In November 2013, a word began to appear in Xiaohongshu's notes and comments section - "planting grass".
At this time, Xiaohongshu just had a name: from an outbound shopping strategy to a Xiaohongshu shopping note, it had a little bit of a community.
In terms of content, Xiaohongshu at that time focused on overseas shopping and sharing, and bloggers recommended good things to each other. When you see something good to share, people who are moved will knock out "grass grows" and "grass is planted" in the comment area.
In the year when Xiaohongshu was born, the Internet was surging, with vertical content communities welcoming spring on one side and e-commerce platforms also reaching the harvest season on the other.
This year, Autohome has just been listed on the U.S. stock market, relying on 6 million registered users to create a market value of nearly 10 billion US dollars, about 1 3 of JD.com in the same period.
The reason why the capital market gave Autohome extremely high expectations at that time is not complicated. The value of Autohome lies not only in the vertical community, but also in its ability to help users make shopping decisions.
Qin Zhi, CEO of Autohome, once said: "China's people under the age of 40 are the main body of buying new cars, and they are also the main body of Internet users, which means that the path of their car purchase decision starts from the Internet first, studying data parameters, reading post comments, and looking for 4S stores***1] - this is the decision-making characteristics of car buyers in the social ** era.
At that time, forums and communities on the Internet were natural fertile ground for discussion. They gather a group of users with the same interests, and naturally become a must for related brand advertising.
In 2013, Ali took a stake in Weibo, and Weibo, which has 500 million users, began to do social marketing, no longer a single "sell brand advertising + sell traffic", but maximize the value of individual accounts with content.
In this context, the first generation of "Internet celebrities" came into being. Zhang Dayi, Sydney, and Zhang Mofan accumulated fans on Weibo and opened stores to sell goods, which once supported half of the world's salesDuring the 2014 Double 11 period, among the top 10 stores in terms of sales, Internet celebrity stores accounted for 70%.
Zhang Dayi's casual life photos have been hotly discussed by fans, and while the dressing style has become a popular vane, the industrial chain hidden behind it has also begun to change to the pre-sale system and the mode of small orders and quick returns.
The rise of this new type of business model has brought new ways to play and increment to Internet advertising—it was possible to plant grass on social platforms and then pull weeds in online storesIt turns out that in addition to shouting slogans, brands also need to operate themselves as a "person".
The value of content to business has begun to be revalued, and grass planting has begun to influence the marketing model of the entire Internet more broadly.
Ten years of grass planting. In 2015, Tmall proposed to do brand e-commerce, and one of the important tasks is to change the advertising model.
To this end, Tmall has set up a content marketing team to directly connect with the marketing department of the social platform for all marketing planning work. In the year since, 95% of Tmall's marketing spend has been related to content[2].
Before that, the advertising and marketing of e-commerce was almost equal to an offline outdoor advertising brand + supermarket channel shelf fee, earning take rate while hard implanting advertising, the posture is very hard, and the effect is of course very direct.
As the penetration rate of content communities continues to deepen and become a part of young people's daily lives, brands are gradually changing from a feeling to an urgent need for a change - brands need to plant grass in the content community in addition to shouting slogans.
In 2016, at the annual seller conference of **.com.cn, three directions for the future were clarified: community, content and local life. For merchants, one of the most important changes is that they need to plant grass to netizens through the content from operating products to operating content.
At a time when the term "planting grass" was far less popular than it is today, some people had already tapped into its great value.
Among the domestic mobile phone brands, Xiaomi is the first to choose to bypass the offline dealer network and sell mobile phones directly online. And the way it sold mobile phones back then looks quite unpretentious today: doing social ** marketing on its own.
Specifically, it first completed the initial accumulation of "rice noodles" in the Xiaomi community, and then extended its position to Weibo, WeChat, Know, QQ space, etc. This practice was so new at the time that it was even considered a form of "zero-fee marketing" – no payment was made to other ** or advertisers.
Later, in a conversation with a friend, Lei Jun drew a picture to explain the real secret of Xiaomi's take-off:
In his opinion, Xiaomi is based on word-of-mouth. It is necessary to treat users as friends and let users participate in order to form word of mouth.
This idea has a similar logic to the "product planting" proposed by Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng later: product planting is a process of communicating the value of the product through word-of-mouth.
At the beginning of 2018, planting grass began to break through the circle of fashion shopping circles, and at the beginning of this year, almost all the reports of ** will be popular science**, why is grass popular?This momentum continued into 2019, when grass planting became even more popular, and was even considered one of the hot words of the year.
As grass planting has increasingly become a prominent learning in the industry, major Internet companies have gone down and want to make a product with the ability to grow grass
In 2016, NetEase launched NetEase Aesthetics, a skincare and beauty community app with the slogan "Discover the beauty that suits you", focusing on discovery and sharingIn 2018, ByteDance successively incubated grass-like products "Puff Community" and "New Grass", and in the same year, Kuaishou also tested the waters of a "Doutian Community" that is very similar to Xiaohongshu. In 2020, the main product will be upgraded and the grass content component "Shopping" will be released.
One of the differentiated advantages of Xiaohongshu is that it has a group of users who pursue high-quality life, middle to high consumption power, and love shopping and sharing at the beginning of its establishment.
As a community that "grows grasslands", some brands describe the special features of Xiaohongshu as follows: In Xiaohongshu, everyone loves to discuss buying, buying, buying, and some categories may have twice the search volume on Xiaohongshu on e-commerce platformsOn other platforms, discussing 'buying' is actually a nuisance to users [7].
In November 2020, Kantar, a consulting firm, released a research report on global media channel changes, which showed that because KOL marketing content is particularly popular with consumers in the Chinese market, the advertising value of Xiaohongshu, a content farming community, ranks first in the evaluation, and Xiaohongshu is tied with Tmall as the digital media platform with the highest advertising value in the Chinese market.
At this time, Xiaohongshu, as well as the massive grass content in the community, became a recognized gold mine in the industry.
Why Little Red Book.
In 2021, Xiaohongshu conducted a survey and selected 3,800 Xiaohongshu users to understand the priorities that affect young people's shopping decisions. The results found that the product quality ranked first, followed by cost performance and brand.
In the past, the supply of brands was scarce, and the supply of content was limited. In this case, the path of building a brand is about the same as playing brand advertising and shouting slogans on CCTV, and then laying out channels to deliver products to consumers at their fingertips. Some of the brands we are familiar with, such as Mengniu, Yili, Moutai, Midea, Procter & Gamble, etc., have taken turns to be CCTV standard kings.
Nowadays, China's developed first-class chain system and the low entrepreneurial threshold brought by e-commerce have jointly created a new era of brand gushing out.
Competition in the same track is getting more and more crowded. Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng mentioned in a speech that there are more than 11,000 brands competing on Xiaohongshu for facial essence alone, more than 1,400 dairy beverage brands, and more than 300 baby bottle brands.
The endless emergence of new products is subverting the traditional brand competition pattern. Old brands certainly have a first-mover advantage, but new brands still have a chance to break through. Because consumers are ordering for the product, not just by the brand. Because of this, a number of new brands can emerge by relying on the explosive product strategy.
With the further segmentation of categories, it is difficult for traditional brand marketing strategies to highlight the selling points of a single product, and the disadvantages begin to appear. A new, product-based marketing model is about to emerge, and at this time there is a new question in front of Xiaohongshu:
"Planting grass" is undoubtedly the most suitable mode to explain the product thoroughly, but what kind of posture should the brand use to "plant grass" in Xiaohongshu?
Before 2020, most of the content on Xiaohongshu was contacted by KOLs themselves, and the most famous case is Perfect Diary and its 15,000 KOL notes.
Later, with the breakthrough of a number of new brands such as Perfect Diary, Xiaohongshu's grass-planting characteristics were highlighted, attracting countless new and old brands, MCNs, and bloggers to come to dig gold.
Xiaohongshu gradually realized that in the early days, Xiaohongshu's advertising could no longer meet the growing needs of brands.
At the beginning of 2019, Xiaohongshu officially launched the Xiaohongshu brand partner platform, providing an entrance to the triple identity of the brand, the content cooperation agency (MCN) and the blogger.
In 2022, Xiaohongshu has successively launched the commercial data platform "Lingxi" and the "one-stop advertising platform" Spotlight, trying to make the matter of planting grass more certain.
Take the recently popular jackets as an example, whether it is high-end Archaeopteryx, Kellerstone, as well as affordable camels and Decathlon, these brands have grown by "planting grass" on Xiaohongshu.
80% of Archaeopteryx's bird fans do not climb mountains, but it does not prevent it from planting grass through scene dressing, becoming a "middle-class three treasures" for both men and women;A 99 yuan popular outdoor culottes made Decathlon soar from a straight man's paradise to the OOTD of Xiaohongshu girls, and won the first place in the Xiaohongshu sports and fitness industry volume list that year[3];;
Camel, a previously low-key domestic brand, sold well this year while raising prices, not only surpassing the old overlord The Northface, but also successfully achieving "more camels on the streets of the south than in the desert".
As the soul item of "mountain wear", the jacket is the new Internet traffic password. And on the way to break the circle of this super item, Xiaohongshu plays a vital role.
As early as the beginning of 2021, some Xiaohongshu users began to take the initiative to go camping, and this trend was quickly captured by the Xiaohongshu community, who decided to do the category of "camping". A year later, public camping became a trend, driving the surge in tents, camping chairs and other related categories.
After the camping craze, frisbee, cycling, and citywalk took over the outdoor craze of Xiaohongshu, and "outdoor" gradually evolved from a niche trend on Xiaohongshu to a national carnival. The new trends in these communities have further enriched the soil for Xiaohongshu to "grow grass".
Today, on Xiaohongshu, the content related to "jacket" has been read and clicked more than 3.5 billion times, and the number of notes is as high as 1.53 million. Three years ago, it was still a disgusted earthy outfit, but now it has become a popular item of "one for everyone".
The road to popularity of the jacket is the specific process of Xiaohongshu planting grass and planting a grassland.
The core of grass planting is people.
The Xiaohongshu community is characterized by a large number of super consumers, whose opinions on life can often give birth to new trends. Therefore, how to mobilize consumers to the greatest extent and let them deeply participate in product planting is the most valuable and relatively difficult part of Xiaohongshu's grass planting.
To this end, Xiaohongshu proposed a "crowd anti-funnel" model for product planting. It is different from the traffic funnel conversion logic of covering a large area first and then accurately breaking it, it is completely reversed - starting with a small number of core consumers, and then using word-of-mouth to expand the circle.
In this way, not only can the brand potential energy continue to be released with the help of natural word-of-mouth diffusion, but the product can also be quickly verified at an early stage, with stronger certainty.
Taking Casarte water heater as an example, a Casarte product is rich in "strontium elements", Xiaohongshu has insight into the maternal and infant population, the skin beautifying population, and the exquisite middle-class population have requirements for bathing water quality, so Xiaohongshu gave the product a nickname called "Little Private Soup", so that the water heater has changed from a low-frequency exchange, a cold small transparent tool hanging outside the bathroom, to a high-frequency association, The steaming whitening artifact has driven the search ranking of the Casarte brand in Xiaohongshu to rise from ninth to first, and the search volume of the product on the e-commerce platform has increased by 415%, with an ROI of more than 9.
Zhiheng said in the interview that through the anti-funnel model, Xiaohongshu can even have a deeper understanding of the track where the brand is located, and can capture the growth trend of the track and the changes in user needs more quickly.
Xiaohongshu, for example, sensed the popularity of perfume as early as two and a half years ago. Today, perfume has become the target of investment by beauty groups, and it is also the guest of major shopping malls vying to settle in.
With the continuous evolution of commercialization capabilities, the path of product planting in Xiaohongshu is becoming clearer and clearer: one is to help good products that have been formed stand up;The other is to help products that have not yet been formed to iterate into good products.
Judging from the results, brands in different life cycles in various fields can grow a grassland on Xiaohongshu.
Bebebus, a new brand of baby strollers, integrates "mothers' words" into product design, and ranks TOP1 in e-commerce sales of "four-wheeled strollers" in 7 days after it was launchedTaking advantage of the "dopamine dressing" trend that is gaining momentum on Xiaohongshu, Bosideng has launched a series of sunscreen clothing items.
XGIMI clarified the product positioning of home projectors through Xiaohongshu"Light and thin performance",The search index has increased by 9 times compared with before the cooperation;Longines Watch and Xiaohongshu created a marketing method of "Spring Travel x Multiple Styles", and in the month of the event, more than 3 new notes were added to the "Longines Heart Moon Series" watch50 thousand.
Within the commercialization of Xiaohongshu, there is gradually such a consensus: "one insight can live a product, and three insights can live a brand".
According to internal data, 90% of Xiaohongshu's community content comes from ordinary users, and these non-institutional expressions from users can be mined and refined into consumer insights by XiaohongshuAt the same time, 70% of monthly active users are searching, and these actions further refine Xiaohongshu's observation of users.
It seems that Xiaohongshu's "crowd anti-funnel" model is counter-intuitive. It requires a lot of complex work in the early stage, and it relies heavily on "human understanding", while the vast majority of Internet content platforms rely on algorithms to operate, diluting the role of "people". Little Red Book is somewhat of the opposite.
But why, it is precisely the "irrational" Xiaohongshu that has repeatedly created a miracle of small and big in marketing transformation?
The grass planting genes of the Xiaohongshu community are a prerequisite for transformation.
Buying a car, buying a house, decorating, mother and child, etc., these "can't post the Moments series" are the main content on Xiaohongshu, which has subtly planted seeds in the hearts of users and brought a lot of conversions to related brands. For example, IndigoSocial, which specializes in car marketing, has observed that dealers have reported that the customer turnover rate brought by Xiaohongshu is very high.
Hu Yi, a senior partner at IndigoSocial, concludes that "Xiaohongshu is the best source of consumer decision-making"[4]. It is like a circle of friends who have been de-acquainted, and some users will spontaneously share their car experience and pick-up notes on Xiaohongshu.
On the basis of massive sincere sharing, the phenomenon of "human-to-human" often spontaneously appears in the Xiaohongshu community, and the trend has been born since. What Xiaohongshu does is to "loosen the soil and water it" to help the brand take advantage of the trend.
Proya is a typical example of relying on product planting to achieve both revenue and word of mouth.
In 2020, Proya gained insight into the skin care needs of young people for anti-aging, anti-sugar, and anti-oxidation, combined with the data on the Xiaohongshu platform, foresaw the "morning C and evening A" skin care trend, and carried out a large-scale combination of double antibodies and ruby essence.
Relying on the crowd anti-funnel model, Xiaohongshu and Proya have completed the comprehensive diffusion of "brand old fans, brand newcomers, antioxidant people, and skin care ** people", and the number of brand interest groups has increased by 369%. On this year's Double 11, Proya ranked first in the GMV of multi-platform beauty categories such as Tmall and Douyin.
If you summarize the secret of Xiaohongshu's grass planting, it is - let people communicate directly with people. Let users help the product speak, and also help more users make purchasing decisions. Treat people as people, not as an account.
This is because grass planting is based on people-to-people interaction, and the community that gathers people's needs and expressions for daily life is the best soil for grass planting. When the people in the community are clearly separated by their needs, it is possible to plant grass in the needs of users.
In Xiaohongshu, grass planting can happen naturally between people. Here, the real needs of "people" can be captured, seen, and amplified.
End. At the beginning of 2023, Zhiheng mentioned in her speech that she has seen a phenomenon that many companies have begun to separate their product planting budgets into a special budget.
According to the traditional marketing method, the budget of the brand can be mainly divided into two categories: brand marketing (branding) and e-commerce marketing (EC), through brand advertising to build awareness and consumer awareness, and then through e-commerce marketing to complete sales conversion.
Planting grass often has both effects, and brands also "metaphysically" believe that there is an effect, but it is not easy to say how it is presented in numbers. If you want to get more space, you need to prove yourself.
At the Will Business Conference held on December 22, how to make Xiaohongshu grass planting and transformation more efficient and certain has become an important proposition in the speech of the bagpipes, vice president of Xiaohongshu's technology.
The bagpipes' proposal speech showed that Xiaohongshu was "determined to create an open and connected commercial product", and in this concept, it launched the "Grass and Grass Alliance" and three product solutions at the same time.
The core of the solution is that through the form of data alliances, the grass planting data on Xiaohongshu and the transaction data on various platforms can be jointly analyzed, so that brands and merchants can measure and attribute these data after "Xiaohongshu planting grass and global transformation", which can not only measure the effect of grass planting, but also know how to optimize.
At the same time, Xiaohongshu has also opened up search, so that users can directly convert through the links in search ads after being planted.
In a recent report released by Kotler Consulting and Xiaohongshu, "grass planting" is defined as the "third marketing paradigm".
According to Philip Kotler, marketing is entering a new era: consumers' access to information, purchase channels and needs are becoming highly diverse. In this case, brands must use a person-to-person approach to design marketing strategies that are more human, emotional, and contextual.
In the past decade, Internet marketing has ebbed and flowed. The plot of Xiaohongshu has the answer buried at the beginning of the story: the word "planting grass" was accidentally born in a shopping and sharing community, where "good things" are a medium that allows people to find people and continue to influence people.
Back to the beginning of the story. Xiaohongshu grows grass, and "planting grass" also makes Xiaohongshu. In the ten years since the birth of Xiaohongshu, "planting grass" has gone beyond the scope of a community and has profoundly and extensively influenced the wave of Internet marketing.
Resources. 1] Autohome: The Business of the Vertical Portal, The Economic Observer.
2] Weibo commercialization for eight years, across the hills, bullet finance.
3] How do brands and MCNs "grow grass"?Let's talk about the next step in the commercialization of Xiaohongshu.
3] From straight men's paradise to girls' OOTD, how did Decathlon make a hit on Xiaohongshu?Knife Research Institute.
Author: Dai Boss Hu Xiaoqi.
Editor: Boss Dai.
Visual Design: Shu Rui.
Editor in charge: Li Motian.