2019, new marketing promotion begins!

Zhihu's Liu Haoran article——

Did you know? Do you really know? Are you sure you know?

If you have any questions, go to Zhihu.

It has the style of Yang Mi’s Liuliumei advertisement “Are you okay?”

Mafengwo's Huang Xuan article——

Go to Mafengwo before traveling.

Why go to Mafengwo first? Why go to Mafengwo first? Why go to Mafengwo first?

There is also BOSS Direct Hiring, everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs——

When looking for a job, talk directly to the boss.

If you are looking for a job, go to BOSS Direct.

Promotion and salary increase. Promotion and salary increase. Promotion and salary increase.

When looking for a job, talk directly to the boss.

If you are looking for a job, go to BOSS Direct.

Critics say that these ads are eye-catching, stupid, and vulgar, and that they damage the brand image and values.

Those who agree say that no matter how much you object, these ads are indeed effective. The number of downloads has increased, and at least you remember them.

I think those who criticize have missed the point.

These ads are definitely effective! During the World Cup, CCTV spent more than 100 million yuan on the advertising budget in just one month, with high exposure and high broadcast frequency every day. If you say that this advertising is ineffective, then you have a grudge against the RMB!

If you give me a budget of hundreds of millions of yuan a month, even if the advertisement turns out to be a piece of shit, it has to be effective. But this "effectiveness" refers to the effectiveness of advertising media costs, not the effectiveness of advertising creativity.

This is like Guazi used cars, I think you have all seen its advertisements. From an advertising perspective alone, Guazi is very successful. But is this because it is so well positioned? Is the phrase “trading volume is far ahead” awesome?

Bullshit! It’s because Guazi has a media budget of over 1 billion yuan a year, and its advertisements are everywhere, making it hard not to see or remember them.

Let’s look back at the three advertisements of Zhihu, Mafengwo and BOSS Direct Hire. It can be said that they have grasped the essence of brainwashing of traditional advertisements (the above are all actual TVC copywriting transcripts).

What is the essence?

Split a 15-second ad into three 5-second ads - and then - repeat the slogan three times.

The three advertisements above all repeat themselves over and over again.

This kind of repeater-style brainwashing advertising, combined with a high-repetition media delivery strategy, intensively bombards your auditory and visual nerves in a short period of time, and can indeed stand out from the advertising environment and be remembered by you.

But remember, is that all there is to marketing?

Although Zhihu increased its popularity and user base through advertising during the World Cup, its core users expressed unprecedented disappointment and alienation with Zhihu.

How does Zhihu define itself? What are values? Nobody knows. And these should also be conveyed through marketing and communicated with users.

There is a question on Zhihu: "In 2019, which one has a better future, Zhihu or Weibo?" You can go and take a look at the highly-rated answers to this question.

If building a brand only requires building awareness, and the whole point of marketing is to be remembered by users, then many years ago, advertising guru Leo Burnett said: "If you want to be different, you can go to work in the morning with a sock in your mouth."

Holding a sock in your mouth can indeed help you stand out from the crowd and be remembered. You may immediately make the headlines of social news and the hot search list and appear in many people’s circle of friends. But what will you do?

I have always said that traditional advertising usually has two destinies:

First, turn a blind eye.

99% of advertisements are ignored and indifferent by consumers due to mediocre creativity and insufficient budget (even if you have seen its advertisements, you can't remember them at all).

What about the fate of the remaining 1%?

It belongs to the second type - damn retard.

Because the advertising costs are too high, they try desperately to brainwash consumers, but because the creativity is too eye-catching, they are specifically hated by consumers.

It can be seen from this that the logic of traditional marketing is still based on traffic, which is essentially buying users from the media. Spend money on CCTV, Focus Media, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent... and then wait for users to come.

However, when the traffic dividend reaches its peak and media prices and customer acquisition costs become increasingly higher, traditional marketing seems to be at its wit's end.

For the same World Cup marketing, Mengniu has a bigger budget. It is said that Mengniu spent a total of 2 billion yuan during the entire World Cup - 330 million yuan for the World Cup sponsorship seat, 40 million yuan for Messi endorsement fees, and 500 million yuan for CCTV's top World Cup media package.

However, Mengniu's marketing effect was completely defeated by Vatti, which only spent tens of millions of dollars.

"If the French team wins the championship, Vatti will refund the full amount" has become a hot topic among the people. Although there is an element of luck, even if the French team did not win the championship, the entire marketing campaign would have been a huge success.

From the comparison between Mengniu and Vatti, we can see that Mengniu still focuses on traditional hard advertising, based on traffic; while Vatti packages the entire World Cup marketing into an event, based on content.

Vatti takes content as its foundation, creates topics, and attracts user attention and discussion, thereby generating more content (including articles, media reports, and jokes) and traffic.

So what should we do when the traffic dividend hits bottom?

1. Content

First, content drives traffic.

Let’s think about the marketing cases that dominated the screen in 2018, such as Li Ning’s catwalk at New York Fashion Week. Lao Gan Ma also went.

Want Want entered the fashion industry and launched a snow-cake air cushion foundation, so that the national trend is recognized as the keyword and small trend in 2019.

Douyin started playing "The First Cultural Relics Drama Conference", and the cumulative number of views exceeded 100 million.

Durex published a collection of poems, Shenzhou Zhuanche issued a notice that "Michael Wang was late for his flight this morning", and Tencent photoshopped pictures every day and asked if you wanted to see photos of yourself as a young man in your previous life.

NetEase is flooding the screen with songs again, including "Jung's Psychological Test", "Sleeping Position Competition", "She Died After Struggling for 48 Hours", "My Philosophical Temperament", and NetEase Cloud Music's annual playlist...

In 2018, GQ Lab wrote more than 280 articles with more than 100,000 views, and its single public account generated revenue of 200 million yuan, making it the most profitable public account in China.

Even at the end of 2018, because of the Dolce & Gabbana's insulting China incident, the 2014 CCTV Spring Festival Gala public service advertisement "Chopsticks" was dug up again and heatedly discussed.

Content is becoming more and more important, and only good content can maximize the value of traffic.

However, traditional marketing relies more on traffic to promote brands, and content becomes a vassal of traffic. During my many years in the industry, I have been very puzzled by one question: Why are many clients willing to spend hundreds of millions to place TV commercials, but are unwilling to spend hundreds of thousands to make a good TV commercial?

In fact, this is the ultimate expression of traffic thinking. The content is irrelevant. As long as the brand can be frequently exposed at the consumer touch points, purchases can be made and results can be achieved.

But today, overwhelming advertising and building channels seem a bit outdated. On the one hand, traffic costs are becoming increasingly high, and on the other hand, the new generation of consumers are immune to hard sales. They have learned to say NO to brainwashing advertisements and overloaded information.

Marketing today needs to be done quietly, by implanting content and word of mouth into consumers’ hearts and social circles, thus stimulating their interest and desire to buy.

Those who understand the marketing industry should know P&G's position in the history of marketing. It pioneered many marketing innovations, such as the brand manager system.

For many years, P&G has been a typical representative of the traditional business model of "big production + big brand + big media + big channel".

First, clearly define the brand through market segmentation + USP; then, carry out high-exposure and high-budget promotion through mainstream media + celebrity endorsements; then, major supermarkets enter, display and promote; finally, consumers will buy, buy, buy.

Every year, P&G is one of the top 10 advertisers on CCTV (the rest are basically pharmaceuticals), but suddenly, this approach stopped working.

P&G's performance in China had been declining for three consecutive years, and it was not until fiscal 2018 that its performance improved. Rejoice/Head & Shoulders/Pantene once occupied more than 60% of the Chinese shampoo market share, but by 2016 the share had fallen to 35.8%.

So, what has P&G been doing in the past two years?

SK-II started its blind date corner marketing in April 2016 (part of SK-II’s “Change Destiny” campaign). Although it was quite controversial, it had a huge stimulating effect on sales, and SK-II’s sales in China soared by 50%.

Blind date corner marketing strengthens topic creation, emotional connection and user interaction, it is content.

There are more than 70,000 notes about OLAY's Little White Bottle on Xiaohongshu. OLAY's Little White Bottle is known as the affordable little light bulb because of its high concentration of niacinamide.

Words such as small white bottle, small dumbbell, and small face essence are frequently mentioned by consumers on social media. This is the new era of grass-planting science, it is content.

Always was going to launch a liquid sanitary napkin. P&G’s first round of promotion was to find hundreds of purchasing agents to promote it, saying that it was “the most popular online sanitary napkin in North America.”

KOL + new internet celebrity, creating internet celebrity products, it is content.

From the perspective of brand assets, traffic can only bring brand awareness, while content can give a brand personality, emotions and values. Good content is the best carrier for brand presentation and user reputation.

After the traffic dividend disappears, marketing can only return to building a good brand. To build a good brand, it is far from enough to just emphasize awareness. Corporate marketing must empower the brand with more value and connotation through content creation.

From a sales perspective, traffic can only bring visitors and low conversion rates, while content can bring repurchase rates and high conversion rates.

As the cost of acquiring customers becomes higher and higher, companies must pay attention to the retention and repurchase of every new customer, and the value of content becomes increasingly important.

Content is the first keyword of new marketing.

Content drives traffic, so who drives the content?

The answer is: social

2. Social

Friends who are engaged in and pay attention to self-media will notice that WeChat official accounts have been frequently revised in 2018. This is a huge pressure brought to Tencent after the rise of short videos such as Toutiao and Douyin.

In the 20 years of China's Internet, generation after generation of content platforms have risen and fallen, from BBS to blogs, from Weibo to official accounts, from Youku Tudou to Tik Tok Kuaishou, as well as Douban, Zhihu, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, etc.

For consumers, the most important factor in deciding whether to go to a content platform is of course whether the platform can provide high-quality content.

But content is overloaded and user attention is limited. How can users quickly find the content they want to watch? How to push the right content to the right users? How to make high-quality content stand out on the platform? How to improve the efficiency of content distribution? It becomes the key to determining the rise and fall of a platform.

In the beginning, BBS and blogs were based on a centralized editorial recommendation system , where a group of professional editors decided which content to push to consumers first.

Later, WeChat official accounts began to use a decentralized social recommendation system , where people forwarded their favorite official account content to their Moments and WeChat groups, thereby bringing more users and fans to the official accounts.

The rise of Toutiao is inseparable from its personalized algorithm recommendation system , which uses big data to analyze what content you may be interested in, thereby achieving accurate push notifications.

The decline of public accounts is obviously due to problems with its social recommendation mechanism.

On the one hand, the number of public accounts is increasing, but the content is becoming increasingly monotonous. When a hot topic emerges, all public accounts will follow it, and users will inevitably become aesthetically fatigued; public accounts that do not follow hot topics will have content that no one cares about and will have no fans, further leading to the bad money driving out the good.

In addition, the list of public accounts changes significantly every three days and slightly every two days, making it increasingly difficult to find the accounts and content you want to see. So users are no longer willing to read official accounts.

On the other hand, normal WeChat users are becoming more and more aloof in their Moments, which are only visible for three days, and are unwilling to forward articles to their Moments;

However, those who advertise, do micro-business, and do purchasing on behalf of others are unscrupulous and occupy a large amount of public resources in the circle of friends. The quality of content in everyone's circle of friends is constantly declining. So users are no longer willing to look at their Moments.

As a result, WeChat public accounts had to be constantly revised, from a list format to a stream-like format, until the night of December 21, 2018, when WeChat version 7.0.0 was launched, announcing that WeChat had given its own answer:

Use Moments videos to respond to short videos, and use the new “Take a look” function to create a new circle of friends.

If you like an article from a public account, click "Like" in the lower right corner of the article and it will appear in the "Take a Look" channel. All your friends can see it, leave messages and discuss it. This is undoubtedly a more efficient social distribution mechanism.

This is the answer given by WeChat, using a more precise and efficient social mechanism to drive content.

Zhang Xiaolong talks about kindness.

So in my opinion, in this age of information explosion, not creating and adding information garbage to others is the greatest kindness of this era.

This is the second keyword we want to talk about today, social.

Social drives content.

In 2018,

There is a marketing keyword: fission

There are two star marketing cases: Pinduoduo and Luckin Coffee

There are two very popular business bestsellers: "Growth Hacker" and "Traffic Pool"

There is a model that marketers always mention: AARRR

All of the above actually mean the same thing - socializing.

How to connect brands with more users? How to leverage users’ social chains through marketing to acquire more users?

When we thought the e-commerce landscape had settled, Pinduoduo suddenly emerged. Obviously, it takes advantage of the traffic dividend of third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities.

Because first- and second-tier cities are the existing Internet users, while third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities are the incremental Internet (mobile Internet) users. Among Pinduoduo's users, women account for 70%, and 65% are from third- and fourth-tier cities.

Pinduoduo's method is to use the WeChat platform. By offering low prices for goods, users can initiate group purchases with friends, family, and neighbors, thereby achieving fission-like dissemination and acquiring a large number of users at a very low cost.

For Pinduoduo, I can give you a lower product price, but you must open up your social circle and bring your relatives and friends together.

So this is different from the traditional logic of "buying users from the media". Pinduoduo’s approach is "buying users from users". Consumers in third- and fourth-tier cities are different from the aloof young people in first- and second-tier cities. They are willing to sacrifice their social networks for discounts.

Like Pinduoduo, Luckin Coffee also invests huge amounts of money in buying traffic and advertising, but when they tell stories, they are not talking about brainwashing advertising, but about user fission.

Free drinks is one of Luckin’s main marketing methods, but Luckin’s free drinks emphasize more on leveraging users’ social chains. For example, its “Give it to friends for free, each of them gets a cup”, and its “Buy 2, get 1 free, buy 5, get 5 free” (buy 5, get 5 free, this is a typical afternoon tea or meeting scene for office white-collar workers).

For Luckin, I can let you buy coffee at a low price, or even for free, but you have to bring your friends and colleagues along. This is actually about creating user fission through interests.

(At this point, think about it again. In March 2018, the New World Marketing Course increased the price by 5 yuan for every 10,000 people who bought it. You can get a commission by recommending people around you to buy it.)

So we see that community group buying e-commerce has become a new trend in 2018. It is community-centric, with group leaders (usually community opinion leaders such as mothers and convenience store owners) as distribution nodes and trust agents. Consumers purchase fresh food, daily necessities, etc. in groups through tools such as WeChat groups and mini-programs.

This new form of shopping is actually a social fission mechanism. It is based on acquaintances + communities and drives growth through relationships, regions and interests.

Suning, Pinduoduo, MissFresh, and Meicai.com are all currently placing their bets.

As we have mentioned before, the traffic dividend has disappeared and the cost of acquiring customers for companies is getting higher and higher. When traffic is cheap, you can ignore user retention and churn because there is a constant stream of new users anyway.

However, when it costs a lot of money to acquire each new user, then you must pay attention to how to retain each new user you acquire? How to encourage new users to make repeat purchases and turn them into loyal customers? And how can you let this new user help you attract more users?

This is the AARRR model.

Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Traditional marketing focuses more on the acquisition link. Just tell users why the brand is and attract users to the store, and the marketing is completed because there is enough traffic anyway.

However, new marketing must focus on refined customer operations. Customer relationships, retention rates, repurchase rates, word of mouth and willingness to recommend to others are all key points of attention. This is an economically sound choice because the cost of acquiring customers becomes higher, so companies must try to maximize the revenue of each newly acquired customer.

The logic of traditional marketing is traffic, acquiring customers through media exposure and purchasing users from the media.

The logic of new marketing is connection (social), connecting users through content and connecting more users through users.

The purpose of creating good content is to connect with users, and the content needs to be driven by social media. Social drives content, so who drives social?

The answer is personality.

3. Personality

In addition to the rapid development of Toutiao and Tencent's active pursuit of change, 2018 also sees Alibaba's ambitious layout.

In May, Xiaohongshu received $300 million in investment led by Alibaba;

In June, Alibaba reached a strategic capital cooperation with the mother and baby vertical community BabyTree;

In July, two short video giants, Douyin and Kuaishou, tried to develop e-commerce shopping guide business and open up paths with Alibaba;

In October, Alibaba completed its strategic investment in Bilibili;

Of course, there is also Weibo, which has cooperated with Alibaba for many years and has been committed to the development of traffic stars, internet celebrity e-commerce.

The intensive investment in new content communities reflects Alibaba’s business intention to focus on new retail and achieve strategic synergy among content, KOLs and e-commerce.

In 2018, Tmall’s Double 11 transaction volume exceeded 200 billion for the first time, an increase of about 27% over last year. Behind this achievement, the traffic from these external content communities obviously played an important role. The sales of Weibo influencers, Bilibili UP hosts, Xiaohongshu masters, and Kuaishou celebrities are astonishing.

The new influencers’ powerful ability to bring goods is partly because they trust the agents, and their fans trust the influencers KOLs, and thus trust the products they recommend.

Another aspect is its personality mapping. The new generation of consumers are increasingly willing to pay for their personality, explore their own style through consumption, build their own unique personality, invest in their interests, and pay for unique experiences.

In the process of consumers exploring their own style, new internet celebrities as opinion leaders obviously play an important role. It can be said that the more distinct and prominent the personality of a new internet celebrity is, the stronger his or her connection with fans and ability to bring goods will be.

Just like today, when companies choose celebrity endorsements, they actually look at the celebrity’s internet influence. The focus of internet celebrity power lies in distinctive personality and fan connection.

This is the third keyword we want to talk about today, personality.

Personality drives socialization.

In 2018, the phenomenal variety show IP "Produce 101" created a record of 13.64 billion topics on Weibo.

"Produce 101" finally selected 11 Rocket Girls. But among so many girls, the most talked-about ones are Wang Ju who was eliminated and Yang Chaoyue who is not good at singing and dancing.

This is precisely because the two have distinct personalities.

Wang Ju is regarded as a representative of independent women who do not follow and even resist mainstream male social aesthetics. Her confidence, independence and bravery are followed by many fans.

Fans created a flood of aphorisms, jokes, photoshopped pictures, and emoticons for Wang Ju, such as the once popular Juhua Baodian, to canvass votes for her.

It is precisely because of these fans’ UGC that “Creation 101” has achieved the annual phenomenal level of communication.

Yang Chaoyue’s personality can be summed up in one word: koi.

It means that even if you don't work hard and achieve nothing, pie will still fall from the sky; it is a kind of comfort to the vast majority of backward people in this society.

Just two years ago, everyone was still pursuing small happiness. By 2018, koi has become a social symbol. It can be a fish, or it can be Yang Chaoyue, Wang Sicong, Wei Yingluo, or Xin Xiaodai.

From small happiness to koi, this indeed reflects that in this increasingly utilitarian and materialistic society, people's appetite is getting bigger and bigger. The little inner happiness is no longer enough, people are more eager for big material blessings.

For example, if I suddenly win a big prize from Alipay, I won’t have to work for the rest of my life and will have no worries about food and clothing. For example, suddenly becoming famous and reaching the peak of life, like Chengdu Xiao Tiantian or Hangzhou renting a house Xiao Wu.

Statistics show that 80% of users who reposted koi on Weibo today are under the age of 30. For 48% of those born after 1995, their most desired career is internet celebrity.

Perhaps in their opinion, internet celebrities only need to dress up beautifully and take photos every day and they can easily earn millions a month without doing anything else.

But they don’t know that the vast majority of self-media who dream of becoming internet celebrities spend enormous amounts of energy and effort every day, getting up early and staying up late to create content, take photos, edit them, and post them online, but they don’t have a single fan who is willing to see them.

Only when the content has a distinct personality and style can it have a strong fan connection and have the possibility of becoming popular.

As I said in the article "The Evolution of the Queen", from the blog queen Xu Jinglei to the Weibo queen Yao Chen, from the public account queen Mimi Meng to the Xiaohongshu queen Lin Yun, they have different styles, but all have their own distinctive style and personality.

No matter how the times change, only with an outstanding personality can you gather popularity and attract fans on any platform.

This is true whether it is an internet celebrity or an internet celebrity brand.

In recent years, Durex copywriting and Jiang Xiaobai copywriting, which have been frequently mentioned, including the attitude copywriting and heartfelt copywriting that have been popular in recent years, have impressed consumers with their warmth and humanity, and have been paid attention to and discussed by everyone.

In fact, this is a kind of personalized traffic.

This is the marketing landscape as I see it in 2018. As the traffic dividend disappears, it provides a perfect footnote to the emergence of new marketing in 2019.

Source: Empty-handed