Brand Socializition Opportunities Brought by Digital ——Sure Liu, General Manager, Social Touch KA Division

1. Brand Socializition Opportunities Brought by Digital
——Sure Liu, General Manager, Social Touch KA Division
Today, I would like to discuss socialization opportunities for brands in the digital age
with you.
In the era, the consumer groups reject the entire commercial trend and information. I
am a pessimistic advertiser because I’ve found a particularly terrible fact that in the
past, people spent money to buy information, buy magazines and order some
charged TV programs. But later on, with the increasing number of information,
people began to spend money on RSS softwares and some subscription platforms to
select information. As a cell phone addict, I often download a kind of software and
buy things from it, and this is what I would like to discuss with you today. Nowadays,

2. people will spend money to shield advertisements within an APP and they even spend
hundreds of yuan to buy the membership of a video platform only to skip all the
advertising links. People spend money to resist all the commercial information
because the Internet has broken all the barriers for consumers to obtain information.
Nowadays, when people would like to know about a brand or product, they would
just search it from Baidu so that they can get the desired information in the shortest
time. In short, today’s customers are more willing to believe the unofficial voices not
spoken by the brand because they think all the commercial information are filled with
a variety of excessive packaging.
A lot of our customers ask me why people seldom interact on the brand’s official
microblog and WeChat account. Is it because they do not like me and no one would
read what I write on the official account? Actually, it is also a headache for me that
there are very few actual interaction data and I have also talked about this with many
people around. A student majoring in Sociology told me that he found that nowadays,
the brands and customers were not in the same social ecology. To put it simple,
nowadays, there is social and class contradiction between brands and customers.
Then, why is there such a class contradiction? I think we can look far into the future.
Let’s take an example of marketing: a person walked to the door of someone else
and knocked on the door, asking whether he could come in to have a cup of water
because it was too hot. The house owner was very friendly. He invited the man to

3. come in and gave him a cup of water. After coming in, the man said it was a nice
house but too hot, and then asked whether the house owner had ever heard of air
conditioning. Finally, he sold air conditioning to the house owner. This is the earliest
marketing model, and at that time, there was no media. Later on, the so-called
advertising golden age and GDT appeared. I remember that in the Mad Men, the
protagonist would like to sell the TV ads to Party A, saying that TV was just like a
salesperson always at customers’ living room. Therefore, since then, great changes
have taken place in the way consumers obtain information. It can be seen from the
left side of the figure that the traditional media age was dominated by TV, radios,
magazines and newspapers, and at that time, both brands and media were high
above and customers could only listen to whatever they said.
Later on, with the emergence of the Internet, people’s feedback on information has
changed. In the past, customers could only watch TV and read newspapers and

4. magazines, but nowadays, customers not only can read your information, but are also
willing to propose their own opinions and they can become the master of their
beloved brands. Two years ago, I read the book “The End of Power”, which talked
about why power is gradually released to the bottom level from the perspectives of
brand, media and society. The author sums up three reasons: revolution of quantity,
revolution of migration and revolution of mentality. There are more people and more
exchanges, so people are unwilling to be obedient. Today’s technological innovation
also makes this effect even stronger because people now have more discussions and
can obtain information more easily, so they are unwilling to hear the official voice. I
think this explains why customers are not interested in us because there are class
contradictions between customers and us. As there are more and more customers,
they become communicative and rational. At this time, all the customer groups are
united and they do not want to listen to us.
We are now in an Internet era flooded with numbers, and then what is a brand’s
social role? I would first share a blind spot with you, that is, data have been there
before the emergence of the Internet. For example, all your friends’ names, age,
gender and favorite food as well as your family members’ hobbies and jobs are data.
However, before the emergence of the Internet and these innovative technologies,
everyone only remembered these data around them. In this case, brands could not
become friends with customers because there was no way to obtain data of those

5. strangers. But nowadays, we can not only get these data, but more importantly, we
can also use these data. We can see what these data can bring to us and these data
are the personality tag for each customer and their preferences. Therefore, I think if
today’s brands still use these previous methods to make hotspot news or
advertisements, it is still called advertising instead of socialization.
The key to the entire brand socialization is that brands and consumers can
communicate with each other on the same platform. Therefore, I think 80% of
today’s social transmission is paranoid. Whether it is the H5 flooding the entire
screen, or some particularly interesting WeChat scripts or the surprising
advertisements released on some social media platforms, they are not real
socialization, but the real brand socialization and social attributes of brands are
determined through communication between brands and customers.
Then, what kind of brands can communicate with consumers? In my opinion, there
are three points. The first point is that we need to change our consciousness. First, do
not cheer up customers. I have contacted a lot of brand owners and more than 80%
brand decision makers have told me that they would make their brands to be the
biggest strongest one, but what customers care about is whether the products are
delicious, healthy and convenient or are there any innovation that can appeal to them.
The second point is that we should also change our attitudes. I think nowadays, the

6. brands are in a socialized environment. Under the whole big Internet social
background, we need to be clearly aware of our selves instead of taking whatever we
think as granted. Customers have clear minds and are rational, so they can see
through those fake words at the first glance. Why is there a war of words between
customers and brands? The major reason is that brand owners think that customers
can accept the brand only when there are high-end, magnificent and classy
advertisements, but I think this is not feasible.
The third point is that good products can speak for themselves. Our understanding of
products in the traditional sense is very narrow that products are those taken from
the shelves. Customers have very small decision-making right in products that during
the entire process from production to promotion, channels, after-sales services and
the second purchase, customers are passive. However, the emergence of the Internet
actually promotes technological innovation in a sense. In recent years, the word
Industry 4.0 is very popular. It tells us that our final state is that products can be
customized according to every customer’s demands. This means that in the near
future, customers can even select the products’ physical properties through the
Internet technology and data. At present, customers may have not reached this level,
but the entire technologies and Internet have already turned customers’ previous
decision-making right from a physical product to a linear product that one day in the
future, this physical property can be defined. But nowadays, in the entire process from

7. communicating with customers, selecting channels, purchasing the products to
after-sales services and the second purchase, customers are more willing to get
involved in talking about and discussing the brands in the forum. There are some
examples, such as the character-spelling bottles of Wei-chuan. These brands give the
power to customers, making customers decide part of the products and promotion,
what to say today and the brand contents.
From another perspective, the power which we thought belonged to the brands has
already become customers’ demands for products through data and technologies.
In the past, we had the final say, but nowadays, customers want to have the final say. I
think in this era, products are no longer hardware or what can be taken from the
shelves, but nowadays, products have become a kind of service and experience. I
think that nowadays, products are no longer faced with customers, but they have to
face brand users every day. What is the biggest difference between customers and
users? I’ll give you an example. Customers are engaged in the “once-for-all” deal,
which means if they want to buy a bottle of milk, they go downstairs to buy the milk
and drink it. And that’s all for the deal. If they want to drink the milk again, they need
to go through the product usage process again, and such customer is a brand
customer. If the milk tastes good that I order the milk for one year or one month, and
then the milk is delivered to me every day. At this time, in the decision-making
process, customers are concerned about not only the appearance of milk bottle, price

8. and the quantity of nutrition, but they are more concerned about whether the milk
can be delivered to the designated place timely, whether the delivery time can be
changed according to their own demands, whether better after-sales services can be
provided and whether there are better choices when ordering the milk again. With
one month and even one year after a customer orders a product, the customer
becomes the brand user. If you have a brand, we would like to turn more customers
into your users. Then, digital marketing can get through the whole line in the
brand’s entire socialized structure and communicate with consumers.
At present, most brands are at the stage between users and customers, and many
users or customers have their own favorite brands, but a loyal purchase has not been
reached and users do not have the subscription habit, why? I think that our entire
experience and service are not smooth in this process, the connection between
customers to obtain information and your established communication platform is not
perfect. Consequently, although a large number love the brand, they cannot become
users.
What is corporate value? Corporate value is formed by multiplying the value of a
single product by the sales volume. But in Internet companies or new enterprises,
corporate value is formed by multiplying the value of your users by the number of
your users. Therefore, for today’s Internet companies or these brands, user value is

9. the most important. After all, it is a very long process to purchase our products, and
this process involves not only a certain product of the company, but customers can
also experience our entire services and system.
In an ideal marketing status, different people have different cases. In fact, everyone
has their own social habit, which is their label. I think that we need to discuss the key
of user-core concept is how to communicate with different people in different
environments. And I think dialogue is also a broad concept. Today’s dialogue is not
just that I send a message to you, and you reply a message to me, but it refers to that
after I sent you a message, how much time you spend to read it, how many people
you forward it to and whether you get involved in the interaction. All these are users’
feedback to you and users’ dialogue with the brand. During this process, the
distance between the brand and brand users becomes very short.

10. Actually, it is already hard to touch customers and I think the reason is very much like
that of the Spring Festival Gala. A few years ago, we all said that the Spring Festival
Gala was very interesting, but in recent years, everyone is complaining that the Spring
Festival Gala is boring because through the Internet, everyone can get to know
what’s funny in the Spring Festival Gala, and we can see all the things from all
around the world that will be shown at the Spring Festival Gala in advance and these
things may even not been seen by artists. Therefore, when the real Spring Festival
Gala comes, we all think it is boring. Nowadays, it is more than ten thousand times
harder than before to let customers notice you in something, but still many people
say that there are still many phenomenal H5 and articles that have been frequently
forwarded. I suggest you do a small test. Last year, I asked some friends who were not
engaged in marketing whether they knew Tencent’s cooperative H5 with the
Forbidden City. Eight out of them said that they did not know. And I also asked them
whether they had heard about the frequently forwarded H5 about WU Yifan, but they
all said that they did not know, which surprised me because this was sensational
among my friends, but why did they do not know it? I believe that although today’s
Internet seems to be an open platform for communication with infinite possibility, we
still live in our own close-loop world, in which we communicate with friends, see what
we like and own our own social circle. Therefore, if we regard ourselves as customers,
whether we should ask ourselves which brand we can become friends with? If I have a
brand, what exactly the means and methods can I take to reach to my customers?

11. In today’s era, if we would like to establish a longer-term relationship between our
brand and customers, provide linear products and integrate all our communications
and products, we should first create our own brand like a product manager to make
every customer become our users.
Finally, brand socialization is to let our customers, users and brands enter a similar
social ecology through data and technologies to a large extent so that we can have
better exchanges. I also believe that in this group, each brand can better explore its
user value.