With 300 million users providing creative ideas, why are brands starting to enter Xiaohongshu’s IP marketing?

Xiaohongshu's marketing IP has become a new favorite for brand marketing with its unique community atmosphere and user insights. This article deeply analyzes the core value of Xiaohongshu's marketing IP and explores how brands can use this platform for effective marketing and achieve deep connections with users, so as to stand out in the fiercely competitive market.

We often say that new marketing should be "people-oriented" and brands should love specific people rather than abstract people.

This is because users are no longer gathered in one ocean like in the past, but are scattered across various platforms, each with its own characteristics. Markets and marketing have also been broken down into multiple small centers around user links, and the production chain centered on the supply side as in the past is no longer feasible.

Today’s brands not only need to attract a large number of people in the public domain, but also need to attract people to their own private domains for refined operations. Even McDonald’s, a well-known brand, is constantly exploring how to make friends with users and develop its own “McDonald’s followers” ​​on major platforms.

We understand the principle, but how can we put it into action and make the brand more human?

The Knife Skills Research Institute has observed that more and more brands are now choosing to cooperate with marketing IPs initiated by Xiaohongshu, such as "Xiaomei Says", "See China", "Foreigner Festival", "Snowman Festival", etc., as a new way to get close to users and let users feel the brand's human charm.

The general consensus among brands is that the insights from these Xiaohongshu marketing IPs are able to see the complexity and diversity of "people", and turn the fragments of inspiration that users find in life into experiences that resonate with a group of people, providing brands with a fast track to seize trends and get close to the crowd.

In the opinion of the Knife Skills Research Institute, Xiaohongshu is a community. The biggest difference between its marketing IP and the marketing IP of e-commerce platforms is that it can amplify the content resonance of the community with an IP. Xiaohongshu's marketing IP = the greatest common divisor of the life hobbies of countless Xiaohongshu users; and Xiaohongshu users provide a constant source of inspiration for Xiaohongshu's various marketing IPs in this real sharing human community.

Why is Xiaohongshu's marketing IP more helpful for brands to master this people-related course? How should brands make good use of Xiaohongshu's marketing IP? The Knife Skills Research Institute will try to answer these two questions through this article.

01 Before understanding Xiaohongshu IP, understand complex and real people

In the era of large marketing departments, brands often talked about being user-centric, but at that time the focus was actually on minds, channels and dynamic sales – abstract people.

In the traditional e-commerce era, with more abundant consumer data, major platforms proposed to divide the population according to basic attributes, lifestyles, values, channel choices, etc. These data are generated after consumers have entered the A3 stage, and are slightly insufficient in capturing trends.

Among all the major platforms, Xiaohongshu is undoubtedly unique in terms of "human touch". In this community where ordinary people help ordinary people, a large number of Xiaohongshu users will post notes or seek life inspiration on Xiaohongshu when they have consumption needs or are even just in the idea stage. From this, it can be further deduced that Xiaohongshu is forward-looking and leading in capturing new life trends.

As a bridge between brands and real people, one of the highlights of the marketing IP planned by Xiaohongshu is to understand real people in a more scientific way.

Taking the Xiaohongshu Slow People Festival IP, which just officially opened in Dali, Yunnan on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival, as an example, the insight into "slow people" was mined based on the support of Xiaohongshu's big data and combined with Ruicong Consulting's social emotion model.

Xiaohongshu has found that more and more users are beginning to define themselves as slow people. They share their "slow life" experiences in the fast-paced urban life, including the "20-minute park effect" on weekdays and staycation slow-paced travel without checking in at any attractions.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu's Slow People's Day IP starts from the four dimensions of "self-body and mind", "personal development", "me and others", and "me and the world" to capture the real emotions and needs of users, and gain insights into the eight "slow life" trend inspirations and slow people.

For example, based on the dimension of "self-body and mind", the rising trend insight of "re-nurturing my body" is very typical. Slow people choose to press the pause button for their bodies in various ways, with a very clear purpose, that is, to better recharge the body so as to move forward.

This slow-life trend is reflected in specific scenarios, including but not limited to taking a nap anywhere in the park, taking time to prepare ingredients and cook, taking a bath to relax and wash off the "work smell", and the recently popular immersive skin care before bed.

Combining the inspiration of the eight "slow life" trends and the needs of slow people, Xiaohongshu's Slow People's Festival IP not only builds momentum with brands online, but also comes offline. In Dali, Yunnan, where the slow pace of life is recognized, a physical slow people's tribe was created for the majority of slow people, and a series of activities such as the Slow People's Music Festival and the Slow People's Photography Exhibition were also supported, ultimately allowing more brands to see the huge business behind the "slow life".

You should know that in the past, brand marketing departments used traditional social science and statistical labels to define groups of people, distinguishing groups based on age, gender, spending power, education, and occupation. However, Xiaohongshu has obviously understood users from a "whole person" perspective very early on, defining people by lifestyle and life scenarios.

The so-called "whole person" perspective refers to a comprehensive panoramic perspective to perceive and understand people, taking into account the physical, psychological, social, cultural and other characteristics of people, rather than relying on a single social science statistical label to define the impression of the crowd. Just as people play different roles and express different voices in society, Xiaohongshu users will also release different real needs in different scenarios.

In Xiaohongshu, these real needs are summarized from a panoramic and holistic perspective, which is more likely to be close to the "complex and real people" themselves, more scientific, and more likely to highlight the value of brand commercial inspiration. Xiaohongshu's series of marketing IPs are typical examples of this "holistic" perspective. They not only start from every physical and mental need of young users in Xiaohongshu, a "human community", but also link to every "human-oriented" life trend in the community.

Obviously, if brands can use this to go deep into the scene to understand real people and transform demand into products, they will be able to capture business growth opportunities brought about by changes in lifestyle more promptly, so that brand products do not grow "statically" on the shelves, but grow more vividly and "dynamically" from cultural phenomena, trends, and people's lives.

02 High-quality content seeding efficiency: starting from life and also inspiring more "desirable life"

In the new marketing era, the biggest headache for brands is the fragmentation of the media environment and the resulting loss of focus in business operations. ——Most of the time nowadays, brands may have to do traditional distribution channels while also focusing on e-commerce, social networking, and interest content. However, the more they are in this situation, the more important it is for brands to focus and concentrate their business vision and improve business and marketing efficiency.

The so-called "efficiency" improvement has both quantitative and qualitative significance. Many brands have cooperated with Xiaohongshu's marketing IP and have gained outstanding results in terms of quality. Because the marketing IP created by Xiaohongshu usually directly points to various life scenes, it also allows brands to quickly establish a strong mental connection with the target customer group's "desirable life".

Based on real life scenarios and capturing life trends and social emotions, Xiaohongshu's marketing IP not only builds influence in online communities, but also builds a strong content marketing field offline, presenting a beautiful lifestyle in an immersive way.

Starting from various kinds of "desirable lives", Xiaohongshu's marketing IP has irreplaceable path influence advantages in helping brands establish high-quality and in-depth mental connections and associations with target customers.

Take the Xiaohongshu Outsider Festival, which has been successfully held for two sessions, as an example. This is a festival IP specially created by Xiaohongshu for outdoor players in response to the trend of breaking the circle of various outdoor sports.

At the end of last year, the second Xiaohongshu Outsider Festival was held in Linzhi, the south of the Tibetan Plateau, which is more than 3,000 meters above sea level. It brought more than 100 outdoor top KOLs and celebrities to travel through the mountains and fields of Tibet, deeply experiencing the surprises brought by nature, and also gave a very extreme visualization of the "yearning for life" in real outdoor scenes.

Based on the same scenario, Xiaohongshu's Outsider Festival integrates outdoor culture, brand core, product selling points, and user selling points into the same vertically focused content marketing field, allowing all participating brands to continuously accumulate UGC content and accumulate positive word-of-mouth reputation, while more deeply locking in and penetrating the vertical outdoor player population, leaving behind a deep brand memory that is strongly associated with the outdoor life.

Indeed, in the new era of people-oriented marketing, the underlying logic of brand growth has evolved into the fission of "user x life cycle value x sharing and communication". After capturing people and crowds, brands must extend the life cycle value, use crowds as a starting point, continue to make referrals, and anchor more dimensions of business growth space.

Focusing on various scenarios of "desirable life" for people is obviously not only a direction of effort to broaden and extend the brand life cycle, but also naturally has topic value for sharing and dissemination. This is also the charm of Xiaohongshu's IP value for brand growth.

Regarding this logic, Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng also shared a similar but more precise new paradigm, that is, replacing the traditional channel x product x discount with "grass-growing x product x channel", using content to connect the brand with the crowd, to segment the needs, and to plant grass in life scenarios, because "the answers to grass-growing are all in life."

It is worth noting that Xiaohongshu's marketing IP not only guides brands to enter people's real life scenes to communicate with users, but also consolidates online content and offline experiences into brand content assets, turning good content into good business. It also hopes to help brands seize trends one step ahead - whether it is a hidden trend or a small trend that has just begun to emerge; whether it is a trend lifestyle such as slow life and outdoor sports, or a trend concept such as aesthetics and health.

There is no doubt that when brands truly have the opportunity to participate in the process of turning niche trends into mass lifestyles, and when brands leverage Xiaohongshu’s marketing IP to become trend leaders rather than followers, they are more likely to find opportunities to break through in the increasingly fierce market competition.

03 Brands with different growth needs at different stages should use the “AURA Aurora Index” to correctly open the Xiaohongshu marketing IP

In addition to the Slow People's Day and Outsider's Day mentioned above, the Dao Fa Research Institute has also paid attention to many Xiaohongshu marketing IPs in recent times, including but not limited to "Xiaomei Says", "See China", "Strolling Life" and even "My Ten Healthy Habits"... Big and small, from vertical industries to general life, Xiaohongshu has so many marketing IPs. How should we scientifically measure the value it brings to the brand?

We might as well make a judgment from the perspective of brand growth.

Sister Dao Doris once summarized the five-step method for the growth of consumer brands: strategic positioning - content seeding - e-commerce closed loop - private domain feedback - brand marketing.

To put it simply, brands can find strategic positioning through category opportunities, crowd insights and brand attributes, and then use content as a means to target the crowd, establish a closed loop and achieve conversion, and refresh users' perception of the brand through marketing activities.

Xiaohongshu's marketing IP is empowering this brand growth chain, or at least providing a unique and irreplaceable boost.

Take “Treasure New Products”, the first marketing IP focusing on new products launched by Xiaohongshu this year, as an example. This IP is linked with the Xiaohongshu User Research Center to establish a new product evaluation and selection system, and has recruited people of different identities such as KOLs, senior users, media, and institutions as producers of treasure new products.

At offline product selection meetings, producers will personally experience new products and rate them. Xiaohongshu will combine producers’ suggestions to provide strategic guidance for merchants’ new product marketing.

A more tangible example is the Focus Cream launched by Kefumei this year. Through the Treasure New Product IP, Xiaohongshu helped Kefumei sort out the product selling points and marketing strategies, and found that Xiaohongshu users are very concerned about how to solve the sub-state skin problem caused by "accumulated ugliness". Kefumei's product can help the skin in the sub-state quickly restore firmness.

In terms of communication and marketing, Kefumei leverages the endorsement of the new product IP of Treasure to drive home the message that Focus Cream = Must-buy Treasure, and establishes a strong association mindset that Focus Cream can solve the pain points of users' skin sub-states.

During this year's 618, Kefumei integrated the IP mentality of treasure new products into the atmosphere of the live broadcast room, which greatly increased the number of viewers, the number of interactions and the length of time users stayed in the live broadcast room. The payment of treasure exclusive packages accounted for about 40% of the total transactions.

During the Slow People's Day, Xiaohongshu also held an annual IP experience conference in Dali, Yunnan. At the conference, it proposed the "AURA Indicator" to measure its IP value. It also targeted the core needs of brand growth and conducted analysis around the dimensions of population penetration, content accumulation, word-of-mouth stimulation and brand image recognition.

At the conference, Xie Wanling, managing director of Kantar Greater China's technology and media business group, shared her insights on the relationship between IP marketing and brand growth. In her opinion, the engine of brand growth lies in creating meaningful "differentiation". Kantar's research data shows that compared with ordinary brands that lack high-quality content, brands with high-quality content accumulation can leverage 72% of sales.

To achieve differentiated content marketing, there are four key elements: shaping a distinctive brand image to make the brand more present and tangible; accumulating high-quality content to convey warm emotions; allowing content to stimulate word-of-mouth and accumulate into brand assets; and using content to drive population penetration and thus increase market share.

Xiaohongshu's marketing IP links these key elements and can form a closed loop within the Xiaohongshu site, truly allowing good business to grow from good content.

In addition, we also noticed that after selecting the Xiaohongshu IP that suits the brand's needs, the brand should also use "KFS" (Note: KOL/KOC/KOS + Feeds information flow advertising + Search search advertising) to cooperate well. There have been many practical cases that have proved that on Xiaohongshu, using the "IP+KFS" combination to do pulse rhythm marketing can accelerate the influence of Xiaohongshu IP and further leverage marketing revenue.

During the same period, Xiaohongshu also released a marketing IP manual, which provided directional suggestions for brands with different growth demands at different development stages. It is more practical to choose an IP that matches its own tone.

04 Analyst Comments

We often say that "choice is more important than effort" and you can get twice the result with half the effort if you have the right direction.

In the new marketing era, we must change our perspective. In the past, our growth logic and organizational structure were based on 4P, but now we are focusing on the changes in people from understanding to repurchase, so we need to see "specific people", put people into real life scenarios to understand them, adjust product selling points to buying points, and make the brand a part of the desired life.

Ultimately, the value and attraction of Xiaohongshu's marketing IP lies in its real implementation of people-oriented principles, helping brands see new groups, new needs, and new values, using content as a means to target groups, establish a closed loop and achieve conversion, and refresh users' perception of brands. We may as well wait and see what new marketing IPs Xiaohongshu will continue to incubate and what new cases it will bring with it.