Listening notes: Are your products tools, toys or props?

If you want to be better, you can rely on technology to lead. But every step of technological breakthrough involves high investment and high risk, and it is very difficult to gain long-term competitive advantage by relying on technology. Usually only large companies with huge investment in technology research and development can do it.

For other small and medium-sized enterprises, a more efficient way to gain an advantage in the competition may be to become "different", that is, to realize the differentiation of their own products. And how to achieve differentiation? The secret that this book provides us is entertainment, that is, to give entertainment to things that were not originally entertaining.

The word "entertainment" here is simply to let people get a happy experience or psychological and spiritual satisfaction from your products or services. For example, the most typical entertainment products, games and movies have no practical value in essence, but they can often be sold as explosions. The reason behind this is that games can provide us with happy experiences, and movies can provide us with psychological or spiritual satisfaction.

The essence of entertaining thinking is to meet people's demand for "entertainment", that is, the so-called "entertainment demand". For example, a long time ago, we remembered to remove raccoon noodles to collect hero cards, and another example was the POP MART doll blind box that was very popular in recent two years, as well as various service details of Haidilao. In fact, they are all meeting people's entertainment needs.

Contrary to entertainment demand, it is practical demand, that is, people's demand for some real material attribute or use function. For example, you need a rice cooker, which is the actual demand; You finally chose a rice cooker with bear ears on the lid. It's time for Lori's voice prompt. The key role is entertainment demand.

This book points out that behind all people's consumption decisions are the functions of practical needs and entertainment needs. At the moment when all kinds of products and services are extremely rich and the competition is extremely fierce, our actual needs have been basically met by the majority of businesses, but in contrast, the satisfaction of entertainment needs is even scarcer. Therefore, this book suggests that in the future, the key to business competition is to see who can better play entertainment thinking and meet the "entertainment needs" of users.

The author of this book is Bo Ming, a cross-border media person. Worked in Southern Metropolis Daily 10 for many years, and served as the editor-in-chief and editor-in-chief of the entertainment news department. Participated in the marketing planning of many film and television works, and served as the chief marketing consultant of the Chinese versions of famous musicals "Cat" and "Mamma Mia". He published a best-selling book "All Marketing is Entertainment Marketing" on 20 16, which is regarded as the application of entertainment thinking in the marketing field. The new book published in 20021that we are going to talk about today further expands the entertainment thinking to more business dimensions, and shows us a set of practical guidelines for "entertainment thinking" that can be fully applied to product research and development, marketing and enterprise management with a large number of vivid cases, and systematically explains the logic behind this guide from the perspective of entertainment demand, aiming at helping enterprises to quickly enhance their brand competitiveness in a homogeneous and competitive market environment.

In today's reading, I will focus on two routes and tell you how to use entertaining thinking in business competition. The first route is how to inject entertainment into the product; The second route is how to inject entertainment into marketing. Having said that, let's finally look at the underlying logic of entertaining thinking.

first part

First, let's talk about how to inject entertainment into the product.

The author puts forward an interesting "product evolution theory" in the book, which mainly says that products need to evolve, and its evolution is divided into three stages, namely tools, toys and props.

The author thinks that the initial form of product is tool form. The products at this stage are born to help users solve specific problems, so they mainly meet the practical needs of users, regardless of their entertainment needs. For example, the laundry detergent for our daily necessities, its main function is to meet people's needs for washing clothes. On this basis, many laundry detergents also add color fixing function, softening function and so on to solve the problems of fading and hardening in the process of washing clothes, but in the final analysis, they are still meeting practical needs.

After the tool form, the second stage of product evolution is the toy form. At this time, on the basis of tool attributes, the product began to have some entertainment. For example, a box of ordinary chocolate is made into colored peas, a simple hard candy is made into a ring and so on. But the book reminds us that the products in the toy stage must still be practical, or even more practical, and cannot be completely turned into toys. In other words, you can't lose the original flavor of chocolate just because you become a colored pea. Even the ring-shaped hard candy is better than the original hard candy, and so on.

So, how to realize the evolution from tools to toys?

Let's think about it first. Why did you buy a toy? In most cases, there are two reasons, one is fun and the other is beautiful. The author points out that this actually reflects people's entertainment needs at the psychological level, mainly curiosity and aesthetic pursuit.

Knowing this, we can "strike accurately and break them one by one."

First of all, for the entertainment needs of curiosity, the main method we can take is "fun", that is, to inject interest into the product.

How to inject interest into products? One of the key ideas given by the author is to find the common side of a product first, and then try to create a strong contrast.

For example, the ice cream we often eat is basically sweet, such as chocolate, fruit, milk and so on; However, in recent years, some businesses have unconventional, and launched spicy and mustard-flavored ice cream, which immediately became a network celebrity product for young people to punch cards.

Also, our common beer bottles are all green, brown and blue. When we suddenly see a white beer bottle, we will definitely be attracted by it immediately. Actually, there is a Belgian beer called "Pink Elephant". Its bottle is white and its brand logo is pink. This is in sharp contrast with other similar products, which injects interest into the products.

Tell me another more specific example. When it comes to mineral water, we usually think of a plastic bottle with a circle of cellophane bottle stickers on it, and the bottle stickers are printed with art word logo or spokesperson photos. However, a drinking water designed by Nongfu Spring for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou has done the opposite everywhere: first, give up plastic bottles and switch to glass bottles with smooth lines; Secondly, give up the bottle sticker and make patterns directly on the bottle body; The pattern is selected from the typical animals and plants in Changbai Mountain, the water source, with relevant graphics and text descriptions. Each character represents a story. It is these that make this drinking water full of fun and get good comments during the listing period.

Well, what is said above is that we can adopt a "fun" method to meet the entertainment needs of curiosity; Let's talk about one of the main methods we can adopt for people's aesthetic pursuit-"artistry". It means combining product design with various art forms, such as music, dance, painting, drama, film and television, etc.

In the author's opinion, this is the most direct and easy way to gain user's sensory recognition. Because, no matter what art form, satisfying aesthetic pursuit is its most important function.

For example, the very popular "national tide" in recent years is to integrate traditional China art forms such as opera and Chinese painting into clothing and furniture;

In addition, Mr. Liu Run mentioned an art case in his Five Minutes Business School, saying that a jeweler made two rings with the Monkey King's iron hoop and gold hoop in Journey to the West, which meant "I love you for 10,000 years", which made people shine at the moment and caused quite a spread.

There are many such examples. But the author reminds us that artistry has a premise, that is, you must first find your own position and give yourself a theme.

For example, if you want to be a Jianghu-themed restaurant, you can imitate the scenes in the martial arts drama, let the waiter dress up as a costume shop owner, make the menu into a kung fu secret book, and the process of ordering and serving should also be full of Jianghu customs. This is a kind of "artistry" with a distinct theme.

The author also gave an example he saw himself. He has a designer friend named Lian Jun, who once did artistic transformation for a homestay in Zhaoqing, Guangdong. Zhaoqing, called Duanzhou in ancient times, is the birthplace of Duanyan, one of the four famous inkstones in China. This belongs to the local characteristic culture, so Lianjun decided to transform the hotel with this theme.

How to present these inkstones? Many people will put their products directly in the display cabinet. But Lian Jun painted a huge ink painting on the wall of the lobby, named "The inkstone flows far and wide", which is the inkstone of Duanyan. There is an ethereal river in the painting, and there are some inkstones floating on the river, which shows that these inkstones came across the long river of history. The two sides of the painting are not couplets, but two huge writing brushes. Let the pen and inkstone set each other off. After this transformation, the whole hotel immediately became very distinctive and artistic, and many guests would take photos and punch in here.

Well, we talked about the first two stages of product evolution, namely tools and toys. Recall that tools evolved into toys because people further developed their entertainment needs on the basis of practical needs. The entertainment demand here is still psychological, mainly including curiosity and aesthetic pursuit. The author believes that when the psychological entertainment needs are met, people will further have higher spiritual entertainment needs such as emotion, respect and meaning. In order to meet this demand, many products have been upgraded and entered the stage of props.

When it comes to "props", our first reaction should be the items used by film and television characters. Just like the chivalrous man in the martial arts movies, he usually wears a hat on his head and a sword on his waist. Here, hats and swords are props.

The author believes that the criterion to measure whether a prop is useful is whether it can help people quickly identify roles. In other words, let the audience know at a glance whether this person is a knight or a bully, a rich man or a poor man.

Props mentioned in product evolution theory also need to have similar functions. The author points out that people buy "props" mainly to meet their own spiritual entertainment needs, that is, through these props, some emotions, personalities, values and other external manifestations that they agree with are reflected. Corresponding to this, it is a way for us to evolve toys into props, that is, to inject emotion, personality and values into products.

Let's talk about how to inject personality into the product. Mention this, you will definitely think of anthropomorphic product names such as "Miss Zhang Junya" and "Little Tea Classmate". However, the author points out that it is not enough to have a human-like name. You must set a "person" for it, that is, "draw an image" for it. In addition to the basic parameters such as gender, age and identity, the core of this portrait is to endow it with some strong personality labels, such as Kumamon's "stay cute", Xiaoming's "base cute" and Yolk Jun's "lie flat", and so on. The source of these personalized labels is the brand's insight into the target customers.

Ok, let's talk about how to inject emotion into a product or brand. In daily life, you can also notice that many designer brands and luxury brands will amplify their feelings such as investment in products, unremitting pursuit of beauty, and persistence in the concept of customer first.

At the time of writing this manuscript, I also had an exchange with the author Ming Bai. He told me an emotional case that impressed him recently. It is said that there is such a small shop on the street of Yongkang Road in Xuhui District, Shanghai. Its entire facade is just a gray concrete wall with an irregular hole in the middle. You will see a bear's paw sticking out of the hole and handing a cup of coffee to the guests waiting at the hole. After the guests served coffee, the bear paws also sold cute, interacting with people outside the cave, greeting and shaking hands, and all the onlookers took pictures.

This is the "Bear Claw Coffee Shop" that has been popular in Shanghai in recent two years.

You may wonder: this is interesting, but where is the "emotionalization"? It turns out that there are two deaf baristas in this coffee shop. Although they won the grand prize in the coffee brewing competition, it was difficult to find a job before. Several founders of this coffee shop discussed it at that time and came up with a way, that is, directly design the storefront as a hole, so that the deaf-mute barista can interact with the guests through bear claws, and the whole process from ordering to serving coffee is silent. In this way, they can run the cafe without any obstacles.

This interesting and humanized way has attracted countless young people to queue up to punch in, and even CCTV has come to interview and report.

Bear claw coffee not only injects emotion into an enterprise, but also embodies the founder's positive values. There are many more famous enterprises or brands whose values are directly tied to the spiritual label of the founders. For example, "Chu Orange" is called "inspirational orange" because of the story of its founder, Mr. Chu Shijian; Jobs said that Apple not only produces products that make people's lives more effective and enjoyable, but also makes people believe that human passion can make the world a better place, and also gives Apple the spiritual core of "changing the world with innovation".

These values are based on the value principles that can arouse public opinion, but at the same time, they show individual differences because of the different backgrounds of enterprises themselves. The author reminds that for users, the values of products or enterprises should at least be at the same frequency as them, and it is best to have a higher value orientation than them, so as to win their respect.

Well, finally, let's review the product evolution theory put forward by the author: from tools to toys and props, it is an evolutionary process from low to high; Behind this evolutionary process, people's needs are constantly upgrading with the development of social economy, from the initial practical needs to psychological entertainment needs, and then to higher and spiritual entertainment needs; With the continuous upgrading of demand, products also need to evolve.

So, in reality, how do we judge what evolutionary stage our products are in? The author tells us that the key is to make clear the value selling point of your product. If the selling point is its function, then your product is in the tool stage; If the selling point is design or service experience, it is the toy stage; If the selling point is brand, it can be classified as prop stage.

After knowing the stage of your product and what level of user needs you meet, you can better judge the next evolution direction of the product and where the next R&D optimization should go. This is also the main reference significance of product evolution theory for commercial competition.

the second part

Well, we talked about how to inject entertainment into products, and then we talked about how to inject entertainment into marketing.

This book holds that at present, compared with the explosive growth of information resources, people's attention has become a scarce resource, and in the era of scarce attention, we need good content to catch people's attention. This has also become the core focus of marketing work in the information age. And entertaining thinking is a powerful weapon to help us quickly grasp the attention of users in marketing. The author points out that when we use entertainment thinking in marketing, we are actually meeting the entertainment needs of users, making their sensibility break their rationality, thus releasing their desire to buy.

So, how to use entertaining thinking in marketing? Let's look at an example first.

Dove, a personal care brand owned by Unilever, launched an advertisement called "Beautiful Sketch" on 20 13. In this advertisement, Dove invited a famous portrait sketch expert to paint the women who took part in the test. For the same woman, they first asked her to describe herself, and then asked another person to describe her appearance to the experts after seeing her. The expert drew two pictures according to the description.

Later, by comparing the two paintings, people were surprised to find that in the eyes of others, they were more beautiful and confident than they described in their mouths. Many women who participated in the test were deeply moved by this. I put a comparison chart in the manuscript, and you can also click it.

At the end of the advertisement, Dove typed a big word: "You are more beautiful than you think."

The video has been watched more than 6.5438+65 million times on the Internet, and it is also the most shared video in the year. Next, we will take this example as an introduction to talk about the two most effective ways to use entertaining thinking in marketing, namely storytelling and dramatization.

Let's talk about the first one, "telling stories".

The author believes that the reason why we tell stories in marketing is because stories can help people quickly establish their understanding of a product or brand through an entertaining form of expression.

I feel the same way about it. I remember when I was a child, there was an advertisement that was particularly impressive and soft: on a bus, a pair of handsome men and beautiful women passed by, the man's fingertips crossed the woman's hair, and a hairpin slipped down the silky hair, thus opening a wonderful love. Later, Rejoice also made a series of advertisements, all of which talked about the subsequent development of this relationship. The key element is the heroine's supple hair. This is to use the power of the story to implant the selling point of the product into the hearts of the audience.

Many international brands also know story marketing. For example, BMW invited many internationally renowned directors to shoot advertisements for it, including China directors Ang Lee, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. Also, YouTube once launched an advertisement selection, and they asked netizens to choose their favorite advertisements in the past ten years. The top advertisements in this selection all contain a good story without exception.

So, how do we tell a good marketing story?

First of all, we must clarify the protagonist of the story. The author believes that the protagonist of a marketing story can be very diverse. You can tell the story of the boss, employees, suppliers, users or other related people, no problem. But the content of the story must be closely related to your product, and emotional elements that can arouse people's voices should be added to the story, so that it is easier to remember and spread.

For example, the protagonist of Dove advertising story is every potential user; The emotional element is "you are more beautiful than you think", which also implies that users should love themselves more and be better to themselves.

The author emphasizes in the book that the form of the story is just an interesting shell, and more importantly, the expression of the theme, emotion and meaning of the story. These are all the things you need to focus on when telling a story.

As for the specific methods of storytelling, because there are many classic bibliographies in this field on the market, the author only gives some references in this book, and there is no systematic explanation. Fortunately, before "listening to a book every day", I have also interpreted the relevant bibliographies such as Story Thinking, Story Lesson and Story Economics for you. Every book has a clever way to tell stories, and interested friends must listen to it.

The method to be discussed next is called "dramatization". In fact, story and drama are inseparable. For example, Dove's advertisement tells the story of every woman with a dramatic and contrasting social survey. The author points out that a story is only an element in drama, and a good story must be dramatic.

So, what's the difference between storytelling and dramatization? I found from the book that the key lies in their different emphases. Storytelling pays more attention to the content design of marketing, which is more obvious in advertisements; Dramatization focuses on marketing forms, and the effect is more prominent in event marketing. Next, we will use the application scenario of event marketing to talk about why we should "dramatize" it and how to "dramatize" it.

Event marketing is an important method besides advertising or content in marketing promotion, mainly by planning large-scale activities to quickly improve the visibility and influence of products or brands. For example, the new product launch conferences of mobile phone brands such as Apple and Huawei are typical event marketing.

Then, in order to do event marketing well, we must first make clear who this marketing is for.

Many people will think that marketing is definitely for users. However, the author points out that this is inaccurate. The direct audience of an event marketing is actually the media and journalists, and most users see the event news spread by the media and journalists.

Therefore, the author believes that the significance of event marketing actually lies in communication. The same activity budget should be spread as much as possible. Otherwise, even if you spend money on activities, it is just a kind of self-satisfaction.

So, how can we maximize the communication effect? Dramatization is a very effective method.

Next, we will talk about how to "dramatize" event marketing with the help of the scene of Apple's new mobile phone product launch conference.

First of all, the first point is that the venue is theatrical.

Drama can give an activity a sense of theme, ceremony and meaning higher than life. Apple's new product launch conference has been held in the theater, and Jobs acted like an actor on the stage.

If you don't really want to move the event to the theater, you can also dress up the venue as a theater. In fact, many companies now do this at the press conference, such as setting up a stage in the gymnasium or hotel banquet hall. It's just that many of them end up in the same conference venue.

The reason behind this is that to be "theatrical", it is necessary not only to have a stage, but also to have scenery, props, lighting and other equipment as an aid, and to have a complete plot.

This leads to two key points that we will talk about later. That is, product props and craft plots.

Let's talk about product props first. Many people think that the protagonist of the new product launch conference must be the product. However, the author believes that the protagonist on the stage can only be a lively figure with life forever, and the product is just a prop. Think about it. When Jobs was alive, every time he launched a new product, he used it as a prop like an actor to show everyone all kinds of designs and meanings.

The reason why he is "performing" is because the whole activity process is full of designs everywhere-where to pause silently, where to throw golden sentences and where to have a climax, all of which have been carefully scrutinized. This is actually "process dramatization", which means that you need to design the activity process as carefully as the plot, otherwise it is empty of the shell of drama, but there is no substantive content.

Speaking of which, I'd like to invite you, when you are free, to watch Huawei's new product launch conference in recent two years. You will find that it also satisfies the above mentality.

In the book, the author also illustrates his expansion and application of this psychological method with examples. This example is a press conference planned by him as the chief marketing consultant before the musical Cat was performed in Guangzhou.

The "theater" in this example is the subway station of Guangzhou Zhujiang New Town. In the morning, three actors in cat makeup appeared here. A enchanting tall and straight, a terrified, a clever and lovely. They secretly hide behind the passengers who buy subway tickets to learn how to buy them, scare them from time to time, climb over the gate and enter the subway car to play with the passengers and make them happy. At the same time, the author also arranged some TV reporters, newspaper reporters and network reporters to follow the whole process. The next day, the city's entertainment reports, photo news and social news were all filled with the news that the musical "Cat" would be performed in Guangzhou for 24 consecutive times.

You see, this activity has no venue rent, no star service fee, no security premium, only the travel expenses of some journalists, but it has achieved the purpose of getting the maximum exposure at the lowest cost. This is the power of drama.

label

Well, that's the key content I want to share with you in the book Entertainment Thinking. To sum up:

This book holds that at the moment when all kinds of products and services are extremely rich and competitive, our actual needs have been basically met by the majority of businesses, while in contrast, the satisfaction of entertainment needs is even scarcer; Therefore, the key to future business competition is to see who can better meet the "entertainment needs" of users.

Just now I focused on how to play entertainment thinking in products and marketing. The author thinks that the evolution of products can be divided into three stages, namely tools, toys and props; Behind them, people's needs are constantly upgrading with the development of social economy, from the initial practical needs to psychological entertainment needs, and then to higher-level and spiritual entertainment needs; With the continuous upgrading of demand, products also need to evolve.

To realize the evolution from tools to toys, the methods we can use are mainly fun and artistic; To realize the evolution from toys to props, we can inject emotion, personality and values into products or brands.

In marketing, this book points out that entertaining thinking can help us quickly catch the attention of users in marketing, and two effective methods we can adopt in this process are storytelling and dramatization.

In the book, the author focuses on an "eight-step method of entertaining thinking", including interest, art, theme, emotion, story, popularity, drama and brand. I also talked about most of it in the audio just now. If you want to understand this method systematically, please click on the original e-book at the end of the manuscript to expand your reading.

Finally, talk about the underlying logic of this whole set of entertaining thinking in the book. The author points out that entertaining thinking seems to be a new business thinking, but it is actually only the concrete embodiment of classical business theory in the era of consumption upgrading.

You see, the "positioning theory" regarded as a classic by the business community tells us that the main position of business competition is the mind of users; Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, further pointed out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow that our brains have two decision-making modes: fast and slow, the perceptual mental model is fast and the rational mental model is slow.

All the methods under entertainment thinking are actually to grasp the perceptual mode in the user's mind. Through interesting, emotional, meaningful and other contents that meet the psychological and spiritual demands of users, users can form perceptual cognition of the brand. Under this perceptual knowledge, the user's subconscious will release the greatest goodwill to the brand and make a purchase decision as much as possible. This is also the underlying logic that enterprises can use this set of "entertainment thinking" methodology to quickly improve brand competitiveness and customer acquisition efficiency in the current market environment with fierce homogenization competition.

As Scott McKain, a famous American business speaker, said, in the future, all industries will be entertainment; Ming Bai, the author of this book, also reminded us at the end that "all enterprises without entertainment thinking will become traditional enterprises in the future" and gradually lose their position in the market competition.