There is such a person, a very ordinary white-collar worker, a little helpless, a little innocent, but also a little ideal and passionate. He is good at working overtime, not good at chasing girls, not good at pleasing the boss, love, money, life All are relatively scarce. His name is Zhang Xiaohe. Regarding personal brand building, perhaps he can give us more inspiration.

Zhang Xiaohe usually introduces himself like this: "My name is Zhang Xiaohe. The computer is a box, the building is a box, and the office is a box. I live in a box, so I am also a box." In fact, he He is not a real person, he is a virtual anime character who was born at the end of 2006 and is only 3 years old now. However, among the 15 people on the "SNS China Pioneer List" launched by China Business News in April 2007, Zhang Xiaohe was listed alongside Ma Huateng and Xu Jinglei.

What was the reason why he was successfully selected in just 4 months? What did Zhang Xiaohe do during those four months? Let's go back to the end of 2006, when he was just born. At that time, he was just an image in MSN's animated emoticons: "square brain, small feet, eyebrows, bean eyes, band-aid, nose bridge, miserable face". If you search "Zhang Xiaohe" on Baidu or Google, the results will be zero.

But in the eyes of one of his creators, Chen Gray, he is extraordinary. This box will become a "cultural brand for office workers", so much so that Chen Gray formed the Box Creation Society for it and started another entrepreneurial venture. But the current situation is that he doesn't know many people, and even fewer people know him. He has nothing but determination. He wants to build his own personal brand and make himself a friend of more working white-collar workers.

Everything comes from scratch. Zhang Xiaohe began to turn the things he did at work into a series of four-frame comic stories, which were published in the picture area of ??more than 30 online forums. Although he lacked experience in animation creation and the works he created were not mature enough, he used his own experience to express his opinions. The method struck a chord with the white-collar workers at work, aroused many people's cries, and was reprinted in a small area, attracting a lot of eyeballs. In just one month, it received more than 100,000 hits on Tianya and Maopu. Zhang Xiaohe has become somewhat famous.

However, Zhang Xiaohe was not satisfied with this result. On the one hand, he insisted on launching three new comics every week, and on the other hand, he also began to open up new fronts. He thought of using Sina Blog and MSNSpace as Represented by the blogging and business social network Ruolin.com. He made friends extensively on Ruolin.com, updated comic stories on his blog, and was also thinking about better ways to ignite his popularity. At this time, a man named Lin Xiaoneng appeared at the right time.

Lin Xiaoneng, like Zhang Xiaohe, is also an ordinary white-collar worker. He works in an Internet company in Beijing. He is a typical office worker. He accidentally learned that an American girl, Leah Culver, had stolen her laptop. Housing panels are sold to sponsors for $150 for advertising purposes. Lin Xiaoneng was deeply touched, so he posted a message on his blog and Ruolin at the same time: "Whoever supports me to buy a laptop for 5,000 yuan, I will help him achieve advertising effects worth more than 30,000 yuan."

Although the news was not widely circulated, it was still reported by one media outlet. How dare such a strange person do such a thing. Chen Gray also noticed this on Ruolin.com. After Lin Xiaoneng negotiated with several companies to no avail, Box Creation Society finally stepped in and cooperated with them to sponsor Lin Xiaoneng to buy a notebook. So Zhang Xiaohe Appeared on Lin Xiaoneng's laptop casing. Subsequently, Lin Xiaoneng fulfilled his agreement as a personal media and actively promoted Zhang Xiaohe: carrying and using laptops every day on the streets, buses, subways, coffee shops, McDonald's, KFC, various restaurants, etc. There is a Zhang Xiaohe sticker on the outer shell, and "Zhang Xiaohe" stickers are sent to curious people. In addition, we also recommend it to all QQ friends, QQ group friends, and MSN friends; use blogs, forums, email signatures, etc. to promote it; invite bloggers to write articles to promote Zhang Xiaohe. The incident later received more media attention and coverage - such a strange person dared to do such a thing and succeeded.

After the "Lin Xiaoneng incident", Zhang Xiaohe became famous all of a sudden, and his attention increased exponentially. He launched a sticker campaign with hundreds of people participating across the country, and posted it on blogs and Ruolin Announcements. , QQ, MSN, video/Flash, mobile text messages, forums, email signatures and other places, people spread the comic stories of Zhang Xiaohe like crazy; the QQ group spontaneously established by Hezi fans reached more than 100 members in a month; various "Hezifans" in the city took the initiative to contact Heziji Animation Club, requesting to be Zhang Xiaohe's image ambassador, and spontaneously organized many activities, including parties, writing scripts, looking for actors, shooting live-action DVs of Hezihe, distributing stickers, making dolls, and writing letters. Provide materials to Box Animation Club, etc.

"Any warrior must use the right combination to win by surprise" ("Sun Tzu's Art of War: Military Strength"). The "Lin Xiaoneng incident" was an unexpected opportunity that Zhang Xiaohe seized, but the success of this incident was inseparable from the thousands of real-name friends Zhang Xiaohe had accumulated on Ruolin.com, and many of these friends were media Internet practitioners, they all contributed to Zhang Xiaohe's promotion - they participated in the earliest sticker activities, and the earliest large-scale reports also came from them and their recommendations to the media.

This topic initiated online was widely reported by traditional media, which not only amplified Zhang Xiaohe’s popularity, ignited Zhang Xiaohe’s popularity, but also marked the development of Zhang Xiaohe’s personal brand. upgrade. Kong Qingxi, assistant director of the Institute of Business Brand Strategy at Communication University of China, has a very insightful saying: "Zhang Xiaohe's brand communication has completely subverted the traditional communication model... It has changed the previous model of mass communication and focused on individual communication. As a starting point, we can use this to stimulate niche communication on the Internet, and then drive mass communication in major newspapers, radio and television stations, and complete the diffusion of information from point to surface. "This kind of social network communication is first created in a small area." "hot spot", and then attract traditional media reports. The traditional media reports will form a secondary spread of the "hot spot", thereby stimulating a larger-scale discussion on the Internet, and then be reported by more media until the "hot spot" cools down. .

In the following two years or so, Zhang Xiaohe worked hard and became omnipotent, from comics to books to dramas, games, and advertisements. The first book "The Fantasy of Zhang Xiaohe's Office" sold 100,000 copies; the drama adapted into it was performed in Beijing twice, with 50 performances, and the box office was full; it has successively become the brand of Intel Centrino, HP notebooks, and NetEase mailboxes. As the spokesperson for marketing activities, he also won the Golden Dragon Award, China's highest animation award, appeared on CCTV's "Fortune Story Show", and entered the Baidu search top 50 for 3 consecutive days. In just three years, it has become the number one animation brand for office workers, and it still maintains its vitality.

Therefore, in the eyes of Chen Gray, the founder of Box Creation Society: "Without the Internet, there would be no Zhang Xiaohe." In a speech at Qiyu Garden in June 2009, Chen Gray made it clear: " Zhang Xiaohe, a brand built with social networks. "So far, more than 300 media have reported on Zhang Xiaohe, mostly half pages and full pages, and reported many times... It is not so much that they have made Zhang Xiaohe." He, it is better to say that he has witnessed the growth of Zhang Xiaohe.

Another point that must be mentioned about Zhang Xiaohe is the background of one of his founders, Chen Gray. He first started as the boss of an advertising company. He is good at creative marketing and is familiar with the Internet. He created the video "Baidu Understands Chinese Better - Tang Bohu Chapter" with a hit rate of 30 million at almost zero cost. He has won the International Effective Advertising Award four times. Effie Awards. All this makes Chen Gray not only good at using social media tools, but also able to steal branding methods from first-class companies. We might as well refer to the seven codes of brand proposed by brand expert Patrick Hanlon: entrepreneurial history, creed, emblem symbol, ritual, opposing camp, magic term and leader to examine the secret of a brand's success.

Entrepreneurial history. In fact, we can compare creating a brand to telling a story. As long as you mention some successful brands, such as Disney and Apple, you will definitely know their ins and outs to some extent. Any celebrity has his own story, which is the basis for people to trust. Almost all media reports on Zhang Xiaohe will repeatedly tell the story of how a group of marketing creatives broke into the animation industry from the advertising world and realized their dreams.

Creed.

Starbucks' creed is to be the "third place" (the third place after home and office), which is simple, powerful, and deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. And Zhang Xiaohe's creed is "Wherever there is an Office, there is Zhang Xiaohe ". The "Science Squirrel Club" we mentioned before has its creed contained in its name: "Science is like a nut that is difficult to open. Although it is delicious, it is not easy to eat; we hope that we can open the hard shell of science like a squirrel. , peeling out nutritious nuts to help people appreciate the beauty of science."

Emblem symbol. Nike is the emblem of the flying lightning, like Apple's white and IBM's black. The significance of the emblem symbol is that when people first come into contact with the identification mark, they can immediately generate rich associations. Zhang Xiaohe is a box. Every modern person deeply feels that he lives in a box. Boxes are everywhere, either in the box or on the way to the box. Houses, cars, offices, lunch boxes, etc. are all boxes, and even after death, they will be placed in an urn. Therefore, in Chen Gray's eyes, the box is the fundamental difference between Zhang Xiaohe and other animations.

Ritual. Getting a certificate is not considered a marriage, only a ritualized wedding is considered a marriage, and only then can there be a sense of belonging, just like people who like Naruto and play Cosplay. Whether it is subscribing to Zhang Xiaohe’s blog, using Zhang Xiaohe’s APP plug-in on SNS social networking sites, watching Zhang Xiaohe’s plays, reading Zhang Xiaohe’s books, or box friends carrying out various offline activities in the name of Hehe. , all constitute the ritual of close contact with Zhang Xiaohe.

Opposing camps. Things are opposite to each other like yin and yang. If you are a believer of God, you can no longer be a believer of the devil. Zhang Xiaohe aspires to be an animation brand for office workers. It is distinct from cartoon characters such as Mung Bean Frog, Dao Dao Dog, and Tuzki. It has divided its own territory and become the king of its own territory.

Magical term. The magic term of Starbucks is "If you are not in Starbucks, you are on the way to Starbucks." Another example is Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo's familiar jokes and the special names for idols such as "corn" and "jelly". These terms are very popular with his followers. Words have a special meaning and allow followers to be closely connected to them. Zhang Xiaohe's magical terminology reflects the culture of office workers, such as "the alarm clock does not ring, the roads are blocked, the elevator cannot be entered, and when the world is not normal, the punch card machine is always normal"; even every comic story is his Magical terms like "What's for lunch?" Hamlet said: "Tobe, or not tobe, that is the question." Harry Potter said: "Where is Voldemort? That is the question." We office workers ask ourselves every day: "What to eat for lunch?" This is the most satisfying thing Annoying questions.

_____"The Story of Zhang Xiaohe"