NIO biscuits are sold out. What lessons can we learn from this for car marketing?

In the automotive industry, traditional marketing methods are changing. As consumers' demand for cars changes from a single means of transportation to a part of their lifestyle, automakers need to have a deeper understanding of the lifestyles and consumption habits of their target user groups. This article analyzes the case of NIO's biscuits being sold out, explores new trends and strategies in automotive marketing, and how to conduct effective crowd insights and precise delivery through new channels such as social media.

"When the Niuwu staff brought the special drink and handed over a cookie, the balance in my heart began to tilt (towards NIO)," a new NIO owner told DaoFa.

A NIO owner on Xiaohongshu lamented, "You can stop selling cars, but you have to sell these blue box cookies." In the NIO mall, these cookies, priced at 188 yuan, have been sold out and are being restocked.

Li Bin, founder of NIO, once said that when you buy a car, you are not just buying a car, but also a ticket to a new lifestyle. NIO Life (NIO lifestyle brand) is an important part of the lifestyle experience of NIO users, and it is also a handle to inspire users who have not purchased a car to feel yearning. In 2020, Liu Jie, head of NIO Life, revealed that half of the consumers in the NIO Life mall are non-car owners.

Under the wave of new energy, automobiles are becoming more and more consumer goods. Cars are not only a tool for transporting passengers from A to B, but also a part of lifestyle. Therefore, understanding the life and consumption habits of the people behind their own brands and accurately capturing potential user needs in product design and content marketing have become issues that car companies have to face.

However, in the era of gasoline vehicles, car companies were responsible for research and development and production, while sales were handled by the dealer network. Many car companies did not have a deep accumulation of population assets.

So in the current environment, are there other ways to gain insights into the automotive crowd and accumulate crowd assets? Daofa discussed with Harris Han Jiajun, head of brand operation strategy of Tencent Advertising Channel Ecology Cooperation Department, and Li Fang, head of automotive industry planning of Tencent Advertising, and obtained two ideas:

• Crowd Insight: Step out of the car circle and use social media data to understand crowd needs
• Precision delivery: first generalize to obtain data, then precisely deliver to increase conversions

1. The first step of car companies’ crowd insight: stepping out of the car circle

If car companies want to gain insights into the crowd, the first step is to go beyond the car category and start with the crowd.

A Weilai salesperson once told DaoFa a case in which a newlywed couple planned to buy a car and were interested in three models at the same time: Weilai ET5T, Avita 12, and Xiaopeng G9, which were a station wagon, a coupe, and a medium-to-large SUV.

These three cars are paired together and neither of them is on the other's main competitor list. Why can they become competitors in the eyes of consumers?

The answer lies in consumer lifestyles.

The couple are camping and skiing enthusiasts. When they don't go outdoors on weekends, they occasionally pick up friends to have a drink. Therefore, the car must have enough space, be comfortable for passengers, reliable for cargo, and have a good texture. It should not be out of place at the door of a bar, campsite, or ski resort, and it should look good when taking photos. Although these three cars seem unrelated, they all partially meet the needs of users.

This case reflects two changes in the automotive market:

1. Weakening of automotive tool attributes

For quite a long time, consumers' car purchasing decisions were almost absolutely rational. However, when car functions and update rhythms are aligned with consumer electronics, it is no longer just a tool to transport people from A to B. Dimensions such as intelligence, design language, and service play an increasingly important role in decision-making.

In other words, even large items like cars can be marketed. In other words, car marketing points are no longer limited to performance and space, and can be approached from more angles.

2. Consumer groups are more segmented, and the weight of "external demand" increases

In terms of usage, a car is a tool for getting from A to B, but some of the consumer's demands for cars may not be on the way from A to B, but more at B. This B can be a campsite, a bar, or even a circle of friends, Douyin, or Xiaohongshu.

In other words, car companies need to see consumers’ needs outside the car, match product selling points, and present them to them.

Harris' team recently reviewed the results of influencer marketing for a new energy vehicle company over the past six months. They sorted the inflow rate of R3 (people with high-frequency interactions, adding fans and forwarding) by influencer track and found that photography ranked first and sports ranked last.

Combined with other insights, the Harris team speculated that the target audience of this brand is "slow-tempered". Photography requires picking up a camera and walking on the street to slowly discover the subtle beauty in life, while sports emphasize faster, higher and stronger.

With detailed insights into the crowd, subsequent marketing strategies will emerge. In the past, the car industry competed on parameters and prices, which was shelf logic. What matters is the use value. Mining consumer needs from the consumption habits of users in other categories is crowd logic.

The users of the brand mentioned above are interested in photography, so the brand can reduce its investment in review videos and focus more on photography, initiate topics related to car photography on social media platforms, organize self-driving tours with photography experts, and so on.

The target groups of other brands of cars are different. For example, some car buyers are keen on outdoor activities. Can brands hire some outdoor experts or move the evaluation scene to outdoor activities? Or for luxury brand SUVs, the consumer groups are highly related to luxury goods. Can brands do some luxury joint ventures or highlight the high-end feeling of the car's exterior and interior in the content of the communication?

2. Broadcast widely to obtain data, then focus on targeted delivery to increase conversions

However, accurate insights into the crowd are often not that easy.

Weilai's accurate insight into users relies on its DTC model and a user operation system that far exceeds its peers. Hundreds of thousands of car owners and a considerable number of non-car owners are active on the Weilai App.

But other car companies do not have such a deep accumulation of crowd assets. Specifically:

• There is a dealer between traditional car companies and users, and it is difficult to obtain user data without going through the dealer.
• Brands with insufficient sales volume and insufficient sample size make it difficult to obtain real and in-depth user feedback. According to Autohome Research Institute data, after 2019, only 21% of models had a maximum monthly sales of more than 5,000 units, and models with monthly sales of less than 1,000 units accounted for nearly half.

But the rise of social media and new user touchpoints have given these car companies the opportunity to reach and understand users.

Take Video Account for example. In the past year, the automotive vertical category of Video Account has grown rapidly. Li Fang revealed that among the automotive-related content this year, the vertical category of expert content has grown to 60%-70%; from 2022 to 2023, the scale of automotive creators increased by 828%, and the explosive content increased by 680%. The prosperity of the automotive ecology on the platform has provided soil for car companies to "break the circle".

There are many cases of automotive content breaking the circle on Video Account, the most representative of which is Chery’s “1990S” model.

Starting from a live broadcast in April, Yin Tongyue became a "regular customer" of the video number car circle.

The communication chain from "1" to "S" can be run smoothly, and behind it is the platform ecosystem's coverage of the "view, select, and purchase" cycle of automobile consumption.

• Look - Moments/Video Account Exposure
• Selection - Expert content recommendation
• Purchase - Live broadcast + WeChat to open up leads/transaction channels

Brands can combine the links from 1 to S according to their marketing objectives and investment resources to break through the content circle. There are also many forms of content, such as press conferences, commercials, and even micro variety shows. For example, last month, smart teamed up with singer Fiona Sit to produce a micro variety show.

Once the content becomes a hit, car companies can gain visibility at the brand level and sales at the performance level, and on the other hand, they can also obtain a portrait of the people behind it.

A certain brand of high-end SUV models reached high-net-worth individuals by placing advertisements endorsed by authoritative media. During the campaign, the brand’s WeChat index increased by nearly 1,500%, and the total assets of the population increased by nearly 200%.

Through these data, we can further analyze which groups of people have left information, which have taken a test drive, and which have placed an order? What are the consumption habits and content consumption habits of these groups? Then we can determine the direction of subsequent content creation, better expose and promote products, and thus reduce the cost of leads and increase the order conversion rate.

3. Analyst Comments

On almost all content platforms, the automotive vertical ecosystem is developing rapidly. This means that in the past few years, the automotive industry has not only surpassed others in terms of products and technology, but also continuously iterated in marketing.

During this process, cross-border car manufacturers from the 3C and Internet fields brought user thinking into the industry, and talents in these fields also began to flow in the automotive circle. We are very pleased to see that in such exchanges and collisions, many car companies have taken the first step to understand the crowd and become user companies.

Author | Xingzhi Editor | Li Zi This article is written by the operation author [Knife Skills Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Knife Skills Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in the operation party, and reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.