---
title: "Why “Interesting and Informative” Is Not as Good as “Useful and Effective”?"
description: "In an era of rising new consumption, many believe brand communication should be “interesting and informative,” as exemplified by Douyin's “interest e-commerce” and Bilibili's “informative” UGC content. However, the author argues that this logic is flawed, and that “useful and effective” repetition, as seen in elevator ads, is more powerful in building brands, based on the first principles of brand communication and Kahneman's dual-system theory."
author: "胡喆001"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2021-06-04"
language: "en"
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---

# Why “Interesting and Informative” Is Not as Good as “Useful and Effective”?

> In an era of rising new consumption, many believe brand communication should be “interesting and informative,” as exemplified by Douyin's “interest e-commerce” and Bilibili's “informative” UGC content. However, the author argues that this logic is flawed, and that “useful and effective” repetition, as seen in elevator ads, is more powerful in building brands, based on the first principles of brand communication and Kahneman's dual-system theory.

In an era of rising new consumption, few would disagree that brand communication should be “interesting and informative.”
For instance, Douyin has recently raised the banner of **“interest e-commerce,”** believing that coupling based on “interest” is the new direction for e-commerce.
Bilibili, on the other hand, hopes to catch up with the monetization wave of consumer communities like Xiaohongshu through **“informative”** UGC content.
Many believe that the logic of brand communication should be completely overhauled, replacing the old “simple, repetitive” hard-sell model with “interesting and informative.” However, the author holds a different view.
**-01-**
**“Interesting and Informative” Is Not as Good as “Useful and Effective”?**
In the rise of new consumer brands, many entrepreneurs like to talk about “new connections,” such as content marketing being a new dividend, “interest marketing” through being interesting and informative, and KOLs directly connecting with consumers to create new channels...
Why does everyone say this?
The reason is simple—**First, this kind of talk is very Internet-like and new-consumer-like, making the brand seem innovative; second, the truly successful elements cannot be easily shared.**
**In the mobile Internet era, aligning all marketing with “interesting and informative” is just an illusion for many.**
For example, when Miaolan Duo (妙可蓝多) was preparing to enter the cheese stick market, its competitor was a French brand—Bonne Maman (百吉福).
Bonne Maman had been selling cheese sticks in China for 10 years, with revenue of 1 billion yuan, but rarely built its brand, probably thinking that a “foreign brand” was the best endorsement (my guess).
Miaolan Duo was in an awkward position at the time, producing both milk and cheese, but excelling at neither. Later, the boss of Miaolan Duo made a judgment—**following behind a successful person and trying to surpass them using their methods offers no opportunity.** So, Miaolan Duo did not have the chance to become the next Mengniu or Yili.
Instead, consumers had not yet formed a perception of cheese; their minds were blank.
Thus came Miaolan Duo's saturation attack on Focus Media (分众). In fact, the whole process was not “interesting” at all.
They simply adapted “Two Tigers,” changing the lyrics to “Miaolan Duo, Miaolan Duo, cheese stick, cheese stick, high calcium and nutritious, growing with me, really delicious, really delicious,” and then repeatedly played it at elevator entrances through Focus Media.
Was this process interesting? Was there cleverness? Were there masterful copywriting or viral articles? None. It just happened that many children would sing along at the elevator entrance, and after singing, they would want to eat this cheese stick.
With sustained investment in Focus Media, Miaolan Duo surpassed Bonne Maman in sales within two years, becoming China's largest cheese company, and its market value rose from over 2 billion to over 20 billion yuan.
The reason I cite these two cases, which I myself find a bit “boring,” is to say that **whether a brand should be interesting and informative or useful and effective cannot be decided by our intuition.**
We must return to the first principles of brand communication.
Today's knowledge workers, if they don't know what “first principles” are, should catch up.
**“The first principle is the first cause that transcends causality, and it is the only cause; at the same time, the first principle must be abstract.”**
In plain language: the first principle is the sole source of things, it is abstract, and it is more advanced than causality.
This theory tells us that to see the essence of things, we must break them down into the most basic components and solve problems from the source.
So, **what is the first principle of brand communication?**
Recently, I came across a book whose recommendation alone was eye-opening.
It is called “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which is said to be “a must-read if you can only read one book a year.”
This is the first book to comprehensively analyze the brain's thinking process, written by the greatest contemporary psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman, with over 50 years of research.
Since its English edition was published a year ago, it has remained at the top of Amazon's cognitive psychology category.
Most astonishingly, Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” described it as a milestone in the history of human thought, comparable to Adam Smith's “The Wealth of Nations” and Freud's “The Interpretation of Dreams.”
Fast thinking and slow thinking are the two protagonists in our minds. They are friends most of the time, sometimes enemies, and often fight side by side!
Kahneman, like a competent tour guide, explains along the way—what thinking in the brain is all about. Simply put, it is the story of System 1 (intuitive thinking) and System 2 (logical thinking) working together in various psychological dramas. **“Fast thinking” is System 1**, which is emotional, relies on intuition, reacts quickly to the situation at hand, and believes that what it sees is the whole picture; **“slow thinking” is System 2**, which is slower, good at logical analysis, and although it is less error-prone, it is lazy and often takes shortcuts, directly adopting System 1's judgments.
The principle is not complicated—System 1 requires no mental effort, while System 2 requires a lot. **Most of the time, people use System 1 to process and judge the world, relying on intuition and conditioned reflexes.**
So Kahneman repeatedly reminds us that he has reinterpreted and overturned the assumption that “human decisions are rational,” and for the first time reveals how **“intuitive biases”** and **“logical shortcuts”** unconsciously determine our seemingly comfortable lives.
That is to say:
To be honest, I felt a thunderbolt when I read this—it turns out that **what we think is interesting and informative is actually not as useful and effective as simple repetition...**
**The most effective and inevitable scenes in people's life trajectories, which are also somewhat boring, are probably waiting for the elevator and riding the elevator...**
In this limited time, we are inevitably subjected to the ear-piercing elevator ads, and most of the time we even feel a bit bored—because time is limited, information is highly condensed, often just one or two sentences repeated over and over, giving us, who are used to seeing wonderful things, a somewhat uninteresting feeling.
By the way, **another similar scene—the cinema.**
In fact, Cameron has already fully articulated the unique experience and value of cinema for communication—why does Focus Media, China's main offline ignition facility, choose only elevators and cinemas as its media forms?
Because the elevator is a closed physical scene that people pass through daily, and it is also a psychological scene where people are most likely to actively watch ads. The cinema is a closed, immersive physical scene, and also a psychological scene where people are most likely to open themselves up to emotion.
Therefore, combining Kahneman's theory not only explains why I often inexplicably remember the ad slogans of elevator ads that I subconsciously find “boring,” but also why I have the urge to buy the brand's products when I see them in the store—the essence is that repetition triggers a comfortable feeling of cognitive ease and familiarity.
Seeing this, I realized that the first principle of brand communication is actually the “two systems” theory mentioned in this book—**no rationality can resist repetition, and no matter how strong the mind's door, it is difficult to resist repetition. The essence of brand communication is that interesting and informative are just floating clouds; using “repetition” to open the consumer's psychological barrier and continuously repeat to resist forgetting is the first principle.**
**If a brand is purchased because of repetition, and if its purchase does not bring you a bad experience, you will gradually develop trust, security, and familiarity with it. Eventually, you will find that the probability of purchasing it increases. Then you will discover that in every area of life, there are several brands that make you feel safe enough; they are your first choice and also your last choice.**
This influence is often silent, from quantitative to qualitative change. Once it crosses the inflection point, it will make the brand deeply rooted in people's hearts and achieve sustained high growth.
So, are viral campaigns, seeding, and betting on variety shows really that bad? Actually, no, but their biggest problem is that they are difficult to repeat, and **things that are difficult to repeat cannot serve as a company's sustained brand strategy.**
**-02-**
**Viral Campaigns: You Can't See the Lonely Smoke**
**In fact, “viral campaigns” are not a term or phenomenon unique to the self-media era.
In the era when TV was the only entertainment center at home, there was a special phenomenon called “bid winner” (标王), which meant publicly bidding for the most prime advertising slots on CCTV; the winner took all.
In that era of high ratings, the bid winner was certainly the focus of media and public attention. But later, people found that starting with the early bid winner Kongfuyan Banquet Wine, many brands that became “CCTV bid winners” ended up in a mess, including Qinchijiu, Aido VCD, Panda Mobile, etc. Consumers of the Z generation today definitely won't remember these brands.
However, with the advent of the mobile Internet era, a new marketing standard was proposed: “viral campaigns.” Whether it's event marketing or viral articles, once it triggers public communication hotspots, it leverages network effects to self-replicate, producing unimaginable communication effects.
I remember that Baidu once used a small budget of 300,000 yuan to produce a set of “Stephen Chow-style Tang Bohu” ads promoting “Baidu understands Chinese better,” which was highly effective and won an Emmy Award that year, with the reason being “achieving 100 million yuan in communication effect with a 300,000 yuan budget.”
Such high-leverage, high-cost-performance marketing effects mean that no brand doesn't want to go viral, but if a brand hopes to rely on “viral campaigns” to sustain its high-potential head brand status, it will likely be futile.
Why is this? A rational analysis reveals several reasons:
**On one hand,**
For example, in 2017, a set of “one-shot” ads by Baique Ling (百雀羚) went viral on WeChat Moments, creating a phenomenal viral hotspot. Although it was questioned for having no sales despite high exposure, with a conversion rate of less than 0.00008, Baique Ling gained over 30 million reads, making it a phenomenal marketing event of the year.
However, although Baique Ling carefully reviewed the core elements of this campaign and tried to replicate similar national-style marketing events, it never produced another viral hotspot. Baique Ling's brand potential remains highly limited, and today, squeezed by imported big brands and new consumer brands, it is struggling.
In fact, if Baique Ling had seized the time window when public interest was aroused, concentrated its energy and resources on offline communication facilities, and penetrated the public's mind in one go, we might have seen a 10-billion-yuan national-style cosmetics brand today.
**On the other hand, in the pursuit of viral effects, the truly important information may be lost.**
Some might say that the inability to repeatedly go viral is due to Baique Ling's poor execution. Isn't Durex known for creating viral marketing cases? Viral campaigns can be replicated if handled by experts.
Here, we won't mention that behind one successful viral campaign may be ten thousand failed attempts; let's analyze the gains and losses of Durex, the “viral king.”
Durex is a “viral machine,” characterized by keeping up with current events and hotspots, combined with its own “ambiguous attributes,” often creating puns and clever metaphors that go viral, making it the “king of topic marketing.”
However, because it must cater to topicality, it inevitably sacrifices the transmission of core brand information, making it difficult to achieve both. This results in Durex having high awareness, but the core reasons for choosing the brand are hard to convey to consumers.
In contrast, another brand, Okamoto, is far less adept at “playing tricks” than Durex. It focuses more on highlighting the brand's “focus, professionalism, and ultimate” information, and has long insisted on conveying the core value of “ultimate thinness” through products like 001, 002, and 003.
Today, although Durex remains the industry leader, Okamoto has risen in sales in both online and offline channels and has achieved a good position in the high-end condom segment.
**-03-**
**Part Three: So What If It's Interesting and Informative?**
**In recent years, new consumer brands have gradually been proven to be no longer a “phenomenal event” but a “structural opportunity.”**
Driven by social media, new channels, and new consumer groups, a large number of new brands have taken off, but highly saturated competition and rapid iteration of information flows have also made long-term development after a brand's rise a problem. In the new consumption era, with internet celebrities rising and falling, what kind of consumer brands can truly transcend cycles?
In fact, I have previously analyzed several paths that brands can use in this era:
**1. Through social media, content delivery, and “know first, recognize later” approaches, KOL-led community communication, commonly known as “seeding and weeding”;**
**2. Seeking to bind with major social entertainment events, such as variety shows;**
**3. Using offline media in people's essential living spaces and paths for ignition, such as Focus Media.**
For paths 1 and 3, I have already provided detailed analysis in the first part of this article and in my previous article “The Internet Can't Build Brands, but ‘Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Focus Media’ Can,” and pointed out—**if the consumer's field of vision is a wasteland, then a single flower is particularly eye-catching; this is the advantage of the early dividend period.**
But if the field has been repeatedly cultivated and is full of flowers and plants, you must plant something different or do something else—make “your grassland” clearly distinct from ordinary flowers, recognizable at a glance, and preferably as tall as possible.
In fact, as traffic dividends dry up and social media over-exploits commercial potential, path 1 is showing signs of decline. Analysts point out that this decline has actually led to **“consumer brands completing the disenchantment of Internet thinking, and brand building paths returning to common sense.”**
However, variety shows still make many brands feel love-hate.
In recent years, domestic variety shows have blossomed everywhere, with many big names gathering and ratings soaring, making them prime spots for brands to compete for advertising and sponsorship. Being able to title sponsor a popular variety show or even just appear in the program can bring great exposure to a brand, so major brands follow the pace of variety shows, and emerging brands try to bet on variety shows for overnight fame.
In fact, the biggest problem with the variety show path is high uncertainty.
In the mainland entertainment market, whether a web drama or variety show becomes a hit or flops is almost “metaphysical.” The most representative example is “Sisters Who Make Waves Season 1,” which was not favored by the market but became a huge hit, while “Season 2,” which was expected to continue riding the wave, flopped. Vanmeilin (梵蜜琳), which entered with 40 million yuan, made a fortune, while sponsors who invested hundreds of millions missed out.
“Sisters Who Make Waves Season 1” was not favored by the market at the beginning; the project's initial rating was only B-level, and many brands only sought cooperation after the show aired.
Because of this, a micro-business brand “Vanmeilin,” which entered the market in 2015, easily secured the title sponsorship for the first season for 40 million yuan. This “lucky pick” made Vanmeilin the biggest winner.
However, ironically, after “Sisters Who Make Waves Season 1” became a hit, advertising slots were hard to come by. Tempted by the popularity of the first season, the sponsorship frenzy for Season 2 escalated, with the exclusive title sponsor's cost reaching at least hundreds of millions, and the number of other sponsors increasing to 15.
Unexpectedly, “Sisters Who Make Waves Season 2” did not continue the heat myth. Halfway through the show, it was so dull that it made no waves.
The difficulty of variety shows becoming hits, or more precisely, the unpredictability of their success, is not a purely probabilistic event but a certainty.
In the post-TV era, variety shows like “The Voice of China” and “Running Man” could stay popular for three years, with ratings easily exceeding 4. But as fewer people watch TV, TV variety show ratings have become increasingly dismal; exceeding 1% is already considered excellent, and they often only last one season. This is the tide of history receding, and the trend cannot be reversed.
Web variety shows had a good period, but as the mobile Internet's time dividend enters its final stage, competition in the video market is extremely fierce. Douyin and Kuaishou have taken all fragmented time, Zhihu and Bilibili's “knowledge-based mid-length videos” have taken the “learning time” of the socially stable middle class with learning anxiety, and even community group buying has taken away the chatting time of the elderly, who now hop between WeChat groups looking for discounts...
Each of these “time killers” has immense confidence and arrogance. The entertainment content on the Internet is vast as the sea, and it is far from simple for web variety shows to become hits.
However, in this mobile Internet era, there are too many choices of media channels and massive content, and various novel concepts and plausible “new ideas” emerge endlessly. Today they say content is king, tomorrow they say interest is paramount. Which is the right path?
So, we should return to the “first principle” of brand advertising discussed earlier—
**Once a brand establishes cognition in your mind, it lasts for a long time, giving you more security and familiarity. Therefore, whenever you see this product in any channel, you will instinctively prefer to choose it.**
Therefore, **no matter how sexy, interesting, or charming a method appears, if it cannot provide a clear, sustained, and repeatable path for your brand building, it is at best a supplementary means. In the end, we must return to the first principle.**
As the poem says, birds fly far away, but ultimately to return home faster.
Once the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.


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