Brand marketing promotion: the underlying logic behind Durex’s content marketing!

On April 19, the cross-border marketing cooperation between Durex and Heytea failed, and received a lot of negative reviews. Durex quickly replaced the copy, and Heytea also issued an apology letter the next day, stating that the previous content "had no malicious intent."

Some people asked, why is Durex the focus this time? What kind of product is Durex? Today we will talk about the story behind Durex.

1. Redefine Durex

Durex actually has two products: one in the product market and one in the content market.

1. Product market: Durex is a condom

Durex is the leading brand in the Chinese condom market, accounting for about 40% of the market share. This is a conventional product that everyone knows, so we won’t explain it in detail.

2. Content market: Durex is the leading brand in social communication

At the same time, Durex is the number one brand in China's social communication, surpassing traditional consumer product advertising and marketing giants such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.

People are often not familiar with this market characteristic, so let’s briefly analyze it. Durex has the following characteristics in the content market:

① Durex is a typical example of a traditional consumer brand using Internet marketing;

② 90% of Durex China’s marketing efforts are on Internet content marketing;

③Internet content marketing is divided into two types:

One is regular interactive marketing, including holiday content marketing, thematic content marketing, user interactive content marketing, etc. The other is its unique weapon, which is marketing by leveraging trends. Durex’s unique posters are always present in major hot spots.

④ Durex’s Internet content marketing has achieved amazing results, with exposure on Weibo alone exceeding hundreds of millions of people per month. If converted into advertising effects on traditional media, I wonder how much budget will be spent?

2. Redefine content marketing

1. Major change: from positive marketing to negative marketing

There is a misunderstanding in the content marketing of traditional consumer products, that is, the content produced mainly revolves around two centers: one is product promotion, and the other is brand promotion.

Traditional marketing is positive marketing (mainly promoting oneself), while Durex content marketing is reverse marketing (mainly serving users).

Durex is user-centric and reversely produces content that users like. It uses creativity to cleverly connect popular events that the general public likes to watch with the Durex brand and produces specific content for specific groups of people.

2. Positioning: Three changes in personality

First positioning: brand promotion personality

In the early days, Durex’s content marketing focused on positively promoting the brand image, while also taking into account the brand connotations: durability, reliability, and excellence. It turned out that the effect was not good and no one spread the content at all.

Second positioning: "Otaku companion" character

Durex discovered that there is a group of people on the Internet, labeled as "otakus", who have the following characteristics:

First, they spend a lot of time online. Second, they express themselves relatively less offline, but have a strong desire to express themselves online, mostly in the form of complaints. Third, they actively spread the content they care about.

So Durex adjusted its image as a company for otakus. The production of content has also undergone tremendous changes. It has started to produce content that otakus like, including some jokes, knowledge about gender, etc. However, it was found that the dissemination effect was not ideal.

The main disadvantage is that the brand personality is not distinct enough and the content produced has very poor interactivity.

The third positioning: "Wandering but not unruly" personality

Durex adjusted its positioning again and created a character that "understands life, knows how to have fun, is a little bad, a little dirty, but not dissolute." I finally got the feel for this positioning.

3. Core Competencies

Durex has two core capabilities in content marketing: one is creative industrialization, and the other is operational interactivity. Specifically, it is reflected in three major formulas:

Formula 1: Creative Production Formula

Creative production = familiarity + unexpectedness + plot + blank space + subculture + authorized production + external self-production

For example, at around 5 o'clock on June 23, 2011, there was a heavy rain in Beijing (a familiar social hot spot event).

At 5:58, a message appeared on a private account of the Weibo operations team: "It rained heavily in Beijing today. Fortunately, I had two Durex in my bag." (accidentally linked to Durex), plus three pictures demonstrating the whole process of using Durex to make waterproof shoe covers (life scenes + dramatic plots).

After testing the product and seeing good results, Durex’s official Weibo account forwarded the message, which quickly topped Weibo’s hot list within one hour. An advertising expert said that the zero-budget social communication effect of Durex's heavy rain in Beijing was equivalent to running three 30-second advertisements on CCTV.

For example, on the afternoon of July 27, 2016, Xiaomi released an air notebook that was "thinner than a one-yuan coin (standing upright), which caused strong complaints online.

At 00:08 on July 28, Durex released a poster with the slogan “Just Thinner”. This is a typical example of blank space (pun) + subculture (people familiar with American singer Justin Bieber will laugh and actively forward it).

Every time a hot event occurs, there will be people online imitating Durex’s style to create posters. As long as it does not damage the brand value and does not contain vulgar content, Durex will not interfere. Instead, it will select some outstanding creators and authorize them to create high-quality works.

This constitutes a crowdsourcing model of authorized production + external self-production.

Formula 2: Creative Communication Formula

Creative communication reading volume = 1% original + 9% forwarding + 90% reading

Good ideas do not necessarily lead to good dissemination. Durex has specially set up content marketing ROI (return on investment) indicators, one is the number of exposures, and the other is the quality of exposure. The so-called exposure quality refers to how much exposure Durex has, which is spread through interaction with KOL opinion leaders.

90% of Durex’s content marketing efforts are focused on optimizing exposure quality.

Formula 3: Customer Value Formula

Customer value = sense of participation + sense of gain + sense of belonging

The goal of Durex’s content marketing is to make user operations interactive. In multiple links such as daily content updates, topic setting, and rewarded interactions, customers are given a sense of participation, achievement, and belonging (the focus here is entirely on user experience, not sales conversion).

3. Redefine the growth logic of new retail

Durex is the new retail. The so-called new retail is an efficiency revolution that takes consumers as the core, uses the digitalization of "people, places, and goods" as the infrastructure, and is driven by traffic, data, and cognition.

1. Redefine customers: business partners

Traditional consumer product marketing defines customers as “one-time buyers”, which means simply paying money. New retail marketing defines customers as “business partners”.

Just like Dianping, it has cleverly created a new type of customer - "content producers" who specialize in experiencing and evaluating catering businesses.

Similarly, Durex has cleverly created a new type of customer - "content communicators" who specialize in spreading Durex posters. Weibo has hundreds of millions of exposures every month, all of which are achieved through free crowdsourcing from this "customer base".

2. Redefining advertising: Fresh digital IDs in the customer pool

Traditional consumer product marketing is aerial bombardment + ground distribution. This aerial bombardment is mainly based on advertising.

So what are the drawbacks of traditional advertising?

① Traditional advertising is centralized and one-way communication.

CCTV, Focus Media and others are the main platforms. Durex mainly uses Weibo and WeChat, which is a decentralized self-propagation method, and users have a strong sense of participation and gain.

② Traditional advertising is an advertising psychology based mainly on mental memory capacity.

Emphasize the word to occupy the mind and simplify the difficulty of memory recall. Durex emphasizes user experience first and focuses on scene interaction. It is unknown how many keywords that can stimulate consumers' minds they produce in a year.

③ Traditional advertising mainly focuses on traffic interception and one-time monetization, and is unable to conduct secondary marketing to old customers.

Durex focuses on user operations and customer life cycle services, directing and accumulating the traffic from each communication with users into its own customer pool, and converting each fresh potential consumer into a digital ID.

This digital ID account contains not only their transaction behaviors (data integrated from e-commerce platforms), but also their non-transaction behaviors (data integrated from two-way interactions on Weibo and WeChat). More importantly, it can be marketed to multiple times until the end of the customer life cycle.

It is obvious that Durex social communication (digital content marketing) and Trout's positioning theory are two diametrically opposed marketing strategies.

In addition to Durex, we can find many cases of well-known consumer brands, all of which are models of new retail.

For example: Michelin (the product of the content market is Michelin three-star restaurants), Red Bull (the product of the content market is extreme sports events), Disney (the product of the content market is Disneyland), Apple mobile phone (the product of the content market is the world's largest game and music distribution platform), etc.

These consumer product companies not only have first-class products, but also have made great efforts beyond products, forming huge differentiation and category separation from their competitors in the content market.

3. Redefining growth: New retail 2C enterprise growth framework

Modern consumer products are shifting from marketing to growth. For example, Coca-Cola abolished its Chief Marketing Officer and established a Chief Growth Officer instead.

Let’s look at another example of consumer product growth:

Xiaomi was founded in April 2010 and its products are mobile phones. In order to promote the sales of goods, Xiaomi separated products from goods and established a traffic-generating product called MIUI (mobile phone operating system). Therefore, the commodity is positioned as “enthusiast-level mobile phone” and the product is positioned as “advanced user-guided innovation”.

Before Xiaomi released its first mobile phone on August 16, 2011, this traffic-generating product had accumulated 100,000 potential consumers and tens of millions of social media contacts for Xiaomi.

Xiaomi’s growth logic from 0 to 1 is the same as Durex’s.

Here, we provide a new retail 2C enterprise growth framework:

1. Separation of products from goods.

First use products to attract traffic, and then use goods to realize value.

2. Product and commodity stratification.

It is the users who experience the product and it is the customers who purchase the product.

3. Product and merchandise profit sharing.

Traffic-based products are cost centers, focusing on CAC customer acquisition costs; value-based products are profit centers, focusing on LTV customer lifetime value.

Finally, let us make a bold prediction: in the future, Durex will not be a condom manufacturer, but a consumer data company, providing consumer data and user operation services for all types of consumer products in the entire Reckitt Benckiser Group (even including its Mead Johnson milk powder).

Author: Cao Sheng

Source: Cao Sheng