Text | Chen Shoucheng
Editor | director
The crotch swings from side to side, and the hands swing in relay, with the antique BGM of "You are a passer-by, but you always sigh and leave". This is the most out-of-the-loop dance at present, "Subject 3".
This network old terrier, whose origin is now difficult to prove, has suddenly been reborn recently. Offline, people are pursuing the younger brother who jumped in "Subject 3" and crowded out Haidilao Store and China Gold; Online, as long as you are willing to rub online celebrity, you can get the gift of traffic.
The entry of Haidilao is a key step to promote it to enter the mainstream circle from the network subculture, and behind this, it is the popularity and development of "social shake" which is quite similar to subject three in China Internet for ten years.
However, from the society to subject three, behind the super red stalk, it seems that the sky-splashing wealth has not been given to anyone alone, even though online celebrity, the "master of shadow flow" in ancient times, has only won more than 100,000 fans in the tens of billions of page views.
Offline, how can brand stores that play content marketing well benefit from this wave?
From Guangxi subject three to "subject three"
On the internet, there are many legends about the origin of subject three, and there are also many who impersonate the founder for the sake of traffic. However, it is indeed a recognized statement to add the word "Guangxi" before "subject three" and call it "subject three in Guangxi" coherently.
The source of this statement is that every Guangxi person will go through three exams in his life, one is singing folk songs, the other is nagging rice noodles, and the third is dancing a silky dance. This silky dance, which is generally considered to be original by Guangxi people, has become the current "subject three" after many changes on the Internet.
It can be seen from the rare video materials on the Internet that "Kemusan" has a history of at least 20 years, and it is closely related to the flexible break dance that was popular in China in the 1980s. However, judging from the fact that the lower body of Kemusan only relies on the upper body to make a living, it is quite similar to the characteristic dance with the same long history as "Social Shake".
Source: Xinhua News Agency, look
However, unlike social shaking or break dancing, the former two are still an all-encompassing "big category", and social shaking even derives many classifications such as "elegant shaking", "suspense shaking" and "everything can be shaken". However, subject three, which is more familiar to the audience today, is a relatively fixed "formula" from dance movements to BGM and even video content.
First of all, the soundtrack of subject three is an antique song "Laughing at the Rivers and Lakes" created by the antique creator "Listening to Books" and released in 2020. After being adapted from DJ version, the gear of fate turns quietly.
Before the advent of "Laughing at the Jianghu DJ Edition", although "Subject III" was also famous on the Internet for a long time, it was far from the current popularity. Until February, 2023, one of the talents who made important contributions to the development of "Subject III", "God is not in Handan", began to use "Laughing at the DJ Edition" as the soundtrack of its video content.
Soon after, the expert who danced "Subject III" found in many videos with music that the video traffic with "Laughing Jianghu DJ Edition" as the music was better, and he began to copy the traffic password repeatedly, so the combination of the two became a formula.
It can be said that the original silky dance subject III, far from becoming a national explosion, is short of a song "Laughing at the Rivers and Lakes", while the "God is not in Handan" who pursues traffic has discovered this traffic password in his own continuous attempts.
The contribution of "God is not in Handan" to subject three is not limited to this. He ingeniously linked subject three with "social fear challenge", that is, dancing in the crowd, which made the social fear sweat, and made me feel frightened. Since then, this special content form has also been borrowed by many followers, and it has become one of the other well-known characteristics of subject three, from which famous stems such as "directing traffic" have been derived.
Through the continuous excavation of subject three, God is not in Handan, so he has become a online celebrity with nearly one million fans, while imitators who are not in Handan, such as "God is not in Taiwan Province" or even "God is not in New Zealand", have gained tens of thousands of fans.
Of course, this is just another carnival that is popular on the Internet or even on short video platforms. Before "Subject III" becomes a national explosion, someone needs to continue to add a fire.
Subject three turns red again, and everyone has a share.
The entry of Haidilao is a key step for subject three to become a national explosion.
According to the Baidu index, before November 2023, the search index of "Subject III" remained below 3,000 all the year round. Until the end of November, the search index of Subject III soared all the way, and now the data is about 40,000, which is about 10 times that of the previous one. The explosion of subject three dance even "polluted" the information source of subject three in the driving test in disguise. Someone vomited: "Please stop sending it, I can’t find the course of subject three."
At the end of November, just two talented people from Tik Tok released a video of performing "Subject III" in Haidilao Store, wearing waiters’ clothes, and thus gained nearly 3 million praises.
This internet carnival began to spread to the offline. Soon, "it’s not that male models can’t afford it, but that Haidilao is more cost-effective" Internet hot stalks became popular, and it became a reality to let waiters jump "subject three" in Haidilao. Even the diners who are keen on following the trend have once again turned Haidilao store with the performance of subject three into a hard-to-find queuing king.
Whether the cause of the incident was an unintentional move or a deliberate hype of Haidilao is now impossible to prove. However, it can be confirmed that after the network fermentation, Haidilao made corresponding marketing. On the one hand, it is widely rumored on the Internet that the monthly salary of waiters who will skip subject three is more than 12,000. On the other hand, Haidilao also publicly gives cash rewards to waiters who perform subject three in stores, which is a great joy.
Obviously, while content marketing has become the most popular Internet marketing concept at present, the content marketing of local life businesses also has miraculous effects. It seems that stores that only serve a fixed passenger flow, on the one hand, have a batch of "natural flow" that they will get when they open their doors, on the other hand, they also need to "invest" in exchange for guests.
This way of offline streaming is to attract user groups with content performance in exchange for income. Before subject three, this method has been applied by countless offline stores in China for countless times. Haidilao’s borrowing of subject three only gives the majority of brand businesses a more ingenious and convenient content form to copy.
China Gold, located in the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, took the lead in learning, and invited the master of the "first-generation muyaozi" movie stream to perform "Subject III", which also succeeded in making it attract attention. In the audience’s video, other brand gold shops next to China Gold are inviting "clowns" to perform traditional methods such as folding balloons to win customers, which is particularly lonely.
Although it is difficult to calculate how many specific benefits China Gold and Haidilao’s subject three marketing can bring to their offline stores, one thing is clear: the content marketing of a single store will ultimately not only affect a single store, but also increase the influence of the whole brand.
In the Internet, this is the online brand marketing empowerment offline. Online, this is the marketing empowerment of a single store to the whole brand. In this carnival, the brands that took advantage of the market gained voice, the online celebrity gained traffic, the spectators got happiness, and everyone was happy.
Taking advantage of the situation and linkage, it is important to persist.
The "God is not in Handan" who jumped into the subject three times, from 0 powder to millions of fans, did two things. One was to find a fixed video template that was popular with the audience, and the other was to shoot this routine all the time.
In fact, what many short video experts do is almost all copies of "God is not in Handan". However, some are exquisite and some are rough, but in essence, they all find a unique track and persevere. Short videos are not afraid of "repeating" themselves.
Of course, the track itself is big and small, and its liquidity is strong and weak.
As far as subject three is concerned, it may not be a big track. Roughly speaking, it may be a small category of "social shaking" under the general classification of "dance", and then subdivided into "subject three" This also makes, in this wave of explosion of subject three, a large number of subject three creators are actually not vertical creators, but mostly people from all circles, including the stars who are working hard to operate Tik Tok, and so on.
The smallness of the subject three track is also reflected in the number of Tik Tok fans in Head online celebrity. The number of fans of "God is not in Handan" is less than one million, the number of fans of "Xumou" who invented the sliding step is less than 300,000, and the owner of the movie stream who once exploded has turned red again, and it has only increased by 150,000 fans in one month. Now the number of fans is less than 600,000.
In addition, the style positioning of subject three is also "low". For the catering brand Haidilao, it is necessary to use the heat of subject three to do marketing.It just helps them to continue to establish a brand image of being close to the people and focusing on service.But for the creator himself, just jumping "subject three" means that his style is not high. If the style is not high, it will be difficult to receive high-end brands, the unit price of customers will be low, and the commercial transformation will be relatively poor. With this popularity, the benefits may be limited to the growth advertisements of e-commerce platforms and the benefits of live PK.
As for the world dance champion, whether it can change the public’s inherent impression of "subject three" is another matter.
Brands want to do offline marketing, and they can’t be blind. The first thing to know is that China Gold and Haidilao are national chain brands with offline stores everywhere. Users can contribute to the brand as long as they want to be lively. However, for brands with limited stores, low consumption frequency or far away from the public, whether this marketing can be useful remains to be considered.
In addition, it should be noted that the marketing of Haidilao is not achieved overnight. Since its establishment, Haidilao has been good at creating topics, so it has established an image of "loving the whole job" in the eyes of customers. Now it is not difficult to create marketing events with the help of the heat itself. However, for more inexperienced brands or brands that do not intend to cultivate marketing for a long time, the case of subject three is not a suitable example for learning.
Of course, "Subject 3" is already a cost-effective choice compared with the traditional tricks of inviting clowns to tie balloons at the door of the store, inviting magicians to perform magic, or inviting song and dance troupes to perform songs and dances.
However, the popularity of subject three will eventually pass, and local life merchants still need to find their own universal routines like short video experts.
