I am not a NIO hater. On the contrary, I like the company. If my wife hadn’t stopped me, when the stock price was around 2 yuan at the beginning of this year, I almost went all-in. Looking back now, it’s better than struggling to make money in a startup.
Bin Ge is an entrepreneur I admire. He has made NIO the most user-centric car company, and car owners have given rave reviews.
My good friend Han Laoshi bought an ES6 with a fuel car number in Beijing over a year ago. Whenever he hears someone around him wants to buy a car, he recommends NIO. Whenever there’s an OTA update, he posts it on his WeChat Moments with the caption “The feeling of driving a new car”.
However, even with such a user-centered approach, NIO still had a PR disaster with a group of Bilibili users.
Here’s what happened: at around 9:15 pm last night during the online salon event “Rebuild 2020” hosted by GeekPark and Bilibili, NIO’s presentation was met with a barrage of negative comments in the live chat due to its “lengthy duration and excessive marketing”. This was compounded by occupying too much of Luo Yonghao’s speaking time.
As you can see, the users were not pleased.
It’s highly likely that neither Bin Ge nor Qin Lihong had ever experienced such a situation even in the worst times last year. The screen was flooded with complaints and question marks, and users’ emotions overflowed through the screen, resulting in a truly disastrous live event.
To be fair, NIO’s ad content was already quite restrained.
There was no awkward product introduction or forced promotion of values. Qin Lihong just wandered with an up-and-coming YouTuber around the NIO House, checked out the cups and the badminton racket co-branded with Red Double Happiness, and shared bits of brand culture output. That’s it.
But that was enough to upset the Bilibili users. I talked to a few post-00s about this, and they pointed out two things:
Firstly, NIO deliberately rode on Luo Yonghao’s traffic and forced them to consume.
Secondly, the ad was too ad-like with pure introductions and no emotional appeal.
Compare NIO’s presentation to Luo Yonghao’s live chat, and you will feel the joyful emotions of the users.
Ultimately, Bilibili is all about personalization.After ten years of development, the users of this platform are already accustomed to parallel communication between people, which naturally leads to being “anti-establishment” and “anti-media”.
If NIO is like this, it can be inferred that other car companies will be the same. You can also check the traffic of the Autohome account on Bilibili, each post gets only a few thousand views.
I have discussed with friends before that there are three characteristics that Bilibili up holders want to achieve:
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Realistic, just standing by the user’s side;
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Hard-working, making audiences feel sincere;
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Equality, becoming friends with the audiences.
These requirements crush not only many traditional media workers and organizations but also people with “not young enough” faces who say “let me tell you” when they first appear on Bilibili and can’t last for more than 3 seconds.
Take NIO as an example. The most criticized part is when Qin Lihong said “I represent xx, thank xx”. A normal sentence for us, but Bilibili users’ reaction is “who let you represent?”
So, what kind of advertising can succeed on Bilibili? Let’s take a look at two examples.
The advertisement that He Tongxue made for OnePlus mobile phone called “I made an animation with ten thousand lines of notes…”
The advertisement that Laofanqi made for NetEase game called “I went to work for NetEase to make games!”
The logic of these two advertisements is almost the same, based on the original content and style of the up holders, combined with some characteristics of the products, and then came up with creative ideas and produced them deeply.
For example, in the video made by He Tongxue for OnePlus mobile phone, the animation effect of ten thousand lines of notes only highlights one product feature of the mobile phone, screen display resolution. As for the effect, the barrage reaction is direct.
Finally, let’s come back to NIO. It may not be difficult to turn Bilibili into an opportunity.
Register another account and don’t call it “NIO,” just use “Li Bin.” Brother Bin shares some entrepreneurial thoughts and work status daily, chats and communicates with friends in his spare time, seamlessly integrating the brand and product into it. This may yield unexpected results. From the perspective of the structure and personnel of the entire domestic automotive industry, only Li Bin, Li Xiang, and He XPeng have the ability to operate like this.
Potential customers are probably not yet on Bilibili, so planting a seed in advance is not a bad idea.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.