If you don’t understand strength and weakness, you won’t understand the public opinion field

In the public opinion field of social media, the strength of a brand is not always the key to determining public sentiment. Instead, emotional resonance and sympathy often make the public more inclined to support those people or brands that present a weak image.

1. Introduction

There have been two interesting things recently. One is that the "separation" of Dong Yuhui and Mr. Yu Minhong triggered public opinion, and the other is that the fan circle culture invasion of Chen Meng and Sun Yingsha's competition for the Olympic gold medal triggered public opinion.

There is a common conclusion emerging from these two cases: in the social media opinion field, whoever is “weaker” is right! Brands have long passed the era of winning by “dominant saturation attack”.

2. The reversal of strength between Yu Minhong and Dong Yuhui

Mr. Yu Minhong should be regarded as a public figure who is more correlated with "weak dividends" in recent years. From his tragic donation of tables and chairs at the end of the New Oriental education and training era to his parting ways with Dong Yuhui to preserve the dignity of readers, Mr. Yu's personal brand definitely has some Taoist essence in it.

Everyone's emotions towards Teacher Yu are not worship, fear, or jealousy, but more of admiration and sympathy. When emotions reach this level, they are more solid.

In the emotional dimension of a brand, being simply excellent and strong is not the highest level. This state still brings "admiration and admiration", which is more isolating for people. The highest level is actually "immersion". Sympathy and empathy carry a feeling of "immersion", a sense of familiarity that "you have the same look as I did when I was in trouble", and also an inspirational feeling that "you are still so strong even though you are so unlucky".

In general, for today's netizens, worship and admiration breed anxiety and rebellion, while respect and sympathy breed stress relief and trust. Which one do you think everyone will support more?

What’s even more interesting is that Dong Yuhui happened to take the opposite emotional route during this process. People’s emotions towards him gradually changed from admiration and sympathy to anxiety and rebellion brought about by admiration.

Especially with the huge breakup fee and the Paris vacation, Dong Yuhui is considered to be "out of touch with the masses" by some people. If Luo Yonghao had not been shouting "black-hearted capitalist", Mr. Yu Minhong would have been completely in the public opinion.

The picture comes from the Internet

3. The reversal of strength between Chen Meng and Sun Yingsha

The same is true for the public opinion about Chen Meng and Sun Yingsha this time. Many people wrote in the comment section: I was originally just a passerby with a neutral attitude, but when I saw the whole venue full of Sun Yingsha's fans shouting, I suddenly became a fan of Chen Meng.

Sun Yingsha is cute, popular, topical, and comes from a commoner family. This series of labels is very good for her. She was originally on the trend of "weak to strong", but a game killed a lot of her brand potential.

Just as He Tao, the content and public relations director of Bilibili, said in his WeChat Moments: The trend of public opinion in this game clearly reflects the emotional resonance of the general public. The common denominator is always strong in the face of adversity. The one-sided screaming and shouting of fans at the scene took only more than an hour, pushing countless people to the other side of the scale.

The picture comes from the Internet

The same story also lurks in the scripts of Quan Hongchan and Liu Yuxi. Fortunately, Quan Hongchan is a strong enough genius, so strong that she is far away from the range of public opinion guns.

For most people/brands, if you have the strength, don’t use it too hard, especially when your capabilities haven’t yet opened up a huge gap. The best tactics are to follow, accumulate, and become strong from the weak.

We always talk about "mass communication". In fact, before the emergence of social media, it was not called mass communication at all. It was called loudspeaker communication. The public was just passively listening and did not really participate in the communication. Even if people had different ideas, they could not express them because they were too lonely. They would only doubt that their ideas might not be right. More importantly, they had no place to express themselves.

But when the public has the power to express and vote, things are completely different. Public opinion after public participation is emotional public opinion, which is what "The Crowd" has reminded us of countless times, and what "Weak Communication" has warned us of countless times. In the real mass era, public opinion often exists on the side of "emotional common denominator is weak".

“The hard is easily broken, the strong is easily humiliated”, “The opposite is the movement of the Tao, the weak is the use of the Tao. All things in the world are born from existence, and existence is born from non-existence”. Re-understanding the dialectical relationship between strength and weakness. For people or companies who really want to build a brand, it is a communication issue that needs to be re-understood.