My name is Chen Shi and I will be organizing the Mentorship Program this coming year. For this blog post I’m going to discuss some marketing trends I’ve seen after returning to China for the summer.
Recently I read an article, “The ‘Logic’ Experiment,” which talked about how marketing has changed from time to time. The article said, nowadays the old way of marketing has lost its power. New ways of marketing have generated more publicity and actual benefits. So what is the new way of marketing?
Community marketing is a good example. People who share similar interests can form a community. People who are passionate about “fragmented” and “useless” information can form a community. Once a product has its own community, and the community has enough people, the product can be easily sold. Furthermore, it is faster to sell the products through community than through old way of marketing: advertisement, publicity, discount, etc.
The usual way to create a community is through creating an app and generating followers. There is a company, Logic Show, which relies on its app. The company sends out daily articles about interesting things that are related to what the company is doing. Once the company conducted an experiment on its app that has 200 thousands interested population. The company said that it was going to sell 8000 hard cover books, and those books sold out within an hour. The company did not spend a cent but the effect was so powerful. This is the new way of marketing: connecting people with their interests, passion, etc. and influencing their purchase behavior on a daily base without spending money.
Recently I also noticed that in China, a lot of young people wear New Balance (NB) running shoes. In the past, Chinese people preferred Adidas or Nike. What has changed their purchase preference? What has NB (Boston based company) done so successfully to take away the market share from other brands in China? On my We Chat App, I saw friends sharing NB’s advertisement. It is a very interesting ad for young people, and for Chinese. It is about a young couple’s love story. I thought I had found the answer of why NB is so successful. However, later when I talked about it with other people, I was surprised that they didn’t even know about the advertisement. Their love for NB’s shoes started from the heated Korean drama “Love from Another Planet”. The actor and actress wear NB shoes in the drama. A large population in China has watched the show and they love the story. Some people got so crazy for the show that they started following the fashion presented by the actor and actress. From this story, I learned that the most powerful marketing method might not be the traditional way anymore.
-Chen
