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When Xiaohongshu announced three months ago that it would create an award for "planting grass", Lao Ding keenly noticed that a long-standing change was emerging.

From the Web era to the mobile Internet era, Lao Ding has been working in the marketing field for a long time. Now one of his company's core businesses is to help brands do marketing and promotion on Xiaohongshu.

"In the past, when we were working with companies, their budget for promoting content on Xiaohongshu was either included in the brand advertising budget or the performance advertising budget. But starting from the past two years, more and more companies have set aside a special portion of their budget for promoting content, or simply put, Xiaohongshu," said Lao Ding.

On August 7, the Xiaohongshu Grass-Seeding Awards, known as the industry's first marketing award focusing on "grass-seeding", was held. Data shows that more than 400 cases from more than 300 brands participated in the competition for the grand prize.

The traditional "paradigm" is being broken. Another senior executive of an agency company revealed to 36Kr, "Although many people seem to be unable to fully define what 'planting grass' is, this does not affect more and more brands coming to us to invest their budgets."

Because seeding can indeed bring growth. At the Xiaohongshu Seed Awards ceremony, Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng revealed that the growth rate of the top 1000 SPUs on Xiaohongshu far exceeds the industry as a whole.

Eleven years ago, when the phrase "planting grass" was born in the Xiaohongshu community, no one would have thought that it would become a new marketing paradigm in the future.

Why plant grass?

There is no doubt that the relationship between consumers and brands is undergoing structural changes.

In the past, when market demand far outstripped commodity supply, the core logic of commercial success was that channels were king, which were both sales channels for distribution and reach channels for marketing. What companies needed to solve in external competition was how to reach consumers with their products and brands in the largest dimension and at the fastest speed.

Therefore, there is a commercial story of a CCTV advertisement creating a national brand and a TVC breaking the circle creating a myth of rise. With the continuous emergence of individual consumer needs, marketing positioning that can bind products, categories and brands has become very important. This is also the rise of new brands that have completed ten years of development of traditional brands in just one or two years under the strategy of big marketing leveraging big distribution.

However, as the supply-demand relationship further tilts and marketing momentum gradually declines, the emergence and growth of "planting grass" is not surprising. Brands always have to find a new way to complete the dialogue with users.

“New” is not only about the form, but also the core.

Whether it is the traditional form of advertising or the traffic strategy that has begun to become ineffective, countless stars, celebrities, and KOLs tell users: You should make this choice, and consumers are always passive. But in the "grass planting" system, whether it is KOL or KOC, whether it is recommendation, display or introduction, users are always active and can choose and find the "life" they want.

Because the "grain planting" is a living "person", it is the external expression of groups with different hobbies, characteristics, and lifestyles. It is for this reason that "grain planting" has become a way to gain a sense of identity in life, allowing the circle to begin to circulate. Or to summarize it more popularly,The core background of “planting grass” lies in “people”.

Xiaodu Tiantian may be one of the brands that first saw this trend. As the pioneer of the "girlfriend phone" category, its conventional thinking is to differentiate its main products and build brand awareness through category innovation.

This approach is effective, but limited. After all, despite being a category innovation, Xiaodu Tiantian is still facing "squeeze" from many other categories such as projectors, mobile TVs, and tablets.

The solution lies in "people" - finding users who need it, rather than telling users that they need it. Through Xiaohongshu, Xiaodu Tiantian has captured the mobile TV category and rental-related content, and the content penetration rate of Xiaodu Tiantian girlfriend machine ranks among the top.

Therefore, it took advantage of the popular "sense of indifference" and cooperated with Xiaohongshu's commercial IP "Relax Lab" to put its own products into the "indifferent people's" happiness guide and start the road of seeding. In the end, the overall exposure of this cooperation project alone reached more than 111 million, the number of UGC notes under the topic exceeded 25,000, and the in-site search index of Xiaodu Tiantian girlfriend machine products increased by 7 times, and the product penetration rate of the core population increased rapidly.

Kotler once made a classic statement about what marketing is. He believed that marketing is not only a function, but also a constantly evolving market strategy oriented towards customer value, and is the first thing a CEO should think about.

For this reason, it does not seem surprising that after changes in the marketing end, "grass planting" that can meet the needs and Xiaohongshu, which carries the grass-planting behavior, have become the inevitable choice of brand leaders.

But in the past, most people’s understanding of “planting grass” was limited to “knowing” or “curiosity”.

Compared with the vast array of marketing methods, tools, and theories, "planting grass" seems vague. It can be a user's spontaneous sharing, a blogger's active content creation, or a brand's carefully planned marketing case. How to do it seems to be a no-man's land without a paradigm reference waiting to be explored.

At the 2024 Xiaohongshu WILL Business Conference held at the end of last year, Kotler's summary may be more accurate. In this more complex and dynamic era, how to make consumers no longer passive but become active creators of brand value is the key to long-term success. Human 2 Human marketing (i.e. H2H people-oriented marketing) is the core path for brands to achieve this step. "Planting grass" and Xiaohongshu, as the main platform, have implemented this model.This makes "planting grass" the third marketing paradigm besides brand advertising and performance advertising.

The convening of Xiaohongshu's Seed Awards has further clarified the definition and methods of seeding.

"Planting grass is a very people-oriented marketing method. It is to find solutions for the life you aspire to by sincerely helping people." Zhiheng's speech seems to make people understand the value of planting grass better.The needs of "people" can be more fully understood.Because the demand structure is no longer conducted by pure commercial organizations, but by the real and living masses themselves. And every communication is almost spontaneous and proactive.

Perhaps it can be summarized this way: "Everyone plants grass for everyone." By planting grass, people get better life solutions, and companies can achieve business growth and get rapid feedback and iteration.

Inward, outward and deep, Xiaohongshu's road to promoting products

In an in-depth conversation at the end of 2023, Xiaohongshu COO Conan summarized how, after starting commercialization in 2019, how to grow grass-seeking from a marketing method that grew out of the community into a native business model.

During the conversation, Conan revealed that what Xiaohongshu will spend a lot of time on in 2023 is how to better quantify grass-roots promotion. "People used to say that grass-roots promotion is "metaphysics", so we will think about how to make it as scientific as possible and better quantified, so that it can be used by more merchants and brands."

Second, when "everything can be promoted" and many industries enter Xiaohongshu, they productize and scale up the business needs originally generated by the community so that more merchants and business entities can use it.

According to 36Kr's observation, over the past two years, Xiaohongshu's commercial products have made the promotion of grass-roots content more than just a concept in three dimensions: inward, outward, and in-depth. The entire promotion effect can be measured and optimized.

Open up the closed loop e-commerce internally and open up and connect externally

At the Link e-commerce partner conference and Live broadcast partner conference held by Xiaohongshu not long ago, data was released: the number of Xiaohongshu purchasing users increased by 4.3 times in the past year, and the number of live broadcast purchasing users increased by 6.3 times year-on-year. This is particularly striking today as we enter the era of e-commerce inventory.

Xiaohongshu's efforts to build a closed-loop e-commerce platform are achieving certain results. At the Link e-commerce partner conference, Xiaohongshu unveiled its upcoming integrated e-commerce marketing platform "Xiaohongshu Chengfeng". This platform is designed specifically for Xiaohongshu merchants and will provide a full range of marketing tools and services. It will work with the one-stop e-commerce business platform "Qianfan" and the blogger cooperation platform "Dandelion" to build Xiaohongshu's three merchant service platform systems.

When products are integrated into lifestyles and presented to users, users can see the life they imagine, and "people" are the core of the lifestyle. E-commerce and marketing infrastructure are also gradually maturing, and the links of planting and pulling grass on the site are smoother.

The closed-loop conversion of seed marketing has also been opened up. The Lynk & Co 06 model that won the award this time is a case worth studying.

After the launch of the electric hybrid version of Lynk & Co 06, it faces increasingly fierce industry competition. The marketing strategy of traditional car companies to obtain leads through large exposure is no longer in line with the current market situation. When the closed-loop e-commerce of Xiaohongshu is opened, "planting grass" becomes the perfect solution.

The user genes of the car models were refined into the keyword "appearance control", thus finding the core scene of "exquisite street appearance". After finding differentiated content, through the KFS product seeding combination delivery method of bloggers (KOL), information flow ads (Feeds), and search ads (Search), and then cooperating with the official "Liuliu Life Festival" IP of Xiaohongshu, it continued from online to offline, and started "seedling live broadcast" in offline pop-up stores. Users can directly place orders in the Xiaohongshu applet to undertake conversions, becoming the industry's first closed-loop new link for car companies. Ultimately, it drove the total order amount of the entire series to exceed one million, and the total vehicle amount of the entire series to exceed 50 million.

"Planting grass" has become a real source of growth in brand business and is no longer empty talk.

Opening up the closed-loop e-commerce does not mean that Xiaohongshu has decided to “isolate itself from the world.” The energy of “planting grass” often spills over to other platforms.

Brands often face the problem of how to select the right audience and set targets, and how to replicate the promotional activities on a single platform on other e-commerce platforms is a difficult problem that can easily lead to losses. Before this, these problems could only be solved through the individual experience of pitchers or marketing practitioners.

At the will business conference at the end of 2023, Fengdi, vice president of technology at Xiaohongshu, released a number of open products on the spot. Fengdi said that Xiaohongshu will continue to create open and connected business products to help good products, good services, and good businesses find business success on Xiaohongshu. It will not only focus on the grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, but also pay attention to the global conversion, and serve the entire chain of brand and merchant business operations.

Go deeper to make the grass planting measurable and optimizable

The biggest pressure and doubts that Xiaohongshu's "grass planting" has previously endured come from the difficulty in measuring the effect. The measurement method of most brands is to extend the time period and make vague judgments based on the overall growth rate.

Just like John Wanamaker, the father of American department stores, once said in his classic complaint about advertising companies, "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half."

At a time when budgets are tight, being able to get accurate measurement of results is key to making “grass planting” acceptable.

In order to "plant grass", Xiaohongshu has strengthened the construction of data infrastructure internally, and at the same time continuously upgraded and launched new marketing products such as "Lingxi Products", "Plant Grass in All Regions", and "Search Direct", etc. The upgraded product functions are used to lower the threshold for opportunity insight, goal setting, and delivery optimization, and the value of "planting grass" can be intuitively seen from a global dimension.

Through cooperation with enterprises and the "Zhongcao Youshu" data alliance, the data links of grass planting and transaction data are fully connected across different platforms and links in a compliant manner, which makes the effect of grass planting clearer.

"Through these actions, we can clearly see the overall conversion path after defining the target audience: including the cycle from being seeded by Xiaohongshu to the final conversion, the search terms used in the process, the notes that mainly achieved the seeding effect, etc." Cang Xiang said, "Brands can clearly see why the user group was seeded and the entire consumption chain, which is another gold mine."

"Choose good products, report back, and leave the rest to Xiaohongshu." This became the signal that Xiaohongshu tried to convey to the outside world during the Grass-Seeding Awards speech.

With the support of these data, Xiaohongshu's research on "people" has become more in-depth. In the "2024 Xiaohongshu Top 20 Lifestyle People White Paper" at the "Grass Planting Awards", Xiaohongshu fully released the "2024 Xiaohongshu Top 20 Lifestyle People White Paper", which deeply interpreted more than 100 lifestyle segments. Shengxiang, head of Xiaohongshu's business marketing laboratory, said: "The team spent 10 months conducting big data and anthropological in-depth interviews and mining, and finally compiled it into the "2024 Xiaohongshu Top 20 Lifestyle People White Paper". This population report hopes to allow brands to use it out of the box, helping brands to more accurately understand the needs of "people", and then efficiently and meticulously complete product creation and grass planting."

This obviously provides more possibilities for the growth of the brand. For example, washing machines, a common category of home appliances, are generally recognized by the industry as being interested in home decoration and home appliances. This is a consideration of the "just need" dimension, and there is nothing wrong with it, but the population base is limited and the growth ceiling is low. However, Little Swan's new product "Little Black Plum" washing machine has found new possibilities through the Xiaohongshu Lingxi platform.

In Xiaohongshu's judgment, people who pay attention to its main features of health sterilization, clothing care, and washing machines are also the audience for topics such as health preservation, dressing, and fashion. The anchoring of new groups has become the strategic basis for Little Swan's new products to "plant grass in one stop and convert across the board." The specific growth is also clearly visible. In addition to the 300% increase in GMV on Xiaohongshu, the average monthly GMV across the board has also exceeded 60 million.

Eleven years ago, no one seemed to think that "planting grass", which belonged to a minority of people, would become the life of most people. But eleven years later, planting grass has become a "new possibility" in business and life. It can meet the needs of brands to grow and find new space, and can also bring practical and useful life solutions to users as "people".

The essence of "planting grass" is to inspire users, bring about yearning through resonance, and plant products to users during the inspiration. The deep understanding and empathy for user needs here allow the product to truly return to the essential level of serving people's lives. Therefore, doing a good job of planting grass means being able to serve people well.

This requires Xiaohongshu, which has long emphasized that "people are important", to continue to work hard.