How to build a community from 0 to 1?

The three eternal philosophical propositions: "Who am I, where do I come from, and where am I going."

As an enterprise, there are three eternal philosophical propositions: "Where do customers come from, how to retain customers, and how to maximize customer value."

How do the world's smartest people think? How do they make decisions in business and in their personal lives? Finally, I found that smart people are good at "classifying" problems, and then using various knowledge frameworks to analyze and solve various problems.

Charlie Munger, the partner of Warren Buffett, believes that thinking models are the toolbox for making decisions in the brain. The more toolboxes you have, the better decisions you can make. Just like Sun Tzu's Art of War believes that the thinking model that determines the outcome of a war is "Tao, Heaven, Earth, General, and Law", and the thinking model that consulting firms use to analyze business is "trend, Tao, Law, Technique, and Instruments", etc.

The thinking model of the retail industry is "people, goods, and places". Human nature’s demand for “more, faster, better, cheaper” will not change. How can traditional retail upgrade to new retail? What are the directions and paths for upgrading “people, goods, and places”?

The author believes that the direction of human upgrading is IP, that is, super users among users such as various enthusiasts and experts. The direction of product upgrading is to produce explosive products, and only explosive products with great value for money can win the trust of customers. The direction of field upgrade is scene. In the past, the field was more of a store, but now the field is the application scenario of the product. In what scenario can the advantages and characteristics of the product be more fully conveyed.

Chuck Bremmer, author of "The Essence of Internet Marketing: Lighting Up the Community", defines Internet marketing as: The essence of Internet marketing is to use minimal investment to accurately connect with target customers, use perfect creativity to achieve strong word-of-mouth and influence target customers. There are three core points here: first, accurate links; second, target customers; and third, strong word of mouth.

The question is, how to link accurately? Where are the target customers? How to achieve a strong reputation?

Deep thinking reveals that these three issues are closely related to the community. In reality, even if we drive to a city we have never been to, as long as we have a navigation system, we will not be nervous because the navigation will tell us how to drive.

What is the community’s navigation system? What is the community’s thinking model?

01 How to build a community from 0 to 1?

A: Why build a community? Traffic is becoming more and more expensive. The biggest headache for companies right now is that they can’t retain old customers and don’t know where to find new customers.

Philip Kotler, the father of marketing, found that the cost of acquiring new customers is five times that of retaining existing customers. A 5% reduction in customer churn can increase profits by more than 25%.

Think about how many old customers we have lost over the years. How to retain old customers when traffic has reached its peak today? It is particularly important to refer new customers through word of mouth from old customers.

If the product is 1, the community is constantly adding 0s behind it. If there is only the product, the product will always be a product. If you have fans on social media, it may become 10, 100, 1,000. The power of fan fission is beyond imagination.

The first question the community faces is where do people come from? That is, how to attract new customers. As the saying goes, money disperses people gather, money gathers people scatter. If you want people to gather, you must disperse the money. We often see that various new customer acquisition activities rely on giving away money, whether it is giving out gifts, vouchers, or points, the intention behind it is to spend money to attract people.

From ancient times to the present, "the world is bustling with people all because of the pursuit of profit, and the world is bustling with people all because of the pursuit of profit." Yu Youren, a veteran of the Kuomintang and a great calligrapher, once presented Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo with a calligraphy that read "When calculating profits, one should consider the profits of the world; when seeking fame, one should seek eternal fame." It means that only by considering the benefits of the world can you give up the current benefits to the people of today, and gather the people of today to work together for the benefits of the world and gain eternal fame.

How to do it specifically? The three steps to community implementation are to identify users, IP addresses, and scenarios.

• The first step is to find 100 seed users. How to find 100 seed users? Fishing requires bait. What bait do seed users like? What kind of products, what kind of content, what kind of activities, and where do they appear.
• The second step is to determine which users are more influential in the user group and more in agreement with the value propositions and life attitudes advocated by the company? How to establish links with these top users?
• The third step is to determine under what circumstances the product can make the seed user appear to be one step closer to what he or she wants to be, that is, to meet a better self. For example, fans in the liquor community often like to play the wine-pulling activity, which is actually a way of declaring to the outside world that I know more about wine than you.

02 How to design the community structure?

Answer: To make it easier to remember, I summarized it into the Six Meridians Divine Sword of the Community.

(1) Community positioning: What does the target user profile look like? What kind of people are gathered? For example, the Mi Fans that Xiaomi initially gathered were mobile phone enthusiasts who were "born for enthusiasts".

(2) Community carrier: After attracting people, what products can be used to solve their problems? Xiaomi’s carrier is the mobile phone, 699fang’s carrier is liquor, and Chaos University’s carrier is the course.

(3) Community scenario: Every religion has its own temple, which shows the role of the temple in religion and believers. What is the temple used for? First, it is for believers to practice, and secondly, it is for the inspiration of non-believers. The same is true for communities. People have seven emotions and six desires. The role of scenes is to awaken certain emotions in people, that is, to be moved by the scene, and then to be unable to control themselves and engage in consumption behavior. The motivation for people to consume is to satisfy certain emotions, and the function of the scene is to stimulate such emotions. For example, Double 11 is a time scene, the Li Du Liquor distillery experience is a space scene, and various physical spaces such as teahouses are all scenes.

(4) Community goal: What do the group of people plan to do together? What will it look like? Community goals influence people’s motivation to strive for success. For example, the community goal I set for the New Women’s Growth Club is to empower 1 million female entrepreneurs to enjoy a happy life.

(5) Community model: How to realize the commercial value of the community? How to design the implementation path?

(6) Community culture: A community is first and foremost an organization. Unfortunately, many people understand community operation as WeChat group management. In fact, the core of community operation is organizational operation, which is the Achilles' heel of most communities that are struggling to survive. As an organization, a community’s vision, mission and values ​​are its basic configuration. It must be clear what it advocates, opposes, believes in and follows. Only when the roots are deep can the leaves be lush, and only when the community culture is profound can the community enjoy long-term stability.

03 Where is the breakthrough point of the community?

Answer: The core of business is transaction, and the premise of transaction is trust. Without trust, there can be no transaction.

As Dong Mingzhu said: "If you believe me, we can make the deal in a few words. If you don't believe me, even if I tell you the entire 5,000-year Chinese civilization, you will still say, let me think about it."

The role of the community is to reduce the cost of trust by establishing strong relationships with customers.

In the context of the stratification of the crowd and fragmentation of channels, how to gain the attention and trust of target users? Psychology tells us that people’s behaviors are determined by their ideas, so if you want to influence people’s behavior, you must first influence their ideas.

1. What often influences people’s views? Basically, people's ideas are influenced by their friends or authoritative experts. People are naturally willing to trust those who have the same interests, hobbies, and cognition as themselves. Therefore, companies must either make users feel that you understand them like a friend, or make users feel that you understand them better than them like an expert.

Management guru Al Ries once said: "Marketing is not a battle of products, but a battle of cognition."

How does it affect people’s cognition?

First of all, we need to know how human cognition is generated. Human cognition comes from the perception of the outside world through "eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body."

How can companies reach the “eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body” of potential users?

The easiest part to reach is usually the eyes, which is why content marketing is so popular.

What kind of content can capture users’ cognition?

There are only professional, entertaining and participatory content, whether it is articles, pictures, short videos or live broadcasts. With the advent of 5G, the efficiency of content distribution will inevitably be accelerated, further accelerating the division of people into groups.

There is a brand called Gillette that makes wedding quilts. It initially spent 10 million to build a flagship store, and invested another 2 million in advertising, and then recruited distributors and sold the products to terminal stores. Three months later, the market response was not ideal. The boss could not sit still and went to the market to investigate in person. He found that most stores sold only one or two sets at most, and there was only one store that sold more than 20 sets at once.

The boss asked what happened. It turned out that the dealer accidentally learned that a neighbor's daughter was getting married. She went to chat with the neighbors and learned about the complicated feelings of those mothers. They were happy for their daughters to get married, but reluctant to let them go. So she invited her friend who is a psychological counselor to organize a mothers' salon to help mothers prepare psychologically for marriage. After the salon, several sets of quilts were sold at once, and later these customers introduced many other customers. This case gives us inspiration on how to win customers' trust through salon activities.

Companies need to help users create large amounts of professional content, which can become a topic of conversation for users and a tool for them to gain appreciation. The logic is that sensory experience produces cognition, cognition prompts transactions, transactions generate relationships, relationships trigger communication, communication brings more user experience, and experience further strengthens cognition. I call it the community growth flywheel.

04 How to break through the dilemma of community operation?

Answer: Einstein has a famous saying, "Problems can only be solved at a higher level." This means that there is basically no solution to the problem at the same level, so problems arising at the community operation level must be resolved at a higher dimension.

What is a higher dimension than community operation?

That is the community model. If we express it in a formula, it is IP+community+scenario+sharing economy. This is the navigation system of the community. When you are planning your community, you need to think about at least three questions: What is IP? How to build a community? Where is the offline scene?

Taking an outdoor project that I recently served as an example, the community was used to redefine outdoor sports. Take Gobi hiking as an example: I designed a customer-centric "outdoor + community" model. I first built Gobi hiking into an IP, and then established three communities. The first one is Gobi Friends Club (people who have walked through the Gobi call each other Gobi friends). Gobi Friends Club is composed of Gobi friends and prospective Gobi friends. There are 48 people in a class, and 3 classes in a group. The group owner is also called the president.

The promotion of Goyouhui is the Alliance, which is composed of the squad leaders in Goyouhui. They use study tours and research as the scenarios, play together, learn together, and form a community of mutual assistance in their careers. The next level of the Tongmenghui is the Private Board of Directors, which is composed of the presidents of the Tongmenghui, who is also a partner of the company.

Through community operation, we continuously convert potential Go friends into Go friends. As the number of Go friends increases, we begin to design other outdoor routes, such as the Ancient Tea-Horse Road, the Silk Road, etc. More outdoor routes bring more fans, and more fans need more routes. After gathering a large number of Go friends, we provide them with customized outdoor products focusing on their clothing, food, housing and transportation.

05 How to monetize the community?

Answer: Many people ask, how do communities make money? Cross-border, alliance, and platform building.

What is cross-border? Cross-border means not making another product, or starting to sell rice cookers instead of selling mobile phones.

But the principle of hybrid rice, how is hybrid rice produced? It was Mr. Yuan Longping who discovered that there are two types of rice. One type of rice has high yield but poor adaptability and must grow in a specific environment of soil, air, sunlight and moisture. Another type of rice has strong adaptability and can grow in any environment, but its yield is not high. Later, he hybridized the two types of rice to produce a new rice that combined their advantages and avoided their disadvantages. High yield and strong adaptability. It can grow anywhere and produce high yields everywhere.

The same principle applies to cross-border social interaction. There is a Douyin influencer named "Zhengshan Beef Brother" who originally only sold beef, but later started selling red wine. During the 618 period alone, he sold 1 million bottles of wine, 100,000 boxes of beer, and 200,000 slices of steak.

If you monetize directly in the community, it is equivalent to using the community as a marketing channel. This is the way to play in the community 1.0 stage. The problem is that if the community is only used to sell goods, what is the difference between it and WeChat business. Community 2.0 is a marketing model, such as Sishijiufang in the liquor industry, and Community 3.0 is a business model, in which the community becomes the carrier of the business model, such as Anaya in the real estate industry.

The core of a community is strong relationships, which determines that community monetization cannot be quick and easy. On the contrary, the quick and easy projects on the market that have gone bankrupt almost all follow the logic of attracting people and cutting leeks. When you redefine the value of the community from the perspective of the platform, the value of the community is not to sell goods, but to gather more users and establish strong relationships with more users.

Neither Anaya, Xiaomi nor 699fang make money by selling goods in the community. The purpose of selling goods is to gather people. Once a large number of users are gathered, the diversified needs of users force companies to integrate more resources across borders and supply more products. Therefore, what the community values ​​is not one-time consumption, but the user's lifetime value; what the community values ​​is not a single user, but the group of users behind the user; what the community values ​​is not providing a product, but a one-stop system solution.

Drucker, the father of management, told a story in "The Practice of Management": Someone asked three stonemasons what they were doing.

The first stonemason replied, “I am supporting my family.”

The second stonemason answered while knocking: "I am doing the best stonemasonry work in the country."

The third stonemason looked up at the sky with a piercing gaze and said, "I am building a cathedral."

What is the purpose of building a community? Some say it is to sell goods and make money, some say it is to attract more fans, and some say it is to build a great brand. There is no right or wrong, only high and low.

The community is the shortest path for every brand to communicate with users, with the lowest cost. Strong relationship communities win companies unlimited business opportunities and imagination space. Business in any era only does one thing: build trust and shape brand.

The ultimate goal of the community is to create a brand that fans dream of throughout their lives.

What is a brand?

For the same product, only brands can earn a premium. The same umbrella, a Rolls-Royce umbrella can be sold for 100,000 yuan, even though its cost is only 1,500 yuan, while other umbrellas usually do not exceed 500 yuan. Therefore, for every action of the community, we must ask a question: does such content or activity add points or deduct points from the brand.

06 Where is the future of the community?

How can we sustainably operate the community?

Answer: Retention is more important than attracting new customers. Retention is an eternal worry facing every operator. Only when a community operates continuously can its value be reflected. The continued operation of the community is inseparable from a powerful empowerment system.

(1) IP empowerment: The community empowers super users to become IPs. Chairman Mao said: "The power of example is infinite." In the 1960s, our party set up shining examples such as Lei Feng and Jiao Yulu, and as a result, thousands of Lei Feng-like figures and a large number of Jiao Yulu-like good cadres emerged across the country. In order to influence millions of target users, it is necessary to establish an IP, which can be a person or an activity.

(2) Brand empowerment: Empower the community with the power of the brand, and become the capital for fans to show and express themselves.

(3) Platform empowerment: Integrate external resources in the name of the platform, conduct cross-industry alliances, and enable the sharing of community resources, traffic, and channels.

(4) Content empowerment: To keep a community active, it is necessary to continuously provide good content. How to stimulate fans' sense of participation and create more content.

The author once planned a community competition for a well-known home appliance company, which was divided into three stages:

• The first stage is similar to the national "Tucao Conference", which allows users to complain about a certain category of products on the market without restraint. Taking mobile phones as an example, you can complain about the small screen, high price, slow speed, short standby time, etc. Through this activity, you can discover user pain points and recruit enthusiasts.
• The second stage is similar to "The Voice of China", customizing new products to address the pain points of a certain user group, and highlighting the powerful functions of the new products in the competition with existing products on the market, such as charging for 10 minutes and talking for one hour.
• The third stage, similar to "Impossible Challenge", recruited 100 super users as chief experience officers, went into the factory to understand the black technology and technical processes behind the products, and tested the use of the products in various extreme environments, such as dropping the mobile phone from a height of 3 stories. Through entertaining and competitive activities, thousands of consumers are stimulated to participate, which not only creates rich and colorful original content, but also influences hundreds of thousands of potential users through large-scale forwarding by users.

(5) Empowerment of hot products: If there are no good products to solve users’ pain points, even the best community will be difficult to sustain.

(6) Scenario empowerment: weak relationships transmit information, and strong relationships generate behavior. The establishment of strong relationships can only rely on offline activities. Only after confirming eye contact can you determine whether you have met the right person. There are also various offline activities and festivals, including cross-border collaborations with other brands. Such as the cross-border interaction between Jiang Xiaobai and Sprite.

In short, if you regard community operation as planting crops, if you want a good harvest, you must first have good seeds, and the first batch of seed users are very important. At the same time, during the growth process of crops, weeding, fertilizing and watering are also required. Only by continuously interacting with fans through online content and offline activities can a community build strong relationships, because trust is not something that can be achieved overnight.

Finally, I would like to borrow a line from "The Wind Rises", the final work of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation master who devoted his life to healing the world, to encourage you.

In the future, "the old wind will not blow, so we can only work hard to survive."

Author: Lu Yan

Source: Lu Yan (no1luyan2015)

Related reading:

1. Community operation methods and mainstream community types!

2. Summary of practical experience in 3 steps of community operation!