Marketing promotion: Analyzing the self-propagation mechanism behind the viral “What’s Peppa Pig?”

On January 18, 2019, I woke up in the morning and suddenly found that my circle of friends was flooded with sharing links of "What's Peppa Pig?"

As a user researcher who has been paying attention to and studying the topic of self-propagation for a long time, I clicked on it out of curiosity and found that it was a short video. However, after watching the tenth second, I roughly guessed the structure of the entire script and understood why it was so popular.

1. Classification of Self-propagation

Self-communication can be simply divided into two categories: marketing self-communication and product self-communication.

Marketing self-propagation refers to the use of clever planning to make product print, video, H5 and other advertising works and various types of marketing activities attractive to watch and participate in, thereby triggering self-propagation; product self-propagation refers to the improvement of the product business itself, implanting a self-propagation mechanism, so that when users see and use the product, the mechanism of self-propagation can be stimulated.

Marketing self-propagation can be roughly divided into two categories: "interest-induced" and "spontaneous sharing". The interest-induced type refers to stimulating users to spread information through interest-based means, and users' sharing is more like a paid behavior; the spontaneous sharing type refers to the behavior of users spontaneously sharing and spreading information without any interest guidance.

Obviously, "What's Peppa Pig?" is a typical example of spontaneous sharing.

From my observation, the vast majority of brands’ self-marketing communications in 2018 were interest-induced communications, because the creativity of the marketing content itself is not demanding, while truly popular spontaneous sharing communications are rare. However, compared with interest-induced communication, spontaneous sharing-based communication can save more than 80% of the cost (no need to subsidize users), and can form a wider range of exposure and conversion effects (according to survey results, interest-induced activities are mostly shared with communities, relatives and friends, while spontaneous sharing content is more often shared in Moments). It is a real low-cost fission and new growth, and it must be the trend of self-communication in the future.

So, how do you create spontaneously shareable content that goes viral?

2. Spontaneous Sharing Communication Mechanism

To create a spontaneous sharing effect that can go viral, we can refer to the principle of viral transmission. Three conditions are required for an epidemic to break out: people's behavior in spreading infectious agents, the infectious agents themselves, and the environment in which the infectious agents take effect.

The pathogen itself is the marketing content idea, the virus spreader is the content spreader, and the environment required for the infectious agent to take effect is also the dissemination environment of the marketing content.

1. Pathogens-Marketing Creative Content

To create good creative content, you first need to have insights into your target users, and explore the connections between your own products/brands and users; secondly, you need to know why users share and what content they prefer to share; finally, apply creative packaging strategies and techniques to improve the quality of creative content.

Creative basis: User insights include but are not limited to socio-demographic characteristics, product data mining, life and mental state, media preferences, world outlook, values ​​and consumption, etc.

But a successful creative content must first achieve commercial success, that is, bring product/brand exposure and conversion. How to achieve natural implantation can be done from two aspects: exploring product/brand potential and implanting product/brand scenarios, which will not be elaborated here.

Creativity is born: Knowing why users share and what they prefer to share can help us tell good stories. Regarding users’ psychological motivations for sharing and content preferences, I have discussed them in detail in my previous article “Applying Sharing Psychology to Make Products Spread Quickly”, so I will not repeat them here. In simple terms:

Self-involvement: including self-expression, self-recording, self-profit, self-promotion, and self-realization. Others-involvement: altruism. Interaction: Cultivate and maintain interpersonal relationships, also known as social currency. Creative packaging: To achieve better dissemination effect of marketing creative content, some techniques can be used, including but not limited to:

Hot spots: Use hot spots (holidays, social hot spots, etc.) to accelerate self-propagation; Publicity/visualization: It is easier to be seen/observed, which can better promote public discussion, imitation, and sharing, thereby achieving the effect of self-propagation; Contrast: Create comedy effects and surprises through contrast to promote self-propagation; Anti-common sense: Create unexpected, novel, and interesting effects through creative content of activities that break through user common sense, trigger user discussion, sharing, and self-propagation; Sense of participation: Provide template paradigms to encourage users to participate in re-creation, thereby achieving the effect of self-propagation; Provide interactive mechanisms to mobilize event participants to play with friends, thereby achieving the effect of self-propagation; Related clues: Plant clues to establish strong associations between your products/brands and other things or scenes, so that users will immediately associate your products/brands with specific things or scenes, and take actions (talk or consume, etc.), thereby achieving long-term self-propagation; Storytelling: Dig out the stories behind products/brands/characters, and provide users with emotional value beyond product/brand value, so that users pay for it and spread it for you spontaneously; Black technology: Use cool technology to package content to promote user self-propagation; ...

1. Patient-Content Disseminator

There are some special people in society who can initiate and promote epidemics - "insiders", "connectors" and "salesmen". These three types of people need to be found and utilized.

1. Communication environment

The dissemination of activity content always occurs in a certain environment, and the dissemination environment must take into account the two dimensions of time and space.

3. Analysis of the "What's Peppa Pig?" Screen-sweeping Case

Now that we have discussed the methodology, let’s analyze the “What’s Peppa Pig?” screen-sweeping case.

1. User insights that are painful enough to resonate with people

The reporter from Sanxiang Metropolis Daily immediately contacted the director of "What's Peppa Pig?" Zhang Dapeng for an interview.

Zhang Dapeng said that the idea for this short film came from seeing many left-behind elderly people in rural areas during previous filming, who could only reunite with their children who worked away from home during the Chinese New Year.

"Left-behind elderly people" is a common social phenomenon. However, based on this social phenomenon, the "contradiction between the selfless love of parents for their children and grandchildren and the growing alienation of kinship in modern society, and the debt of love owed by adult children to their parents and grandparents" is the soul of this short film, which is also the real "user insight".

1. Maximize user sharing motivation

From the perspective of sharing psychological motivation, this short film mainly meets the following two aspects:

Social currency: returning home for the Spring Festival, Page, the urban-rural dual structure, family and love, etc. are all topics that carry huge traffic. When all these elements are concentrated in a short story and presented so naturally and cleverly, it is bound to cause huge discussion.

If you type "What is Peppa Pig" into Baidu, the message "What is Peppa Pig sparking heated discussion" will automatically pop up.

Emotions and self-expression: The book "Contagious" states that high-arousal emotions can stimulate sharing. "What's Peppa Pig?" stimulates the audience's deep love, emotion, guilt and other high-arousal emotions, and achieves a certain emotional catharsis through sharing.

Here are some screenshots from my WeChat Moments:

1. Successfully utilized "liaisons" and "salesmen"

"What's Peppa Pig?" successfully utilized the attention of "connectors" (traffic influencers, KOLs) and spontaneously helped spread it.

"What's Peppa Pig?" successfully utilized the vast number of "salesmen" (especially new urban immigrants and the new white-collar generation), which I will not elaborate on here.

1. Detonating packaging techniques

Here are a few of the main ones:

Taking advantage of hot topics and IPs: "What's Peppa Pig?" took advantage of a hot topic during the Spring Festival holiday, as well as Peppa Pig, an IP with huge traffic.

Public/visibility and participation: As a short video, "What's Peppa Pig?" is easy to see/observe. The visual lingering moment of Peppa the blower at the end of the video brings this point to the extreme, promoting users' spontaneous creation and dissemination of fission.

Contrast and anti-common sense: Page, who is well-known to "city people", has become a mystery to the left-behind grandfather and the village, a mystery that requires constant inquiry and exploration to finally discover the truth; the absurd and realistic film lens language and expression; the left-behind grandfather's selfless love and his children's "not going home" and the misunderstanding at the dinner table...

Black technology: The "black technology" in this film is the "hardcore Peppa Pig" at the end of the short film. Accompanied by steampunk music, this Peppa Pig transformed from a blower and manufactured using backward and traditional methods has been forcibly turned into a "hardcore product."

1. The most suitable communication environment - before the Spring Festival reunion

It can be said that if "What's Peppa Pig" is not released during the end-of-year Spring Festival and family reunion period, it will not be a screen-sweeping phenomenon at any other time period.

In other words, in order to truly go viral, creative marketing content must have all the right elements: “the right time, the right place, and the right people.”

Author: Liu Peilong, authorized to be published by Qinggua Media .

Source: Liu Peilong