As the community economy is becoming the mainstream trend across categories, brands tend to associate with the “community” to grow with it. Every Gen Z in real life is part of related communities. How to communicate with specific Gen Z audience and achieve ideal performance has become the core appeal of brand marketing. IP is vehicle of each community culture, capable of gathering community members with values and developing outward for derivation and expansion. Each community has its own unique or preferred core IP, cultural identity, and discourse system. With the help of IP content, brands can directly reach the community, penetrate community culture, build emotional links, break the boundary between brands and Gen Z community, and significantly generate more marketing possibilities.
Rencently, 2022, Shanghai, UM China and Endata jointly released white paper on IP Marketing Trends in Gen Z Communities. As the industry-first white paper which is focused on ROI value of IP content, through cross-industry in-depth research, interviews with Gen Z KOLs, UM’s unique 3C model along with Endata’s IP content database, the white paper explores community cultures associated with community economy, diving deep into analysis of “community ecosystem”, “community IP’s marketing touch points”, and “ 3 popular communities and related IP marketing strategies”.
From the perspective of futureproof media agency, the IP marketing value of the Gen Z community through the 3C model is a key topic in the white paper. To deliver a guidance for clients into practical IP marketing practices, the white paper evaluates IP types and list top IP content that delivers best marketing value for each of the 3 popular Gen Z communities, and highlighting UM’s industry- first community IP one-stop marketing solution with ROI effect as its core.
The link between Gen Z community and IP marketing
The community has its own unique values and community languages, and it may be difficult for audience outside the community to accurately interpret it. IP is seen born of community, representing values and cultures of community, which can help reduce the entry barriers of brands into the community. What’s more, IP can also be used as a heated topic to fuel engagement outside the community, generating more engagement and buzz within the community as well. In the process of outward breakthrough and inward feeding, IP is shaped as a channel bringing brands and Gen Z community together with common values and culture. With the development of diversified communities, the communication approach of community members has been evolving from one-way communication of brand and KOL content into co-creation of UGC content among community members, which has contributed to a mature IP community marketing closed-loop for product co-creation, social amplification and experience feedback.
Along with communication approach, the marketing value of IP has also increasingly expanded from developing product line to cultural impact, community relevance and commerce connection, which is mainly reflected in:
- Develop product lines to promote sales: derivative products, new product co-branding.
- Penetrate into community and improve brand image related to community values: brand renewal, brand trust enhancement.
- Influence people minds to improve loyalty: private domain management and mental influence management.
Analysis of 3 popular communities and related community communication
The report comprehensively divides overall community world into three categories: popular community, rising community and niche community by evaluating the metrics such as user awareness, size, and maturity of the commerce for each community. Among the popular communities, the report elaborates on audience insights and characteristics of communication for “urban outdoor – glamping community”, “street culture – skateboarding community” and “ACGN + gaming community”. Moreover, based on the 3C model, the report reviews marketing value of IP in three pillars of brand influence, community engagement and business conversion, using the unique metrics. It delivers a powerful IP content list with top marketing value for the 3 communities.
Take the urban outdoor – glamping community as example, with the constant growth of glamping fever, its concept and format are becoming increasingly diverse and integrated. Sports, entertainment, leisure, catering, and other activities can relate to glamping. New sub-communities of “glamping +” emerge one after another and glamping seems to have become a domain that can include all things such as Frisbee, fishing, yoga, etc., providing abundant occasions and opportunities for brand marketing within the communities. The report shows that the target audience of glamping community have strong purchase power, who prefer IP-related and celebrity-related brands when purchasing equipment for glamping, in addition to other factors such as quality and function. A glamping community member said, “glamping-related variety show IP or celebrity who endorsed the equipment will make me more willing to buy. Besides, if I buy a tent with the brand, then when I need to buy a sleeping bag, I will give priority to the same brand.”
In the glamping community, the full marketing closed-loop features information sharing, in-community communication, content co-creation and e-commerce conversions. and the communication and engagement can be seamlessly conducted across public and private domains. In the public domain environment, community TA continuously obtain and share information through social platforms such as Douyin, RED and Weibo, engage with other community members within or outside communities. For private domains, a typical format is WeChat group formed by campsites/offline shops/KOLs as a main platform for glamping community to exchange community updates and event information.
Thanks to the inclusiveness of the glamping community itself, various marketing occasions and marketing touchpoints can be linked together. For brands, collaboration with glamping community IP in the format of variety show or celebrities/KOLs, together with online and offline integrated experience is considered a popular approach in the market to penetrate and engage this community.
IP marketing strategy with ROI as its core
Based on the insight of the intrinsic relationship between Gen Z and IP marketing, the white paper indicates that the solution of IP marketing should eventually aligns to business goals, solve the business challenges, and push forward new opportunities for business. Dennis Gu, EVP, Growth, UM China, elaborated on “ROI IP” that integrates the wisdom and expertise of UM and the Endata teams at the press conference of white paper: “ it is worth noting that there are 3 key trends in Gen Z community development: the category is evolving from the mass community to the vertical community; the communication channel is changing from single online platform to integration of online and offline; and the key objective of IP marketing is also transforming, from the traditional product promotion at the content marketing level to the core goal of performance-driven marketing, and that is why we propose UM’s brand new ROI IP solution.”
At the launch event of the white paper, Lawrence Wan, UM China CEO, pointed out: “IP marketing has been the new trend and effective way to reach the Gen Z communities. We also know that to master these trends, we need to understand the importance of these Gen Z circles, how they came into being, and how IP marketing interacts with them. We are proud to integrate our unique 3C model, futureproof position and corporate vision into the white paper, aiming to provide cutting-edge industry insights for customers’ business growth, and help clients achieve ROI maximization of branding and performance through our ROI IP content marketing solution.”
Leon Gao, Founder and CEO of Endata, said: “Gen Z is not only a symbolic group in social culture and consumption power for future, but a new driving force to facilitate marketing industry development. To analyze Gen Z in collaboration with UM, the white paper combines our data capabilities with consumer insight research, providing one-stop solutions to community IP marketing to embrace a new era of content and media.”
Please scan the QR code below for more information on the white paper.
