NAPCAFE is a small café in Shanghai. Its founders, with the concept of "getting closer to life in the name of coffee", have created a very popular CAFE. Guests at NAP CAFE can feel as if they're at home: listening to music, reading books, eating snacks, chatting, and resting freely. What delights me even more is that NAP CAFE's rise to fame is an extremely successful case of social marketing. From this, we can see many bright spots.
Regarding this case, I've learned three points:
The dissemination platform in social marketing should be an organic combination.
The dissemination platform in social marketing should be an organic combination. Self-owned interactive platforms can spread the most authoritative information. On one hand, it educates new users, and on the other hand, it retains old users. It's easy to conduct two-way interaction between enterprises and users on self-owned platforms. Interaction, and due to the support of enterprise resources, business is easier to carry out. Efficiency and relative controllability are the advantages of self-owned platforms. When enterprises need to solve user needs, they must consider the communication cost of users, meaning how users can maximize and simplify two-way interaction. The ultimate destination of social marketing is the social dissemination of audience information. However, most enterprise self-owned platforms inherently lack a social foundation, so expanding outward is the only way out. Future communities and future internet will be very open, which also provides conditions for reducing costs to achieve social dissemination. Although many media platforms exist as individual points on the periphery, these relatively dense points are not independent but can be integrated into a surface, thus playing out the advantages of social marketing. Circles on peripheral community platforms can gather unified audiences in a limited environment, allowing audiences to engage in free dialogue on the majority of platforms they are accustomed to. With the self-owned platform as the center, radiating outward, the enterprise's social marketing platform formed by peripheral community platforms will create a good dialogue environment. Taking NAP CAFE as an example, it interacts with users and conducts business centered around its own website. On the periphery, NAPCAFE has its own themed circles on many community platforms, such as on Douban, where circle members have already exceeded two thousand. The circle on Dianping.com is also very active. A simple search on Baidu yields numerous experience articles about NAP CAFE. In such a large atmosphere, audience dialogue naturally appears quite active. You can observe that many audience-written experience articles receive a lot of replies, and audiences actively spread NAP CAFE in different environments, leading to the high online reputation of NAP CAFE. Similarly successful TARGET also pursues complementarity and diversity in the selection of social marketing platforms. Even though TARGET effectively utilizes the powerful FACEBOOK social platform on the periphery of its self-owned platform, TARGET does not forget to use other social and pseudo-social platforms as auxiliary tools, such as blogs. I believe that in the future, social marketing will require the integration of different platforms for dissemination, using the authority of self-owned platforms to drive the social nature of peripheral platforms. Self-owned platforms can become the source of professional information, while peripheral platforms can well disseminate this information and provide feedback to the self-owned platform. The two mutually promote and develop, neither being dispensable. Of course, utilizing peripheral platforms is not easy. Peripheral platforms are uncontrollable, and once improperly utilized, a small flaw in the enterprise can be infinitely magnified, which could be fatal. Therefore, to utilize peripheral platforms well and achieve social dissemination, enterprises must always SPEAK IN ONE VOICE, highlighting their excellent brand image and corporate image, increasing consumer recognition and sense of belonging. This requires the long-term maintenance of proper enterprise behavior. Clearly, social marketing is a double-edged sword; when used well, it achieves half the result with twice the effort, but when misused, it leads to failure.
Social marketing dissemination requires a certain foundation in the early stages to stimulate.
The emergence of any hotspot will be amplified in the early stages, relying on external forces to activate the hotspot. Social marketing is conducted on a social basis, but how to expand from initial niche dissemination to social diffusion? During the early dissemination process, the boost from external forces plays a crucial role. First, widely inform people, letting enough people know about the existence of the hotspot. When the number of such audiences reaches a trigger point, natural viral dissemination will occur. Of course, if the enterprise has sufficient confidence and patience, it can choose to wait for the natural outbreak of the trigger point. The openness of the internet allows sufficiently good products and events to be naturally discovered and shared, starting from sporadic dissemination and gradually accumulating until reaching an outbreak. But the problem is that such time costs are too high, and even saving expenses often proves unprofitable. A netizen commented that NAP CAFE's social dissemination was inseparable from HI!PDA's strong assistance at the beginning. Without HI!PDA's amplification, NAP CAFE might still grow, but it wouldn't gain fame so quickly. This makes sense. The overlap between HI!PDA users and NAP CAFE users is relatively high, both being night owl coffee enthusiasts. Thus, the prolonged promotion of NAP CAFE on HI!PDA at the beginning garnered a large number of loyal users, who became early proactive disseminators of NAP CAFE. Based on this, NAP CAFE achieved social dissemination.
Social marketing requires enterprises to pay attention to all aspects of the social marketing dissemination environment.
What is socialization? My understanding of society is rather simple: mass living, naturalization. So here we need to consider an overall environmental issue, including cultural, economic, and other factors. Enterprises must pay special attention to controlling the dissemination environment during social marketing to prevent excessive or harmful dissemination. For example, when an enterprise promotes its brand with the theme of "happy living," if gamers tie the brand philosophy and image to playing online games for dissemination, then this social marketing would have a negative effect. The reason is the lack of control over the dissemination environment, striving for harmonious unity. I believe that the dissemination environment in social marketing is determined by the cultural orientation in the initial stage of dissemination. Enterprises must pay particular attention to the formation of culture in the early stages of dissemination, which is controllable. Enterprises can fix the orientation of marketing culture through integrated marketing communication, thereby indirectly controlling the socialized dissemination environment. NAP CAFE gives us a great demonstration. Throughout the NAP CAFE site, there is a strong humanistic and life-like atmosphere. Users can exchange ideas about coffee, visit the backyard to read life diaries, vent frustrations, make friends, and patiently learn. Extending offline, NAP CAFE truly lets you experience a different kind of life sentiment: elegant attics, unique balconies with charm, warm care, and free friendship—all making users feel the unique cultural connotations of NAP CAFE. Especially, we can observe that NAP CAFE not only sells coffee but also related lifestyle items, and even offers coffee-making classes. Apparently, what NAP CAFE sells is no longer just a product but a unique NAP CAFE culture. This move by NAP CAFE is, I think, highly ingenious. NAP CAFE even integrates this culture into e-commerce, promoting social dissemination on one hand and controlling the social dissemination environment on the other.
Discovering NAP CAFE feels like meeting someone late in life. Such a small café can carry out social marketing so perfectly, which can't help but make one admire the grand vision of that young couple. Social marketing is definitely a trend, and enterprises should treat social marketing with a long-term perspective. I also believe that implementing an excellent social marketing strategy will bring endless benefits to enterprises. Who is as bold as NAP CAFE, taking big steps forward?