“Bad” Marketing——Traffic Code for Brand Rejuvenation

Nowadays, more and more young people like to go against the routine and be down-to-earth. Traditional brand marketing methods are not popular among young consumer groups. This article introduces how several major brands use "bad" marketing to gain traffic from young consumer groups, how to effectively attract the attention of young people and achieve brand rejuvenation.

"Motivation is against human nature, and playing badly is the norm in life."

This is not only a true portrayal of young people, but also the new traffic code that many brands have obtained.

The worse the marketing is, the more the brand will become a hot topic on social platforms and the more young people will participate in the interaction and spread it.

After all, for this generation of young consumers who have seen through the "consumption routines", there are many identical and homogeneous products, and interesting brand souls are one in a million.

1. “Bad” character setting

Compared with the strict brand operation, netizens prefer to pay attention to the bad operation of "being angry with the boss and acting like he will quit tomorrow", and even form groups to watch the show in the comment section.

For example, Lao Xiang Ji, which was rated by netizens as "the easiest to operate in history."

While other official accounts were racking their brains to write copy, Lao Xiang Ji easily completed the task with just one sentence "Cluck, cluck, cluck". What's even more annoying is that the traffic for each note is quite good.

Facing the question from Chairman Shu Congxuan, the operation of Lao Xiangji remained calm and replied: This is the Weibo post that fans love to read the most.

"Fooling work" has suddenly become a special phrase for netizens to make fun of, and they squat in the comment section every day to grab the sofa. Occasionally posting some advertisements, netizens will also say: What about your old job?

Another person who has become famous for his "perfunctory operation" is the editor of the Alipay public account, who used only one punctuation mark to complete the shortest article in history with more than 100,000 words. His daily painting style is also perfunctory, but every article has more than 100,000 words.

When launching a lucky draw event, Alipay said: The event started yesterday. Oops, I forgot. Please tell each other.

When reminding netizens to participate in the lucky draw, Alipay said: Set the alarm for tomorrow.

This kind of self-deprecating look is very similar to that top student in the class who only sleeps in class but still gets first place in exams, which makes people envious and jealous.

Some "bad" operations simply stopped installing. In the Double 11 promotion battlefield where every inch of land is valuable, Weilong spicy strips changed the previous noisy promotion information and debuted with a "lying flat" abstinence style.

"You take one order, I take one order, and the operation can go off work immediately"

"Place an order as you wish, and make money"
"Discounted airspace, spicy strips sold out, all four are empty"
"Latiao sells well, so I can go home early for the New Year"

This is just like me, who said, "I really don't want to do it, but have to do it, so I just do it perfunctorily." This wave of actions resonated with many netizens, and they said they would pay out of their own pockets to help the operations team get off work early.

Some companies directly vent their dissatisfaction by operating poorly. All employees of Shanghai Auntie posted 9 posters in a row to "complain" about their work and expressed their desire to "resign" collectively.

On the surface, they are all complaining about the company's "inhumanity", but upon closer inspection, they are all praising the company's "strict production", "good service", "fresh ingredients"...
Finally, the official statement responded, "It's not that we are quitting, but that we are quitting because "pears" support me!" and revealed the new autumn and winter product, fresh stewed pears. The traces of this "double act" script are very obvious, but it does not affect the enthusiasm of netizens at all.

The soul of a product is operation. Operation can directly activate the brand's personality through a series of activities and content.

The logic behind the "bad-ass" operator's personality is to put oneself in the user's perspective and form a united front. No matter how high-end the brand is, there is a worker behind it who likes to slack off and mess up at work like everyone else. Workers don't make things difficult for other workers, and the relationship is immediately brought closer.

In the eyes of users, the "bad" operations and all kinds of crazy activities are also a "cool article" for workers to tidy up their workplaces. It is no more exciting than novels or TV dramas, and they can participate in this farce at any time.

It can be seen that if a brand wants to become younger, it must not be too pretentious in its operations, but must take the initiative to enter the young circle.

2. “Bad” production

Hard work does not necessarily lead to results, but not working hard will definitely make you feel comfortable. When the "bad" sentiment becomes the password for traffic, many brands are also trying to make their products an outlet for users to resolve their emotions.

It is also a peach series. Naixue’s previous promotion was “domineering peaches full of girlish hearts”, but now it is directly a “rotten peach” series. Not only did it directly change the Meituan store avatar to the “rotten peach” image, it also took the opportunity to release a wave of rotten emoticons.

This move made Nayuki's peach series drinks a success, with total sales exceeding 1 million cups and ranking first in Nayuki's sales for consecutive years.

Heytea even directly played with the brand name. At first, some netizens discovered that the cover copy "Go to Heytea on Monday" could easily cause misunderstanding.
After being reminded by netizens, I realized: Yes, it is exactly what you think.

This wave of dark humor has made phrases such as "Let's get married on Monday" and "It's another day I really want to get married" quietly popular among young circles and become "secret codes" for everyone to vent their emotions.

Heytea even released a song for workers called "Let's Go to Heytea on Monday". Combined with the "Heytea on Monday" series of discount activities, it successfully turned the hated Monday into a brand promotion day and focused topic marketing on the product.

The driving force behind a brand's long-term and stable growth lies in whether it meets the real needs of users and creates a deep emotional connection with them. For young people who have no worries about food and clothing, they pay more attention to the spiritual needs brought by brands than to material needs.

When "playing badly", "being in a Buddhist way" and "getting rich quickly" become a social emotion, brands can try to bind them to their products to give users an emotional purchasing motivation.

After all, the new product name you brainstormed for three days and three nights may not be as topical as a cup of "Sorrowful Tea", "This Cup of Milk Tea is Oh My God", or "Rotten Peach".

Brands can actively use memes to establish a youthful image of being “funny” and accumulate social assets.

3. “Bad” business

Every marketing campaign, from strategy-content-media-promotion, needs to be carefully planned. Despite this, we still cannot predict the conversion results.

But there is a business method that is almost always effective in "creating topics" and "conversions", and it's called "BUG marketing".

The brand actively creates bugs, allowing users to actively discover and spread them, thus bringing about a viral effect. It may seem that the brand is negligent in causing the bug, and in the end it has to "suffer the loss" and pass the profit to consumers, but in fact it is all carefully planned by the brand, and consumers are just part of the play.

For example, when the KFC APP first had a bug, as long as the birthday was changed to August 28, one could get a half-price coupon for a family bucket within 5 minutes. Through word of mouth, the KFC APP directly entered the top 50 of the free list.

There was also a bug in Baidu Netdisk in 2013, where you could get a one-year membership for 10 cents and a 100GB top-level package for 50 cents. This bug allowed Baidu Netdisk to gain hundreds of thousands of new users overnight, achieving the goal of attracting new users in the shortest possible time.

In 2022, Lao Xiang Ji celebrated its "100-store Shanghai expansion" and distributed 100,000 free lunches. At the critical moment, the mini program crashed. Just when everyone thought that Lao Xiang Ji had "emergency" braked and announced the removal of the event, the official directly issued a "generous" statement, proactively extending the cancellation event time, which once again boosted the popularity of the event and attracted a wave of goodwill.

There are also cases like this where the wrong price was entered in the live broadcast room and "薅羊毛" (薅羊毛) was scammed. Yuanqi Forest sold 36 bottles of sparkling water for 12.55 yuan, causing the company to lose more than 2 million yuan. Jie Rou put the wrong price at 10 yuan for 6 boxes, causing the company to lose 10 million yuan overnight...

Compared with deliberate creation of marketing events, these marketing methods that seem to be work mistakes caused by the brand's "bad job" and then actively discovered and participated in by users can bring more exposure and topic discussion to the brand.

It can be seen that by taking advantage of human weaknesses and actively guiding their consumption behavior, marketing goals can be achieved more efficiently.

4. “Bad” PR

No one is perfect, and brands are not indestructible. How should brands deal with mistakes? Occasionally, “playing badly” can also turn things around.
The earliest example of "bad-ass" PR was the incident where Tencent Penguin was cheated by Lao Gan Ma.

In April 2020, Tencent sued Lao Gan Ma for overdue advertising fees. It turned out that the culprit was three scammers who forged the Lao Gan Ma seal and tricked Tencent.

How can Tencent put its face in this sudden "PR crisis"?

The sentence "The chili sauce at lunch suddenly didn't smell as good" triggered a wave of ridicule on the UGC across the Internet. Later, Tencent's public relations director posted a photo of rice mixed with chili sauce, and Tencent's official account launched a video titled "I'm the silly penguin who ate fake chili sauce." This series of pitiful and bad-mouthing operations successfully established the "silly and sweet" persona of the penguin.

There were also netizens who complained that Fenghua’s new product packaging was ugly and the product was cheap. The netizens who protected the product came up with suggestions overnight, some of which included making the new packaging themselves and recommending the product to participate in the college student advertising design competition.

Faced with this sudden "collapse of the house", Fenghua directly "played dirty" and revealed its cards: "We are actually very cheap", "This will cost money", and this wave of replies directly made Fenghua sell out overnight.

"Bad" public relations does not mean letting things get worse, nor does it mean giving up. Instead, it means facing consumers honestly, admitting mistakes when they are made, and making changes when necessary.

At any moment, sincerity is always the key.

Finally, I want to say that although many brands nowadays are shouting “lie down and screw up” every day, in fact, each one is more competitive than the other.

"Playing it bad" is a popular topic at the moment, and it is also a relatively down-to-earth and relaxed communication attitude that brands use when facing young consumers, rather than just fooling around.

No matter how fancy the marketing is, product safety is always the top priority and consumer demand always comes first.

Author:Aye

Source: WeChat official account: "Shock Copywriter (ID: SHOCKCW)"