Revelation of "Village Super": Become Zibo and Recreate Rongjiang

This article first briefly introduces Rongjiang, mentions the unexpectedly popular Cunchao in Rongjiang, and then introduces and explains Cunchao and analyzes the reasons for its popularity. This article is suitable for everyone to read and understand the principles behind the popularity of something.

"Our ancestors have lived on this land for thousands of years, and this is the first time that Rongjiang has become so famous." This small county located in a corner of Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province, which was not delisted until 2020, unexpectedly became popular because of football at the end of May. Village Super League has become another popular folk sports and tourism IP after last year's Village BA. "Guizhou Village Super League", the full name of which is Guizhou Rongjiang (Sanbao Dong Village) Hemei Rural Football Super League, is an amateur league sponsored by the Rongjiang County Football Association of Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, with 20 village-level football teams participating. This year's league opened on May 13 and ended on July 20 with the finals.

WeChat index shows that before the opening of the game, no one knew about "Village Super League" and the search index was 0. As the game progressed, the search index of the word "Village Super League" soared, with the peak data exceeding 180 million. The Chinese Super League, which opened a month earlier than the Village Super League, has never had a search index of more than 100 million on WeChat.

Rongjiang has a permanent population of only 295,000, but during the Village Super League, it received more than 3 million tourists, a passenger flow that far exceeded Rongjiang's capacity. According to Ctrip data, during the Village Super League, Rongjiang's hotel orders increased by more than 3 times year-on-year and 3.4 times compared with the first three months. As for the hotel rooms for the final on July 29, they were fully booked as early as June. When there were the most tourists, a bridge that was only one kilometer long could be congested for up to an hour.

The influx of tourists has made local vendors very happy. Nowadays, stalls near the stadium are in great demand, but even if they set up stalls 500 meters away from the stadium, stall owners can still make up for their weekday chef wages by selling four weekends a month (matches are on weekends). A bayberry juice stall can sell more than 600 bowls every night, and a rice noodle roll stall can sell dozens of kilograms of rice noodles a day. Some restaurants can make 5,000 to 6,000 yuan a day on weekends, almost double the usual amount.

1. Unexpected success and hard-to-replicate genes

Village Super League has suddenly become a new name card for Rongjiang and even Guizhou. The billboard outside the Rongjiang high-speed railway station reads "Two hot spots in Guizhou: Rongjiang Village Super League to watch football, B Guiyang XX real estate to buy a house." The streets and alleys of Rongjiang are dominated by Village Super League elements. T-shirts with the words "Village Super League" are hung outside stationery stores, and the restaurant owner wears a "Village Super League" headband on her head; private cars are printed with "Village Super League free pick-up"...

A football match organized spontaneously by the public turned into a grand carnival.

Rongjiang's popularity through football was somewhat accidental. Since 2021, Rongjiang County has planned five city IP shaping activities, including bullfighting, basketball, the Guzang Festival of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and marathon competitions, but none of them made Rongjiang well-known. Instead, it was the football match played by the villagers for their own entertainment that unexpectedly became popular. A football field that was so simple that there was no stand even produced a wonderful world wave.

For the players from Rongjiang County, this is just an ordinary game in life. Wei Qi, a member of the Pingyong Village team, said in an interview with Hedgehog Commune that when they formed the team, they had no idea that the village super league would be discussed and participated in by people all over the country - there is a football gene here that has lasted for many years.

In the 1940s, the National Guizhou Normal University moved from Guiyang to Rongjiang, bringing football here. Today, Rongjiang, with a total area of ​​only 3,315.8 square kilometers, has 14 standard football fields, and 50,000 of the less than 300,000 people play football. The Laobiao Cup, Weekend League, Football Association Cup, Local Taxation Cup, Spring Festival Cup... The rich competition system gives local people enough space to display their talents.

Here, you can find many people who love to play football in every age group, and the tradition of playing football continues. The Yuezhai Village Football Team was initially established with less than ten players, but now has more than 40 players. A player said in an interview: "The veterans born in the 1980s have basically retired, and those born in the 1990s are slowly declining. Fortunately, the players born in the 2000s are rising, and those born in the 2010s are ready to go." Such intergenerational continuity is probably something that even the Chinese national team would envy. For Rongjiang people, playing football is a daily routine, a source of happiness, and a cultural choice that has long been integrated into their lives. It has little to do with whether they want to be famous or make money.

From the very beginning, neither the football players nor the event organizers thought about the issue of commercialization at all.

There is no commercial sponsorship, no commercial elements are allowed, and the players have no income. The prize for the winner of each game is very local, two pig feet. The prize for the first place in the entire league is a small yellow cattle, the second place is three black pigs, the third place is three Tashi small fragrant sheep, and the fourth place is 12 local geese. If there must be a sponsor, it is the cheerleading team of the game, that is, all the villagers - most of the expenses for participating in the game are donated by villagers, some donate 500, some donate 20, and some donate 15 kilograms of glutinous rice, 200 bowls of taro cakes, 100 rolls of rice noodles...

Even though the Village Super League has become popular, they still remain restrained from commercializing it. Yang Yajiang, the main planner of the Village Super League, said in an interview with Yicai: "After the Village Super League became popular, some companies took the initiative to find the village team to ask for sponsorship, but we are worried that too much capital involvement will cause problems through hype, which will destroy the original pursuit of happiness in the Village Super League and change the taste of the Village Super League."

The pursuit of pure happiness is the driving force behind Rongjiang people's love of playing football, and now it has become the deep core of Rongjiang's popularity. Rongjiang Village Super League is like a paradise, and it coincides with the current anti-corruption storm in Chinese professional football. Of course, professional football and amateur football are not the same, and there is no need to compare them together. The emergence of Village Super League is more like a cultural revelation. It turns out that sports can be like this. The essence of sports is not gold medals and championships, but participation and happiness.

The joy brought by sports is contagious. Because of the village super league, Rongjiang has developed a cohesiveness and mobilization force that many regions and cities envy but cannot reach. What is more valuable is that this force comes from the bottom up.

Many media outlets wrote such a story when recording the live broadcast of the village super league. Li Xueyuan, a girl who married out of Rongjiang, returned to her parents' home on the day of the village super league final just to be a cheerleader. She doesn't know football, but she would cry loudly when her village team lost. "The collective sense of honor in the village is very strong. We don't want to admit defeat and don't want to lose to other villages. We just want to show our strength."

There were many people like her in the stands, young and old, women and children all came to watch the game, most of whom did not understand football. The cheerleaders cheering for their respective villages were mostly composed of women in the village and married aunts. At this time, football was just a carrier, carrying people's wishes to gather together, go home and have a lively time.

If it weren't for precise positioning, people might think the scene described above is a rural scene in football powerhouses such as Britain and Germany. But this is in Guizhou, in Rongjiang, and in the village super league. "After the village super league became popular, we feel proud to be Guizhou people." - All of this is the unique cultural foundation for Rongjiang and the village super league to stand out.

2. The necessity behind the accident

But it is far from enough to review the past. First there was Zibo, then there was the village BA of Taipan Village in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou Province, and now there is the village super of Rongjiang Village. These cities with average tourism resources have become popular. In addition to extremely special cultural genes and even some luck, some traceable human operations may be more worthy of reference and discussion.

In the eyes of financial scholar Xiang Shuai, Village Supermarket is the soil for the industrialization of the service industry 2.0. "Freight logistics, map navigation, itinerary booking, personnel scheduling and matching, new media communication... A small county in the southwest can complete such a large-scale organizational collaboration in such a short time."

The success of Rongjiang Village Super League is a victory for the participation of all the people in sports culture, and it is also a success for the local organization, mobilization and publicity efforts.

Let's first briefly review the peak times of the Village Super League. "Two and a half months, 20 teams, 98 games, more than 100 cheerleading performances, thousands of people participating in on-site support, tens of thousands of volunteers, and 385,000 Rongjiang people's yearning and efforts for a better life." This set of figures was broadcast during the broadcast of the Village Super League finals. In the two months, the Village Super League set off several waves of traffic climaxes on the Internet.

The competition opened on May 13, and at that time only local bloggers and county-level integrated media released the content they had produced. It seemed that this was a routine operation in the local area and did not produce immediate results.

In the third week of the competition, on May 27 and 28, Guizhou TV and CCTV News began to repost the village super video, and the popularity of the game started to rise. On May 30, the captain of the village super football team in Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province, called on CCTV football commentator Han Qiaosheng to go to Rongjiang to commentate on the game.

After this session, a staff member who participated in the organization of the village supermarket said in an interview: "We feel that the village supermarket has become popular. We really feel that the power of the Internet has been transformed into real action. This is because there is a traffic jam at the Rongjiang toll station under the Xiarong Expressway. Those are all self-driving tourists from other places."

On June 4, Han Qiaosheng went to Rongjiang and recorded his experience on Douyin. It was at this time that the popularity of Village Super League on Douyin also rose. Data from the huge index showed that the content with the keyword "Guizhou Village Super League" suddenly increased on Douyin. Looking through the official account of "Rongjiang Release" before and after this time, the data related to Village Super League was significantly higher than others. Among the data that were generally in the three or four digits, the video of the Village Super League's live fireworks show received 15,000 likes, the video of Han Qiaosheng holding a plastic bag and explaining Village Super League received nearly 200,000 likes, and a video of a Village Super League star player calling out to Fan Zhiyi also received more than 100,000 likes.

On June 23, former Chinese football captain Fan Zhiyi led his team to Rongjiang for the match. According to local people's recollections, previous football matches did not have as many spectators as this time. Soon, the on-site security checks and reservation mechanisms became strict.

The planned content organization and the massive amount of tap water that followed have raised the traffic level of the village supermarket in one fell swoop. Following this idea, we have also summarized the three factors that make Rongjiang Village Supermarket a popular travel destination this summer. These factors are not only a summary of the village supermarket, but can also serve as a signpost for other cities to market as tourist destinations.

First of all, the local area has a strong short video gene.

Although we mentioned earlier that Rongjiang had not succeeded in its five attempts to create IP before launching the village supermarket, it had accumulated awareness and capabilities for digital content in the process. In recent years, the local county government has been promoting the "three new changes" of turning mobile phones into new agricultural tools, turning data into new agricultural materials, and turning live broadcasting into new agricultural activities. Short videos have penetrated into the lives and work of local residents.

It is reported that the county has cultivated more than 12,000 new media accounts and more than 2,200 local online live broadcast marketing teams, which have become the "infrastructure" for village super communication.

Rongjiang County has a clear idea of ​​using short videos for destination marketing. In order to promote the Village Super, they set up a "Village Super New Media Special Class". The class members will be responsible for organizing and training local farmers to shoot on-site, and professional operators will edit and package the materials after returning them. This move has a significant effect. Within two weeks, the related content of Village Super created more than ten Douyin hot spots. The topic #Guizhou Village Super has more than 100 million views in 3 days. According to Douyin data, the three topics #Village Super#, #Guizhou Village Super# and #Guizhou Village Super Live How Burning# have created 120 million, 1.1 billion and 270 million views respectively.

Rongjiang's short video marketing strategy is very similar to that of Zibo - a closed-loop communication loop has been built by the government, local residents and netizens across the country. Looking back at Zibo's operations, the government quickly took over the torch when it sensed the gathering of traffic. The full-scale involvement of all official links, the quick response to follow hot topics and the clever use of short video platforms to create content have all become the key to communication.

After the short video spread the aroma of Zibo barbecue, he made a wonderful shot in Rongjiang.

As short videos spread like wildfire, a large number of celebrities added fuel to the fire.

It has become a trend for celebrities in the football circle to go to Rongjiang. Han Qiaosheng went to the scene twice. During his commentary, he passionately expressed: "The ratings have exceeded those of the Chinese Super League!" "For the professional players in the Chinese Super League, their football is not as good as that of our village Super League..."

This is obviously an exaggeration, but it is enough to become a footnote to the craze for the village super league. During the final, another commentator, Huang Jianxiang, also went to the scene to comment, "Don't treat bean buns as dry food, don't treat the village head as a cadre, don't treat the village super league as a game, we are serious about playing football", and the official Weibo of "Guizhou Village Super League" specially cut out Huang Jianxiang's golden sentence and spread it, which shows its professionalism.

The Village Super League seems to have suddenly become a "pilgrimage" for people in the football circle. CCTV football commentator He Wei went to Rongjiang during the finals. He said he had wanted to go to the Village Super League for a long time. The official video of He Wei dancing with the cheerleaders on the court was also released. This method of "touching" football celebrities to stir up the heat was also specially designed by the "Village Super League New Media Special Team".

If it is not enough for only people in the sports circle to speak out for the Village Super League, the appearance of entertainers in the entertainment industry has further released the influence of the Village Super League. As early as the end of June, the Hong Kong Star Football Team led by Hong Kong comedy star Chen Baixiang went to Rongjiang, but was unable to play against the Village Super League team because the game approval had not yet been completed. It was not until August 13 that the Hong Kong Star United Team finally completed the game with the Rongjiang Village Team.

Celebrities frequently appeared during Zibo's boom period. Gao Yalin, Li Zixiong, and "Lao Mo" Feng Bing, some of them are from Zibo and stood up to promote their hometown, while others came here because of its reputation.

In the marketing process of these tourist destinations, celebrities are often not the starting point of traffic. They come here on the popularity and use their popularity to add icing on the cake. They are "tap water" and use their traffic to attract more "tap water". Of course, how to make good use of the celebrity effect and maximize their potential energy is a test of the local response ability and content creativity.

Finally, not only celebrities came, but major traffic platforms and even e-commerce platforms also keenly participated in promoting the tourist destination. Although their purpose was more to attract traffic for themselves, it also gave a boost to the local area to a great extent.

The platforms have a keen sense of smell. When Village BA was popular, Kuaishou was the first to see the opportunity to live broadcast the game. According to Kuaishou data, the total number of viewers of Kuaishou Village BA Guizhou Station live broadcast exceeded 300 million, and the number of related topic videos played reached 450 million. Durex, which has been deeply involved in sports marketing, brought in JD.com and Kuaishou to do marketing together, and also jointly planned the documentary "Village BA "All People's Heart"".

The platform was also not absent from the Village Super League. Before the Village Super League finals began, Baidu APP became the public welfare communication platform for the "Village Super League" finals, inviting nearly 100 vertical creators in sports, technology, tourism, food, music, etc. from Baidu's content ecosystem to Rongjiang to participate in content creation and dissemination.

The intervention of the platform is a recognition of the tourism traffic of a place, and it also helps to introduce more traffic that breaks through the circle.

3. The counterattack of “weak” tourist destinations

The way of marketing a tourist destination is very different from that of more than a decade ago. In the past, a city promotional video was considered successful if it was repeatedly used and broadcast by CCTV. Now it is not enough to rely solely on top-down forces. Only by linking up the top and the bottom, and the inside and the outside, can new possibilities be created, especially for non-traditional popular tourist destinations.

In the past, destinations with weak tourism resources such as Zibo and Rongjiang would most likely be submerged outside people's sight, but now, relying on iconic events, novel experiences, and special lifestyles, short video social communication can achieve effects that were unimaginable in the past. In this process, the government, locals, non-local users, and short video platforms will form a multi-nested and smooth content production and dissemination chain.

In the early stage, most of the creations were spontaneous by locals, who recorded their lives in a self-entertaining way; then the government stepped in and began to promote dissemination from top to bottom. In this process, local governments and short video platforms would often establish connections and interactions, and folk materials would become organized and planned content libraries. The platforms would also use their own advantages to inject more traffic into the local area. For example, in Zibo, a platform mobilized influencers to visit stores; as the popularity continued to increase, users scattered on the Internet would take the initiative to publish content until celebrities entered the scene to push the voices to a climax.

In a nutshell, if a destination with weak tourism resources wants to stand out, it must either have strong social value or unique experience value. This whole process can be replicated in almost any tourist destination with its own characteristics.

The tourism market after the epidemic has given unprecedented opportunities to destinations with weak tourism resources. The soaring prices of popular destinations have deterred people in a period of consumption downgrade, and the price advantages of emerging markets have been highlighted; in an era where everyone is a creator, unpopular destinations with unique experience value have unprecedented possibilities to go viral, and the pervasive spread of short videos has the huge power to make obscure places famous overnight.

Now, the official competition of the village super league has ended, but the locals of Rongjiang are obviously not satisfied. They don't want to be a short-lived firework that will be forgotten by the crowd after shining. After the official competition, Rongjiang held a national food competition and invited amateur teams from surrounding Guangdong, Guangxi and other places to participate. Still based on football, this time with the addition of food elements, food has a stronger coverage and universality than sports elements.

From Zibo to Guizhou Village BA and Village Super, tourism destination marketing has ushered in a new paradigm, allowing more regions with average tourism resources to see the opportunity to become popular. Peng Han, director of the Strategic Research Center of Ctrip Research Institute, told Doujiao that a destination must have a flagship product to become popular. From the current cases, it can be seen that this flagship product does not necessarily have to be a famous scenic spot, historic site, or famous mountain or river.

Zibo has set a good example, and Rongjiang has used its own characteristics to retrace and verify the "Zibo model". In the future, we will see more Zibo and Rongjiang.

Author: Li Jinglin WeChat public account: Doujiao TMT