How do you communicate with professional users overseas?
Xiaomi is the flagship of China’s mobile phone industry. Xiaomi has become the top five mobile phone brands in the world in terms of market share. In fact, Xiaomi has been working hard on the road to "internationalization", and overseas business revenue accounts for more than 40% of total revenue. In the marketing of high-end mobile phone products, Xiaomi's strategy is to cooperate with overseas professional photographers and KOLs to build high-end minds in the field of imaging functions. Therefore, Xiaomi’s overseas marketing department needs to have a clearer understanding of the characteristics of overseas professional users and their views on mobile photography to better formulate marketing communication strategies. The purpose of this project is to help Xiaomi's overseas marketing department bridge the "information gap" in the cognitive level of overseas professional users.
01 Let's look at socio-cultural and talk about communication.
Photographers are artistic creators. In traditional concepts, artistic creators generally have strong perceptual thinking and are good at extracting "non-daily" inspiration from everyday people, things, and objects to form works with a personal style. However, in addition to these, what other differentiating characteristics do overseas professional users have?
To solve this problem, we need to use one-on-one in-depth interviews. With the assistance of Mi, we participated in interviews with several professional users abroad.
The soil and water support the people. We found that overseas professional photographers not only have the traditional characteristics of artistic creators, but also have distinct characteristics due to the different social and cultural environments in which they live. For example, because they grew up in cross-cultural backgrounds, professional photographers from developed countries such as the United Kingdom and Italy have the values of "global citizens" and hope to present local themes in a way that transcends ideological and cultural barriers. When talking about their personal photography style, they all mentioned authenticity and nature, and did not want too many algorithms and technical additions. Therefore, for overseas photographers, mobile phone photography needs to highlight the naturalness of imaging and avoid excessive influence of algorithms.
From the perspective of living habits, maintaining regular exercise is a major feature of overseas professional user groups, which is related to local climate change, the new crown epidemic, and the impact of the sports enthusiast community. The inspiration for brands is that they can enhance the appeal of the Xiaomi brand to this group of people through themed photography activities and joint activities.
(External photo KOC interview)
Therefore, going deep into the cultural and social background of users and combining them with their actual behaviors can allow us to see more essential crowd characteristics. Only with a deep understanding of the characteristics of the crowd can we formulate more targeted marketing communication strategies.
02 Does the image solution that the Chinese admire must be suitable for professional users abroad?
Since the development of mobile phones, all parameters have reached the ceiling, but imaging is still the "track" that major brands are still clinging to, and Xiaomi is no exception. Filters, beautification, and whitening are functions that are popular among Chinese people but may not be recognized by professional users. As mentioned above, due to differences in social and cultural atmosphere, behavioral habits, etc., overseas professional photographers respect the authenticity of images. During the interview, some users mentioned that they hope to launch filters with more natural effects for Europeans.
What is also interesting is that in the testing of product selling points, the functions that help improve the efficiency of capturing and natural imaging are favored by users, while the appeal of selling points such as ultra-telephoto range is relatively low.
(Summary of basic philosophy of expert photography)
From a small perspective, this project helped Xiaomi capture the portraits (designs) and interests of typical overseas professional users; from a larger perspective, through qualitative interviews with professional users, we confirmed a golden rule in marketing, which is to always start from the user's perspective and "dialogue" with local users in a narrative way that they are familiar with and accustomed to.
