Information filter丨The three steps of marketing strategy: brand strategy, product strategy, and communication strategy

In today's highly competitive market, brand building is not only the key to product success, but also the cornerstone of sustainable development of enterprises. This article will take you to an in-depth understanding of the three levels of brand value: functional, experiential and symbolic value, as well as how to deeply integrate brands with lifestyles to meet the diverse needs of consumers.

01 Combine brands and analyze 3 brand values ​​in practice

Brands provide customers with three levels of value: functional value, experiential value, and symbolic value.

1. Functional value is the practical value of a brand. A watch is used to tell time, water is used to quench thirst, an umbrella is used to protect against rain, an electric drill is used to drill holes, and an air conditioner is used to adjust the temperature.
2. Experience value means that customers get an experience. If the packaging design of a bottle of mineral water is very exquisite, it will give people a beautiful experience. For example, today's talk shows, trendy brands, fragrances, etc.
3. Symbolic value is the meaning of a brand symbol. A brand, because of its own long-term performance, social evaluation, media coverage, etc., is the identity and social status of your product in the minds of users.

A middle-aged man wearing an Arc'teryx jacket, a girl wearing Lululemon yoga pants, and a woman carrying an Hermès platinum bag, these brands themselves convey value beyond the product functions themselves.

There is a criterion for judging advertising slogans: whether employees use it, whether customers recognize it, and whether competitors hate it.

02 Brand and lifestyle integration

Consumers are increasingly focusing on self-expression. They require not only physical functionality and quality from the brands they purchase, but also that they should be able to demonstrate their own personality, image, ability, and status, and reflect their personal emotions, attitudes, and values.

How to find the lifestyle consumption concept of your own brand? Look for more concrete scenarios; instead of blindly building a lifestyle brand, focus on one or several core scenarios and use them as a strategic starting point to develop and plan products.

The "Five Old Senses" of Brands: American marketing guru Martin Lindstrom proposed this theory in his book Brand Sense. This theory advocates stimulating consumers' senses through the concrete 1 color (vision), 2 sound (hearing), 3 smell (smell), 4 taste (taste), and 5 texture (touch), thereby stimulating their desire to buy.

The brand's "new five senses":

1. Original, initial, natural, pure, seemingly effortless, not over-processed or modified, returning to the true state.
2. The sense of atmosphere, through the creation of the overall atmosphere, allows people to put themselves into a certain emotion, artistic conception, and situation, which is essentially an aesthetic need and a taste of life.
3. Social sense, people attract each other, accompany each other, and connect with each other through interaction, finding a sense of belonging and feeling self-worth, thus achieving a state of physical and mental pleasure.
4. A sense of relaxation, seeking a balance between involution and lying down, having a proper balance between tension and relaxation, being able to deal with pressure or difficulties calmly, without tension or internal consumption, and being in a rational and healthy state.
5. It is high-end, unconventional, and non-common. It pursues a certain identity image and quality of life, and is a lifestyle with great quality, connotation, and style.

03 Marketing trilogy: brand strategy, product strategy, communication strategy

Brand strategy: satisfying what kind of consumer psychological needs of what kind of people in what kind of scenarios. For example, low-end cars meet the needs of wind and rain protection, fuel saving and safety; high-end cars meet the identity and social recognition of a certain type of users;

Product strategy: what story is conveyed through what color and packaging. For example, the existing product side of Miaofu Wet Wet Le uses warm colors with medical labels to convey the calm medical brand value. Behind each color and packaging are the user's emotions.

Communication strategy: Play with topics, traffic, brand co-branding and other large-scale SNS activities. Brand naming, such as oral series, Miaofu Zhangya, hip protection series, Miaofu Xiaohongpi, etc. Each product has its own communication attributes, which reduces the cost of publicity and assists in selling goods.

04 KFS’s distribution strategy ratio on Xiaohongshu

Early stage: 631 ratio, through 60% of the influencers, test a large amount of content, select the content that can run smoothly, carry out 30% information flow delivery, plus 10% search delivery.

Mid- to late-stage: 235 ratio, concentrate 20% of the costs on already identified popular content, 30% on information flow, and finally 50% on search placement to find your target group of people with interests.

05 Offline stores: multiple considerations on business

Think about offline business from a three-way perspective, how can a brand be evergreen and last forever. There are always people who say that they have never heard of this brand, that this brand's advertising is not strong, and that this brand has no celebrity endorsements.

How can a brand continue to flourish in the channel? Here are some thoughts on offline channels. As for how to do marketing, it is more appropriate to take corresponding operational actions based on the attention of the three-party audiences.

1. Brands: They can achieve a consistent start and an end, have excellent quality, and produce products that consumers can repurchase. It is not a one-time deal. In the era of self-media, the transaction begins when the goods are circulated to the consumers. Good products will make the brand better and better through self-propagation, while bad products will be an amplifier through self-propagation, and negative information will spread far and wide in an instant.
2. Channel operators: whether they can make money, whether they can cooperate easily and relatively smoothly, whether there is after-sales guarantee, whether the brand is popular in the market, brand influence, etc. These are all points of concern for cooperating channel merchants. The guarantee of commission/gross profit, the universality of the product, the market size, etc. are all issues that operators are concerned about.
3. Consumers: Can I save money? Can I buy products with high cost performance? Can I get a shopping experience that exceeds my expectations? Is it a white label? Will it be embarrassing to buy your brand? These are all issues that consumers care about.

From different perspectives, different products and market strategies can be planned. For example, the OKR task indicators of the business strategy for Douyin and offline business are completely different. However, there are some similarities, such as offline agents and online supply chain companies, the focus is the same: whether the profit margin can be guaranteed.