Brands playing with Xiaohongshu: 3 new ways to play and 2 new cognitions that cannot be missed

In today's digital marketing era, Xiaohongshu has become an important battlefield for brand marketing. It is no longer just a collection of grass-roots notes and KOL recommendations, but a comprehensive platform that integrates consumer decision-making, demand stimulation, word-of-mouth communication and product transactions. This article will reveal 3 new ways of playing and 2 new cognitions that brands cannot miss on Xiaohongshu in 2025 for your reference.

You may be using Xiaohongshu and investing in it, but do you really know it well enough?

From notes and KOL, to KFS and search, and then to e-commerce, Xiaohongshu has changed very quickly. It is now a comprehensive platform that integrates multiple positionings such as consumer decision-making place, demand stimulation field, word-of-mouth amplifier, content interactive exhibition, and product trading field.

In this collection, we have compiled the five key changes in brand marketing on Xiaohongshu in the past 2024. It includes micro-specific gameplay and macro-overall cognition to help you quickly understand Xiaohongshu and make good use of it:

3 new ways to play:

Buyers: What is Li Dan, who ranks No. 1 on the “easy win” buyers list, selling?

KOS model: Dismantling Weilai’s Xiaohongshu storm

Private domain: 90% of brands are unaware of the new domain that can contribute 1/5 of GMV

2 new insights:

Using products to promote brands: Exploring Xiaohongshu’s Chinese branding

Grass-planting measurement: How can people’s thoughts and intentions be measured?

01 Buyers: What is Li Dan, who ranks No. 1 on the “easy win” buyers list, selling?

In 2024, Li Dan, who had been silent in the live broadcast industry for a long time, opened "Dan's Convenience Store" on Xiaohongshu and appeared in the public eye again.

Without lighting, makeup, in-depth product reviews, or promotions, Li Dan spends 90% of his time giving his audience a "spiritual massage". Despite his casualness, he is able to top the buyer list almost every time he broadcasts, and leads by a huge margin.

In Li Dan’s live broadcast room, the act of "watching live broadcast" itself is part of consumption.

As he himself said, "Running a small shop, reading letters, and selling things gives me a sense of security." Just like the small shop I used to run downstairs from my home, the boss was often in the shop, and customers would come in to chat and buy some sunflower seeds and snacks.

In this state, the anchor is natural, casual, and relaxed, and the fans' feelings are also natural and unpretentious. The relationship between the two parties is more like friendship than business. Rather than selling goods, it is better to say that seeing the content and the anchor you like, you encourage him to continue to create in the form of "rewards".

The consumption logic of "buying while watching live broadcasts" determines low decision-making costs, which corresponds to low customer unit prices. In terms of product mix, food and beverages account for more than 90% of Dan's store, and the unit prices of the top 10 products in terms of sales are between 50-100 yuan.

The selection of products that meet the characteristics of the anchor and the needs of the audience can allow the products to be naturally brought out during the live broadcast, reducing the deliberateness and unfamiliarity of buying and selling, and giving a better live broadcast experience. The product price that is suitable for the customer base can also reduce the decision-making cost of fans and promote order conversion.

02 KOS Model: Dismantling Weilai’s Xiaohongshu Storm

On Xiaohongshu, there are more than 780,000 notes under the entry for NIO, second only to BYD (more than 1.93 million), Tesla (more than 1.88 million), and Li Auto (more than 850,000). The cumulative delivery volume of the other three brands is much higher than that of NIO, which means that NIO has invested far more resources in the Xiaohongshu channel than its competitors.

Some of these notes come from official accounts, some come from users, but more come from front-line sales.

Before NIO entered the market, few people in the industry believed that a product category like automobiles, which has a high unit price, heavy decision-making, and long chain, could run the seeding-conversion chain online.

However, there are currently more than 1,200 Weilai sales staff active on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. According to Daofa, in some stores with mature account management, the proportion of locked orders from online users has stabilized at around 25%, and CPL (lead cost) and CPK (lock-in cost) are the same or even slightly lower than traditional channels such as vertical media.

This also leads to three questions:

1. Why did NIO choose Xiaohongshu as the key to breaking through sales?
2. How did NIO “reclaim wasteland” on Xiaohongshu?
3. Can the NIO model be replicated?

Not all car companies can copy the NIO system. The online customer acquisition system, including KOS, is not simply posting notes or making TikToks, but a systematic project, which is based on the understanding of users and Internet business models.

The benefits of such investment are obvious, but NIO itself is often troubled by negative information such as losses. In the context of price wars, are other car companies willing to invest in content for a long time and on a large scale like NIO to do a business that has no output in the short term? Different brands may have different answers.

03 Private domain: 90% of brands are unaware of the new domain that can contribute 1/5 of GMV

While many traders are still struggling to figure out how to achieve high conversion rates, brands such as Shidajia, Ermutou, and LINHUANYING have already established private domain positions by operating Xiaohongshu group chats and achieved considerable conversion results.

The old operational idea was to plant grass on Xiaohongshu, and then find ways to sediment the traffic to the private domain outside the site. However, this idea actually ignored the fact that Xiaohongshu itself is an efficient private domain pool.

As a centralized platform, Xiaohongshu group chat is becoming a breakthrough for brands to improve conversion efficiency. On the decentralized platform of Xiaohongshu, merchants finally have a platform to achieve the goal of managing users and improving LTV.

Summarizing successful cases, there are several replicable experiences for brand merchants to refer to:

1. Believe in "people matters" and fully mobilize the subjective initiative of users. Every group chat user can be a KOC, releasing the energy of "ordinary people planting seeds for ordinary people";

2. Group chat is both an operation and conversion platform, which improves the efficiency of seeding to conversion. We believe in the long-term value brought by operating the crowd and increasing LTV. The healthy relationship between merchants and users will bring a super high repurchase rate.

3. Everything is connected. Public and private domain traffic are not separated and opposed. The public domain can divert traffic to the private domain, and the private domain reputation can feed back to the public domain’s brand voice. By organically unifying and closing the loop, business will be more efficient and more certain.

04 Using products to promote brands: Exploration of Chinese branding in Xiaohongshu

For a long time, when people mentioned Xiaohongshu, their first reaction was to promote products. But in 2024, Xiaohongshu began to promote "products to promote brands", which means that while promoting hot products, it also built up brand potential.

"Brand promotion through product promotion" is not a new concept, but how will it look on Xiaohongshu? Can it solve the conflict between the marketing department and the brand department?

Daojie talked with Xuan Shuang, general manager of the beauty, luxury and fashion industry group of Xiaohongshu, and Tacy Tan, general manager of the marketing department of Chando, and found that Xiaohongshu has further strengthened the role of UGC in recent years, allowing it to evolve from a "life manual" to a "life guide". On the one hand, brands can use Xiaohongshu users with a keen sense of smell to screen out good products, and on the other hand, they can adjust according to their positive and negative feedback to make products better and enter a positive cycle.

With the methodology of creating a hit product, the next question is, what should the brand do? Xiaohongshu is doing "product-driven brand". Once the hit product is created, the brand potential will naturally be brought out.

Take Chando as an example. The new generation of users already have the impression that it is a high-tech beauty brand. The brand turned its attention to scientific research and found the "polar yeast Himeline" - it was discovered deep in the Himalayas, known as the "third pole of the world", and has very strong genetic vitality, tolerance and repair power.

By promoting the overall popularity of Ximoin, Chando has increased the overall popularity of "Chinese ingredients" by 23 times year-on-year. After successfully creating the fifth-generation small purple bottle, Chando took advantage of consumers' recognition of big single products and core ingredients, and applied this core raw material to different product lines, which not only attracted new brand users, but also helped the brand establish a professional mindset.

05 Grass planting measurement: How can people’s thoughts and intentions be measured?

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed the key nodes in the user journey being moved forward.

20 years ago, people were concerned about “when to choose” and “when to use”. In 2005, P&G proposed the first moment of truth and the second moment of truth, focusing on the decision-making moment in front of the shelf and the product experience moment.

13 years ago, people began to care about “when to choose”. In 2011, Google took a step forward and proposed the zeroth moment of truth, which means that consumers are already collecting information for comparison before they come into contact with the product.

Today, Xiaohongshu has extended the “time to choose” to “time to be inspired”, from 2, 1, 0 to -1. The key nodes of the user journey are increasingly advanced, farther away from the final conversion, closer to people’s hearts, and marketing is becoming more and more “mysterious”.

So, how does Xiaohongshu plan to break the metaphysics and measure the popularity of products? In summary, there are two directions: first, use the crowd to see the process of product popularity. Second, use ROI (T+x) to see the results of product popularity.