---
title: "Hello! Consumer Dynasty"
description: "Building a brand that everyone loves takes time, but in the mobile internet era, the consumer-centric approach is reshaping brand cycles. This article explores new consumer trends, such as refined segmentation, exploratory consumption, and aesthetic value, and provides case studies of brands like GoPro, Durex, and Danone Mizone to illustrate how to engage consumers in the new era."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2016-01-17"
language: "en"
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---

# Hello! Consumer Dynasty

> Building a brand that everyone loves takes time, but in the mobile internet era, the consumer-centric approach is reshaping brand cycles. This article explores new consumer trends, such as refined segmentation, exploratory consumption, and aesthetic value, and provides case studies of brands like GoPro, Durex, and Danone Mizone to illustrate how to engage consumers in the new era.

How long does it take to build a brand that everyone loves, flowers bloom at its sight, and cars get flat tires when they see it?
Coca-Cola took 129 years, P&G 100 years, Haier 31 years, Apple 18 years, New Balance 4 years, WeChat 2 years, Snapchat 1 year, and Youfan App only 3 months. When the second episode of "U Can U Bibi" aired, Youfan App entered Sina Weibo's hot search and downloads reached 5 million.
If you ask, what is "U Can U Bibi"? What is Youfan?
**Then there is a crisis called "The world of young people is wonderful, but it has nothing to do with you."**
Those who win the post-90s generation win the world. Not only the post-90s, but with technological progress and social changes, the balance of power has tilted. We are moving from the industrial production era to the consumer-centricism of the mobile internet era. The rapid development of communication technology and experience economy has shortened brand cycles.
The logic of industrial society is scale. To make beverages, you have to be like Coca-Cola, selling a can of soda to the world, because scale generates efficiency, which is the basic law of industry. But **what is the new business essence of the mobile internet era? All business models must center on "people's more diverse needs" and "more extreme and fast experiences."**
How to build a brand that "meets more needs and provides ultimate experience"? Obviously, it is not just about pursuing perfect product functions, but thinking about how to build a consumer base and manage consumer relationships.
The destructive power of consumer-centricism is rising on the horizon. The industrial society may come to an end within the next decade. Choosing to watch or participate is not only about business, but also about survival.
**Disintegration and Reconstruction: Discovering the New Consumer Order**
Why do people consume? What drives consumers to buy products? It is no longer the product itself. In today's competitive era, to stand out, you cannot follow the past regular route. The logic of consumption is being reconstructed, the consumption order is being rebuilt, and the perspective from which brands think about consumers also needs to change accordingly.
**The Refinement of Consumer Groups**
In the past, companies often used geographic and demographic characteristics as criteria for consumer segmentation. But today, such segmentation is clearly not accurate enough. Consumers are no longer a portrait outlined by a single indicator, but a composition that integrates more interest tags, behavioral preferences, and value propositions. Different age groups may gather in the same community or consumption space. The 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s may play together because of a common interest. Consumer culture is no longer intergenerational isolation, but mutual penetration.
The recently released "2015-2016 China Precision Marketing Development Report" points out that the mass market has entered homogeneous competition, and the internet has further plunged the mass market into a bloody red sea. Using the same goods and services to face Chinese consumers is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach. The extensive economy era is gone. China is gradually moving towards a more precise and diverse "precision market" than segmentation. Enterprises need to redefine consumers, re-find more vertical precision markets and personalized precision groups, and gain insights into deeper community tags that move consumers.
**From Checklist Consumption to Exploratory Consumption**
In the past, consumers used to consume according to habitual consumption logic. "Checklist consumption" was an important feature. For example, buying a house, a car, or home appliances, many consumers made purchases based on life plans. In such consumption behavior, meeting basic needs became the core driving force.
But today, people's consumption needs are no longer limited to this. Consumers will seek value beyond basic consumption. Consumption is not only to meet basic life needs, but also to give more meaning to consumption. Coupled with the real-time information flow of e-commerce, mobile internet, and social networks, consumers are triggered by various moments. Consumption is not only an experience, but also a source of "unknown" or "fun." Exploratory consumption has become a trend, and new discoveries and experiences are increasingly becoming the focus of consumers during the consumption process.
For brands, giving consumers this space for exploration, or injecting different experiential meaning into the brand, is becoming increasingly important for triggering their consumption.
**From Functionalism to Equal Emphasis on Aesthetics**
A popular term on the internet is "face value." Whether to rely on "face value" or "strength" has also sparked controversy among netizens. But while people argue, they also mention that face value, character, and sentiment all need to be "competed."
**In an era of relatively scarce goods, consumers have few choices, so "functionalism" is paramount. Whether a product has enough functions to meet people's needs is the core. But when goods in every field are abundant, "functionalism" is no longer the only driver. Consumers' demand for aesthetics is growing, and product design aesthetics are becoming increasingly important. Therefore, today's products and brands must have both "face value" and "strength."**
**From functionalism to equal emphasis on aesthetics, this is also an important path for Chinese enterprises to upgrade their products.** Low-priced products without aesthetics will become less competitive in the future. Especially today's young people, who were born in the internet world, have a broader vision and much higher aesthetic ability than consumers of past eras. Therefore, product aesthetics, brand aesthetics, and marketing aesthetics have become basic skills that enterprises must cultivate. If an enterprise can integrate cultural and aesthetic elements into its products, it can better move consumers. For example, many people like MUJI because it conveys a simple aesthetic, fully integrating the spirit of "simplicity" and "reduction" into product design.
**Pay Attention to Subcultures and Seek Personalized Demand Markets**
In the mobile internet era, consumers increasingly pursue not "mass conformity" but "niche self." Consumer culture is decomposing into more subcultures centered on content, interests, and social interaction. This is the new consumer culture.
This new consumer culture is both a disintegration of mass consumer culture and a reconstruction of mass culture. Moreover, many cultures first disintegrate and then reconstruct, or disintegrate and reconstruct simultaneously. For example, the post-90s generation has created many new languages. These new languages first disintegrated the communication methods of other generations, and then these generations began to imitate the post-90s for fear of falling behind. Thus, the post-90s culture quickly began to penetrate from niche to mass, which is also called the "feedback effect." The logic of the niche market is similar: after a niche is born, it first establishes differences from the past, and then the mass follows, becoming popular.
Driven by this trend, subcultures have value, small communities have value, and vertical consumer markets have value. Therefore, the most commercially valuable in the future will not be mass aesthetics and tastes, but subcultures and small communities. For example, the two-dimensional culture that is very popular among the post-90s is typical. Two-dimensional culture not only affects the animation and game industries, but also the fashion industry. For instance, Dior recently held a makeup launch in Japan, and the new products successfully used designs from Japanese anime.
The industrial economy era relied on economies of scale, assembly lines, and mass production. But today is an era of personalized economy. Focusing on more refined subculture mining and more refined cultural segmentation may find new business growth opportunities.
**Help Consumers Discover and Construct Themselves**
In the past, consumers and the product world were two separate worlds. That is, consumers bought a product mainly for use, so "emotional connection" was relatively rare. But today, life scenarios and product scenarios are integrated. Products are no longer cold interfaces. Consumers need to dialogue with products and interact with them. Especially in a digital and intelligent era, brands need to give consumers more meaning.
First, help consumers find and construct themselves. Why do people buy your product? Why do people like your brand? Product meaning determines consumption value. In this era of differentiated consumption, consumers are no longer looking for sameness but difference. Consumption is no longer for showing off, but for better matching. The brand is no longer something attached to the product level; for consumers, it is a proposition of self-worth. Therefore, all products and brands need to help consumers discover themselves, use emotional elements to establish connections with consumers, and make consumers feel "This is me, this is what I want." In the past, many categories did not need to consider emotion and product spirit. Today, that is clearly not possible.
Second, content is king. Brands no longer transmit information rigidly, but build content that is loved and seen. In the era of information explosion, content is scarce. Repetitive bombardment only increases consumer defense. "Transmitting trust" is what brands need to think about. The marketing interface has changed greatly. As integrated marketing master Schultz said, the key to brand communication is no longer how much information marketers can send, but how much information consumers can accept. In other words, today's market emphasizes consumers' media consumption, not marketers' information distribution. For brands, creating brand content is an important carrier for transmitting trust. Content is not just a "marketing tool," but should become a normal information communication mode for the brand. Only content with more "connotation," "culture," and creativity can move consumers.
**Scene Revolution**
There is no truth in the world, only perception. When the mass market has become a segmented audience market, enterprises no longer control the entire communication process as before. Mass communication will give way to one-to-one and precision marketing. Creative thinking based on consumption scenarios, behavioral scenes, consumer emotions, subconsciousness, and psychology is the creative path to move consumers.
**Extended Reading:**
**GoPro: The "Narrow Door" for Mavericks**
Waterproof, drop-resistant, simple operation, and capable of capturing fast-moving scenes... By tapping into these niche "extreme" needs, GoPro cameras rose rapidly and almost monopolized the action camera market. In 2013, the company sold 3.85 million GoPros, and in the first half of 2014, sales reached 4.75 million.
In the traditional industrial era, it seemed to stop there. But in the mobile internet era, the relationship between GoPro and its users is just beginning.
The company has 700 employees, and a 20-person original production team acts like directors. Every day, they publish authorized GoPro-captured content collected from around the world on social media like YouTube and Facebook. GoPro even sponsors extreme athletes, attaching GoPros to them to record those thrilling moments.
This greatly promoted the GoPro brand. In the first three months of 2014, YouTube videos with "GoPro" in the title attracted over 1 billion views. From niche to mainstream, it is no longer exclusive to extreme sports enthusiasts.
More importantly, hardware is easy to imitate, but content cannot be copied. GoPro attempts to build its moat by creating a content entry point. Because of this, the hardware company headquartered in California, USA, successfully went public on June 27, 2014, with its stock price rising 31% on the first day, making it one of the best-performing technology stocks in the US stock market in recent years.
Contour and Sony were once GoPro's rivals. After years of competition, in the fourth quarter of 2014, GoPro sold 2.4 million cameras, holding a 94% market share, while Sony only had 3%.
**Durex: The Correct Way to Open Two-Dimensional**
Why did a three-hour live stream with no plot or substance spark heated discussion and group viewing on social networks?
On March 13, 2015, the eve of White Valentine's Day, Durex created a live-streamed new product teaser on Bilibili. Bilibili is a mainstream gathering place for danmaku enthusiasts, with content focused on two-dimensional culture, and users mainly aged 17-31. They spend a long time on the site and have extremely high participation and interaction with self-created content.
"Danmaku is content." Durex chose Bilibili for a boring live stream, precisely capturing the boring culture popular among the two-dimensional group and even the entire young group, providing a platform for Bilibili audiences to complain and encouraging user co-creation. It is said that during the long three hours, many viewers waited from beginning to end, and some even counted how many times the actors blinked in the video.
This level of participation is hard for any advertisement to achieve. And it is the danmaku created by users combined with the video that truly completes the advertisement.
In fact, Bilibili audiences are not Durex's main consumer group. Durex uses their spontaneous dissemination to convey and amplify the news of the new product launch.
On March 13, Durex reminded users on Weibo and WeChat platforms 24 hours, 3 hours, and 30 seconds in advance about the live stream and sale, guiding some Weibo users to Bilibili. In terms of KOL selection, Durex chose @小野妹子学吐槽, who has attributes of both a KOL in the otaku culture field and a major Weibo account.
Finally, with repeated back-and-forth between Bilibili and Weibo audiences, the peak online viewers in the Bilibili live room exceeded 6,500, with a total of over 20,000 danmaku. The danmaku video after the live stream reached 470,000 views and ranked fifth on Bilibili's overall rankings. On Weibo, Durex's official account promotion achieved over 5,500 reposts.
Data from Durex's official Tmall store showed that within two hours after the live stream ended and the product went on sale, sales exceeded 500 boxes, with an average of one box sold every 4.5 seconds in the first five minutes.
**Danone Mizone: FMCG Needs to Play Scenes**
For a long time, FMCG advertising has followed the mass marketing route, trying to grab consumers through volume and coverage. But now audiences are increasingly fragmented, and marketing cannot avoid the high energy consumption and low efficiency of network communication.
Breaking tradition, Danone Mizone and Biotiful have shifted from increasing penetration through mass media to focusing on core consumers and cultivating drinking habits.
Who are core consumers? Core consumers are not the mass, but the precision group. They are the first batch of consumers of new products/services, the "advanced consumer group" with market demonstration and guidance, the vane of consumption and word-of-mouth champions, and opinion leaders in various circles. Whoever captures the precision group can lead the mass.
A report shows that brand stores, fitness clubs, and trendy restaurants became the top three gathering places for the precision group in 2015.
Taking Mizone as an example, it linked the "Slim Series" with fitness women, seizing women's pursuit of exercise and slimming, and tailored the product's "slim attitude," such as "A big face is not a disease, but thick legs are fatal," "If you don't lose weight in April and May, you'll be sad in June and July," and "One white covers a hundred ugliness, one fat destroys everything." These humorous positive incentives won women's favor and perfectly expressed the product's functional needs.
In terms of media format, Mizone catered to women's aesthetics, using beautiful and fresh petals as prototypes to design special-shaped media, very intuitively conveying the product image of "high face value for women's products." In terms of media placement, Mizone focused on women's functional areas, such as women's locker rooms and aerobics/yoga rooms.
Thus, Mizone established trust with fitness women, and later its O2O tasting activities attracted tens of thousands of participants, ultimately achieving sales conversion of Mizone drink cards.
Another example is Danone Biotiful, which promotes "The more Biotiful, the lighter." The product was placed in 250 fitness clubs across Shanghai, carrying out O2O terminal linkage activities, adopting a supermarket/club alliance model, distributing fitness experience cards at retail terminals to drive sales, ultimately achieving 140 million media exposures.
Small budget, big return. Danone Biotiful and Mizone Slim Series just won the outdoor category award at the Golden Rooster Awards, known as the "Oscar of Chinese advertising." It shows that precision marketing based on technology and geographic location can deliver personalized information to the right segmented group at the right time and place.
**Lufax: Cross-Border Robbery, Cute and Adorable**
From Jiangxiaobai in the liquor industry, Erguotou Subian, to Mengniu's Big Eye Meng banana milk, you will find that brands are becoming more entertaining and more integrated with consumers. Lufax, the regular army in the P2P industry, backed by Ping An Group, is no exception.
Lufax changed the traditional financial institution's top-down, professional and rigid "dignity" in brand communication, combining the fan economy of the internet era with the youthful characteristics of internet finance itself.
For example, in 2013, it did product placement with "Longmen Express," in 2014, it cooperated with the movie "Breakup Buddies," and also sparked with Professor Yi Xiaoxing's "Unexpected," and joined forces with the self-media "Luojiji Think" for financial innovation and market promotion.
Luojiji Think is currently the most influential internet knowledge community. It is said that its WeChat account has over 3 million fans, mainly serving the post-80s and post-90s groups with a strong need for "love of wisdom and pursuit of truth." Moreover, many members of this community are upper-middle class or highly educated. This coincides with Lufax's customer base.
The cooperation between the two is commendable. This includes Lufax and Luojiji Think co-hosting the "Talk About Money and Love" lecture, customizing "farewell gifts" and "welcome gifts" for the second and third phase paid members of Luojiji Think, and holding a "Talk About Money and Love" themed party.
—Cross-border mixing, "Investment and wealth management can be this fun." At that time, Baidu web search information reached 74,800.
Not only that, Lufax and Luojiji Think created a closed community financial product that only Luojiji Think members could purchase. This product had extremely high liquidity and returns, and of course, the results were naturally good. Wang Shi's girlfriend Tian Pujun, as Luo Zhenyu's "best friend," is also a member of Luojiji Think, and happily became a Lufax customer.
Following Lufax, Yirendai "joined hands" with the stage play brand Mahua FunAge; Aiqianjin and iQiyi launched a "double love marriage" based on the third season of "Running Man"; Financial Workshop officially became a strategic partner of Mango TV; Dianrong, which just completed a C round of financing totaling $207 million, started large-scale advertising, with Dragon TV and Beijing TV becoming partners; the peer-to-peer lending platform Jiedaibao launched brand cooperation with the National Day hit movie "Lost in Hong Kong"; and the popular star-making platform "Goddess TV" filmed the first episode of "Goddess Finance" at the office of P2P platform Bangbangtang.
**Reshaping Business Models**
Open brands need two-way dialogue with consumers and co-creation, such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and reverse customization. Consumers play more and more roles: they are self-media, salespeople, creators, product managers... Consumers can earn money while spending, and spread information while shopping. In the future, every individual consumer will become a new leader, not only contributing profits to their favorite brands, but also using their emotions and wisdom to protect the brand.
**Little Black Dress: Sharing is Value**
Recently a hit, Little Black Dress. A startup brand that only sells little black dresses attracted over 10,000 fans on its first day online, gained 170,000 fans in 100 days, sold 4,000 little black dresses, and had revenue exceeding 2 million yuan. What is the magic?
In the view of Wang Siming, founder of SOIRE Little Black Dress, black is eternal fashion, representing elegance, mystery, power, and confidence. No matter the occasion, wearing a little black dress is always right.
Moreover, each little black dress is said to have an exclusive designer. Designers create each SOIRE little black dress with the concept of creating art, ensuring the classic quality of SOIRE little black dresses—giving each SOIRE little black dress a soul; making each SOIRE little black dress have a story from the designer.
Of course, the most critical thing about SOIRE is its marketing model. SOIRE little black dresses are priced at 299-599 yuan, covering leisure, professional, evening dress, and golf series. Currently, they are only sold through the WeChat platform. What makes it different is its micro-distribution model. Consumers only need to successfully purchase a little black dress through "WeChat Pay" on its WeChat public platform, and the system will automatically generate a personal exclusive QR code, making the consumer a spokesperson for SOIRE little black dresses. If someone scans and purchases, the platform will reward the promoter with 30% of the selling price. By analogy, there are rewards within the three-level purchase relationship chain.
Spokespeople actively share their exclusive QR codes to their Moments, friends, or WeChat groups. According to one spokesperson: "I think this method is particularly good. Whenever I encounter good things, I share them with my girlfriends, but sharing is just sharing, nothing else. With SOIRE little black dresses, first I recognize its quality, so I recommend it to friends. After friends buy, I even get sharing rewards. On the first day the little black dress went online, I reposted it to my Moments and recommended it in several friend groups. Unexpectedly, I got over 1,000 yuan in sharing rewards. This greatly surprised me!"
In the era of big data, consumer behavior is more easily influenced by purchase reviews. The brilliance of the little black dress platform is that it makes everyone an active communicator, both a consumer and a seller.
**Maodou Travel: Future Business is C2B**
"24-hour economy class fully subscribed, 6.63 million yuan, 810,000 views, single highest 240,000 yuan, first Shanghai direct flight crowdfunded charter, first private island crowdfunded honeymoon, first 10,000-yuan high-unit-price 24-hour fully subscribed project in JD Crowdfunding's pop culture section."
On September 15, 2015, the Tahiti crowdfunding project sold well, marking the first step of Maodou Travel's C2B precision community e-commerce.
Throughout 2015, the experience economy brought high growth to China's tourism industry, especially the free travel market. Maodou Travel targets the pain points of the free travel market, such as uneven quality, severe saturation, and redundant information, and does C2B reverse customization based on user needs.
Maodou Travel believes that the essence of tourism is managing user expectations. Therefore, before users make purchase decisions, Maodou Travel will emphasize the quality of the product and its application scenarios, such as parent-child or couples; then, Maodou Travel's products will be distributed through social media to complete dissemination; then Maodou will do standardized customization based on user needs, such as for parent-child, hotels may provide toys, or private beaches where children can dig sand, virtual production; after the product is clear, it will use consumer finance or crowdfunding to promote quick user decisions and lock in customers in advance; finally, the demand is transmitted to the supply side, producing according to sales.
In other words, the crowdfunded product this time is a package of charter flight + different levels of hotels + customized activities. Behind it is Maodou Travel's "one city, one island" themed product, which is a vacation itinerary of an island resort + a city shopping.
Before this, Maodou Travel held a "face value" activity on WeChat. Through an HTML5 interactive test mini-game, users upload a photo to get a score, and those with high scores may go to Tahiti. In addition, Maodou Travel also did targeted paid ads on WeChat Moments to attract attention and continued to use Weibo and WeChat to create momentum. In the future, Maodou will consider cooperating with some communities to obtain precise traffic, and then rely on social media dissemination and word-of-mouth among users to quickly acquire a large number of users.
Currently, the most important thing for Maodou is to continuously refine user needs in various scenarios and finally provide users with a solution.
In fact, C2B in the tourism industry is just the beginning. When goods are surplus, in the future world, enterprises will no longer focus on scale and standardization, but only on flexibility, agility, personalization, and user-friendliness.
**Tiexue.com: Community is Not the Same as Community**
While many old communities are in dire straits and uncertain about the future, in November 2015, Tiexue.com, as the first military website and community e-commerce company, was listed on the New Third Board, with a market value exceeding 700 million yuan on the same day.
If we treat community as a productive force, its contribution in terms of high-quality content and high-quality users is almost unparalleled. As "The Crowd" says, the intelligence of a group is usually lower than that of an individual, but a well-guided group can burst out with unexpected enthusiasm and vitality.
Good content is the driving force that attracts users to Tiexue. A large number of original authors submit and upload, and a massive number of users discuss and interact. On this basis, in recent years, Tiexue has also developed unique weapons through the development of novel IPs, especially derivatives from movies and TV dramas.
For example, the TV dramas "Snow Leopard," "Infiltration," "The Gunner," and "Code Name Sparrow," as well as the upcoming "Hummer Scorching Sun," all have original works from Tiexue.com. The 2015 box office dark horse movie "Wolf Warrior" was also written by a contracted author of Tiexue.com.
Relying on the community for advertising and PR is currently the most common business model of the community economy. The next step is to rely on the community for e-commerce. In 2008, Tiexue established the first military product e-commerce website in China—Tiexue Junpin. Finally, relying on the community to make products. In 2011, Tiexue.com also created its own tactical clothing brand—Longya, deeply developing into the military niche field through the community, forming a complete strategic layout of content + e-commerce.
In a community, the spirit of the community and the relationships among members can often be more effective incentives than material rewards. A stable, highly cohesive community can also create long-term spiritual dependence among members, thus forming extremely strong product stickiness.
In fact, it was a Tiexue.com netizen who proactively approached the Longya team to invite them to participate in the research and modification of a certain military uniform. Only then did Longya have the opportunity to participate in the formulation of military standards for this uniform system and obtain the first military order. In 2011, "Longya" achieved sales of over 10 million yuan in just one year. In the second year, independent brand sales increased to 38 million yuan, and in the third year, independent brand sales increased to 57 million yuan.
In the new business era, brands need to learn to connect with communities. From now on, there is no mass communication, only individual communities. And everyone will play different roles in different communities. Brands need to learn to find and resonate with communities that match their audience. The future business form should be that every brand has its own community.
**Positioning: The Core of Future Business is Data**
Consumers are now widely using the internet to inform their personal needs and are willing to pay a premium for personalized products or services.
**O2O is Not Channel Replacement, but Integration**
The marketing miracle of two weeks to a million fans, a 50% increase in average order value, and doubled member purchase frequency was not achieved by Be & Cheery through acquiring new customers, but by deeply mining the existing consumer base.
After the "Mid-Autumn Festival scan code for discounts" campaign at 1,300 stores nationwide, from late August to early September 2014, Be & Cheery's WeChat account reached a million fans, with a peak of 200,000 new fans in one day—relatively, there are only about twenty service accounts with over a million fans on the entire WeChat platform, and most are giants like China Merchants Bank and P&G.
Exchanging discounts for fans is just the first step. Be & Cheery's system is well-equipped, with not only a member center (binding member information, checking member points, redeeming member gifts), a micro-shopping platform (mobile ordering and payment, micro-community), but also various irresistible red packet games, all aimed at keeping fans.
Through tag management, Be & Cheery has done precision marketing for this million users.
First, each Be & Cheery store has an independent QR code. Consumers entering the store scan the code to follow the service account, and they are tagged with that store. When a store launches a new promotion and changes its in-store poster (the store QR code is on the poster), it notifies the system operator by email about the poster theme change, and the store QR code's category tag will also change accordingly.
For example, yesterday Store A's promotional poster was for meat snacks, "Scan code and spend 100 yuan on meat snacks to get 10 yuan off." Fans who scanned and followed that day would be tagged with a "meat snacks" preference. Today, Store A's promotional poster changes to "nuts." After receiving the notification, the system will change the store's QR code to a "nuts" preference tag.
Moreover, each store clerk also has their own QR code, allowing them to maintain customers point-to-point, and even customize promotional plans based on customer needs. For example, if a regular customer hasn't come for a long time, to awaken consumption, they can push discounts on preferred categories.
With QR code order tracking, the enthusiasm of sales guides will be greatly stimulated. For the brand, this O2O closed loop not only effectively increases sales, but also achieves systematic management of offline stores. In other words, reverse O2O returns to the essence of retail, focusing on consumer research. Its essence is to use O2O methods to optimize the collection, classification, and application of consumer data.
**The More Manual Work, the More Intelligent**
Consumers use search to find, shop on e-commerce platforms, share through social media, and record life through smart hardware... Behind all this prosperity is the orderly operation of big data. When consumer behavior is traceable online, advertising can be directly converted into online sales, actions, and measurable return on investment.
This era will see data leasing companies, data analysis companies, and decision outsourcing companies. Traditional enterprises use the help of these companies to innovate traditional business models.
Social Touch, which received $58.5 million in Series D funding from Lenovo in August 2015, is one of these companies. It is helping thousands of enterprises build the core business model of the mobile internet era: deeply connecting with consumers.
After the rise of mobile social networking, users gradually have unified IDs, including Weibo IDs, WeChat IDs, and e-commerce IDs. As one of the earliest marketing technology companies in China, Social Touch can link these IDs, track and record their interactions with enterprises, and then continuously capture and accumulate data through automation, ultimately achieving a deep understanding of users, thus providing personalized and intelligent overall marketing solutions.
Social Touch's clients are mainly divided into two categories: one is the mobile social transformation of traditional enterprises, with representative clients involving FMCG, offline retail, electronic products, financial services, and other brands; the other is digital innovative enterprises, with representative clients being internet applications, e-commerce platforms, online services, and other types of internet companies.
There is a joke in the internet circle: What is artificial intelligence? It is the more manual work, the more intelligent. In other words, for big data to be precise and personalized, a large amount of user behavior data is required. Therefore, Social Touch's client positioning is large and medium-sized brands. This is because large companies have offline users in the tens of millions or at least millions, and corresponding online populations of over 100,000.
**Group Owner is a New Profession**
Clay Shirky said in "Here Comes Everybody" that industrialization is like a dryer, drying all the human touch in social relationships, and then linking individuals with atomic contracts.
But in the mobile internet era, what enterprises want to sell or display is people—employees representing the corporate image and fans representing the corporate appeal—not just products. The core capability of an enterprise will be reflected in how many people it can circle, not how many traditional resources it has.
On July 1, 2015, Haier announced that it would recruit at least 30,000 makers to start businesses on Haier's WeChat store platform. This means that the hundreds of millions of users in Haier's customer database will no longer be maintained and managed solely by its customer service center, but will be managed separately by these 30,000 micro-businesses.
The living space of micro-businesses is WeChat groups and Moments. In this sense, Haier's customer relationship database may be fragmented into 30,000 or more groups, becoming groups managed by 30,000 micro-businesses.
Each micro-business is a group owner. So is the group a live group or a dead group? The group owner is the key to whether it can truly circle people.
Group owners who have built groups know that it is not easy to keep a group truly active and avoid becoming a dead group. For a group to be truly valuable, it needs to be on the same frequency and interest, forming a tribe.
Because of this difficulty, the value of the group is determined in reverse: once traditional enterprises realize that groups are the channels they dream of, full-time group owners become indispensable.
**Your Opponent is the Era**
**Text/Yu Jian**
If we just operate and practice in the above ways, is that enough? Not enough! We may be missing a core that should be focused on in positioning the target group in the mobile era. What is it?
Luo Yonghao, founder of Smartisan, once recommended a book—"Consumer Behavior." The author, Michael Solomon, said an extremely critical sentence—**"Treat consumers as people, not just as consumers."**
In the past, a large amount of our marketing practice was based on treating people as consumers, not treating consumers as people. This is not an exaggeration.
For example, consumer insight: a normal person may not think deeply about a "toothbrush" for more than 10 minutes in their lifetime, but we organize a focus group of more than 10 hours to talk about the experience of using a toothbrush. So the invited people immediately switch to expert mode and consumer mode. These "expert remarks" are more likely to mislead the brand.
For example, our advertisements are all shot for "consumers" to see; our communication also revolves around target consumers. When a person is considered unlikely to become a consumer of the brand, we quickly shift the communication focus to others.
Smartisan is very interesting. After a few years, it made 2 advertisements: "A Driver's Natural Pride" and "A Vegetable Farmer's Natural Pride." What's going on? Did Luo Yonghao discover through a series of big data algorithms and consumer portraits that Smartisan's target consumers are drivers? Vegetable farmers?
The real question Lao Luo thinks about may be: for a person who can identify with the concept of "natural pride," if he is a man, a woman, a student, a driver, a vegetable farmer, a CEO, what would their "natural pride" look like when mapped to their lives? Brands might use this formula to think: what is your brand's emotional value? Substitute it, for example, "dare to love." Then what would be the performance, topics, people, and brands that people of different genders, ages, identities, and occupations who identify with this attitude talk about and follow?
Positioning your target consumers narrows the brand's vision forever, seeing only a very small part of society. In the mobile era, when talking about brands, we should talk more about how to make the brand's concept popular among the widest group of people, bringing the widest possible word-of-mouth and experience. But the past consumer-oriented marketing thinking does not support the operation of these logics.
Therefore, when we say "how to position your target consumers through data and other methods," we find that in the mobile era, some premise corrections should be made to this proposition. We not only need to find our consumers, but our real goal should also include those who will resonate emotionally with us, those who may recognize our brand concept. To a certain extent, what we really need to find is "consumers of brand values."
**Source: Business Journal**
**-END-**
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