This article explains the marketing business behind City walk .

Visual China.

Text |New marketing.

City Walk's out-of-the-circle first hit the lifeblood of this generation of young people's "relaxation". In the wake of the pandemic, people's lifestyles, needs and expectations are undergoing profound changes, and the pursuit of quality of life and personalized experience is constantly improvingAt the same time, under the pressure of various fast-paced movements, everyone hopes to seek a balance between involution and lying flat against the rebellion of volume culture.

On each Citywalk route, a group of young consumers will spontaneously gather, and this trend of actively choosing to consume offline is a good opportunity for brands to take advantage of the situation.

Secondly, Citywalk has its own theme, and behind it is actually a combination of new retail, catering, leisure and entertainment, which is easy to form a circle of aggregation. For example, in the popular routes, the theme of the route such as humanities and history, food exploration, outdoor cycling, etc., can attract groups with specific attributes. If the citywalk crowd tag can be more segmented, the brand can grasp the characteristics of the target group and carry out marketing activities in a more directional way.

What's more, Citywalk is a natural experiential consumption scene. In some routes that are usually slower paced and focus on immersive experiences, consumers focus on walking and watching the experience, such as buying a cup of coffee when you are thirsty and going to the store to sit in a store when you are tired.

If the city walk is for the purpose of visiting stores, it will make active consumption an inevitable event, which can increase the frequency of ** and experience for brands, especially the brands with chain stores can bring actual economic benefits.

In the face of this year's bullish wave of City Walk, brands with a keen sense of smell have taken advantage of the situation to go through a wave of hot marketing.

For example, Keep launched a citywalk campaign called "Conservation of Calories" in Beijing, linking up with several food chain stores, focusing on "sports are for better eating".During the Hangzhou Asian Games, Yili cooperated with 5 Internet celebrity stores around West Lake to launch the "Fulu Shouxi Cai" check-in activity, and participated in the Asian Games in the way that young people like to check in.

There are sports and food, competitions and games, tension and relaxation, and this "relaxation" experience will be the overall tone of future marketing trends.

City Walk is a form of presentation of brand marketing and the embodiment of comprehensive gameplay, which actually indicates some marketing trends:

Where people go, brands go. City Walk can work, and the essence is the resurgence of offline consumption. Over the past few years, online marketing has been a source of fatigue, with consumers being separated from brands by a layer of window paper, which can only inspire very limited emotions.

But when brands are on the scene, they can interact with consumers to form a new emotional field and create a more authentic perception. At the same time, the intricate gameplay of major e-commerce platforms has made people tired. All these reasons have prompted consumers to want to walk around and experience the real consumption scene.

For brands, trust is a long-term investment, and there are many ways to establish it, through the establishment of offline space is currently a model for many brands to explore and expand, which is more three-dimensional, more direct and more accurate.

We saw that Huaxizi opened the world's first *** West Lake Hidden Garden";Oriental culture fragrance brand Guanxia to Summer has opened spaces with different themes in Beijing, Shanghai and HangzhouSkincare brand Winona also has its first retail boutique. At this stage, the strategic significance of these brands opening offline stores is no longer a simple channel penetration or a number of points, but an innovative combination of brand services and terminal marketing.

from Xiaohongshu ID Guanxia).

Of course, not all types of brands need to have the conditions to develop offline stores, so City Walk inspires brands to achieve offline contact with consumers through some lightweight forms, and convey the brand concept in the form of services.

For service-oriented store retail brands, City Walk actually stimulates brands to create reasons to engage with consumers and increase the frequency of service. For example, outdoor bicycle brands can try to link with urban cycling in Citywalk, so that consumers can not only have a social play experience, but also integrate products and services into it, and directly connect users with brands.

City Walk literally, is to emphasize the interaction between people and the city, people and life, it is born with regional attributes, in fact, it is more like a version of the condensed urban marketing gameplay in the past two years.

In the past, many new tea brands relied on urban marketing to get out of the circle and become the city's business card: Changsha has a pleasant face, Guangxi has a grandma's handicraft, Xi'an has a tea alley, and Shandong has a large cup of tea. There are also brands that expand the market by establishing regional potential energy: for example, Heytea selects popular cities and local cultural and tourism bureaus to launch limited refrigerator magnets, and Lay's launches Lincang, Wuhan, and Xi'an lo-mei limited to create micro-documentaries to show the city's food culture.

The emergence of City Walk is in a more focused way, such as a streamlined route, running through the classic coordinates and scenes of the city, allowing the brand to create a brand symbol in a directional way, and through the interaction between consumers and the city, everyone can have a memory of the brand, so as to strengthen the connection between the brand and the city.

Observing the successful cases of the past year, it is not difficult to find that the marketing method of the brand to realize City Walk is actually to accurately find the commonality, or an intersection point, form a recognizable brand expression, and finally achieve a breakthrough in the scene or crowd. There are a few ways brands can think about it:

The city walk route resources on the market are very extensive, there are 60w+ notes on Xiaohongshu alone, nearly 800 million ** on Douyin, and countless themes of all kinds, among which humanistic nostalgia, natural scenery, historical coordinates, food and beverage, clothing and photography, and outdoor sports are the types with the highest participation.

No matter what kind of citywalk it is, it is actually an interactive way for young people to return to urban life, and it represents the interests of a certain circle, a certain collective emotion or demand, so brands can choose a mature route that meets their own content, tonality, and aesthetics, and take advantage of the marketing.

For example, Xiaomi used the urban humanities theme of City Walk to point the lens of the new 13 Ultra at Chongqing to start the "City Image Slow Travel Program". Users can shoot with 13 ultra street in the three designated locations: Metallurgical Village Vegetable Market, Baixiangju, and Longmenhao Old Street, as well as a photo festival composed of video works taken by different photographers.

*On the Internet) Xiaomi does a good job in that it cleverly combines humanities while promoting products, relaxes to a certain extent, does not over-market, and at the same time raises the brand culture to a certain height. Let people take a city walk while capturing the silhouette that Xiaomi left for the city.

The gameplay in Linlee is more ingenious, combining the three elements of dopamine color matching, hole shoes, and dressing, and combining five dressing and life bloggers to launch the activity of drinking lemon tea and "wearing duck duck cave shoes to city walk".

In this marketing, Linlee Linli has reasonably matched the user's concerns, such as "how to wear" to designate the young people's popular summer popular items hole shoes, "how to shoot" linked KOL bloggers as a reference for street photography, and "Go to ** Shoot" uses Citywalk to allow users to walk around the streets and alleys freely.

When the existing city walk type does not integrate well with the brand, the brand does not have to force it to join. City Walk gives the brand a good idea: to create its own home stadium based on scenes, needs, and emotions, and to create an activity trajectory that has both purpose and entertainment.

The sports brand Keep independently launched the City Walk activity and created three routes starting from the store: Nanchizi Hutong Route, Sanlitun Route, and CBD Route.

*Online) Similarly, the Danish footwear brand ECCO has teamed up with the sports community Co-Fun to make a series of city walks in Shanghai, each time the theme route is different, but it will eventually end with an offline store.

This kind of city walk gameplay organically combines sports, products, and emotions, so that consumers can get in touch with products in an interesting way during the experience, be familiar with the brand concept, and achieve silky communication with the brand.

City Walk also has a popular route based on blocks and categories. This kind of route basically covers the same category or similar categories at one time, and focuses on satisfying the consumer's experience at one time.

For example, the classic city walk route of Wukang Road summarized by Shanghai blogger A Jun, one of which is along Anfu Road and Wukang Road, with one-stop check-in of 8 coffees, 4 desserts, and 6 specialty shops, providing one-stop coverage of delicious, delicious and fun.

From the point of view of operability, this method has natural resource soil, and basically every city has some areas where brands gather. Beijing's Dongsi Hutong, Nanluoguxiang, and 798 Art District are home to a number of coffee and dessert shops, and Chongqing's Ziwei Road, known as Little Bangkok, brings together bars of various styles, full of exotic styles...

These resources inspire brands to co-design route content through collaboration, and promote it through influencers and bloggers to attract consumers to experience the check-in. From the perspective of marketing logic, the essence is to find a partner, or launch a cross-border co-branded activity to hit the interest group, so as to achieve a breakthrough and in-depth interaction with the crowd.

Brands can find allies from themselves, such as the women's sex toy brand BEU in 520, which boldly created a route in this way, and joined hands with six different store spaces in Shanghai, such as Shanghai Common Daily Coffee, Puff Cloud Bookstore, and Pearlona Common Room, to make a City Walk with the theme of "love".

For example, the "Jinan Trend Coffee Map" is an activity initiated by 12 high-quality brands and a number of local event organizers, which has become the focus of attention of coffee enthusiasts, and has also made "the citywalk route more suitable for Jinan's human physique" a topic of relish.

The city is a big stage, full of unknowns and surprises, humanity and fireworks, and young people are accelerating their return to urban life in various ways. Thinking about the above cases and methods, we can draw a distinct conclusion——There are only thousands of ways for brands to enter the life scene of consumers.

Citywalk is just a microcosm of how to play, and it actually reflects the marketing trend of brands to put into life and be close to the crowd.

More figuratively, consumers' emotions originate from life. The brand is not to create a new emotion, but the emotion itself exists in everyone's life, but it needs to be triggered through some scenes.

Consumers' sense of relaxation comes from life. A good brand doesn't need to sell too much to consumers, just let them try it in the way they like, and they will naturally have the answer.

Consumers' desires are born out of life. In the final analysis, the brand is always in the business of people, not completely serving the platform, capital, dividends, and trends, and the real needs of the most users are displayed in the life scene.

When the brand really enters life, thinks about what users think, and looks at what users need, can the gameplay be effective enough, the emotions are accurate enough, and the communication is in-depth enough, so that the brand is real enough.