On November 21st, the 9th Morketing Summit was held in Shanghai, China.
With the theme of "Ten Years", the 9th Osmo Awards will focus on five major directions: "Brand - System Beauty", "Globalization - Go Glocal", "Digital Intelligence - Digital Intelligence + AI", "Game Application Field - New Traffic" and "Podcast Marketing Session". Morketing invited leaders from different industries such as consumption, branding, e-commerce, entertainment, games, new technology, and overseas to gather together to "go back to the origin and explore the singularity" with marketers.
Finishing | Sober
There is a clear consensus that marketing is no longer a one-way push of information, but a two-way conversation.
According to public information, in 2023, the number of views on topics related to "listening to persuasion" on Xiaohongshu has exceeded 900 million...... Many businesses sell explosive goods because of "listening to persuasion", and some amateur bloggers have become Internet celebrity Vs because of "listening to persuasion", and in this context, the emerging marketing vocabulary of "listening to persuasion marketing" has also been incubated.
"Listening to marketing" requires brands to let go of themselves, listen to the real voice of the market, understand what consumers say and what they need, so as to find a unique positioning in the fierce market competition.
If you want to truly do and do a good job in "listening to persuasion marketing", the premise is still user insight. On the surface, it's user insight, but the key is to dig out the real needs behind it.
At the 9th Morketing Summit "Beauty of Brand-System" sub-venue, Dr. Dong Haoyu, Global Partner of Oxygen Technology, Deputy Director of the Academic and Education Committee of China Advertising Association, and Executive Chairman of IAB China Academic Research, and Daisy Sun, Director of Enterprise Solutions of Meltwater Rongwen Greater China, Cai Hong, Chief Marketing Officer of Kraft Heinz China, and Sun Liang, General Manager of White Elephant E-commerce, discussed the topic of "Listening to Persuasion Marketing". How can brands use consumer insights to connect with users?" This topic was discussed.
The following is a transcript of the discussion in the roundtable, edited by Morketing:
The last thing the market needs is data
What's missing is the insight behind the data
Dong Haoyu: Please introduce yourself. With the changes in the entire market environment and media environment, user insights are becoming more and more complex, so what are the most difficult problems you encounter in consumer insights based on the track of the category itself? How do you understand "persuasion marketing"?
Daisy Sun: My major is practical mathematics, and in the early days I worked in a financial company, helping different brands to do industry research. At that time, we will rely more on traditional data and external data to help brands gain insight into their own categories, consumer behaviors, and evaluate the effect of advertising and post-ROI. At present, I have nearly 10 years of experience in brand marketing consulting at Meltwater, and provide solutions for enterprises.
In my opinion, for brands, "listening to marketing" can better help them establish a sustainable and systematic thinking, just like the theme of our session "The Beauty of Systems". Namely, to whom? When to listen? After the delivery, how to evaluate the measurement effect, and do a good job of "listening to persuasion" next time.
Cai Hong: I studied medicine as an undergraduate, and now I am in charge of the marketing department in China at Kraft Heinz, and before joining Kraft Heinz, I worked at Unilever for 10 years. I have always felt that whether it is a researcher or a Marketing, these two things are a bit of the same root, including the topic of "listening to marketing" today, which is actually a "gimmick", the essence of which is to research people and listen to the voice of consumers.
In fact, every company will take "listening to the consumer" as one of its corporate cultures, but very few of them really do it well.
I agree with Daisy's general point of view, "listen to marketing", what do we listen to? How to listen? When to listen? It's all very important, there is no shortage of data in the Chinese market, especially we are not short of data tools, but what is missing? It is in-depth insight, whether it is the platform or the brand itself, which can really be interpreted correctly and very few can achieve deep insight.
Sun Liang: Hello everyone, I am Sun Liang from White Elephant E-commerce, focusing on the company's product innovation and online marketing. Daisy studied math, and so did I. After graduating from the Department of Mathematics, and now being in charge of e-commerce and new media for so many years, I don't believe in "mathematics" anymore.
Mr. Cai Hong just mentioned that "persuasion marketing" is a gimmick, but in my opinion, the focus is on how we understand this term, for example, I have never heard of this term before I understand this issue.
There are two aspects to my understanding of "persuasion marketing".
First, persuasion is an attitude, the source of how we treat the market, how we treat consumers, and all our decisions. The role of data is that it will make us more respectful of the market and the consumer. Second, "listening to persuasion" is a system or a decision-making mechanism. If we really do "persuasion marketing", it will definitely mean that the evaluation and decision-making of enterprises from product system, channels, financial indicators, etc. are based on "persuasion".
Dong Haoyu: As everyone said, "persuasion marketing" is a hot word at the moment, but the essence is still user insight, and eventually it must return to its own brand system to promote business growth. Then, different companies have different categories and different growth stages, and the perspective of looking at consumers is also different. Therefore, I would like to ask Mr. Daisy, among the brands or brand partners you serve, are there any differences in the needs of various brands and brands at different growth stages in terms of consumer insight?
Daisy Sun: The first category is high-end brands and some luxury brands, they pay more attention to quality and efficiency, especially in the past two years, when the economic environment is not good. High-end luxury brands already have strong brand power, and what they need to consider is how to use brand equity to retain the core group and do something new, especially the expansion of young consumer groups.
For example, a luxury brand wants to play the scene of gift-giving. Through external data, we have insight that in addition to the traditional festivals and anniversaries, there are also some new scenes, such as young people's current house warming, housewarming or warm residence will hold a party, which is also a gift-giving scene. Another example is the "metaphysics" that is very popular this year, which is also a point that Chinese pay more attention to, so when giving gifts, they will choose some products with better meanings. Therefore, it is necessary to further delve into the segmentation scenario to understand what kind of products users need, and how the brand will carry out subsequent online communication after users purchase.
The maternal and infant category is similar, I once served a traditional maternal and infant brand, and their product is an electronic thermometer. After listening to user insights and social media, we found that this is a red ocean, especially since the brand we serve is already at the top level in this category. However, in the process of category insight, we found that many young consumers not only use this product to measure their own body temperature, but also to measure the body temperature of their furry children, which is a new scenario. Therefore, if a more mature brand wants to break the circle, it is first necessary to continuously strengthen its brand mentality, and at the same time, it can use different tools and methods to conduct more in-depth insights.
Dong Haoyu: Insight is carried out according to different growth stages and super-segmented scenarios/groups. What about Mr. Cai Hong and Mr. Sun Liang, what dimensions will they pay attention to when conducting user insight? What tools are used? Do you have some real-world experience to share?
Cai Hong: In addition to some conventional social media listening tools, we will also devote a lot of manpower to traditional qualitative research and anthropological research. Because Kraft Heinz's purpose is to have a warm insight into the stories behind the data.
Kraft Heinz is a condiment-based company, in the Chinese market, there are familiar tomato sauce, salad dressing and other Western condiments, as well as soy sauce, fermented bean curd, etc.
I don't know if you know, Guanghe bean curd is now also a brand of Kraft Heinz. In a consumer insight, we found that the category of fermented bean curd is very large and is the general trend, but young people will not eat it often, because there are too many alternatives at the moment, so how can we regenerate the category and brand growth?
Through user insights, we found that many consumers mentioned that they like the taste of fermented bean curd wine and soy sauce, because fermentation is similar to that of alcohol, and the production process itself needs to be fermented. Therefore, we repositioned the category of fermented bean curd as "Oriental Cheese". When we "reinvent" the category and brand, and really start from the user's perspective, you will find that the product will also expand at the same time.
Before adjusting the positioning, fermented bean curd was just a condiment that could appear in breakfast and spread on steamed bread and other foods, but after becoming "Oriental Cheese", we made it into the form of "cheese powder", which can be added to the milk tea lid and fused with products including cakes and croissants. We've also co-branded this product with some coffee brands; It also created fermented bean curd custard dumplings with Wan Chai Wharf, and this product also has a strong natural exposure on Xiaohongshu and sells well.
Another example is Kraft Heinz's ketchup, which is our key category, but its use rate in the Chinese market is not high. The reason is that foreigners' eating habits or hobbies, including making hamburgers at home, tomato sauce is just needed, but Chinese people don't, especially it is very convenient to order burgers for takeout. So how can we boost the growth of this category in China?
We found that many users will ask in the comment area and live broadcast room, how can ketchup be used? One of the consumers mentioned scrambled eggs with tomatoes. 365 days a year, in addition to breakfast, there are more than 700 meals to eat, even if half of the meals are eaten outside, there are at least 300+ meals to eat at home, and tomato scrambled eggs are the most common home cooking, which is a high-frequency scene for us. Therefore, Kraft Heinz chose to replace the low-frequency scene with the high-frequency scene of the Chinese people, and highly bound the tomato sauce to the tomato scrambled eggs.
According to our calculations, after binding, we will have at least about 14,000 opportunities to contact consumers a year, which means that we can make this category have huge room for growth. Of course, the insight behind this is a relatively complex process, including the subsequent series of undertaking, etc., which is a complex system engineering.
Sun Liang: Just now both of you have shared practical experience, I will give you 3 cases, on the surface it seems that they are all explosive products, but in fact, there is no so-called "law" behind it.
The first case, coriander noodles. In 2022, White Elephant created a popular product on Douyin - coriander noodles. According to the conventional thinking, when launching a new product on a certain platform, the company will gain insights based on the platform users, such as age groups, and their preferences.
But this is not the case with white elephants, and we don't use these "conventional" ideas. Douyin is a content platform, so our choice is to directly "gain insight into the content" and find out what users are paying attention to in the content, especially what young people are discussing, and even what kind of topics are most conflicting, because conflict means participation. So we found coriander, which is a topic of "sometimes hot, sometimes silent", but as soon as we started to discuss, it was very enthusiastic, because coriander is a food that is very polarized among users.
Do these content insights count as user insights? It must be counted, but it's not the kind of way we usually understand, we don't have the crowd and traffic of Douyin, but choose to plate the content that can be raised in the content platform.
The second case is crab roe noodles. This product was very popular in August last year, and everyone once thought that we had some cooperation with Bai Bing, but in fact, it was all tap water-style traffic.
After the epidemic ended at the end of the previous year, we had an insight into the scene of offline catering, because it is essentially convenient for the fast food industry, and most of the product innovation is the restoration of offline catering products. We found that in the crab season in 2022, due to travel restrictions, it is not convenient for everyone to go to Yangcheng Lake to eat crabs, and at the same time, crab roe noodles for offline catering are a very popular product, even in mainstream cities that do not eat crabs, such as Zhengzhou, where the headquarters of White Elephant is located, it is very popular.
Therefore, in our opinion, this is also a direction to restore offline catering products and carry out product innovation. At the same time, combined with the hot spot of "consumption downgrading" at that time, as well as everyone's pursuit of health, other companies made frozen crab roe noodles, and we made crab roe noodles at room temperature, and the price was lower than that of crab roe noodles in offline catering. In the end, thanks to user insights, this product has been launched since 2022 and has become a product with sales of more than 10 million, until 2023, when we ushered in the "explosion" of this product.
The third case is a marketing campaign. At the end of last year, we had a Brand Super Member Day. The purpose is simple and straightforward, and like most brands, take advantage of a big event at the end of the year to boost sales. But we didn't adopt the conventional behavior of inviting celebrities into the live broadcast room or directly sending coupons for promotion.
Theme activities, there will definitely be traffic output, product output, but only these, we feel that it is not "sexy and interesting" enough. We have insight that after the epidemic is over, the hottest content is tourism. Therefore, we positioned the theme as tourism, and at this node in December, Northeast China and Hainan are popular tourist areas, so we did a "Tiannanhaibei" activity. For the first time, the live broadcast room was turned into a theater, with southern scenes and delicacies, such as the dregs vinegar seafood noodles we launched based on the tastes of southern users; There are also scenes and delicacies from the Northeast, such as Malatang. So, Harbin became popular last year, and based on these activities and authentic products, the spicy tang of the white elephant was also popular.
The above three cases are essentially user insights, but they are obviously not the same methodology, and there is no so-called law.
Not all insights have to take action
On the surface is insight, behind which is the mining of demand
Dong Haoyu: Thank you for your remarks. To sum up, brands should not only insight, but also look at the insight, and turn insight into growth through insight into what to do. So after chatting about how to "listen to persuasion", I would like to ask all the guests whether they have adjusted their marketing actions after seeing the insights and trends, or after "listening to persuasion". In other words, how to systematically "listen to persuasion"?
Cai Hong: Listening is the first step, and listening to persuasion is to let you understand what consumers want to express. Of course, users will give you a lot of suggestions, such as packaging details, product specification suggestions. But in my opinion, for enterprises, first of all, not all the content that is "listened" to must be feedback; Secondly, we must learn to judge and dig out the real needs behind it.
For example, the user wants you to adjust the packaging on the surface, but the essence behind it is to solve the problem of the scene, not to treat headaches and foot pains, but to look at the problem systematically.
So, how do you really solve the problem? Still take the category of "Oriental Cheese" as an example. Why can we continue to move forward after proposing a new category? Because it can expand the scene of this product and this brand, it can solve the problem that young people don't like to eat fermented bean curd, solve the problem of low frequency of this product scene, and solve the problem of low penetration rate of this category.
To sum up, two points are very important, first, the surface is insight, but behind it is to find the most important and common needs and problems of consumers. Secondly, according to the company's own strategy, select a means that can not only solve consumers, but also help enterprises solve business problems, and then amplify.
Dong Haoyu: To understand, first dig out the real needs behind it, and then find the best business solution. What about Daisy Total? Meltwater also has a lot of practical experience in social media listening and user insights. With so much data, how can it help companies distinguish between valid information? And how can brands avoid misreading or misinterpreting some invalid information from consumers?
Daisy Sun: I agree with Mr. Cai that not all the insights you hear should take action.
As a service provider, of course, we have the ability to help enterprises with insights, but for enterprises, the more critical thing is that after the insight, or after taking action, such as after the product is launched or some marketing communication behaviors, will it hit a wall? How to avoid hitting a wall? We can establish a set of standards for measurement and evaluation for enterprises.
For example, the behavior of product newness can be used to focus on defining and gaining insight into a group of people with some traditional models. But the point is, we need to focus on three things: Who do we reach? After reaching it, how many people are inspired to buy? And, after being reached, or activated, how many people actually make a purchase? For brands that want to release new products, it is necessary to look at these data more systematically.
When it comes to brand mentality, we have recently been serving a century-old high-end brand. In fact, it already has a strong brand label and user awareness, so what needs to be done is not complicated. The main thing is to use us to gain insight into UGC, see how users perceive and understand the brand on social media, and pay attention to word cloud changes. For example, look at what new keywords are available, and whether some of the keywords that are considered to be the brand's DNA have been strengthened or diluted.
Another measurement method is more suitable for brands that do a single track, but if the brand wants to expand somewhat, it needs to see whether these new brand characteristics or communication content are really recognized by users.
As Mr. Sun Liang said just now, user insight is a systematic concept, and the audience can also be further segmented, not only to "listen" to their needs for taste, but also to "listen" to the needs of channels. In particular, we have served some global brands, different regions, for different user groups, the content that needs to be "listened" is definitely different.
AI or HI？
Dong Haoyu: After talking about so many "human" insights, this year, AI is a hot word, I am personally a pessimistic optimist about artificial intelligence, I believe that the progress of technology can help human beings to complete some things, but in fact, the core still depends on HI, human intelligence, or human opportunities. Specific to the field of consumer insight, I would like to ask you, what do you think is the final proportion of AI artificial intelligence and HI in the dimension of consumer insight? In the end, how much is it for people to judge and make decisions? How much AI is able to do its job?
Sun Liang: My conclusion is more extreme, 99:1. We have all heard the saying since childhood, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% effort", but in fact, without this "1%" inspiration, it will definitely not work.
From the perspective of the practical application of white elephants, some basic work, such as data collection and data presentation, can indeed improve efficiency and is a kind of progress. But if you take into account a series of actions after insight, when there is no AI, enterprises can collect five or six clues to make a simple judgment, which is the norm for most companies. But now that the technical means have gone up, there are many various dimensions such as the complexity of clues and the amount of clues, so the requirements for the people who make judgments and refine next are bound to become very high.
AI has raised the threshold for insight, but the essence of insight is still people, and it is the enterprise itself.
Dong Haoyu: 99% of AI data collection is the core of the judgment of the wisdom of the 1% of human beings. Only 1% of human intelligence can lead to 99% business growth. The same question is given to Mr. Cai Hong, what do you think will be the proportion of AI and human intelligence and the proportion of HI in the future? Or, what is the right ratio?
Cai Hong: My views may not be as extreme as those of Sun Liang, but I also agree with his views on AI and human intelligence.
There is a lot of discussion about this issue in the industry, not only in the research field, but also on the creative side of advertising. For me, AI is more of a tool for me to simplify my work, to collect data, and that's it.
In fact, all the AI research companies, technology partner companies, and advertising agencies in the market can basically talk about it, and our team has basically talked about it, but in the end, it basically can't be implemented, or very little.
The reason for this is that, on the one hand, I have been doing user insight myself for a long time, and on the other hand, when I talked with industry partners, I also found that the most scarce thing in marketing now is insight. Everyone talks about traffic and platforms, but what everyone doesn't know is that the money we "waste" by investing in streams and laying channels is all paying for insights that are not good enough.
I never expected AI, at least for now, I don't see AI being able to give something special, especially, AI it doesn't have temperature, it's a very superficial thing, it can only tell you that there may be a mine in this place, but it can't tell you exactly how many meters this mine is underground. For me, I value the role of people in this, and that's the key to being a good brand.
Dong Haoyu: What about Mr. Daisy? Does the application of AI help in the collection of system data? What do you think about the importance of AI?
Daisy Sun: Our job is to provide systematic solutions for enterprises/brands, and AI can definitely increase efficiency, but AI is not the ultimate decision-making.
The good thing about AI is that it increases efficiency, it has massive data collection, and it can also realize massive data operation. In this process, we can also do some trend research and explore some relatively scientific models. For example, trends in certain categories, or tastes and textures, these can be systematized.
But AI can't provide creativity. For example, in the food and beverage track, we will find that some curious flavors have exploded on social platforms, because it can stimulate content on social media, and the emergence and application of these contents still come from people's creativity.
AI is the tool that can help, but the human is the source of the idea and the decision-maker.