.

Moreover, in the process of connecting new information with old knowledge, more brain cells are mobilized and involved in the memory process, so the impression is more profound.

Let’s look at “Crazy Four Literature”, as well as other once popular memes such as “Huaqiang Buys Melons” and “Chicken Soup is Coming”. They have all spawned a lot of creations that seem to have nothing to do with the memes themselves.

For example, the popular secondary creations of "Huaqiang Buys Melons", from Sarilang to the Lord of Shadows, from Iron Man to Squidward. Countless.

For example, the secondary creation of "Chicken Soup is Coming", from Breaking Bad, to Plants vs. Zombies, from Chicken, You Are So Beautiful, to The Deathly Haunted Man on the Tip of the Tongue.

The mixture of multiple information allows the audience to mobilize the multiple known information in their brains to understand and remember the information in front of them during the viewing process, and keep a large number of memory cells active.

When information is presented to people in a way that conforms to the laws of memory, it is naturally easier to remember.

The same is true for how people remember Bing Dwen Dwen. First, the Winter Olympics gave it meaning, then there was the connection with her shape as a panda, and then there was the news that ice was hard to come by, and there were also memes such as "Wu Qian worked overtime to make Bing Dwen Dwen." A large amount of information that was already known in the mind is called up, making it difficult for people to forget it.

We want to be remembered by users, and we cannot wait for users to actively use their brains to understand the product.

In addition to encouraging and guiding existing secondary creations, even if it has not yet triggered a large number of secondary creations, it is entirely possible to maintain a more active attitude towards the way information is displayed through limited contact with users.

To explain the secret, let’s use the harshest word in the creative circle: outrageous.

2. A little outrageous is reliable

Have you noticed that nowadays, fewer and fewer people are interested in various topics and pictures related to festivals?

At every season, Xiao Du still contributes various pictures and texts in various ways, but the number of people around him who pay attention to and talk about him is getting smaller and smaller, and he no longer has the phenomenal popularity he once had.

Because Xiao Du is not the only one who is following festivals in various ways. Almost every IP with some aspirations is following this path, using their brains and starting to create.

The result is that there are only so many festivals in a year, and everyone has come up with all the creative ideas they can think of, so the audience no longer finds it fresh.

To put it simply: reasonable creativity has lost its living space.

In the past, when people pursued creativity, they often started from rationality. Conduct in-depth research on existing information and expand it from related scenarios. This can indeed bring unexpected and reasonable feelings.

But the biggest flaw of this creative approach is that it has limited paths. With more competitors, it becomes harder to come up with truly new ideas.

When hailing a taxi online, you discover a night bus scenario, only to find that someone else has already used it.

When making 3.8 blessings, you racked your brains to come up with an idea that you thought was brilliant, only to discover that users have already become aesthetically fatigued.

Reasonable ideas are no longer novel, but if you want to be remembered by users, novelty is a way that cannot be missed.

When people are curious, theta wave EEG waveform will appear in their brain. This frequency band is closely related to the human brain's memory system and can promote LTP (neurons produce more stable connections). The difficulty of LTP may be only 1/10 of the usual level.

To put it simply: when people are faced with new and novel things, their memory will be 10 times better.

Therefore, when past creativity no longer feels novel, we must explore new creative ways.

For example, an idea that has suddenly become popular recently. In essence, it is just a lottery for a 50,000 yuan prize. If we only extend the clue of lottery, whether it is a festival, feedback, or giving out money, it will not be new to netizens who have seen big prizes such as koi. But combining recruitment and lottery, which were originally unrelated, created amazing sparks.

Say goodbye to the previous path dependence on extensibility and make your creativity even more outrageous.

It's already 2022. On the Internet, there is no need to make your products and brands so righteous. It's okay if they are a little outrageous.

Not to mention, there are some products that, in order to maintain their so-called brand image, always put on a cold face and talk to users like government spokespersons. The "creative ideas" they come up with are even more lackluster.

3. Operate, Operate, Operate Again

"Crazy Four Literature" allows anyone to create a second creation easily.

Anyone can easily copy the copy written by others and ask for a KFC meal from their friends in an interesting way.

In this process, users are not only spectators, but also fully appreciate the operational sense.

The operation process is undoubtedly an important part of memory.

Open a psychology book and turn to the chapter related to memory, and you can find a way to classify memory: declarative memory and procedural memory.

For human individuals, declarative memory only consists of the information itself.

For human individuals, procedural memory has each specific link and step.

Let’s take a simple example: it is not easy to memorize a phone number directly. But if you imagine yourself standing in front of a phone and pressing each number on the phone one by one, it will become easier to remember the phone number.

For users, the memory efficiency of simply seeing certain information and personally participating in a process is completely different.

Many product and operation people have a natural fear when facing users:

For example, in the process of attracting new users, in order to reduce the difficulty of participation and make it easier for users to enter, the participation process is often simplified to the extreme - allowing users to complete the entire process of participating in the activity and receive all benefits by just clicking a button.

In this process, although users received benefits, they had no sense of participation at all, and naturally they were prone to forget about it easily.

The final result is: the activity data is encouraging, and a large number of new users received the benefits. But in the long run, the active retention rate is lower.

Indeed, from the perspective of growth hacking, if we only look at individual links, every additional operation step will result in the loss of a group of users. By streamlining one operation step, a group of users will be added.

But if you look at the overall situation, most of the users who cannot tolerate taking one more step are not your real target group, and the probability of them being valuable is very low.

In order to cater to them, more real users have lost the sense of participation they could have had.

When you already have the resources and valuable benefits that users need, you might as well let users click and operate more times, just like Pinduoduo did. Users will remember it.

4. Wake up

There are three steps in memory: decoding, storage, and recall.

It is obviously not enough to just let users remember.

Users must also be able to remember it.

In this regard, "Crazy Four Literature" is undoubtedly very successful.

“Crazy Thursday,” Thursday, is the perfect opportunity. Let people spontaneously think of KFC, use "Crazy Four Literature" to make jokes to people around them, or get a free portion of fried chicken.

This is the most important part of the mechanism for awakening memory: the cue.

Our memory holds too much information, but when we don’t need it, we don’t think about it one by one.

For example, you know the next sentence of “The stone path slants up the cold mountain”, but when you have nothing to do, would you deliberately repeat it?

Therefore, simply letting users remember will not produce any effect. You also have to give users hints so they can remember it.

If you have enough capital, it would be best to pop up ads in front of users whenever they have a need. But if not, bury the hints in your memory ahead of time.

It can be a time, a place, a specific scene, or a certain behavior of the user.

Likewise, the more outrageous this particular tip is, the better.

If you open a Kenkenji fried chicken restaurant, you also want users to remember you on Thursdays.

I'm sorry, but it's hard to cover up people's memory of KFC. By emphasizing Thursday, you are actually promoting KFC.

But if you find a more outrageous time scenario, such as: receiving fan benefits from Kenkenji while taking a paid shit every Tuesday morning, users may be deeply impressed by you.

5. Final Thoughts

This is not an era of creativity exhaustion. On the contrary, the excess of creativity has raised people's appreciation level.

If you want users to see you and remember you among a sea of ​​​​flowers, it is essential to have more outrageous creativity and more sophisticated design.

Just like KFC’s new fried chicken products, they are becoming less and less innovative.

But if you treated me to one this Thursday, I wouldn't mind.

Author: Mo Tao

Source: Mo Tao