The value and significance of brand user portraits

User portrait is an important way to achieve precision marketing of brands. Only by accurately positioning consumer needs can consumers consume better. This article discusses related content and I hope it will be helpful to you.

01

Anyone who has watched Douyin live broadcasts or searched for products on Tmall or JD.com, as well as anyone who has had online shopping experience, knows that as long as you leave your behavior and tracks on the website, when you log in to the APP or related APP with alliance investment again, various recommendations for alternative or complementary products of the same type will pop up.

If you become a registered member of a brand, you will often receive notification (blessing) text messages or emails from the brand on special days (membership day, birthday). These are already common routines of precision marketing that we are accustomed to.

In the era of mobile Internet business dominated by algorithms, whoever wins the users wins the world. Relying on the massive user data, building a complete set of user portraits, with its labeling, information and visualization attributes, is a strong prerequisite for enterprises to achieve personalized recommendations and precision marketing.

For this reason, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has repeatedly asked several major Internet platforms to achieve "interconnection and interoperability", but everyone is willing to do so. Interconnection and interoperability means that the original moat has been opened by an external link. This is also the funniest and most crazy thing about this era. The Internet is actually

Of course, this kind of problem does not only happen between Internet companies, but also in other fields. Especially when the problem of "interconnection" occurs in the field of social management, it will cause headaches for everyone.

From the above examples, we can see the importance of user portraits to the success of today’s brands. As a brand, it is very necessary to understand the meaning of user portraits and master the methods of building user portraits.

02

I think the person who gave the most accurate definition of "user portrait" from a business perspective was Alan Cooper, the father of interactive design. He believed that user portrait is a virtual representation of real users and is a target user model based on a series of real data.

Enterprises use samples of existing target user groups to mine the demographic attributes, behavioral attributes, social networks, psychological characteristics, interests and hobbies of each user. After continuous superposition and updating, they abstract complete information labels, combine and build a three-dimensional user virtual model, namely user portrait. "Labeling" users is the core part of user portrait. The so-called "label" is a series of condensed and refined words with specific meanings, which are used to describe the attribute characteristics of real users themselves, making it easier for enterprises to do statistical analysis of data.

03

When doing user tagging, brands need to consider two dimensions. The first dimension is the static dimension, and the second dimension is the dynamic dimension.

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Static dimension: Demographic attribute labels are the most basic information elements of users. They are usually self-contained labels and do not require excessive modeling by enterprises. They constitute the basic framework of user portraits.

Population attributes include natural and social attributes of people: name, gender, age, height, weight, occupation, region, education, marriage, zodiac sign, blood type, etc. Natural attributes are congenital and will remain stable once formed, such as gender, region, and blood type; social attributes are acquired and are relatively stable, such as occupation and marriage. Psychological phenomena include two major categories: psychology and personality, which are also congenital and acquired.

For enterprises, studying the psychological phenomena of users, especially the three aspects of needs, motivations, and values, can help them to understand the deep motivations of users to register, use, and purchase products; understand what functions and service needs users have for products; and recognize what kind of value labels target users have and what kind of group they are. Both demographic attributes and psychological phenomena are innate and are in a stable state as a whole. Together, they form the most superficial and innermost pheromones of user portraits, thus forming stable static user portraits.

05

Dynamic dimension: website behavior attributes. Here we mainly discuss a series of operations performed by users inside and outside the website.

Common behaviors include: searching, browsing, registering, commenting, liking, collecting, rating, adding to shopping cart, purchasing, using coupons, etc. At different times and in different scenarios, these behaviors are constantly changing, and they are all dynamic information. By capturing user behavior data (number of views, whether to make in-depth comments), companies can classify users into shallow or deep categories and distinguish between active and inactive users.

Social network behavior refers to a series of user behaviors that occur on virtual social software platforms (Weibo, WeChat, forums, communities, Tieba, Twitter, Instagram), including basic access behaviors (search, registration, login, etc.), social behaviors (invite/add/unfollow friends, join groups, create new groups, etc.), and information release behaviors (add, publish, delete, leave messages, share, collect, etc.).

By labeling users with different behavior tags, we can obtain a large amount of network behavior data, website behavior data, user content preference data, and user transaction data. These data further fill in user information and together with static tags form a complete three-dimensional user portrait, which is the so-called 3D user portrait.

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The value of user portraits: User portraits can clearly answer the following questions: first, who are the brand’s users? second, what do the brand’s users need/like? third, through which channels can these users be reached? fourth, which users can become the brand’s seed users and become opinion leaders.

In terms of user portrait, Xiaomi is very accurate. Xiaomi's users are indeed "diaosi", so they fully utilize communities, Weibo, QQ space and other positions that users often pay attention to for sales and communication. Xiaomi's success is not the so-called triathlon of "software, hardware, and the Internet". It is the brand created by Lei Jun who understands technology and his partners who understand marketing and communication through successful marketing. Of course, I am talking about the early days of Xiaomi here. Today's Xiaomi has undergone major upgrades and improvements in many aspects.

07

User portraits can guide product development and optimize user experience. In the traditional production model of the past, companies always adhered to the principle of "selling what they produce to users". This closed-door product development model often results in "users not buying what they produce".

Nowadays, "companies produce what users need" has become the mainstream, and many companies put the real needs of users in the most important position. In the product development guided by user needs, companies analyze, process and combine the large amount of target user data they obtain, build a preliminary user portrait, and make statistics on user preferences and functional requirements, so as to design and manufacture new products that better meet core needs and provide users with better experience and services.

08

User portraits can help brands achieve precision marketing. Precision marketing is highly targeted and is a point-to-point interaction between enterprises and users. It not only makes marketing more efficient, but also saves costs for enterprises. Take activities as an example: when merchants are doing activities, they give up their own user resources and choose external channels. In other words, they abandon their own precise seed users and choose activity objects that know nothing about their brand. As a result, they acquire new users at a cost several times higher than the budget.

09

User portraits can also help brands do relevant classification statistics and in-depth data mining. With the help of user portrait information tags, we can calculate such information as "how many people like a certain type of thing", "how many female users are between 25 and 30 years old", etc. Based on user portrait data, through association rule calculation, A can be associated with B. The story of "beer and diapers" in Walmart is a typical example of user portrait association rule analysis.

10

There is a certain threshold for brands to build accurate user portraits. It needs to be done through data mining and collection, and data modeling. Brands need to use SDK embedding through websites and activity pages. That is, pre-set the "events" you want to obtain, and let programmers use Java/Python/PHP/Ruby language to develop front-end/back-end modules, write codes to embed "events" on the corresponding pages, track and record user behavior, and transmit real-time data to the back-end database or client.

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In the data modeling stage, brands not only need quantitative data, but also quantitative research. Qualitative research methods are descriptive and determine the nature of things; quantitative research methods are quantifiable and determine the quantitative characteristics, quantitative relationships, and quantitative changes of objects. Generally speaking, qualitative methods, in user portraits, are manifested as summarizing the nature and characteristics of products, behaviors, and individual users to form corresponding product labels, behavior labels, and user labels. Quantitative methods, on the basis of qualitative methods, give each label a specific weight, and finally calculate the total label weight through mathematical formulas to form a complete user model. Therefore, the data modeling of user portraits is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.

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Finally, some important tags are given higher weights. Through weighted tags, core users can be better targeted. Establishing an accurate user portrait is a long-term task. Companies should start to develop their own brand user portrait construction system as soon as possible, so that the company's future marketing and investment can be traced and based on evidence.

Author: Liu Yichun

Source: WeChat public account "Liu Yichun's Brand Business Innovation (ID: shangyeyiguohui)"