How to make consumers like your product as much as the founders?

What role does Xiaohongshu play in brand sales in the current era? What is worth exploring and learning behind Xiaohongshu's marketing strategy? In this article, the author will teach you how to make consumers fall in love with your products, from multiple dimensions such as user relationship, sincere marketing, business relationship, brand positive cycle, people-oriented, etc., and recommend it to those who are interested in Xiaohongshu operation, brand marketing, and product operation.

"The baby takes an hour and a half to eat, and the meal needs to be heated up about 4 times." This is a daily pain point for many parents. But apart from "heating the meal", these parents don't seem to have a more direct solution, and they regard this problem as a normal situation.

But some brands have taken extra care of parents. “We were thinking, can we use one product to replace the need to heat up meals four times? So, Babycare launched a special insulated bowl for babies,” said Iris, Chief Brand Officer of Babycare.

Many mothers who are troubled by the problem of hot meals will “place an order in seconds” for this key design.

"When visiting brands, customers would ask their product managers to tell me about their products and how they were designed for target consumers. Many brands have taken every possible consideration for consumers. Craftsmanship, sentiment, technical capabilities, and the costs that users are willing to pay are all included in the product. For this reason, the risks that business owners need to bear are also included in it," shared Zhiheng, CMO of Xiaohongshu.

In fact, as Zhiheng said, the birth and emergence of a product is like the "child" of a brand. These entrepreneurs devote their efforts to polish their products and consider every detail.

However, in today’s fragmented media environment, it is not easy to make consumers understand and cherish your products…

"The supply of goods in each sub-category is extremely sufficient. For example, in the category of beauty essence alone, there are more than 4,000 brands on Xiaohongshu," said category data on the Xiaohongshu site.

There is too much supply, and consumers are faced with the problem of "how to choose" and "why should I choose you when I have everything I need".

The answer given by Xiaohongshu is: return to product recommendation.

"Currently, the driving factors for purchasing decisions on the supply side and the consumer side have changed. We conducted a wave of sampling surveys in 2021. At that time, a Nielsen survey report pointed out that among the 3,800 Xiaohongshu users, there were those born after 1995 and 2000. The survey showed that young people are most concerned about five things when buying things: product quality, cost-effectiveness, recommendations from others, brand, and price." Zhiheng shared.

"To go a step further, what is the value for money in the eyes of young people? First of all, your product must be good. If it is not good, I may not buy it even if it is cheap. If it is good, it can be a little more expensive, as long as I feel that the value for money is good."

"From a marketing perspective, for brands, the logic in the past was 'branding + channel e-commerce shelves'. But now it's 'Share of shelf (please yourself) + shelf penetration'. In other words, under the Branding + EC model, the product must be clearly explained. What is worth buying? What scenarios can it be used in? " This is a key point raised by Zhiheng.

01 Premise: Good products come from users, serve users, and guide users

If you want consumers to cherish or understand the brand's intentions, the prerequisite is to have "good products" so that you can tell a "good product story." However, many times when brands are developing products, it is not easy to gather a group of "precise user groups" and launch new products or hot products based on actual user needs.

In such a situation, "brand + platform co-creation" becomes an option.

Taking new brands as an example, Zhiheng first cited the case of a food brand. The functional gummy candy brand Minayo has a product called Minayo Iron-Rich Gummy Candy. The question about the "origin of dates" used in the product once attracted a lot of interaction from users on Xiaohongshu.

For example, why Xinjiang Hotan dates are used instead of Shandong dates? Why Qinghai black wolfberry is used instead of wolfberry from other places? The real thoughts of users can bring more innovation and inspiration to the brand, and Minayo has really upgraded and optimized everything from taste to packaging based on user suggestions.

In fact, in addition to Minayo, many new products, including Colorkey's lip mud color, Wuling Hongguang's EV skin, and Daily Black Chocolate's product flavors or ingredients, are co-created by brands and users on Xiaohongshu.

Of course, in addition to new brands and new products, there are also some mature companies and classic products, and their grass-planting logic has also changed to a certain extent. Zhiheng continued to introduce to Morketing: "For example, Centrum is a mature company that has been making health products, but it needs to break through the circle. People born after 1985 know Centrum, but younger users may not know it. So, how does it communicate with young people? - Focus on the health pain points of young people today.

This is about revolving around classic products and making them younger. "What kind of products do users need? In fact, Xiaohongshu always stands with brands: grasping the scene, grasping the crowd, creating good products with users, and even co-creating some life trends. In fact, as a social platform based on high-quality content, Xiaohongshu itself carries good content and new scenes of the crowd, which can itself form a certain trend.

This year, Xiaohongshu released the top ten life trends for the third time: such as warming up with neighbors, going for tea, and brewing tea around the stove. Regarding "tea", whether it is pure tea or tea for beverages, it is upgrading. In addition, it also includes circular fashion, outdoor mountain wear, etc. These life trends may have been some so-called niche trends before, but with the changes in users' daily lives, habits, and preferences, they have also moved from niche to mass.

The reason why Xiaohongshu can provide these capabilities and create these trends is that it always follows the perspective of the enterprise, and considers how to help the enterprise in the ecological chain and around the product cycle .

Based on product positioning, it focuses on how to launch new products, how to break through the circle of classic products, how to renew old products, etc. Of course, this is inseparable from the infrastructure capabilities of the Xiaohongshu platform itself, and how to apply it to the three levels of product innovation, product creation, and product seeding.

The product itself carries more than just the efficacy of the product. For example, it not only solves the practical problems of redness and acne on sensitive skin, but also brings users emotional value and more "added value" of the product through the taste of some fragrances and brand values. The same is true for Goodnight Little Sweet Wine, City WALK, and beauty products such as morning C and evening A, which are applied to morning coffee and night wine.

02 Planting grass: The platform amplifies "sincere sharing implanted in the heart"

Compared with social marketing, branding is often more effective in realizing customer value, but social platforms account for a large proportion of the number of users, user time, and user attention, so brands first need to think clearly about what user value they provide on the platform. The answer can be traced back to the basics of media platforms.

The media has always talked about three things: content production, content distribution, and content consumption. First, content production. "When I entered the media, I understood that social was content production. From the original PGC (professional content production) to UGC (user content production), the magnitude of the change is huge.

In the past PGC era, adding 10,000 articles a day was considered a big deal, and the editors were exhausted. Now, there are at least a million new articles every day, which is very different. "Zhi Heng said. The second is content distribution. In the past, content distribution was mainly one-way distribution for thousands of people, centralized one-way output. Now, whether it is social distribution or interest distribution, it is one-way interactive distribution for thousands of people.

Then, content consumption. Content consumption means that many readers or users have active feedback and active interaction. The interaction is very positive and large in volume, and there are various forms of interaction. From content production to content distribution to content consumption, all three aspects of the media have been changed.

So, what kind of content should consumers consume on a social platform based on high-quality content like Xiaohongshu? The happy experience brought by good products includes the experience brought to consumers by various good products and services. The reason why Xiaohongshu became popular in the past is mainly because users can find useful content they want on Xiaohongshu. For example, young people nowadays pay more attention to their own emotional value and they care about the "sincerity" of the content. When "Kuangbi" was popular at the beginning of the year, every time An Xin and Gao Qiqiang acted against each other, the audience in the comment area were saying "sincerity is the most lethal weapon."

In fact, "sincerity" is also the underlying logic for many consumers to be attracted by the content on Xiaohongshu. In fact, this is consistent with Xiaohongshu's positioning of itself. "Xiaohongshu has always been a community around UGC, and the original intention of this has not changed."

But from a 10-year perspective, Xiaohongshu has gone through three stages:

The first stage: Initially doing overseas shopping and overseas travel. Starting from how to buy better and have better fun overseas;

The second stage: The community began to "transform", with huge iterative changes, from shopping and travel to "how do I use this thing after buying it, how do I use cosmetics, how do I wear clothes (and other issues)". Even today I wore a silk scarf, which I hadn't worn for a long time. When I bought it, the salesgirl told me to check the notes on Xiaohongshu and she would teach me how to tie it. At this stage, Xiaohongshu became a place for young users to learn how to be more beautiful and buy more correctly;

The third stage: About two years later, the theme of Xiaohongshu was "Live Better", and the content broke through the circle. Many users said that Xiaohongshu was an encyclopedia of life and a guide to life, covering all aspects of content, and it might be the most fashionable thing. From the perspective of the brand, when it comes to product recommendation, in addition to hoping to complete the process of "production to sale", what is more important is whether users will share after purchasing and using the product, so as to achieve long-term retention after temporary sales and further accumulate brand assets.

"The needs of brands are actually very clear, and the platform just needs to amplify them. That is, in addition to seeing the commercial traffic, users can also see other users' sharing from various angles." What is the more important role and function of Xiaohongshu? Zhiheng's answer is "amplification". "We found that companies on the platform that have better products, better content, and actually good business have done this: they divide the budget around the target products of consumers and continue to accumulate water.

The traditional water storage plus conversion model at critical periods can not only maintain business scale but also protect people's hearts. "In Morketing's view, Xiaohongshu is providing brands with a kind of value they need most, maximizing the value of product promotion . That is, maximizing the value of promotion, maximizing the certainty of promotion, and maximizing the effect of promotion.

Based on this, when Xiaohongshu and brands work together to maximize the effect, they will explore deeply along the product line, and the deepest level will be direct product innovation, that is, Xiaohongshu can directly intervene before the product is launched on the market. "In practice, the Xiaohongshu team will hold meetings with the brand's laboratory team to share consumption trends, what consumers like, and product transformation cases with customers." Zhiheng further explained to Morketing.

In summary, the commercialization of Xiaohongshu is to explain clearly to companies in which aspects and scenarios the product solves what problems for consumers, what needs it meets, and what kind of good emotions and experiences it creates. Then, it uses commercial traffic to accurately amplify the good content that has been produced.

In other words, we should return to the promotion of content, but we should not stop there. To promote content with higher quality, we need a scientific logic. In Xiaohongshu, there is a KFS product promotion strategy. Specifically, KFS is the abbreviation of three English words: KOL (content system), FEEDS (information flow), and SEARCH (search flow).

From helping brands provide more high-quality content, to amplifying high-quality content through information flow, ensuring the long-tail effect, and then triggering users to complete the closed loop from seeding to pulling out. Based on the sincere sharing of content on Xiaohongshu and the unique field of search and browsing, and through the combination of different commercial tools on the Xiaohongshu platform, to a certain extent, for brands, KFS is a set of efficient and scientific product seeding combination delivery strategies.

In fact, in the past two years, Xiaohongshu has been iterating its commercialization system, with the goal of helping brands to efficiently and high-quality complete the promotion, increase certainty, and lower the threshold. Increasing certainty is the previous insight, and it is supported by excellent notes. For example, bidding is a model to lower the threshold.

03 Users: Forming long-term business relationships with users

Let’s go back to these questions: “From production to sales, or how to occupy the minds of consumers? And after consumers buy and use the product, will they share it by word of mouth? What role does seeding play in the entire chain?” In essence, this is a long-term operation process. And this long-term operation also requires the linkage between brands and platforms.

"We start the optimization from the infrastructure, and we optimize not only the commercial products, but also analyze all the historical notes and new notes in reverse, and provide the data of natural traffic and commercial data analysis to the customer at the SPU strength (product strength) data level." Zhiheng introduced.

Because of this, Xiaohongshu can clearly know how many people the brand's products cover within the system, as well as what the natural traffic and commercial traffic are. "We can also analyze the product's penetration, engagement, track ranking, product NPS (net recommendation score) positive and negative word-of-mouth, and the brand's top of mind (mention), what kind of sub-category, keyword, name it wants to occupy, its top of mind ranking, etc." In long-term operations, Xiaohongshu mainly helps brand growth in two aspects.

First, it is the mental level. When the supply side is sufficient, the post-90s and post-00s need mental influence to consume for their own enjoyment. Second, it is necessary to renew around the different life cycles of products. Find the "second spring" of the brand's life, rather than letting the brand's development momentum fall. From the very beginning, help the brand to do product research, then debug the product, and focus on branding.

The so-called "crossing cycle" is, in other words, the ups and downs in the market. The key is to have food in hand and not panic. What is "food"? It is the consumer's mind. As for how to accurately understand consumer needs and successfully penetrate the user's mind, the premise is the "infrastructure" of data.

"Two years ago, we started to optimize infrastructure, from insight, KOL selection, to content direction optimization, refined investment, and effect verification, all with data analysis." Zhiheng introduced. From a breakdown point of view, the vertical axis is the search index of the category, how many people are willing to search; the horizontal axis is the number of new notes in the category, which can analyze the search demand, which categories are added quickly, have many opportunities and great potential, and then find the track with high demand and high supply. From the perspective of business operators, aiming at the seed user stage and product growth stage, different solutions are provided to brands at different stages.

04 Ultimate: Forming a positive cycle of business and brand

Points, lines and surfaces form a set of logic.

"Point" is pulse-like, hitting a single point, hitting through and penetrating. We need to create good products based on the real pain points of users. See what the real pain points of users are, see clearly what color, texture, flavor, and what kind of outer packaging everyone wants in the lip mud market, and Xiaohongshu users will tell you.

If the product is not right, it may not meet the real needs of users. If you want to create a good product, you must focus on the user and think clearly about the scenarios in which the user needs you. For example, Hua Zhixiao's "Runaway Princess Makeup" found the scenario, created a real good product, found the right consumers, let consumers know you, and the brand was successful. At that time, a new product went from 0 to 1, with monthly sales of 30,000 units and 100,000 units per month on Double Eleven.

"Line" means always on and continue this line, and continue to steadily increase the volume, which is equivalent to building a foundation. Without a foundation, it is just a sieve to catch water. Because Xiaohongshu is a gathering place for new people, lifestyles, and trends, through non-commercial systematic product launches, there are a lot of online and offline linkages, which are called marketing activities on the site. For example, the marketing IP "Life Five Flavors Convenience Store" has an activity that involves more than 4,800 convenience stores working together to take over the stores and shelves, and to make a big splash with the brand.

"Surface" refers to the year-round node marketing, completing the conversion at the nodes that can be converted, and ensuring the results of the brand's daily sales. Without daily sales, there is no brand accumulation, and there will be no return visits from terminal customers. There is accumulation and good cognition there, and conversion is just a step in the middle.

In addition, there is also the idea of ​​obtaining traffic in the entire domain. Returning to the user consumption route of Xiaohongshu, the conventional approach is to convert in the entire domain, whether it is taking a screenshot to Taobao Pailitao or going to an offline counter and saying "I want this color number", it actually works. Xiaohongshu product promotion is nothing more than associating the volume of global reach within the site with the efficiency, effect, and data of product promotion.

05 Return to “people-oriented”

Finally, in addition to the basic functions of the product, the brand must also give the product emotional value, cultural value, aesthetic value, etc. Those things attract many people who can create life experiences, creative people, and they are particularly sensitive to life. For example, my family is particularly sensitive to aesthetics. When choosing wall paint, they will choose 300 wall paints and pick one color that they will definitely look good when they buy it. They will not go astray or fall into traps.

Such people have to use Xiaohongshu, because they can stand the energy of Xiaohongshu, but they can't stand other places, and they feel uncomfortable. Zhiheng said: "We have a word internally, called 'people matters', love and creation." Back to people, these people are here, what can these people create together? What is the business model in the co-creation scenario, what is the product carried, and what role does business play in it? There are a lot of unknown and very interesting things in it.

One thing is not suitable for everyone. Supply exceeds demand. Even if all things are piled up in front of you, they may not meet your needs for a certain feature. Always return to the human being and put people first.

Author: Ivy Zeng

WeChat public account: Morketing (ID: Morketing)