---
title: "Decoding the Viral Marketing Events of 2017: Can Marketers Still See Hope?"
description: "Despite the economic downturn and harsh environmental regulations in 2017, marketers can find opportunities in the coldest times. This article reviews the year's most notable marketing events, from deceptive advertising to new retail, and argues that true marketing is just beginning."
author: "苗庆显"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2017-12-14"
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# Decoding the Viral Marketing Events of 2017: Can Marketers Still See Hope?

> Despite the economic downturn and harsh environmental regulations in 2017, marketers can find opportunities in the coldest times. This article reviews the year's most notable marketing events, from deceptive advertising to new retail, and argues that true marketing is just beginning.

Introduction
**If Trump can not only become president but also pull off something as difficult as tax cuts, why can't we see hope?**
Since 2014, our real economy has been on a downward trend overall.
In 2017, we faced a fierce round of raw material price hikes and the strictest environmental controls in history. This time, many physical enterprises didn't even bother to wail; they simply sought other paths or closed up shop.
The coldest times are precisely the season for opportunities. Looking back at 2017, which is about to pass, marketers might see more opportunities...

**1**
**Deadly Deception**
Dingxiang Doctor's article "Shapu Aisi, Please Let the Elderly Go" awakened and enraged netizens. Unless something unexpected happens, this product will face a catastrophic blow.
For Shapu Aisi's misfortune, we can only gloat and say "serves you right." This is the price of deceiving people without a bottom line. A thumbs up to Dingxiang Doctor.
If the Shapu Aisi incident was infuriating, Wanglaoji's "extend life by 10%" claim was "more stylish" and full of joy. Past claims like "prolong life," "nourish kidneys and beautify," and "never recur" were all weak in comparison. This time, they directly extended your lifespan, with data support, the authoritative "863" plan endorsement, and the chairman personally endorsing it.
But the Chinese public wasn't impressed. Before they could even apply for a Nobel Prize, they were met with a wave of ridicule.
> "Wanglaoji mixed with Shapu Aisi, you can live to 250."
>
> "Afraid of death? Drink Wanglaoji."
>
> "Drink a can of Wanglaoji, and your lifespan will hit a limit-up."
>
> ......
Netizens fully displayed their meme-making spirit, happily playing along with Wanglaoji. Even the CEO of BGI gave a like and was scolded by Wang Sicong as "a polite like is still stupid."
Lao Miao estimates that such an entertaining topic will continue to be played out, extending to Bilibili, live streaming, and other areas. "Afraid of death? Drink Wanglaoji" and "Drink a can of Wanglaoji, extend your life by 10%" might pre-book the internet buzzwords for 2018.
In fact, the Chinese market has never lacked big liars: "Zhonghua Lingzhibao" was repeatedly exposed by the media; at the beginning of the century, nucleic acid products represented by Zhen'ao Nucleic Acid were cut down by Fang Zhouzi; some local walls were painted with slogans like "Drink XX to give birth to a boy." Not just the medical and health industry, but also anti-cancer liquor, mattresses that cure all diseases, training that promises a monthly salary of 50,000—every industry has them. Even Nongfu Spring, which Lao Miao appreciates, once used the "daffodil experiment" to test the IQ of the entire nation.
But the communication environment has truly changed. In the past, as long as you could "justify yourself," you could deceive a group of people for a considerable time.
Now, the internet can eliminate most information asymmetry. If your deception is trivial, it might not matter, but if it stirs people's emotions, the resulting negative information will spread rapidly online, and a product or brand could be doomed.

**2**
**New-Style Micro-commerce**
Starting in 2014, rising in 2015, then being suppressed, and rising again at the end of 2016, micro-commerce has had a bumpy ride in just over three years.
The first generation of micro-commerce, which developed in 2015, basically followed the pyramid scheme routine: recruiting people, using career dreams and wealth dreams to attract members, giving them pep talks, and selling overpriced products. That generation was quickly rectified.
Since the end of 2016, the second generation of micro-commerce has risen, with brands like Lecun, Renren Youpin, Zhufei, and Global Catcher growing rapidly. These brands no longer pursue the previous overpricing but target high-frequency, low-value daily necessities, and their products have distinctive features. For example, Lecun yogurt's high protein and fat content, and Zhufei tissue's bamboo fiber and non-bleaching.
Product differentiation creates topics for sharing on social circles, high-frequency low-value products lower the membership threshold, and with an incentive system that still bears traces of pyramid schemes, this wave of micro-commerce is more intense than the first. Several brands quickly formed sales of hundreds of millions or even billions. Of course, business risks still exist; Global Catcher was sacrificed just as it was in full swing.
Micro-commerce developed based on WeChat's traffic dividends, strong diffusion, and high communication stickiness. Relying on walking the edge of pyramid schemes won't make it big, nor will showing off "rented luxury cars" or "busy shipping."
But micro-commerce naturally has the huge advantage of combining information flow, logistics, and capital flow. If it can overcome trust crises and solve issues like sales conversion rates, it has a good chance of becoming a mainstream business form.

**3**
**Getting Fired and Throwing in the Towel**
When making predictions for 2017 at the end of last year, Lao Miao suggested that a large number of traditional marketers would face "hidden unemployment" and many distributors would "quit."
Soon, the news that Coca-Cola abolished the "Chief Marketing Officer" position caused panic among domestic marketers. Throughout the year, stories of "distributors fleeing" were common, and there were even reports of a distributor at a large enterprise committing suicide.
Marketers, once hot in companies, became "teammates who drag you down" and "big liars." Getting fired due to poor performance was the norm for marketing "bosses" in 2017.
Marketing is no longer the hottest position in companies; product positions have taken its place.
Is "marketing" really failing? Lao Miao believes the opposite: true marketing is just beginning.
Our traditional marketing over the past 20-plus years has been two decades of channel dominance. Not many people really studied consumers; most corporate resources were directed at distributors, treating middlemen as customers and united front targets as struggle targets. This has been a key marker of low-level competition in the domestic market.
Of the so-called 80 million "marketing personnel" in China, over 90% are salespeople carrying goods to find buyers, and the remaining nearly 10% support the salespeople. They are called the marketing department, but they are actually the "sales support department."
But this logic no longer works. Companies must study users, win them over with product value, service value, and brand value, master communication rules, gain insight into consumer needs, and perceive consumer experience.
This is marketing in the modern sense. The popularity of product manager (i.e., brand manager) positions is a reflection of the return of true marketing value.

**4**
**Conflict**
Our marketing has been at a relatively low level for 20 to 30 years. It looks like there are many theories, methodologies, and tools: "explosive products," "cross-border," "X-position," "X-cut," "X-style marketing," and in medicine and health products, there are the Southern School and the Mongolian School.
But these tools mostly stay at the operational level, greatly influenced by the external environment, execution conditions, and industry. None of them have risen to the theoretical level.
In 2017, China's most famous marketing expert, Ye Maozhong, claimed to express marketing in one word based on 27 years of marketing practice and exploration, and that word is "conflict."
Ye Maozhong's "conflict" is the first time domestic marketers have interpreted marketing from a theoretical level. He attempts to explore a logic more fundamental than "demand": how demand arises, what the basis for judging positioning is, and what the physiological and sociological basis for conflict is.
The book "Conflict" sold over 100,000 copies from its initial release in August to November, a miracle for business books. Its impact has been comprehensive, with widespread attention in marketing, management, advertising, capital, and media.
A new theory will face skepticism and have imperfections, but it still holds extraordinary milestone significance in marketing history.

**5**
**New Retail**
New retail is undoubtedly the hottest term of 2017, burning from the beginning of the year to the end, and it will continue to be hot next year.
From the "Five New" to the "New Retail Research Report," to Alibaba's alliance with Bailian and investment in RT-Mart, from unmanned stores to unmanned vending, from the million small store project to piloting into wholesale markets, information about new retail is dazzling. To be honest, it's made us sick.
But this concept is unavoidable. At the end of the year, Lao Miao will pull it out and summarize it again:
> **1.** New and old are relative concepts, each with its own perspective. Those who label themselves as new XX and others as old XX are either malicious or brainwashed.
>
> **2.** In Lao Miao's view, Jack Ma's new retail is an extreme representative of old retail: building platforms and collecting tolls. In 2017, they expanded aggressively, hoping to support retail's sluggish growth through land grabbing; this game has too high a threshold, with few players, and others can only watch.
>
> **3.** Due to the equalization effect, online traffic is now about as expensive as offline traffic, and Tmall's growth has slowed significantly.
>
> **4.** The biggest drawback of old retail is unclear retail entities. Producers go all the way down, which is inefficient and unsustainable.
>
> **5.** NetEase Yanxuan, IKEA, Uniqlo, HLA, Miniso, new-style micro-commerce, mother-and-baby specialty stores, etc., look more like new retail.
>
> **6.** In an environment where consumers always enjoy "high-priced" but "low-quality" products, and even frequently buy fakes, it's a bit far-fetched to tout "wonderful consumption experiences" and "always feeling service beyond expectations." The real task is to improve the low retail efficiency.

**6**
**Concept Bubbles**
Concepts come every year, but this year many burst. The environment changes quickly, information spreads quickly, so concept bubbles are created quickly and burst quickly.
Extreme products, internet thinking—these weren't mentioned much in 2017. The most embarrassing burst this year was "ecosystemization." Because Mr. Jia Yueting, who promised to "return next week," hasn't returned, "ecosystemization" has almost become synonymous with "big liar."
The sharing concept also got hot in 2017 due to the popularity of several bike-sharing companies, but it quieted down by the end of the year.
Previously, Brother Shark Xiaojiang wrote a insightful article titled "Helping You Strip Away the Coat of the Sharing Economy": "Exclusivity is human nature, while sharing is anti-human, with a very small applicable scope and extremely high usage costs." These words were unfortunately proven true.
Bike-sharing is not actually sharing but public transportation. In the early stages, due to government support and small scale, public management costs were not included, so it looked very profitable. Once scale expanded, the costs of damage, maintenance, and occupying public resources were all accounted for, and the books looked terrible.
"Knowledge payment" was much luckier. Although it's also a concept, it's essentially an online paid classroom, which should be considered part of the education industry.
This demand has always existed. The Luos used the "knowledge payment" concept to create more anxiety, stimulate and expand the market, and then monetize through fan effects. It's a quite clever business model.

**7**
**Down-to-Earth Main Melody**
This year's most successful communication belongs to the main melody.
A main melody TV drama "In the Name of the People" set ratings records, a main melody movie "Wolf Warrior" set box office records, and an online event "August 1st Military Uniform Show" got billions of views.
We can see that the main melody is no longer just grand narratives or the usual "great, glorious, and correct" style. It now includes flawed individual heroism, self-deprecating humor that exposes shortcomings, and events that can interact with the public. This is the so-called down-to-earth approach, where the main melody content highly matches the communication context, unleashing enormous communication energy.
In contrast, some companies are still engaging in self-serving communication: "people-oriented, continuous innovation," "leading the trend, internationally advanced"—these clichés are the most unimpressive in the internet context.
Without audience resonance, the information you convey is just building an information island that no one cares about.

**8**
**Going Viral**
Every year has viral marketing events, and this year is no exception: Baique Ling's ad, NetEase Cloud Music, iPhone X's launch, Heytea's long queues, and Durex's Thanksgiving marketing all became topics.
Lu Han got a girlfriend and received hundreds of millions of attention. Luo Yonghao's Smartisan Technology is said to have started making profits.
Nongfu Spring's design and Jiang Xiaobai's copy have always been topics of discussion in advertising and marketing circles. Du Guoying's Xiaoguan Tea is still full of product concepts as always.
Of course, there were also negative ones, like Juewei Duck Neck, which was investigated for obscenity, resulting in poor communication effects and a bad reputation—a case of "throwing a chicken and losing the rice."
Going viral has patterns, but also accidental factors of timing, location, and people. Overdoing it can sometimes backfire.

**9**
**Traffic Monopoly Pattern**
Compared to Alibaba's high-profile retail layout, Tencent's layout at the traffic end is not only low-key but also effective. In 2017, Tencent formed a monopolistic pattern in traffic entrances.
Currently, WeChat's daily active users are 85%, and mobile QQ is 73%, far ahead of all other apps.
In news, Tencent News has 240 million monthly active users, twice that of Toutiao, which is second.
In community applications, QQ Space is far ahead.
Among entertainment and social software, Tencent's Quanmin K歌 ranks first, far surpassing the seemingly popular Yingke and Huajiao.
In gaming, how many people play Honor of Kings? You know.
Ma Huateng didn't mention "ecosystemization" or the revolutionary "Five New." Instead, he developed products with high stickiness, hammering them into people's lives like nails, thus building an industrial empire that monopolizes most traffic entrances, truly achieving "ecosystemization."
The Wuzhen Internet Conference dared not invite Jack Ma, and they had the confidence to do so.

**10**
**Tax Cuts**
When summarizing last year, Lao Miao mentioned a keyword: "Trump." I thought this crazy guy who dares to think and act might stir up something big that would eventually affect us.
But I didn't expect it to come so quickly.
In less than a year in office, Trump accomplished a particularly difficult task: tax cuts—significant tax cuts.
The large-scale return of American companies is almost certain. On one hand, investment in our country will decrease, and America's reshaping of manufacturing will impact the international competitiveness of our real economy. On the other hand, as some foreign companies withdraw or shift their focus, local physical enterprises can also welcome a more relaxed competitive environment.
More importantly, the U.S. tax cuts have also raised expectations for tax cuts domestically. The heavy tax burden on domestic enterprises has long been a consensus, and calls for tax cuts have always existed, even with the phrase "death tax rate."
But our government, which concentrates resources to accomplish major tasks, needs huge fiscal expenditures, and land finance revenue has been declining in recent years, making tax cuts unrealistic in the short term. As reforms continue to deepen, coupled with international economic environment pressures, tax cuts for Chinese enterprises are not impossible. That might be the real spring for physical enterprises.
Source: Lao Miao Tears Apart Marketing (ID: yiheyingxiao)
-END-


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