Car Brands' Marketing: Dominating Comment Sections
Lei Jun has once again made it to the top of the trending searches.
In mid-November, Lei Jun posted a photo on Weibo of himself lying on a foam board, claiming to have dozed off in the workshop for a while, and upon waking up, the production of the Xiaomi SU7 had already surpassed 100,000 units. This Weibo post quickly went viral, making it to the trending searches. The next day, Lei Jun stated in a live broadcast that "lying on the foam board was staged," and soon after, the term made it to the trending searches once again.
Clearly, this founder of a tech enterprise has successfully gained another identity—that of a Weibo "top influencer." Lei Jun's own breakout has also drawn the audience's attention to the Xiaomi SU7. What kind of car is this? In Lei Jun's Weibo posts, you will find that from its launch to the production of the 100,000th unit, it took only 230 days. Even if you are not at all concerned with the details of Xiaomi's car manufacturing, you would think that this is quite an impressive number.
Only then do you realize that Lei Jun is constantly gaining attention, and the Xiaomi SU7 has successfully entered the public's view.
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Although Lei Jun's every move seems effortless, it is not easy to give users a concept of a new car. There were 78 world premiere cars alone at the Guangzhou Auto Show that just concluded. On the path of accelerated electrification and intelligence in the automotive industry, car companies are competing on price and performance while also competing in marketing.
The changes in industry structure, channels, consumer demand, and the new forces bringing internet thinking into the background have ushered in a new era for automotive marketing.
Taking Lei Jun's viral Weibo as an example, in the third quarter, the new car marketing cooperation in the automotive industry covered nearly 50%, and the revenue from new product marketing contributed nearly 70% of the industry's revenue, with Weibo's automotive industry revenue also increasing year-on-year in the third quarter.
In the field of automotive marketing, the three dimensions of "people," "goods," and "place" are being restructured. Deconstructing the changes behind this helps us to see more clearly the new path of automotive marketing in the era of great transformation.
Saying goodbye to one-way output and embracing decentralized interaction
This year's Guangzhou Auto Show can be regarded as a large live broadcast base, with a large influx of internet celebrities conducting live broadcasts around the clock, as well as car company sales taking turns to broadcast, and even some car owners holding their phones to broadcast while watching.
These live broadcasts and videos are spread on social media and short video platforms, allowing the influence of the auto show to break through the limitations of the venue and reach a wider audience. Car brands display their products and technologies in a comprehensive, multi-angle, and more specific manner in the live broadcasts, allowing consumers outside the auto show to participate as well.
This kind of decentralized interaction is precisely the marketing driving force that car companies are paying more and more attention to.
In the era of television thirty years ago, car companies' marketing mainly relied on advertising films. That is, first determine the target audience for a car model, build scenes based on this portrait, and produce advertising films to be broadcast on television. As a result, as the audience, we often see on TV a person driving on an open land, or a family of four driving out for a picnic, with close-ups of the car's streamlined body, and the brand and model of the car flashing at the end of the film. This is the story of the Marketing 1.0 era.
The 2.0 era was initiated by vertical websites. In the PC era, portal websites were the entry points for traffic, and Auto Home, Sohu Auto, Sina Auto, and others supported half of the automotive marketing. Portal websites provide high-quality content and related car information, filter out users with purchase intentions, and then guide customers to leave their contact information, with dealers guiding customers into the store, forming a full-link marketing action.
There, a group of people who understand cars the most were also nurtured. Li Xiang of Ideal Auto and Li Bin of NIO both have entrepreneurial experiences in car websites.
Although TV advertisements and vertical websites are still in operation, this one-way output and centralized distribution method is becoming less and less efficient today, and the deeper reason comes from both the supply and demand sides.
On the one hand, when cars first began to popularize in the Chinese market, and every household was striving to own a car, it constituted a clear "seller's market," and centralized distribution and display of products could bring great wealth. As of the end of June 2024, the national motor vehicle ownership reached 440 million vehicles, and car sales entered a "buyer's" market. In an environment where brands and products are extremely rich and competition is fierce, marketing must be targeted.
On the other hand, Generation Z has become the main force in car purchases. This group has an instinctive liking and high acceptance of new things, while pursuing personalization and emotional resonance. They will look at whether the price and performance match their own needs and will also care very much about whether "this car appeals to me." As internet natives, they dislike top-down information dissemination and prefer real feedback from the same temperature layer.
This makes decentralized social fields the main battlefield for marketing, and more and more car companies are beginning to deeply embrace platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili. In these fields, there are not only car company management, professional evaluations by KOLs, but also real usage experiences generated by ordinary users. In multi-dimensional interactions, the information gap between car companies and users is reduced, and it is easier to establish trust links.
More importantly, these fields can achieve hot spot fermentation. Hot spots are like a spark, which can form a large amount of interactive content in a short time, continuously spreading and radiating to form a prairie fire, with a "four-two-thousand-pound" effect.
Some fields, due to user activity, high-quality content, high publishing frequency, and strong interactivity, are naturally suitable for hot spot fermentation and can help car companies attract user attention.
The data released by the "Digital Brand List" shows that from January to November 2023, Weibo alone produced 37.616 million pieces of content in the automotive industry, bringing a total of 13.62 billion DB of digital brand value to car companies.
The success of Xiaomi Auto is a classic battle in social field marketing.
Since announcing its entry into the automotive industry in March 2021, Lei Jun has been continuously posting progress on Weibo while maintaining a sense of mystery. Some spy photos are occasionally released by KOLs, and users speculate from the appearance to the technical path, and finally to the price. Lei Jun's refreshing life and domineering president story, along with the passionate car-making dream, also form hot spot outbreaks from time to time.
The "cultivation system" interaction participation makes Xiaomi Auto cultivate a group of fans before its release.
Not car company executives, but Weibo netizens
In the past automotive marketing, "people" were relatively vague, and there was a thick "wall" between car companies and users.
Car companies' products were not worried about selling, and to some extent, they ignored the specific portraits of users and their feedback on the real needs of the product. Users' impressions of car companies were more high and distant.
However, the situation is very different now. From Musk to Li Xiang, and then to Lei Jun, who has承包ed Weibo's hot searches, when you think of these people, the products under their leadership are no longer cold and distant. This is precisely the method adopted by car companies to improve the "interpersonal relationships" in the marketing field and close the distance—the founder's IPization.
Whether it is Lei Jun lying on the foam board or Li Xiang using AI face swapping to "jump off a building," they are all very recognizable personal IPs. In mid-November last year, Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Auto, once commented on the speculation about the MEGA design drawing on Weibo: "If it is really designed like this, I will kill the design team and jump off the building myself." It whetted the appetite of the audience.
When the MEGA design was finally determined, it was almost consistent with the design drawing speculation at the time, and the second wave of marketing began: Li Xiang himself released an AI face-swapped video of jumping off a building, with the caption "This is MindGPT forcing me..." And MindGPT is the multimodal cognitive large model independently developed by Ideal Auto. Kill two birds with one stone, while promoting the new car, it also pushed its own large model to the front of the stage.
Car company marketing starts with the exposure of the founder, drawing the audience's attention to the brand and model, so the carnival of public opinion has become the brand's competition for attention.
In 2024, more traditional car company bosses have taken the lead in interacting with users from behind the scenes to the front, either doing live broadcasts or opening Weibo, all taking a people-friendly route.
The data shows that in 2024, there are more than 200 active car company executive accounts on Weibo, and more than 100 car company executives settled in in the first half of 2024, with an average monthly increase of 230% year-on-year.
Last June, 18 executives of Great Wall collectively announced their entry into Weibo, covering the five major brands under Great Wall, such as Tank, Haval, Ora Salon, etc. At that time, the copy released by Great Wall Auto on Weibo was "If you have doubts, ask directly, if you have ideas, say directly, if you have suggestions, make them directly." Obviously, building brand volume is only the first step. After the competition for attention, the platform has also established a direct communication mechanism between car companies and the audience.
This year, when Great Wall Auto released its first NOA intelligent six-seat flagship SUV - the new Weipai Blue Mountain, Chairman Wei Jianjun chose Chongqing, with its extremely complex road conditions, for a test drive live broadcast, challenging the "yellow Ferrari" Chongqing taxi, to show the NOA intelligent driving system of its new car. On that day, the term "Who can beat the yellow Ferrari" topped the Weibo hot search.
After the communication mechanism is established, the interaction methods between car company executives and founders and the audience are very diverse. In addition to the most direct live broadcast, the founder will also release new car spoilers on Weibo, allowing users to see the gradual landing process of the product, and use hot topics to stimulate user discussion, etc.
In April this year, Huawei executive Yu Chengdong joked about Xiaomi's original car mount at the press conference, believing that if the car system is strong enough, there is no need for a phone mount at all. In response, Lei Jun posted on Weibo, "Do you support having an original car phone mount?" and ultimately received the support of the vast majority of netizens.
Throughout the process, the intimacy between the onlookers and the brand is established, and trust in the product is also established. This is precisely the most important step to achieve the transformation from "onlookers" to "users".
Pay attention to user needs and carry out brand full life cycle management
In the past, the marketing model was simply directed at selling cars, and the relationship between users and car companies ended with the transaction. Now, the relationship between users and car companies in the social field is closer. The launch of new cars is gradually becoming a brand full life cycle management from a single cycle event.
Car companies need to understand the real needs of the target customer group on the product level, refine the functional dimensions, provide value-added services, and at the same time, they can also force product updates from more real user feedback, ultimately accumulating fan assets for the brand.
The traditional car distribution model is "car company - dealer - customer", and there is almost no direct contact between customers and car companies. Now, car companies, from establishing direct sales stores to operating official Weibo, Douyin, and other accounts, all hope to establish the most direct contact with users and gradually form user communities.
Among domestic new force brands, NIO was the first to start operating user communities. Now, NIO's official website has a detailed introduction to its community, including not only hobby groups spontaneously formed by ordinary users based on interests but also more formal industry communities.
Through the construction of communities, car companies will transform "users" with low stickiness into "fans" with high stickiness. In the social field, these fans will take the initiative to become new dissemination seeds, helping the brand to expand the boundary of trust, and they can also become the "self-media" of corporate marketing and the "main force" of public opinion warfare.
From the era of television to the era of mobile Internet, everyone can speak and interact in the comment area, which has become the high ground of public opinion warfare. Even if the early promotional films are high-end, once the comment area is occupied, the emotions incited will affect more ordinary users. For example, the comment area of Ideal MEGA was caused by the "coffin" shape, which led to public opinion emotions and ultimately had a huge negative impact on the product.
In this field, the comment area battle, relying solely on the brand to enter the field is difficult to change the situation, and the real combat effectiveness and radiation transmission ability are the brand fans. Their comments based on their real feelings constitute the most powerful response.
BYD, which has a large number of fans, is a beneficiary of the "fan effect". These users will debate under a large number of posts and notes questioning BYD, providing more positive perspectives. This is a very valuable asset for the brand. When fan trust is established, even public relations costs will be reduced.
Brands that are more fun have begun to advance from the "fan effect" to the "fan economy", such as selling value-added services to target customers, or simply making the demands and pain points of fans directly become effective feedback from the production end.
Last year's Baojun Cloud, which was listed, is a product co-created by netizens and Baojun.
Before the official launch of Baojun Cloud, Zhou Ming, the deputy general manager of SAIC General Motors' brand business department, once served as a "customer service" on Weibo, communicating with netizens about the new car's color matching, product positioning, configuration, and other details. Just for the color matching, it was adjusted from June to August, and a new color scheme was presented at the beginning of August for netizens to vote. Many fans also jokingly called themselves the "spiritual shareholders" of Baojun Cloud.
On the eve of the new car launch, Zhou Ming also collected suggestions for the press conference in the Weibo fan group, saying "How to hold the press conference is up to you, I am responsible for execution." Such a strong interactive attribute also allows car companies to know the most real and credible user pain points and needs at the lowest cost.
The rise of social media has driven the continuous update of "people, goods, and places", but whether it is the "emotional value" provided by executives personally going down to the field, or the sincere value output behind "building cars with open doors", it is actually reflecting the value of coexistence with users. Marketing is a complex course, but for car companies, it is nothing more than bringing the distance between car companies and users closer and closer.