How do you evaluate Jiang Xiaobai’s marketing style?

The heart-wrenching copywriting creativity only satisfies the audience's superficial sensory stimulation, but fails to provide the core value that will make consumers continue to choose it. Things that exist based on short-lived creativity cannot be called true products in essence and will gradually be forgotten.

The thinking that “good wine needs no bush” has always been the target of criticism in marketing textbooks and is a low-level thinking in marketing. However, today's Chinese business society seems to have gone to another extreme: only seeking small alleys, not good wine.

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Among the copywriting camp that attracts the most traffic , Jiang Xiaobai is undoubtedly one of the best and has many fans in the world. If anyone dares to say that Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting is poor, he will surely die miserably.

In a sense, Jiang Xiaobai is more like a creative planning company rather than a liquor company. This is both a compliment and a criticism.

Five or six years ago, Jiang Xiaobai had just started out and I accidentally heard the name Jiang Xiaobai while listening to a self-media program. During the show, the founders talked about how they used marketing thinking to reposition a sorghum winery that was on the verge of bankruptcy and helped it rise. Jiang Xiaobai came to the public's attention under the banner of "new liquor culture" among young Chinese people.

At that time, Jiang Xiaobai was more of a marketer for other people’s wine than a wine maker. In fact, when the company was first registered, Jiang Xiaobai’s full name was: "Chongqing Jiang Xiaobai Liquor Marketing Co., Ltd."

This company gene that emphasizes creativity makes Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting often create waves in the Internet world and become a topic of conversation after dinner. Similar articles such as "It hurts, Xiaobai", "You will never learn Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting", "Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting hurts your heart again" can be seen everywhere on the Internet. The copywriting they created once became a model for marketers to learn from.

Out of appreciation for the copywriting, I decided to buy a box of Jiang Xiaobai to show my support. But since I don’t have the habit of drinking alone, it doesn’t seem appropriate to invite everyone to drink at most gatherings, so a box of Jiang Xiaobai has been lying at home for almost half a year without being opened. But I still take out the bottle from time to time to appreciate the wonderful copy they have created.

Later, a good friend who taught at the School of Economics and Management of Wuhan University came to Shanghai on a business trip, and we made an appointment to have a midnight snack, which gave me the opportunity to taste Jiang Xiaobai. I specifically picked up two bottles with particularly good copywriting that were very suitable for our relationship. Before opening the wine, I praised the brand and told my friend that this case was worth studying by business school professors.

They opened the wine, drank it, and then frowned and remained silent.

Even though we have been friends for more than ten years, I still felt a little embarrassed and regretted that I should not have used this kind of wine to entertain old friends whom I hadn't seen for more than a year. We comforted each other, thinking that maybe the bad weather affected our mood for drinking. After that, we each drank about one or two glasses of beer reluctantly, and finally switched to beer. The next day, I gave the remaining 22 bottles to the community security guard.

Not long after that, I tried Jiang Xiaobai again on another occasion. Then I realized that it had nothing to do with the weather, but rather that the wine was indeed unpalatable.

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On one side is the copywriting that floods the screen, and on the other side is the unpalatable wine.

Among Jiang Xiaobai's many fans, there are a large number of female fans who never drink alcohol. They admire the talent of Jiang Xiaobai's creative team very much, but they will never buy a bottle of wine to try it. What impressed them was just the copywriting, and it had nothing to do with alcohol. Jiang Xiaobai's sales are seriously disproportionate compared to its huge voice.

Judging from various online reports, Jiang Xiaobai's sales volume in 2017 was said to be 300 million or 500 million, which sounds like a good result. The Jinpai Distillery in Daye City, Huangshi City, Hubei Province, has long had a slogan: "Jin wine is good, but don't drink too much." In 2017, Jinjiu’s sales revenue reached 10.49 billion yuan, of which taxes alone reached 2.58 billion yuan.

Energy obeys the law of conservation in physics, and a similar principle applies to the business world.

If a company puts too much energy into copywriting that goes viral, it means it will forget about other aspects. In the process of strengthening their core competitiveness, many companies have actually turned their advantages into a sharp knife that stabs themselves.

Jiang Xiaobai's team includes a large number of top creative talents. If these talents were placed in a marketing company or an advertising company, they would definitely be able to provide endless creative ideas for different types of clients.

But we rarely hear about how many top copywriting and creative talents are inside those great companies. On the contrary, it may be a disaster for a person with a lot of creative ideas to stay in a company that is serious about making products .

The success of a company does not depend on high-frequency screen-sweeping copywriting.

The most important thing in marketing is to find a benefit point that is most valuable to consumers, and then deliver it to consumers repeatedly over a long period of time. In this sense, marketing is the output of a certain period of time, rather than the result of frequent changes in creativity.

Talented people who have one idea today and another idea tomorrow are very likely to draw consumers' attention to the ever-changing copy rather than the product itself.

Investing in marketing requires not only money, but also a stable investment of time. An idea today, an idea tomorrow, if the focus is not on the product level, the meaning of marketing will be lost.

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Many companies attribute their marketing success to the success of voice communication because they often overlook a simple fact: marketing is a combination of measures.

The classic marketing mix actually includes four key components: product, channel , promotion and pricing. Among them, the copywriting screen-sweeping can only be said to have done a good job in the promotion link.

Only with an overall concept of the marketing mix can companies decide whether they should stay away from social networks and focus on offline development, or continue to invest in online social traffic and constantly seize consumers' attention on social networks.

Jiang Xiaobai is not an isolated case. It has led to a large number of companies that focus more on copywriting and less on products to follow suit, and made a large number of people feel that the product itself is not that important. Through the copywriting that they constantly display on the screen, the most important product link appears to be extremely weak.

They don’t realize that if there are problems with the product, screen swiping is just invalid traffic, the channel is just scattered inventory, and the price is meaningless and cannot be a reason to buy.

Drucker, a famous management expert, said that the most important things for a company are to do two things: one is to create value, and the other is to spread value.

The former is the foundation, and the latter is just a tool to assist. What Jiang Xiaobai and others lack is precisely the basic work. At the product level, Jiang Xiaobai has two fatal mistakes: one is the misalignment in positioning, and the other is that the wine itself is unpalatable.

As Jiang Xiaobai and others repeatedly flood the screen with their copywriting, the users who actually contribute to its traffic are not the users of Jiang Xiaobai products, and the friends in the circle of friends who really like to drink liquor are not interested in this.

Jiang Xiaobai’s heart-wrenching copywriting continues to emerge, constantly attracting new consumers to “try their first bottle of wine in their life,” but it has nothing to do with consumer loyalty. The vast majority of people who identify with Jiang Xiaobai's brand culture are young people, but their purchasing power for liquor is obvious.

Liquor has a sedimented taste. Middle-aged and elderly people will always be the main user group of liquor. Selling liquor to young people is destined not to be a good business. They would rather enjoy the happiness brought by drinking beer worth two or three yuan than endure the "pain" brought by Maotai worth thousands of yuan.

"A wonderful drama was staged in the wrong theater" seems to be the best interpretation of Jiang Xiaobai's current situation.

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Many creative copywriters have mostly fallen into the misunderstanding of swiping social media posts. They often only pursue the creativity of being applauded, but forget that the essence of promotion is to make consumers take consumption actions.

Even if you find the right person to write the copy, there is still the problem of "time account". This is a concept I developed by borrowing the concept of " mental accounting " from psychology.

To put it simply, there is a distinction in the minds of users regarding what to do and when to do it. It's like you have money saved in two accounts, one of which you set for buying a car in the future, and the other for daily consumption. When you have a car purchase account, you won’t think about buying messy things.

Therefore, when we open Taobao and see a promotional information, the feeling is very different from seeing a promotional information on a social account. When you open Taobao, your "time account" is set up for buying things. When you see text information that stimulates you, you will be very sensitive and make timely purchases.

However, when you open an article on a public account , your "time account" is used for leisure or information seeking. When you see heart-wrenching copy, the feeling in your heart will not be obvious, and it will be difficult to break away from the original time preset.

This determines that the exposure conversion rate on pure social media will definitely not be very high.

Although Jiang Xiaobai and other brands have high exposure and good creativity, what the audience thinks is: "I am here to see the copy, not to buy the product." Many people think this is a good copy, but do not realize that this is a good product.

The most phenomenal marketing event last year was Pechoin’s one-shot soft advertisement “1931”. The ad was launched on May 7, 2017, and continued to dominate the screen thanks to the promotion of several major accounts. Within 5 days, there were 3,282 WeChat articles related to the " Pechoin advertisement ", with exposure on the WeChat platform alone reaching nearly 40 million.

According to estimates by relevant industry insiders, although Pechoin's traffic data is very impressive, its conversion rate is less than 0.00008. The reason is that those people who are swiping the screen are not Pechoin users at all. They only appreciate the advertisements but not the products.

In addition, many brands have great creative copywriting on social media, but fail to establish timely purchasing channels. That is to say, after reading the copy, you want to buy it but there is no direct purchase link.

Some people may say that if consumers like the advertising information they see, isn’t it very simple for them to just open Taobao and search for it themselves? Marketers should remember one sentence: "Consumers are too lazy. They are too lazy to make an extra move!"

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The excessive worship of copywriting has led to many companies now being unwilling to focus on the product level. In fact , the marketing functions of social media such as WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, and Twitter are often deliberately exaggerated by their own creative planners.

“Since 2014, Coca-Cola has earned $2.13 in return on every $1 it spent on TV advertising, compared to just $1.26 on digital advertising ,” Coca-Cola ’s chief marketing officer Marcos de Quintos noted in 2017.

Rigorous scientific research also shows that the popularity of copywriting, the number of fans and sales often have little to do with each other. Leslie K. John and others published the relevant research results in the Journal of Marketing Research, the world's top academic journal in 2017.

Their study collected data from more than 14,000 people to conduct a series of experiments. They divided the experimental subjects into two groups. People in the experimental group followed the merchant’s social account, while those in the control group did not.

Through research, they came to two main conclusions: first, consumers' attitudes toward a company and their desire to buy do not change with their following behavior; second, consumers' attention to a company's social account will not have much impact on their friends around them.

Although during the experiment, the experimenters actively encouraged the experimental group to pay attention to the company's social network information, while the control group did not take any action, the results still showed that the consumption behavior of the experimental group was not much more active than that of the control group.

The results of this experiment may surprise many people. How can this explain the belief that the more followers a business has, the higher its income?

The researchers explained that following a business’s social network is the “effect” and liking the company is the “cause.” In other words, they pay attention because they like and buy, rather than paying attention and then liking it, which then leads to purchase.

Despite this, the significance of copywriting is still significant. Companies can maintain relationships with consumers through screen-sweeping copywriting, build relationships and stickiness with consumers, maintain and activate old customers, and develop new customers.

But not all businesses need to rely too much on copywriting, because consumers ultimately buy your products, not your copywriting.

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Copywriting does not need to be given top priority. There is another important reason: the Internet’s elimination of asymmetric information makes the product itself more and more important, and the “deceptive” value of copywriting will become weaker and weaker. Only those contents and products that can truly provide value to users will have the last laugh.

Copywriting is certainly important, and it plays an extremely important role in attracting traffic, but the overall operational capabilities of the product that follow are the real core of the competition.

The former is a highlight, but the latter has become the "dead point" of many Internet celebrity brands. Behind the noisy copywriting, many companies ignore basic common sense, resulting in products that no one uses and that are out of touch with business fundamentals.

In the past few years, we have seen a lot of copywriting that has caused a huge amount of discussion or voice, but the actual effect of promoting the product has not been satisfactory. This has led to an embarrassing phenomenon where traffic is just traffic and has nothing to do with conversion rate.

There is a story about the German painting master Adolf Menzel, which well illustrates the difference between putting heart into making a product and putting heart into writing copy. A young man asked him: "I usually only spend one day to paint a picture, but why do I have to wait a year to sell it?" Menzel replied: "Please try it the other way around! If you spend a year painting, you can sell it in just one day!"

Each of the amazing copywritings only provides superficial sensory stimulation to the audience, but fails to provide the core value that will make consumers continue to choose it. Things that rely on creativity for their existence cannot be called true products in essence and will gradually be forgotten.

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

Source: Lishi Business Review (ID: libusiness)