INSIGHT and Publication

1 – Why should you read this white paper?

It is a well-established perspective that the quality of an advertisement greatly impacts user perception. Mediocre ads often lead to heightened sensitivity and judgment among viewers, ultimately reducing their effectiveness and efficiency.

In “H2H Marketing,” Philip Kotler introduced the O-zone concept which highlights the 3 primary influences on user consumption. These include advertising content produced by the business, word-of-mouth recommendations from others, and personal positive experiences with the brand.

In contrast, traditional marketing is limited in its ability to influence brand awareness and attraction to a certain extent. The true impetus behind consumer inquiries, purchases, and advocacy typically stems from “people,” reflecting the level of trust consumers place in themselves and others.

This underscores the importance of people-centric marketing. In the realm of human-to-human (H2H) interaction, the influence people can have on each other is significant, emerging as the main driving factor in shaping consumer decision-making.

Amidst the intensifying competitive world today, it is crucial for businesses to adopt more effective and sustainable marketing strategies that deliver tangible incremental value.

Building upon Philip Kotler’s insights on the new marketing perspective of the H2H era and Little Red Book’s pursuit of a consumer-centric approach, a notable breakthrough has emerged: amidst various marketing methodologies, word-of-mouth remains in enhancing product value, stimulating user interest, and shaping consumer decisions.

 We aspire for this white book to liberate businesses from the relentless cycle of “generating traffic but lacking sales” and “making sales but failing to turn a profit”. Rather than solely focusing on chasing traffic and getting entangled in pricing tactics, we champion a return to the fundamentals of marketing. This involves viewing products, content, and people with a human-centric perspective, understanding, and fulfilling user needs, and employing genuine communication to ignite sales motivation, ultimately achieving more purposeful and valuable growth.

2 – What does this white book cover?

This white book is a comprehensive analysis of “Grassroot Marketing”. For readers to truly understand and grasp the “Third Type of Paradigm in Marketing,” we will do an in-depth analysis based on principles, method and technique as follows:

“Principles” refer to the understanding of the changing in media environment and consumer behavior patterns and grasping the basic relationships and operating rules among “users-products-demands” in the H2H era. In “H2H Marketing,” Mr. Kotler summarizes human-centric marketing into three pillars: human-centered mindset, service-driven value co-creation, and digitization to enhance diversity and connectivity. Integrating these three pillars in businesses’ seeding approaches embodies the essence of “principles”.

“Methods” delves into the understanding of the core value and key nodes of Grassroot Marketing through a scientific standpoint of consumer decision-making. Combining Mr. Kotler’s insights on the 5A framework of user paths, we can distil three key points:

1.       Encourage proactive pre-consumption decision-making.

2.       Facilitate the initiation of post-consumption recommendations.

3.       Establish a promotional mechanism bridging the gap between inquiry and support.

Tapping on the true potential of human influence, to foster a “snowball” effect with word-of-mouth.

“Techniques” blends insights from Little Red Book’s (小红书) outstanding case study on Grassroot Marketing into a replicable framework. In this report, we boil down to scientific insights, goal settings, content optimization, and the four key steps to enhance effectiveness. By leveraging these strategies, businesses on Little Red Book can unleash the low threshold, efficiency, and high determinism of the growth model. Furthermore, “Techniques” emphasizes the importance of adopting a grassroot mindset, implementing streamlined processes, and adopting effective management practices, all of which are addressed in this white book.