"Brand blue V number has 200,000 followers and 2 pieces have been sold", what's the problem?

“How can brands use the Blue V marketing strategy to build a personal image and cultivate super users on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu to achieve the goal of leveraging large traffic at a low cost?”

"Our blue V circle is... messy." This note published by Taobao's Xiaohongshu official account perfectly shows how hard brands work to create IP.

For example, Duolingo IP Duoer, which focuses on "encouraging learning", seems to be monitoring the learning progress of netizens at any time in every corner of the Internet, or Taobao's "CP" with blue Vs on Xiaohongshu every day, and Jie Rou, which caused a lot of discussion a while ago, created a "dominant president" universe on Xiaohongshu. These blue Vs spend all their efforts to create personalities, spend a lot of money on lotteries, and make jokes in the comment area of ​​netizens, all for one thing: to use low-cost IP operations to leverage traffic. The new marketing strategy of creating IP and traffic with low costs has become a consensus in the brand circle, and brands of all sizes on the market are trying to break through the circle through this method.

For example, the official account operated by a post-00s employee that went viral on Douyin and Xiaohongshu some time ago has become a hot traffic list, and many large, medium and small brands have used the same method to create popular content for their brands.

The results of over 10,000 likes and over 1 million views are indeed enviable, but after careful reflection, it is found that netizens are not paying attention to the brand itself, but the "post-00s live show". The explosive content did not bring mental sedimentation to the brand, which is the biggest hurdle that the brand encounters in blue V marketing.

Daofa found four successful cases of IP on Xiaohongshu, including Jie Rou, McDonald's, Lao Xiang Chicken and Duolingo, providing some methodological references for brands that want to do a good job in blue V marketing.

1. Learn the thinking of short plays and create a popular personality

On Xiaohongshu, Blue V accounts can be divided into two categories: one is an IP with a clear positioning, and the other is a "funny" official account with a general personality. Of course, the ones that netizens can remember are the official accounts with labels and personalities.

The importance of establishing a personal image is self-evident, but the difficulty lies in the fact that even the founders of traffic stars have difficulty in establishing their personal images, let alone the Blue Vs who have no "experience in life"?

In this regard, the experience of Jie Rou and Lao Xiang Ji in building IP is worth learning. In Dao Fa’s opinion, the reason why the IP of Jie Rou and Lao Xiang Ji is effective is because they used the right formula: public sentiment + brand assets = traffic personality.

The ultimate goal is not to personify the brand, the ultimate goal is to make the brand personality a "traffic star".

Many people are curious about how Jie Rou’s domineering personality was determined on Xiaohongshu, and why our brand personification cannot achieve the same effect as Jie Rou?

Daofa believes that successful IP characters are all similar, and Jie Rou Ba Zong just fits the short drama thinking: cool characters + user cool points = hit short drama.

Open the short drama channel of Douyin, and you will find that the number of views of short dramas with domineering CEOs easily exceeds 100 million.

In the world of short dramas, all the character positionings that contain popular elements have long been remade into countless short dramas. It is not accidental that Jie Rou Ba always becomes popular, but it is because it recruited characters suitable for Jie Rou's operation among the elements that are bound to become popular. Jie Rou CCO Lu Bai once publicly shared his experience on how to build brand character from 0 to 1.

After looking at the cases of brand content operations that have gone viral, Lu Bai determined that if Jie Rou wants to go viral, it must create a personalized account, and the most important thing is to find out what makes users remember Jie Rou. "Brands that can stand out in the era of algorithms are all creating personalities. Personality is the password to traffic."

After exploring the memory points of users, Lu Bai found that users had a deep memory of the cologne-scented perfume tissues that Jie Rou had launched. However, he was worried that there were only 20 million consumers in China who liked cologne, and Jie Rou’s goal was definitely not this. Extending from cologne perfume, combined with Lu Bai’s Internet thinking, he found the “dominant president” character positioning that brought its own traffic.

Jie Rou's core consumer group is women. Having experienced the baptism of domestic TV dramas and Mary Sue novels, women pay more attention to the term "dominant president". In recent years, the "dominant president" personality has gradually interpreted a new connotation, from the personality label that captured the hearts of girls to the overbearing president Huang Xiaoming who was ridiculed by the crowd, "I don't care what you think, I care what I think", this personality has always been a hot word in traffic. Whether it is a real domineering president or a pretending domineering president, it can always stir up heated discussions in public opinion.

After deciding on the domineering president character, Lu Bai first selected Xiaohongshu as the first offensive position, trying out the domineering president character with low cost.

On Xiaohongshu, there are matrix accounts, from the boss to the customer service, all of which have their own positioning. The chairman of Jierou claims to be the only real boss on Xiaohongshu, and has set up an exclusive account for the boss Jierou, as well as the accounts of assistants and followers to interpret the daily life of the boss Jierou from a second perspective. The Jierou female care brand Duolei Mi is the little wife of the boss Jierou.

Lu Bai has shared that there are three types of bloggers that Jie Rou can target, namely maternal and child accounts, beauty accounts and male appearance bloggers.

The competition for male beauty bloggers is not high, and female consumers like to watch them. The cost is low and the cost performance is extremely high. Therefore, in Jie Rou's Xiaohongshu account, you can often see a 1.8-meter-tall male college student shooting short videos for Jie Rou. Starting from the domineering boss's hand control that girls like to watch, it records the "sweet" daily life of the domineering boss and his assistant like a pure love novel.

Lao Xiang Ji has also been very successful in creating its own image. Before Lao Xiang Ji entered Xiaohongshu, its image on Weibo was that it would "cluck cluck" every day and liked to help workers do things they wouldn't dare to do to their bosses.

Determined to take advantage of the boss, he has a "love-hate relationship" with the boss. The character setting of Lao Xiang Ji also hits the public's emotions. As a "humble worker", he fights wits and courage with the boss, and works hard to benefit the workers. Such scripts are also very popular in the short play thinking.

The reason why Lao Xiang Ji’s personality is established is precisely due to the founder Shu Congxuan’s open attitude towards the Internet and his likable personality.

When Lao Xiang Ji entered Xiaohongshu, its image was enhanced. The first thing Lao Xiang Ji did after entering Xiaohongshu was not to post, but to like and collect the muscular men on Xiaohongshu. After being exposed by netizens, Lao Xiang Ji broke the circle again and quickly hid the favorites.

It seems to be a deliberate operation, but it has achieved the goal of leveraging large traffic with minimal cost. Later, Lao Xiang Ji officially announced its identity and transformed into "Little Red Chicken". Even the lucky draw on Xiaohongshu took the needs of the sisters into consideration. Instead of drawing other things, the lucky draws were Hermes gold and the latest Xiaomi folding phone screen + portable camera set that girls like.

The purpose of creating a traffic personality is to break the circle, but more importantly, how to integrate the traffic personality into brand assets. Otherwise, another situation will occur: the Blue V account becomes popular but fails to achieve effective conversion, and can only rely on continuous content creation to achieve the effect of boosting sales in the short term. This is not the ultimate result that brands want to achieve when creating Blue V accounts.

The personality of Jie Rou and Lao Xiang Ji is certainly successful, but what is more important is that the traffic personality is tied to the brand assets, achieving mental sedimentation while becoming extremely popular.

2. "Toxic" content. To cultivate a likable super user persona, the content must also be "toxic" enough.

Unlike the popular "playing with memes" on official Weibo accounts in the past, today's Blue V accounts need to bear more responsibilities. "Playing with memes" can bring popularity and attract traffic for a short period of time, but most users are just there to "watch the fun". This is not conducive to the brand's ability to settle in people's minds, and it goes against the original intention of creating a Blue V account.

Nowadays, "toxic" content must not only attract traffic, but also release brand awareness. To achieve this, brands must learn to rely on super users.

Let's first explain what a super user is.

Last year, Doris Klein had a conversation with Joanne, Vice President of Integrated Marketing at McDonald’s China, in which she fully explained McDonald’s “super user” theory.

In her opinion, users are divided into ordinary users and super users.

Ordinary users can be made interested in buying through advertising or some simple promotional means, but such people will come today because of the low price and leave tomorrow because the price is lower elsewhere.

Super users are those who truly love, identify with, and resonate with a brand. These people choose brands not because of their functional value, but because they identify with the lifestyle the brand represents from the bottom of their hearts. They often hope to have a deep connection with the brand and are willing to speak for the brand spontaneously.

In simple terms, blue V accounts are responsible for producing "toxic" communication materials, and brand super users are channels with their own secondary creation capabilities. When there are enough brand super users, it also means that they bring the brand's mind to every corner of the Internet.

Therefore, Blue V accounts face two major problems in terms of content: first, how to produce content that super users are interested in? Second, what to do if there are no super users?

Let’s use McDonald’s and Duolingo as examples to answer the above questions.

McDonald’s “Fan Moments” strategy focuses on producing “toxic” content that can connect with super users, while Duolingo’s Social First strategy is to cultivate super users through viral content, and then let super users spontaneously produce UGC content for the brand.

Let me first introduce how McDonald's produces content that super users are interested in.

For this reason, in 2022, McDonald's began to use the "Fan Truth" strategy on all social media platforms. The core of this strategy is to explore the content that can resonate with "McDonald's believers" in the process of experiencing McDonald's products. Based on the three major screening criteria of specific, resonant, and special, secondary creation is carried out around UGC content.

For example, McDonald's noticed that consumers really like crispy hash browns. So it collected user UGC content from the entire network based on three screening criteria and observed that consumers really wanted crispy hash browns to be available all day. It produced a lot of secondary creative content about crispy hash browns, which always aroused heated discussions among netizens.

Led by McDonald's, many Blue V accounts followed suit and incorporated "fan moments" into the operational logic of content production. In fact, many Blue V accounts were able to break through the circle because of super users who have truly experienced the product and identified with the brand's values. However, compared with McDonald's, which has a large group of super users, most brands are similar to Duolingo. What should they do if they don't have super users?

If there is no super user, then create a super user.

Previously, Daofa interviewed Chu Chu, the head of marketing for Duolingo China, and shared information about Duolingo’s Social First strategy.

In the introduction, the Social First strategy refers to the goal of each activity launched by Duolingo to promote the viral spread of the brand. This strategy can make users and fans become brand ambassadors who are willing to actively spread brand content, and Duolingo's brand influence will spread like a snowball.

If you want to break through the circle, you must first find the right people. Therefore, Duolingo first entered Douyin and Xiaohongshu, which use content and crowd as the core of the algorithm.

The next step is the most difficult to imitate, which is to produce viral content. Duolingo’s careful planning is to appear at the scene of events that are already hot topics, and then use contrast marketing to make Duoer (Duolingo IP) a small hot spot in the hot events.

For example, she dressed up as Chun-Li at the GQ ceremony and walked the red carpet with other female stars; she went to the BW event dressed up as Tang Monk and wrote "I quietly ask the holy monk, is my daughter beautiful?"; or she often appeared in the user comment section to post witty comments to increase her favorability.

In short, brands want to use low-cost methods to create Blue V accounts to leverage natural traffic, first creating "toxic" content to cultivate super users, and let users help brands break the circle.

3. Analyst Comments

No matter how you break down Blue V Marketing, the methodology for success is the same.

Jie Rou Lao Xiang Ji and Duolingo tell us that it is important to learn how to catch the public sentiment by taking advantage of the hot spots. Understanding human nature means stepping into the traffic black hole. At the same time, the traffic personality cannot be separated from the brand assets, otherwise, the blue V will be popular, but the brand will not be popular.

McDonald's tells us that when the brand influence reaches a certain level, it is important to focus on cultivating super users. The brand cannot rely solely on its efforts. Only through two-way communication and interaction with users can the momentum for breaking the circle and brand influence be accumulated.

Author: Old Crab

Source: WeChat official account: "Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)"