Five new underlying changes in brand equity

This article revolves around the concept of brand assets, covering three aspects: the connotation of brand assets, the underlying changes of brand assets, and the selection of content platforms. Let’s take a look.

Content is the present era.

For enterprises, content can not only increase brand exposure and communication range, but also improve marketing conversion rate and sales performance. The hat of brand-effect integration seems to fall naturally on the head of content. Content is even regarded as the remedy for current corporate marketing and branding to some extent.

For most people, content is not only a tool to kill time, but also a must-have for soothing the soul, finding like-minded people, learning independently, and even making money to support the family. The fact that Douyin has over 900 million monthly active users and the rising average daily time spent by users are the best proof of this.

For the media, content is the foundation of their survival. Whether it is the internal war over content among traditional media or the anxiety and overdraft of self-media, it all illustrates the cruel reality that there is no media without content.

In a nutshell, content has become the main form of entertainment and survival. In the new era of content, it is necessary to look at the old topic of brand assets again.

01 Brand assets in the classical era

The concept of brand equity first originated from the Marketing Science Institute of the United States in the 1980s, and was basically formed through the systematic explanation of three books by the famous marketing scholar David Aaker: "Managing Brand Equity" (1991), "Building Strong Brands" (1995), and "Brand Leadership" (1998).

The fourth wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions appeared in the 1980s when the concept of brand assets was born. Different from the previous ones, this round of corporate mergers and acquisitions involved a new issue, namely, how to include the acquired company's continued marketing investment in the merger and acquisition costs.

Compared with tangible assets that can be depreciated, such as production equipment, how can marketing costs, which are mainly concentrated on mass media advertising, maximize benefits in corporate mergers and acquisitions?

The birth and improvement of the concept of brand assets, on the one hand, enables both parties to a merger and acquisition to have a common means of quantifying the initial marketing costs. On the other hand, and more importantly, it turns the intangible asset of continuous marketing investment into tangible assets, thereby enhancing the voice of strong brands in mergers and acquisitions and greatly stimulating the enthusiasm of companies to build their brands.

It is not difficult to see from the above that the concept of brand assets originated from the financial field, mainly serving corporate mergers and acquisitions, and has strong financial attributes. The background of its birth is the era of large-scale industry and large-scale media of the global expansion of multinational corporations. The 1980s was an active period of global expansion of Western multinational corporations. Multinational corporations are based on manufacturing and use the financial industry as leverage and backing. The media background is mainly mass media dominated by television and newspapers.

Marketing tools based mainly on advertising are the main body of building brand assets. The large-scale advertising model, which is mainly characterized by large media, large investment, and large production, is not only the main marketing tool during this period, but also the main force in building brand assets.

Enterprises are the main operators in building brand assets, and audiences have always played the role of testing subjects for the specific marketing effects of enterprises. Third-party organizations in the industry provide measurement methods and data.

The entities involved in building brand assets during this period were mainly enterprises, mass media and third-party organizations (market research, brand rankings, etc.).

02 Brand assets in the content era

In the content era, the biggest change in brand assets is that content assets constitute the main body.

Among the various forces in building brand assets, the role of enterprises still exists, but traditional mass media has actually withdrawn, replaced by content platforms, and at the same time, the role and status of individual audiences have increased.

For enterprises, although they are still the operators of brand assets in the content era, they can no longer achieve “what you want is what you get”. Having lost the important accomplice of mass media, the content means and tools (teams, accounts) of enterprises are treated equally with self-media on content platforms. They are not given special treatment. In other words, their rights are reduced.

For individuals, they have transformed from bystanders to players in the game. They can express their views and attitudes towards the brand through evaluation and feedback on the company's official content and their own proactive content production, and thereby gather more individual power (attention, forwarding, sharing, evaluation, likes, etc.), and their status has risen sharply compared to the past.

Content platforms are the biggest variable in this round of changes. They not only carry the role of mass media in brand assets, but also become the game rule makers, with the ability to shape or reshape the brand content production environment. The ability of content platforms to shape the external appearance of brand assets is often implicit and difficult to detect.

The main bodies for building brand assets in the content era are content platforms, individuals and enterprises.

03 Five new underlying changes in brand assets

From the past to the current content era, brand assets have undergone many changes, but the most important ones are:

1. The initiative to build brand assets shifts

In the past, brand asset construction was a conspiracy between enterprises and mass media. In the content era, brand asset construction mainly relies on the majority of individuals and content platforms, and the subjective will space of enterprises as operators has been significantly compressed.

2. The difficulty of building brand assets increases

In the past, brand assets were mainly built through mass media advertising and marketing activities initiated by companies. In the content era, companies as professional organizations do not have obvious advantages in content production. In addition, due to the constraints of content platform rules and the competitive reality of the rise of self-media accounts, corporate brand content needs to be screened by both content platforms and the majority of users before it can stand out. This is much more complicated than the previous linear model of budget investment-media agency-effect measurement.

3. Brand asset evaluation changes from self-evaluation to other-evaluation

In the past, brand asset evaluation was provided by third-party organizations, but these third-party organizations have obvious business attributes of Party B. Therefore, enterprises, as Party A, have strong influence and voice over their business, so this brand asset evaluation is more like a self-evaluation of the enterprise. In the content era, the content of enterprises' brands has no privileges on major content platforms. After seeing the brand content of enterprises, a wide range of individual users have more freedom to express their will and rights. They can not only comment but also process it for secondary processing and then spread it independently. Brand asset evaluation reflects more of the trend of other evaluation.

4. The role of the enterprise changes from Party A to Party B

In the past, when building brand assets, companies provided budgets, media and agencies took money to do things, and third-party agencies took money to evaluate. In this process, companies have strong control, which can better reflect the will of the company as the first party. In the content era, the control of companies over content has greatly decreased. Content platforms and individuals are the real forces that determine brand assets. Companies are simply second parties in front of these two. Today, the brand content of major companies is a case in point. It is strange that they can do a good job by using the first party's thinking to do the work of the second party.

5. The role of the brand department has changed from steward to translator

In the past, the role of the corporate brand department was to be a brand steward, that is, to look after the brand for the boss, and to some extent, to play the role of an executor who implements the boss's or management's will in the brand business. In the content era, it is not important how the boss views his own brand, but what the broad individual thinks is the most important. The main task of the corporate brand department is to collect, monitor, and listen to the dynamics on the content platform, to keep abreast of content hot spots and development trends, to combine brand strategy to achieve control over the flow and speed of brand content, and to do a good job of "translating" the underlying emotions and psychology of content platform users.

04 The roles played by the five content platforms

The major content platforms are naturally the protagonists of the content era, so what role do they play in building brand assets?

Bilibili. Its characteristics are that original content is relatively concentrated and of high quality, but the production scale and efficiency are not high, the user purity is high, and the commercial atmosphere is light. It is suitable as the birthplace of brand assets, and long-form brand content that fully reflects the brand strategy and will is first released here.

Douyin. It has a large user base and high content replication efficiency, making it very suitable for testing and screening popular content. Based on brand strategy, you can test popular content by tracking the platform's content hot spots and user attention.

Xiaohongshu. It is characterized by a strong sense of life and a harmonious community atmosphere. It is suitable for displaying brand content with clear vertical categories or target groups.

Weibo. It has the characteristic of rapid public opinion amplification effect and is suitable for brand content to defend against public relations and negative public opinion.

Video accounts. They are characterized by belonging to the WeChat ecosystem, having obvious familiarity characteristics, and are suitable for content with high trust thresholds and long-tail effects of brand diffusion.

For enterprises, it is not advisable to take only one scoop from the vast ocean, nor to swallow it all and apply average effort. Ultimately, they still have to adapt their own genes, capabilities and stages, focusing on layout first and then developing in three dimensions.

Chief Writer: Dr. Liu, Article Architect: Miaomiao

WeChat public account: Party A Finance