How to Understand Digital Living Space
In the book Creative Communication Management - The Marketing Revolution in the Digital Era, digital living space is described in this way: "In a nutshell, the Internet is a new form of communication that relies on digital technology to virtually restore and amplify various information dissemination and communication activities in human daily life. In a nutshell, the new form of communication based on the Internet is a virtual restoration and amplification of various information dissemination and communication activities in human daily life relying on digital technology, and this form of communication creates a new type of digital living space".
From the point of view of the distribution of user's life time, the user's use of the Internet is getting longer and longer, and the dependence on the digital life space constructed by the Internet is increasing, while the dependence on the real life space is relatively decreasing, and the brands and consumers are becoming more and more netizens. The Internet has permeated every aspect of people's lives. Especially with the development of mobile Internet, it has fundamentally changed the shape of consumers' lives and consumption habits.
Overall speaking, digital living space is an extension of real life on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is separated from real life. The lifestyle of digital living space is the mapping, restoration, enrichment and amplification of human daily life. Take China as an example, according to the latest report of China Internet Network Information Center, "by the end of June 2013, the number of Internet users in China reached 591 million, an increase of 26.56 million compared with the end of 2012, and the Internet penetration rate was 44.1%. The Internet penetration rate was 44.1 percent, up 2.0 percentage points from the end of 2012."
In a sense, users gather in this global mega-living space, and according to their personal preferences, living habits and social attributes, they gather into large and small online communities with different characteristics. Here users can shop, entertainment, online learning, interaction, carry out e-commerce, and even have exclusive transaction money, such as the emergence of bitcoin (Bitcoin) in recent years, with "decentralization, not subject to the constraints of any institutions and groups, anonymity, high degree of covert, easy to transact, the transaction cost of low and so on, these Bitcoin was born at the beginning of the affiliated characteristics make it different from other currencies, unique, and unique, and the most important. It is different from other currencies, unique and scientific and reliable in the time and space of the Internet gradually penetrate into people's daily lives." Some merchants on Taobao are now able to accept bitcoin for settlement of transactions, and EBay CEO John Donahue has said that EBay is exploring ways to integrate bitcoin into its PayPal payment network. Digital living spaces are becoming as much a part of people's lives as real ones. Network theorist A.R. Stone (Allucquere Rosanne Stone) has pointed out that cyberspace is "unquestionably a social space where people still meet face-to-face, but where 'meeting' and 'face-to-face' are redefined. face-to-face' have to be redefined". He intends to emphasize that cyberspace is becoming more and more connected to real space and that it can provide users with extremely real opportunities to engage in real interactions with each other.
In the digital life space, human beings have got rid of the constraints of the real unitary identity and become "digital people", who can create various virtual identities in accordance with their own preferences and fantasies, and the online identity has been completely divorced from the real identity, which is the first real "identity emancipation movement" in the history of mankind. This is the first real "identity liberation movement" in the history of mankind, which has greatly enriched the types of human social relations. The digital living space is a completely different ecosystem, in which people use their virtual identities to release themselves more fully, or to hide themselves more carefully, and to express their innermost needs without fear.
In the digital living space, enterprises exist as information entities and must adapt to the laws in the digital living space to strive for more resources and create more advantages in this environment. Traditional enterprises are used to influencing consumers in their real life space, but now, such influence is too limited. In a certain sense, the main battlefield for future business competition will be the invisible digital living space.
Today, is not to do digital marketing has been no doubt, the Internet advertising market is the best proof of the rapid progress, in 2013, hundreds of millions of dollars of single-brand advertisers several have chosen to put in Baidu. According to Millbrown's prediction, in 2015, the proportion of brand advertisers will be 4:3:3, i.e., TV 4, Internet 3, and other media 3.
For enterprises, what exactly should be done, and how to better build the brand in the digital world in the era of big data has become a more critical issue. Traditional marketing methods are no longer able to reach consumers, and today's consumers want more tangible help and services. The traditional enterprise-consumer relationship has evolved into a "service relationship" in the digital living space, where users become lifers, enterprises become life service providers, the media become service platforms for life solutions, and enterprises provide services for lifers through various service platforms for life solutions.
From consumer to lifer
Chaplin's comedy film "Modern Times" satirizes the "side effects" of large-scale standardized production in the industrial era, which improves the production efficiency through professional assembly line operations, but brings about alienation of people. Standardized production not only alienates producers, but also traps consumers in the trap of consumerism.
Consumers are the starting point and the end point of industrial production; the number of consumers determines the market size, the quality of consumers determines the market value, and the structure of consumers determines the market structure. Under the standardized framework of industrial society, consumers are regarded as homogeneous "atoms" due to their fixed consumption relationship, and only their ****similarity is paid attention to while their differences are ignored.
With the advent of the big data era accompanied by the development of the Internet, the concept of "consumer" is being challenged more, in general, in the following four aspects:
One of them is the concept of "consumer" is an individualized. The first is that "consumer" is an individualized concept. Consumption, as an individual behavior, is the basis for the survival and development of consumers. Although the consumer's consumption behavior is expressed as individual consumption, there is a profound social logic hidden behind it. The concept of consumer, though seeing the individualization of consumption behavior, strips away the social nature of consumption behavior. Individualized consumption is private, the logic behind it is difficult to identify with small data tools, if only focus on the "consumer" in the person, it is easy to make the standardized production of enterprises full of uncertainty.
Secondly, "consumer" is a concept of typology. Typical demand is the basis of economies of scale, but niche demand and personalized demand is difficult to meet, therefore, the industrial economy is a typical economy of scale. Constrained by the time and space limitations of production and consumption, not all consumer goods enterprises are willing to provide, only to reach a certain scale of production to be able to produce, "the law of two or eight" has become the rules of behavior of most enterprises in the industrial era. The digital living space, on the other hand, has the ability to aggregate decentralized individual needs and provide new opportunities.
"I am Jiang Xiaobai" and "Ultra Pure" - two liquor products launched in March 2012 by Chongqing Jiangjin Distillery (Group) Co. targeting the two post-1980s and post-90s youth crowds.
Young people in mainland China don't actively drink liquor, and even regard it as the "choice of their parents' generation," which has caused a lot of confusion for many liquor manufacturers. "I am Jiang Xiaobai" through social media in a year's time to build a youth fashion brand, so that passive drinking 80s and 90s into active drinking, and get a lot of market revenue. Compared to Moutai, Wuliangye, Luzhou Laojiao, Langjiu and other giants of the liquor industry in mainland China, "I am Jiang Xiaobai" can only be regarded as a micro-brand, but it is seizing the market opportunity point in the era of big data to meet the demand for decentralized personalized aggregation.
Third, "consumer" is an abstract concept. Enterprises often search for typical consumers and consumption scenarios, and reinforce the relevance of the product to typical consumers, typical consumption behaviors, and typical consumption scenarios through mandatory advertising. This abstract search, often stripped of the diversity of life scenes, it is easy to see consumers as the same, so the "social visibility" of the live consumer is very low, the enterprise can only focus on its abstract group characteristics, while ignoring the dynamics and variability of consumer behavior.
Fourth, the consumer is a fractured concept, which is reflected in two aspects: First, the spatial and temporal fracture, enterprises believe that consumer behavior has a greater degree of randomness, it is difficult to tap into the coherence of the consumer's purchasing behavior, therefore, "the last kilometer" of the retail market has become the focus of the competition; second, the consumer isolation, it is difficult to tap into the relationship between consumer behavior and consumer life, it is difficult to tap into the consumer behavior and consumer life. It is difficult to explore the correlation between consumer behavior and consumer life. Small data can not insight the relevance of consumer behavior, which is the root cause of consumer cognitive disconnect, should be based on big data to explore the internal logic of consumer behavior and daily life.
Overall, the concept of consumer is a product of an era of small data, which meets the needs of standardized production and standardized consumption in the industrialized era, but it is difficult to gain insight into the continuity and individual differences of consumer behavior. In addition, consumption is only a part of the user's life, and the correlation between consumption behavior and other social behaviors in the user's life cannot be separated. In the era of big data, the existence of the user's form and social behavior is digitized, the relevance of the user's behavior and the specificity of the user's existence can be clearly described, so the enterprise's perception of the user should be upgraded from the "consumer" to the level of the "lifer".
The concept of "lifer" was created by Hakuhodo in Japan in the 1980s. We were first introduced to the concept at a lecture organized by Dentsu Japan at Peking University in 1998. According to the explanation provided by Hakuhodo's Lifestyle Synthesis Institute, "Sei-Katsu-Sha (Lifers) denotes the idea that the consumer population is more than just consuming and shopping, 'Sei-Katsu' denotes life and living, 'Sha' denotes people, and 'Sha' denotes people. ' denotes people, and 'Sei-Katsu-Sha' means people who live their own lives, which covers not only the economic dimension of people as consumers, but also the psycho-social and political dimension of people as individuals." This concept is broader than the notion of "consumer," which is understood in economics as the purchaser of goods, whereas "lifer" expresses the person who has his or her own The concept of "consumer" is broader than that of the buyer of a product in economic terms, while "lifer" refers to a person who has his or her own lifestyle, ambitions and dreams, and who is not only a consumer of a brand, but also a potential consumer.
The prerequisite for effective marketing communication is to view the target audience as living, breathing, flesh and blood people who live in the world and have rich characteristics. Only by observing them from all angles and grasping their essence can we better communicate with them, anticipate possible changes in the future, and continuously adjust our marketing communication strategies to establish a long-lasting relationship with our companies and brands.
While the concept of "Lifers" is based on the traditional communication environment, it is in fact more meaningful and valuable in the Internet communication environment and in the digital life space.
In the digital living space, the target audience that enterprises hope to communicate with and approach can show more and more specific information to enterprises, instead of the abstract and generalized group characteristic information obtained through sampling surveys in the past. Moreover, they are very real life in the digital living space, and in the digital living space in the enterprise adjacent to the living space, they are no longer a typology, but a live and concrete life individual.