QQ Nest is becoming a new hotspot for brand marketing

Young people always like brands that are emotionally closer to them, which is why QQ has become a magic weapon for the youth memories of generations. The future is the era of young people, and the relationship between brands and users will continue to evolve. Brands that know how to establish connections with young people will gain better advantages. Let's take a look at how QQ Xiaowo does it?

"Tell Lao Mo that I want to eat fish."

The drama "Kuang Bi" became a hit across China, and the various conflicts between the characters and fish in the drama became "famous scenes" in the minds of many netizens. Secondary creations with the theme of "selling fish" emerged in an endless stream, and Internet joke makers went all out, triggering a great boom in the "selling fish" culture.

But compared to the joke tellers on the Internet, some young people have actually opened fish shops in the new dimension universe. In the QQ nest, the "shop owner" has filled a whole wall with all kinds of fish tanks, which contain all kinds of fish and even big turtles. The fish shop is so luxurious that Lao Mo would be silent when he saw it, and Gao Qiqiang would cry when he saw it.

Image source: QQ Nest

In QQ Nest, besides selling fish, you can also eat chicken and KFC. If you are lucky enough, you may walk into this KFC in the "parallel universe" one afternoon.

Here you will find hot-colored building decorations, Colonel Ken's national fashion, and the super eye-catching KFC family bucket. You will also occasionally meet young people from all over the world who are walking around like you. Here, you will unlock this brand new journey.

Image source: QQ Nest

During the Spring Festival, QQ Xiaowo and KFC jointly launched the "Cross-Dimensional Spring Festival Temple Fair" on the Spring Festival Never Sleeping Island. The temple fair was filled with a variety of stalls, providing young people with different celebrations. On the Never Sleeping Island, friends can get together, give each other gifts and blessings, and draw some good luck with brand benefits in those never-closing market shops.

KFC is not the only brand to try out the new dimension universe in QQ Nest. Many first-line brands and IPs, including Gucci, L'Oreal, Jordan China, Kappa, Vans, Calvin Klein, Pepsi, and the movie "The Wandering Earth 2", have launched their own "new dimension universe exploration" in QQ Nest.

Among them, Gucci even moved its 2023 Spring/Summer Collection Cloud Show to this new dimension for the first time. The QQ Nest team tailored a gorgeous and retro "Gucci Audio-visual Hall" for Gucci, restoring the brand's aesthetics and sense of ritual, and allowing more users interested in Gucci to have an immersive brand show experience in the new dimension.

There is a popular saying in the marketing circle: "He who wins the young people wins the world." The marketing value of new-dimensional social platforms like QQ Xiaowo, where Generation Z gathers, is being valued by more and more brands.

Image source: QQ Nest

1. Young people are increasingly fond of QQ

QQ Nest is a gathering place for young people of Generation Z, which allows the brand's "desire to express" to be fully released in the event. Simon, a senior practitioner who has been engaged in the fast-moving consumer goods brand business for a long time, believes that this change is due to at least three reasons:

First of all, QQ has always been one of the most important social platforms for young people in China.

Although social channels have emerged in the past few years, the reliance of emerging young people on QQ has deepened. This structural change has increased the "purity" of QQ's "Generation Z" users. This means that if brands make targeted placements on QQ, the strategy will be clearer, the structure will be more accurate, and the model will be easier to predict.

Market research data also indirectly confirms this trend. Data shows that as the leading social platform for Generation Z, QQ has nearly 600 million monthly active users, and most of them are aged between 18 and 27 years old - this means that there are many core young users across the country who are gathered on the QQ platform.

Secondly, major brand owners in the market are also paying more and more attention to the construction of social fission and core traffic operation systems.

For leading brands, betting on young people is actually betting on the future of the brand. Young people in Generation Z have more distinct personalities and clearer aesthetic preferences. QQ Xiaowo naturally gathers a large number of users from different circles; and this social space that encourages the display of personality naturally provides soil for brand circle marketing.

But compared with the above two structural market factors, the more decisive factor is that the QQ Nest team has been building a digital virtual space over the past year. It is this technological breakthrough that further releases the commercial value of young users in the QQ system and makes it possible for more brands to test new gameplay.

2. QQ Nest: A social playground for Generation Z

QQ Nest’s social presence is close to the real world, thanks to the QQ team’s 24 years of accumulation in social interaction design and Tianmei Studio’s outstanding computer graphics processing capabilities.

At the end of 2021, Super QQ Show will be launched with a new upgrade.

Compared with previous 2D dolls, Super QQ Show has realized 3D portrait display, action interaction, high-degree-of-freedom face pinching and modeling capabilities, and can even use mobile phone cameras to help users with AI face pinching, helping users to have a more customized and emotional virtual image.

Image source: QQ Nest

At the beginning of 2022, QQ Nest was launched in internal testing.

Compared to the virtual image that is closer to the user, Xiaowo has truly become the user's own virtual social world. QQ users have their own Xiaowo and Xiaodao, where they can customize their own furniture and decoration design style and invite friends to have a party in the world they created.

For many external observers of Internet products, a common perception is:

"QQ is operating situational social networking in the virtual world."

From virtual images to virtual space, QQ has indeed built a new dimension of fantasy for users. And for many users, this is indeed a more novel existence than text-based social networking.

Senior Xiaowo user CC roughly attributes the charm of this new dimension to two points:

One is the ability to arrange space with a high degree of freedom.

"You can put the wall lamp on the floor" or "cover the entire wall with discs". These surprising "decoration ideas" are impossible to appear in any actual room decoration, and they are not even in the thinking of the QQ Nest design team. But they can be recreated by users and are "really beautiful".

Image source: QQ Nest

The other is the “social ability” of spatial interaction.

For CC, the core difference between Xiaowo products and other types of products is that the former has stronger social attributes and social experience. This is partly due to the inherent advantages of the QQ platform, and also the product of Xiaowo's interactive capabilities.

CC said that he is a music lover, so he often holds parties at his home, inviting friends to sing karaoke, play script-killing games, etc. Attending parties is also a way to quickly establish connections. Sometimes when he sees an interesting little house during a visit, CC seems to be able to see the interesting soul of the owner behind the little house.

For CC, her experience with QQ Nest started with "decoration" and ended with "socializing".

Her Xiaowo has accumulated more than 6,000 fans and many close friends. She will confide in her friends in Xiaowo about some embarrassing things that she cannot tell to her acquaintances.

And there are many people like CC in the nest.

Image source: QQ Nest

In a sense, QQ Xiaowo is an upgraded dimension of QQ's social capabilities, which is more in line with the social needs and aesthetic preferences of Generation Z. Putting social interaction into the scene actually releases the vitality of social interaction.

3. New Dimensional Universe: A New Scenarios for Brand Marketing

QQ Nest is naturally a scene where UGC flourishes. All its content generation is actually based on UGC, and all social behaviors are also based on UGC content and interaction.

This kind of UGC atmosphere and vitality applies to every user, and in fact, it also applies to every brand that hopes to take root in the UGC scene.

Take KFC, L'Oreal and Gucci as examples. Relying on QQ Nest's facility construction capabilities, brands naturally have a lot of room to play in design. Brands don't have to stick to offline traffic problems, and don't have to worry about the presentation capabilities of the space under physical constraints.

The brand nest can be a virtual twin of an offline store, or a new-dimensional store or showroom, or even a large space for virtual shows, virtual parties, and product launches.

One of the advantages of this openness is actually the optimization of the “cost-benefit ratio”.

Compared to building a metaverse brand space from scratch, the budget for scene construction and design ranges from seven figures to nearly eight figures. However, with the help of QQ Nest’s own platform, the marginal cost of building and operating brand nests can be reduced, which can continuously generate long-tail brand exposure benefits.

Image source: QQ Nest

From "Campaign" to "Operation", the transformation of brand thinking may bring new opportunities.

When a brand is integrated into the entire new dimension universe, as a participant in it, its brand penetration opportunities actually become more diverse and closer to real life.

For example, many users will buy Jordan's virtual models in online stores and wear them on their feet. For Jordan, wearing Jordan's virtual image is itself a mobile ambassador walking in the QQ new dimension universe.

Not only Jordan, but also many virtual image costumes and furniture with brand trendy features have been popular among some deep users.

You can see mugs with Pepsi elements and virtual KFC restaurants in some users' Xiaowo. "If it goes on sale, I will definitely buy a Colonel to protect my home," a Xiaowo user told Pinwan.

In the new dimension universe, the relationship between brands and users is quietly changing——

As long as the brand can customize excellent space or props, UGC has the ability to make the most of it and provide more vitality for these activities.

Image source: QQ Nest

In other words, this places higher demands on the brand's marketing capabilities and also provides more opportunities.

In the past, users had to go offline to have a complete, immersive brand experience center. But in QQ Nest, as long as the brand can give users enough reasons, this frequency can have no ceiling at all.

This is a brand showroom that is open to everyone, has no risk of traffic squeeze, and is open 24 hours a day. It is a frontier for continuous and high-frequency communication with users.

How should brands present themselves in such a space and how should they create their own fan effect? ​​This is also a new opportunity and challenge for brand marketing.

Image source: QQ Nest

4. The new era of gold mining for brands

Young people always like brands that are closer to them emotionally, which is why QQ has become a magic weapon for the youth memories of generations. According to information previously released by Tencent, QQ Nest is more than just an "upgrade" of social interaction - it is the beginning of a bigger blueprint, and will build a more grand world in the future:

Q-City.

Image source: QQ Nest

Q-City will be the Max version of QQ Nest.

This virtual city will have its own city landmarks, a variety of entertainment venues such as parties and board game halls, small parks and outdoor entertainment, as well as large venues prepared for super large events (concerts, press conferences, etc.).

It can be foreseen that Q-City will become a more complete online metropolis, releasing more modular creation tools and opening up more ecological scenario interfaces to the outside world.

In addition to the current "brand nests", virtual exhibitions, large-scale virtual press conferences, and even virtual corporate headquarters, virtual creative industrial parks, etc. can all appear in this new Q-City.

The relationship between brands and users will continue to evolve, and brands that know how to establish connections with young people will gain a better first-mover advantage; brands can have richer spatial imagination and more creative marketing methods in the new dimension.

In the future, this "city" that gathers Generation Z will eventually become a battleground for brand marketing.

Author: Zhong Wen

Source public account: Pinwan