NetEase deepens brand-consumer emotional resonance

At the 2016 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, NetEase unveiled its joint report with Peking University, Chinese user attitudes in the mobile era, providing valuable insight into the mindset of China’s new generation of consumers. 

“China’s current mobile internet environment requires brands to have a deeper understanding of consumers’ emotional expressions, in order to gain real consumer insight,” said Miao Li, general manager, marketing management centre, at NetEase Media.

NetEase realised at the onset of the Web 2.0 era that true resonance between brands and consumers can be established through user sentiment. It set out to uncover consumer attitudes — their emotions, views, opinions, behaviours and values. Through NetEase’s Attitude Marketing services, the company inspires its clients to explore and refine their attitudes towards their own brand. NetEase then matches them with those of consumers, enabling clients to better formulate their marketing strategy. 

NetEase owes this success to its incorporation of a classification system that captures the user’s sentiment, and breaks through the confines of traditional TA analyses. Their high-precision technology not only provides deep insight into consumer sentiment of specific target groups, but also, on a larger scale, up-to-the-minute marketing trends. 

In addition to the with Peking University collaboration, NetEase has jointly published with CR-Nielsen the Blue book of internet brand attitudes, which provides an in-depth understanding of brand marketing, based on mobile internet thinking in relation to marketing methods, channels, demographics, and more. 

Together with Nielson, NetEase developed a list of “Top 10 Brand Attitude Trending Words” of the year 2014. Following this list, it joined forces with one of China’s largest data companies to introduce an “Attitude Classification System” to more directly and effectively serve advertisers and the entire industry in the commercialisation and digitisation of marketing. 

NetEase also produced a series of online videos about marketing — titled “Attitude Talks” — featuring local and overseas speakers and lecturers, including renowned corporate CMOs, experts and academics. 

Mobile impact: A “social paradigm shift”

NetEase believes that information on consumer behaviour is the starting point for any form of marketing. In servicing advertisers, NetEase first understands what advertisers aim to market, then consumers convey the feelings they have towards the subject being marketed. Subsequently, the big data of consumer attitudes that is collected provides valuable insight towards marketing strategies, data analyses and other tools to establish a channel between advertisers and consumers. 

When behaviour and preferences change, NetEase takes an active approach in responding and adapting to shifts in consumer attitude. Over time, NetEase has accumulated extensive data, not just of a target population as a whole, but individual consumer needs from a wide variety of emotional expressions. NetEase has achieved this by incorporating “emotional attitude tags” as elements in its big data analysis system. This creates more accurate information on consumer emotions, providing a distinct point of connection between users and brands. 

The next step for NetEase is to comprehensively upgrade its Attitude Marketing services, what it is calling “Attitude Rejuvenation”. This includes new consumer groups, products and marketing systems. NetEase also intends to further integrate its internal and external resources, increase technology development and data mining efforts to enhance the capabilities of its creative team, and upgrade its marketing services.

Miao Li: “Understand consumer emotions”