Special Train with Music Reviews: Seeing the Power of Music – An Integrated Marketing Campaign of Netease Cloud Music

April, XU Xin, 1155089254

On March 20, a special train in red color, decorated with a large collection of touching music reviews at Hangzhou subway station caught thousands of passersby’ attention, instantly becoming a hit in social networks. It’s a marketing campaign called seeing the power of music conducted by Netease Cloud Music, which contracted ads of line 1 as well as Jiangling Road Station with high-quality music reviews selected from the platform.

Figure 1. Photos of the Campaign.

However, it’s not uncommon to advertise on subway, and there are several successful precedents, from Headline Today, Particle News to recent Peach Blossom Train implemented by a popular TV drama. Nevertheless, what makes this campaign outstanding is that it doesn’t promote through size and quantity of ads or empathizing slogan, but from a product perspective, and importantly, it widely spreads on the internet, leading to a mania of sharing and discussing on social media.

With no doubt, multiple highlights are presented from this campaign. Firstly, it’s the sensitive insights of user psychology and the choice of advertising place. Apparently, subway is a common transport carrying people together with their hopes and dreams, also loneliness on the struggling way. Because of confined space, it’s easier for people to concentrate, think and to recall the past. Thus, people will be easily struck if the ad copy shares the same emotion.

Besides, empathetic music reviews is another highlight of this campaign. Specially, music reviews is one of unique features of Netease Cloud Music. It’s said that approximately 640,000 reviews are produced by users everyday and over 400,000,000 reviews are stimulated on the app up to now. Just like seeing shoots on video websites, looking through music reviews to find comforts has become a habit for majority of users. Focused on this, the marketing team selected top hot 5000 pieces of reviews through computer and according to its specific content, they picked up 85 reviews which are simple but touching, understandable and empathetic, covering the popular topics of dream, life, friendship and love. And taking them as advertisements in the combination of review, user ID and song, which reflects the feature of product and matches the brand position – a warmhearted music society.

For example, @Culiu writes that I want to be the one who describe you at your funeral, after listening to the song Palpitation. Thank you for accompanying me from wearing school uniform to wedding dress, which is written by @Nanguobeidao below the song Duandian of Hins Cheung. And @Ney_S writes the review under the song Long Lost Pen Pal that when I was young, I hoped to be everyone except myself.

Figure 2. Music Reviews of the Campaign.

More reviews can be seen from the last link of references.

It’s admitted that user generated content and real people stories can bring audience unexpected surprise with touching power. When people see these reviews, they feel like talking to an ordinary person about his simple but unforgettable stories rather than a speech with high-sounding words. In this equal way, people may find some same experience and resonate with what they say. And then, they probably become interested in the song that brings such feelings, download the app, enjoy the song and find some like-minded people. Just as the vice president of Netease Cloud Music, Li Yin, said that they applied the product strategy to do social marketing and provided what users what to know, digging out content and guiding users to share same emotions, instead of traditional one-way information delivery of brand.

For this campaign, the biggest success is the transformation from offline to online, creating secondary spread on the internet. People who came across this campaign took pictures of these reviews, posted on the social media and wrote down their opinions and feelings. In addition to these personal content sharing from experiencer, official media platforms like Wechat subscription and other media or KOL reported this activity, which attracted plenty of people share and express a deep sense of identity on social media.

Figure 3. Screenshots of official media platform posts.

Consequently, the campaign report on Wechat subscription has been viewed more than 100,000, which was 5 times the number of reading in normal times. Several songs related to splendid reviews ranked high on the music list and Netease Cloud Music has gone straight to number one in the music category of app store.

Figure 4. Ranking trend of Netease Cloud Music's Download.

In a word, the campaign of Netease Cloud Music build emotional similarity with public through presenting user generated music reviews and successfully transform to online marketing by widely sharing and discussion, attracting people download the app and experience the music society. The logic of this marketing campaign can be concluded in the picture as below.

Figure 5. Logic of this Marketing Campaign.

Obviously, through this activity, Netease Cloud Music completed the objective to increase the brand awareness and attract potential users, showing the unique distinction from other music app – a music society with emotions from a product perspective.

References:

网易云音乐是如何用产品思路做营销的？http://www.managershare.com/post/328167

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