---
title: "Find Customers, Operate Customers, Let Customers Create More Customers"
description: "The 'customer problem' is the primary issue in marketing. In the internet era, the term 'customer' has been replaced by 'user', and its position in the value chain has been elevated to unprecedented heights. This article explores the importance of individual customer value, the need for direct connection and operation of customers, and introduces the 'cognition, transaction, relationship integration' marketing principle, along with the 'Weimai' system as a practical implementation."
author: "文石"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2019-07-20"
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# Find Customers, Operate Customers, Let Customers Create More Customers

> The 'customer problem' is the primary issue in marketing. In the internet era, the term 'customer' has been replaced by 'user', and its position in the value chain has been elevated to unprecedented heights. This article explores the importance of individual customer value, the need for direct connection and operation of customers, and introduces the 'cognition, transaction, relationship integration' marketing principle, along with the 'Weimai' system as a practical implementation.

Click 'Read Original' for details.
**The 'Customer Problem' is the Primary Issue in Marketing**
**Discovering and satisfying customer needs is the fundamental value of a business**. The 4C marketing theory places 'customer' at the core, and its importance is self-evident.
**In the internet era, the term 'customer' has been replaced by 'user', and its position in the value chain has been elevated to unprecedented heights**. In internet companies, to 'please' users, a large number of subsidies and free models have emerged. (The term 'customer' emphasizes transactional relationships, while 'user' emphasizes usage relationships.)
Today, whether traditional enterprises or internet companies, almost all are proposing **'customer orientation'** or **'user first'**, and based on this, they determine corporate strategy, products, marketing strategies, and brand propositions. This also shows that the history of enterprise development is the process of creating customers. Once an enterprise loses its ability to create customers, its mission ends.
From the consumer's perspective, we often find that many enterprises do not practice what they preach, even going so far as to 'fool users' while claiming 'user first'. These enterprises' value proposition issues do not mean that 'customers' or 'users' are unimportant. In fact, regardless of the type of enterprise, once user numbers and consumption frequency begin to decline, disaster will soon follow.
The customer issue is so important that Teacher Shi Wei, in his marketing monograph 'Connection', said, '**Who are our customers? This is the primary issue in marketing.**'
In fact, not only 'who are customers' is the primary issue in marketing, but any issue related to customers is a primary issue: **Who are our customers? Where are our customers? How do we find them and operate them?**
**Is Connecting with Every Customer a Luxury?**
**Who are our customers? This is the starting point of all marketing activities and a fundamental issue.** Here, 'customer' often describes a 'customer group' rather than a specific 'customer individual'. For example, the target customers for this product are 'middle-aged white-collar women aged 30-40', which is a description of a group.
By continuously segmenting the population and anchoring a customer group, statistical methods can be used to depict a group profile, which is indeed meaningful for establishing corporate marketing strategy and formulating tactics.
For this reason, in the realm of traditional marketing, 'customer' often defaults to a 'customer group'. This leads to a severe lack of attention and research on individual customers in traditional marketing systems. In fact, this is the biggest limitation of most enterprises' marketing activities today.
A most powerful proof is that most brands believe they practice 'customer orientation', but in fact, they invest 99% of their energy in channels. This is not the original intention of the enterprise; initially, it was a passive choice based on the efficiency and feasibility of marketing behavior, and today it is based on the continuation of traditional models.
Before the mobile internet era, to directly connect and communicate with customers, one could only do so through physical visits and phone calls, which was a highly time-consuming and costly task. This is evident from the fact that many enterprises spend millions or even tens of millions on market research, and this is only the cost of a single connection with a limited sample size.
Under such circumstances, enterprises' marketing activities are forced to make the following choices:
> **1. Choose large media platforms with broad audiences to disseminate brand information, rather than building their own ability to face customers;**
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> **2. Choose one-way brand communication methods rather than interactive communication methods;**
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> **3. Choose passive customer connection methods, i.e., waiting for customers with problems to proactively contact through after-sales systems;**
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> **4. Choose to focus main energy on channels and terminals because they are needed to achieve brand-customer connection.**
But today, the number of mobile internet users in China has exceeded 1.1 billion, and information transmission and interaction have undergone earth-shaking changes. 85% of China's population is interconnected in real-time in a networked world, and this change has had a profound impact on Chinese enterprises' marketing activities.
The direct manifestation of this profound impact is that, technologically, enterprises can now fully achieve low-cost, large-scale, direct finding and connection of customers.
But in fact, apart from internet companies, most consumer goods brands still do not have sufficient awareness of the importance of 'finding and connecting customers'. Internet companies, on the contrary, directly use 'valuation' to mark the value of each 'user'. This thinking should trigger reflection and reference for traditional enterprises, prompting them to re-examine the true value of individual customers.
**Re-recognizing the True Value of Individual Customers**
In terms of the degree of attention to individual customers, internet companies are clearly more advanced than traditional enterprises. The reason is not difficult to understand: for internet companies, user scale is often the most important asset, and numerical indicators directly related to users, such as growth rate, open rate, usage frequency, etc., are also the most important operational indicators.
Today, with the technological possibility of brands directly connecting with massive numbers of customers, it is necessary for us to re-examine what value 'customers' as individuals have for enterprises.
What can customers contribute to us? The easiest to understand is **sales and profits**. If it were only this, finding customers would not be so important. Today, with the help of social networks, customers can more conveniently and efficiently help us create new customers on a large scale. This is the greatest contribution of customers to enterprises.
Many classics have discussed customer value, among which the most influential is the 'Customer Lifetime Value' theory. It divides customer value into **historical value**, **present value**, and **potential value**. Now, the potential value of customers will become increasingly significant.
'The cost of developing a new customer is 3-10 times that of retaining an existing one' – this is an explanation from the perspective of marketing costs.
'The success rate of marketing to new customers is only 15%, while the success rate of selling to existing customers is 50%' – this is an explanation from the perspective of marketing efficiency.
'60% of new customers come from referrals or influence from existing customers' – this is an explanation from the perspective of customer promotion efficiency.
The important role of existing customers is actually a concentrated manifestation of the value of individual customers. The development of business has proven that almost all successes are ultimately proven to be the success of 'existing customers'. This not only proves the importance of individual customer value but also shows how important customer relationship management is.
Theodore Levitt vividly discussed this: 'A sale is a marriage; it is only the beginning of a successful courtship and married life. The quality of the married life depends on how well the seller manages the relationship.'
The functional beverage brand Dongpeng Special Drink, using one-bottle-one-code technology, completed connection and interaction with 60 million customers in three years. Although this is only a one-time shallow connection and interaction, it is a good start.
**The level of customer operation is the level of enterprise marketing activities**. If 'who are our customers' is the starting point of enterprise marketing activities, then 'how to find customers more accurately and efficiently', 'how to connect customers at lower cost and larger scale', and 'how to let customers help us find customers' should be the core work throughout marketing activities.
**Find Customers, Let Customers Help Us Create More Customers**
In terms of finding and connecting customers, **the cost and efficiency advantages of online are significantly greater than offline**. For consumer goods brands, most have little research on online, and the current period is the biggest dividend period and opportunity point.
Where are customers? This question is easy to answer: on JD.com, Tmall, Douyin, Kuaishou, WeChat, and Weibo. But they do not belong to you; they belong to those e-commerce companies and social platforms.
Knowing who customers are and where they are does not mean finding customers. Even if they have purchased your products, strictly speaking, they are not entirely your customers.
To measure whether they are your customers, at least the following questions should be answered affirmatively: **Have you established your own customer account system? Can you accumulate and apply individual customer behavior data? Can you manage and advance customer relationships through technology, allowing customers to help us create more customers?**
Teacher Shi Wei, in his book 'Connection', proposed a new marketing principle of 'cognition, transaction, and relationship integration'. That is, enterprises can simultaneously achieve the three important goals of customer cognition, product (service) transaction, and customer relationship deepening in the three spaces of 'network, community, and terminal'.
'**Cognition, transaction, and relationship integration**' is an important and innovative marketing principle. In the past marketing system, we always separated cognition (brand communication), transaction (sales), and relationship (customer relationship building), which were completed by the brand, sales, and after-sales service departments respectively. But under the new marketing principle, the three can often be achieved simultaneously.
For example, when you open a link shared by a friend in a WeChat group, you complete cognition of a new brand or product; if you purchase the product, you complete the transaction; if you share it with other specific or non-specific friends, you complete the promotion of the brand, forming a shallow new relationship. And these are almost completed simultaneously.
Not only on WeChat, but now you can almost complete similar actions on any social platform and e-commerce platform.
This is a relatively common and popular internet gameplay in recent years, but once a method becomes popular, it often approaches the time when it becomes ineffective.
This sharing fission gameplay has two aspects that make enterprises feel powerless. **First, it increasingly relies on stronger reward incentives to drive customers; second, the entire process is passive for enterprises, unable to track and study individual customer behavior data.** That is to say, even if the activity succeeds, completing 'cognition and transaction', or even 'fission', the 'relationship' between the enterprise and customers still cannot be established.
Min Yibo, a former sales champion for Dell in China, noticed this situation. He believes that '**cognition, and even transaction, are only the process of enterprise marketing activities, not the purpose. The purpose of marketing activities is to establish a solid and continuously expanding customer relationship system.**'
Therefore, Min Yibo began to deeply think about the value of customer behavior data behind social traffic. In 2016, he developed a technical system called 'Weimai' based on all social platforms, helping enterprises mine the value of social data, find customers at the minimum cost, and help enterprises establish customer systems.
The design logic of the 'Weimai' system subtly aligns with Teacher Shi Wei's marketing principle of 'cognition, transaction, and relationship integration', and is also a practical implementation of this principle. Min Yibo once tested it in a class at the Dark Horse Academy. Through the 'Weimai' system, he published an enrollment brochure for the Dark Horse Academy. As a result, for a course priced at 200,000 yuan per person, nearly 100 people signed up within 24 hours, and ultimately achieved sales of over 7 million yuan, with marketing expenses of less than 1,000 yuan. Accurately finding customers and using customers to create customers, the 'Weimai' system strongly proved this logic.
How to use internet technology to help enterprises accurately find customers at the minimum cost? Find more customers? How to let customers help us create more customers? How to help enterprises establish customer systems? From August 20-23, 2019, the China FMCG Conference invited Mr. Min Yibo, founder of 'Weimai', to share in depth on 'How to use social traffic fission to accurately find more customers'.


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