The harder it is, the more you need to invest in product advertising

How to do a good job of brand communication in the environment of dusty media? The author of this article points out that we should invest more in advertising and do brand advertising rather than performance advertising. He also analyzes four publicity hotspots with case studies. Let's take a look at the author's analysis.

I wonder if you have noticed that brand communication is becoming increasingly difficult.

Why?

In the past era of media fragmentation, we have become accustomed to the fragmentation of information. Now, the situation has become even more extreme. Not only have media platforms become fragmented, but user groups have also been refined to the level of almost dust through the "Thousands of Faces for Thousands of People" technology.

The media environment has gradually evolved from fragmentation to dustiness and even haze.

In this era without a unified central media, everyone is a KOL. The most critical change is that consumers seem to be wearing "masks" and only choose to accept information that interests them.

Therefore, the brand is getting worse and worse.

A friend who is a consumer goods consumer goods consumer goods consumer goods consumer goods friend complained that he could do nothing with a budget of hundreds of thousands. Investing in large accounts to drive product conversions might attract a wave of users at first, but they would soon disappear. Investing in small accounts to penetrate the market might seem like a huge base, but in reality it would not help the brand much. It was so difficult.

Faced with difficult-to-achieve KPIs, I am nervous every day at work, fearing that I will be laid off.

Yes, all platforms are emphasizing the promotion of new products and segmenting circles. This approach seems to have made brands fall into a small-scale, intensive street battle.

Each alley is narrow and the situation is ever-changing and unpredictable.

What should we do? The more this happens, the more we should do brand advertising rather than performance advertising.

01

Let’s first look at the difference between the two:

What is brand advertising?

Outdoor billboards, digital advertising screens, and event sponsorships are all brand advertising that revolves around exposure. The goal is to make consumers remember you as soon as they see a certain slogan.

Of course, the better the location, the more times it is seen, and the higher the fee.

What is performance advertising?

If a short video posts a link to a product and you click on it and place an order immediately, it is performance advertising. Simply put, advertising can be measured to promote consumption or complete a certain behavior.

For example, registering an app, filling out a questionnaire, or leaving a phone number are all counted. In terms of billing, performance advertising is just like its name, charging based on actual results.

If you just look at the introduction, even a fool would choose performance advertising, how great it is.

But:

The 2022 China Digital Marketing Trends Report shows that 88% of advertisers said they want to enhance their "brand image" and let more people know about the brand. But in fact, everyone chooses effective advertising that can directly see the results.

Why is this happening?

The answer is: consumers value brands. Therefore, when voting, everyone will definitely choose "strengthen brand influence", and when taking action, they will also vote for conversion, because if you do business without talking about conversion, the neighbor next door will say, "You are a rogue."

However, is it absolutely correct to focus too much on conversion (ROI)?

This is not the case. Let’s look at an example:

In 2022, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted announced that he would leave the company in 2023, three years earlier than originally planned. In an interview, he mentioned that he had made strategic mistakes in the Chinese market.

He said that Adidas' excessive pursuit of short-term profits has damaged the long-term development of the brand. In order to pursue sales, we frequently offer discounts and promotions. Although this has increased sales, it has made users very sensitive to prices and formed a habit of waiting for discounts.

The result of this practice is that Adidas finds it difficult to maintain original price sales in the Chinese market, and the expectation effect in consumers' minds turns into "price reduction."

Therefore, Adidas' experience in China provides a lesson for other brands:

When others are engaged in price wars and media fragmentation, don't pursue short-term sales too much, but find a balance between long-term brand building and sales.

Perhaps you think this case is a bit far-fetched.

Let’s look at another set of data:

The "2022 Bytedance White Paper" surveyed more than 300 beauty brands, and the results showed that nearly 90% of the brands encountered problems in advertising.

This is mainly because these brands rely too much on bidding to attract traffic, which accounts for more than 85% of the total investment, while ignoring the importance of brand building and content marketing.

The consequences of this are:

Brands have invested more and more money in performance advertising, but have not achieved the expected conversion results. Some brands cannot even afford to spend advertising money because the cost of acquiring new customers is too high.

Other institutions, such as Soochow Securities Research Institute and iResearch Consulting, have also pointed out similar problems.

They say that only pursuing short-term returns from performance advertising and ignoring brand building will damage the brand's long-term influence, because performance advertising often cannot help build a brand's psychological impression, and it is difficult to promote a complete consumer conversion process.

Therefore, brands need to find a balance between pursuing short-term traffic and long-term construction. If you only focus on traffic and ignore brand building, marketing costs will increase.

02

Why do I emphasize investing more in brand advertising this year?

First, let’s talk about this year’s market environment.

What do you think about 2023?

From the perspective of entrepreneurship, most people would say: It’s difficult, very difficult. However, there is a strange phenomenon: there were actually quite a lot of brands that spent money last year.

From a big picture perspective, Tencent's online advertising revenue reached RMB 25.7 billion in the third quarter of 2023, a 20% year-over-year increase, mainly due to the performance of video accounts, mobile advertising alliances, WeChat search ads, and local consumer businesses.

Douyin is in a similar situation, with advertising revenue growing 20% ​​to RMB 25.7 billion in the third quarter. Weibo is a little behind, with advertising and marketing revenue a little less in the second half of the year, only US$389.3 million, a year-on-year decrease of 12%.

Even so, their advertising business, denominated in RMB, showed signs of recovery, growing 3% year-on-year.

Looking at the data in the white paper "Advertising Industry Outlook 2024", from October 2022 to May 2023, and then to November 2023, the view that brand advertising is an indispensable part of advertising capabilities and media investment has received increasing attention.

The number of people who support this view has increased from 36% to 42%, and is now even close to 50%. Therefore, despite the economic downturn, it seems that everyone adopted a counter-cyclical investment strategy last year to ensure that they would gain more users and market share.

Secondly, the Matthew effect is occurring in the industry.

The principle is quite simple: the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker. Some people will have more and become richer, while those who have less will have even the little they have taken away.

In the long run, any market segment is getting smaller overall. If companies increase their investment to strive for growth, their own opportunities will become fewer and fewer, and those who remain silent will be more likely to be eliminated.

So, for those brands that cut their advertising budgets, they feel they are saving money, but in fact, the money saved does not bring any substantial benefits.

Furthermore, consumers have become more cautious.

The wave of layoffs and economic conditions in the second half of 2023 have caused people to think more about what they buy than before. Before shopping, people will first ask themselves, do they really need this thing? If they decide to buy it, they will then screen which one has the better value for money.

I don't know about others, but for me:

When I went to MUJI or Uniqlo to buy clothes in the past, I would naturally buy a few pairs of socks. Now, I actually go to Pinduoduo to buy in bulk.

However, from a brand perspective, don’t forget that consumers are easily confused. What they decide to buy today may be forgotten tomorrow. The solution to this problem is to constantly remind consumers.

Therefore, today when advertising spending is not as generous as before, it is particularly important to increase product display and promotion efforts, because it can not only help consumers reduce hesitation costs before purchasing, but also make it easier for them to make choices.

Of course, brand is the core of the cycle.

In fact, even when the economy is in a downturn, advertising cannot stop. This is not just my blind experience. Developed countries abroad have certain historical experience in the past hundred years to tell us this.

Take the oil economy in 1973 for example. The US economy was in a difficult situation at that time.

American Business Magazine later analyzed which companies reduced their advertising spending and which did not, and what the difference was in their sales over the next two years, from 1974 to 1975.

The results showed that when the economy was bad in those two years, the companies that cut their budgets saw their performance decline by 1975, but the companies that continued to keep their advertising budgets unchanged saw their performance improve.

By 1977, the differences had become even more pronounced.

The companies that did not reduce their advertising budgets almost doubled their performance, while the companies that reduced their budgets saw their performance increase by less than 50%. In just a few years, the gap between the two widened.

so,

I think that when competitors reduce their advertising budgets due to the bad economy, it provides a good opportunity for capable brands.

At this time, if you can persist in building a good brand, you can not only attract users' information, but also enhance your influence in the long run.

Therefore, if companies can use flexible and innovative methods to promote their products this year, the chances of success will be greater.

Why invest in product promotion instead of directly facilitating transactions? A very direct reason is that in the past two years, many companies have realized that simply pursuing return on investment (ROI) is actually calculating costs more clearly.

The more you try to make money through sales, the easier it is to get caught in a price war. And what about brand promotion? It is the weight that increases the brand premium.

03

So, how can product promotion be seen in the powdered media?

1. It should be related to color

Looking at last year’s advertisements, many of them were linked to colors. For example, wearing bright-colored clothes gave people a feeling of happiness and positive energy, just like the Barbie doll, who was all in bright pink “Barbie pink”.

For example:

According to a report by Xiaohongshu in the second half of last year, the “Maillard style” has become a trend expression, with representative colors such as brown, tan, khaki, etc. This trend quickly covered multiple industries such as beauty, clothing, food, mother and baby, and home furnishing.

After some research, I found that brands such as Prada, Hermès, and Miu Miu all used Maillard color matching in their autumn and winter fashion shows, while brands such as L'Oréal, Carslan, Bananain, and Anta also invested a lot in notes last year.

These colors are popular not only because they are beautiful, bright and lively, quiet and comfortable, but more importantly, they can bring comfort to people's hearts.

At this time, everyone especially needs something that can heal the soul, so using color for brand promotion will never go out of style.

According to the 2024 annual representative color report released by New York Fashion Week and Pantone Color Institute, this year's representative color is Peach Fuzz, a soft tone between pink and orange, symbolizing warmth, modern elegance and the desire for intimacy and emotional connection.

PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz "Soft Peach" is a peach color with a velvety texture, symbolizing warm and comfortable tones [for reference only].

Therefore, it is worth considering how to incorporate this color into product promotion.

Assuming you are an online consumer brand, you should think as much as possible about how to implement the IP or collaborate offline. How can you show uniqueness while maintaining color and brand characteristics?

2. Bigger, bigger, bigger

Many things were popular last year, for example: Einstein's brain, horse-faced skirt, hole shoes, Zhuozhou refueling backpack, Linglong No. 1 nuclear power charger, coenzyme Q10, sauce-flavored latte, black plum sauce, and the wildly popular "The Art of War".

But compared to these, the two biggest items that impressed me the most were Costco's super-sized strawberry bear and Sam's Club's super-sized instant noodle bucket, which were almost impossible to get.

I remember many brands taking advantage of this:

For example, LV built a large boat on the Huangpu River in Shanghai, with a giant LV Speedy bag with a red pattern on it. It also placed oversized LV bags in front of the LV stores in Zhangyuan, Shanghai and Taikoo Li, Chengdu.

Chengdu Taikoo Li LV super large bag

North Face launched a giant "Yellow Man", KFC made an extra-large egg tart, and Want Want launched an 8L giant milk mug. Although it was sold at 2,999 yuan each, it was quickly sold out.

So, big, big, big, and enlarge is one of the simplest means.

As long as it is big enough and eye-catching enough, users will want to take it home. Can you imagine how your brand can make it bigger?

Online, there is a large amount of traffic and a great reputation, and the common method is to rely on KOLs, large self-media, and burn money; offline is different, users are more curious, and if you can present a different form, they will definitely go to watch.

04

When buying things, people's decisions are often influenced by emotions, which is called "emotional psychology" in psychology.

In the past two years, everyone has been talking about emotional value, and various brands have been trying to figure out how everyone wants to feel, and then trying to become the "spokesperson" of everyone's emotions.

But I think that starting this year, people's emotional needs have changed a bit, and everyone wants to feel more comforted.

Being a spokesperson is not enough. We really need deeper emotional support. Consumers will buy things because they like a brand. Therefore, emotions and atmosphere play an indispensable role in the process.

3. Emotional atmosphere and soothing value

How to use the concept in brand promotion? Take Ele.me in 2023 as an example. They made two waves of copywriting to attract the attention of the public.

One wave is "This Cup of Zen" which combines temple culture, working people's life and the healing effect of milk tea, successfully touching the emotions of consumers.

Ele.me's "This Cup of Zen" theme poster

Another wave, during the Spring Festival, centered around the two themes of "reunion" and "flavor of the New Year", quickly became popular with a series of warm and humorous copywriting, such as "I wish you don't have to be hungry during the holidays", "One of the important forms of work is rest", etc...

If you want to take your copywriting a step further, it’s also a good idea to try an audio theme.

In the "000 Theme Song Challenge" event, Yuanqi Forest invited Cai Guoqing to re-interpret the classic song "365 Blessings". This brand promotion also caused a lot of discussion.

In addition, Luckin Coffee cooperated with the Korean IP Line Puppy on Valentine's Day 214, and launched the comics and animation videos of "Dog Repair Love Instructions" and "Dog Repair Love Story", which also successfully attracted the attention of many netizens.

Therefore, although the traffic dividend is gone, people’s hearts and brand dividends are ushering in spring; of course, in addition to "emotion", this year we cannot do without an important topic: artificial intelligence.

4. AI brand promotion creativity will definitely come out

If it is not possible to go offline and use billboards to showcase yourself, then AI creativity can be used for both B-end and C-end brands.

In China, Coca-Cola released a short film "Masterpiece" produced with the assistance of AI, which used AI (Stable Diffusion + 3D modeling + real shooting) design to "revive" many world famous paintings.

Screenshot of Coca-Cola’s AI-generated short film “Masterpiece”

Fliggy used AI to produce 1,000 print ads in a short period of time.

Abroad, in 2023, Ogilvy planned an event for Lacta called "AI Love You", where users used Chat GPT to assist in writing love letters through the website and associated them with chocolate.

The recipient of the chocolate can see the love message by scanning the product with their mobile phone, which has inspired many people to participate.

The Danish Tourism Board uses AI to "hijack" famous paintings and sculptures, allowing them to speak out in person and tell everyone "Don't be a tourist – be an Explorist".

Therefore, AI itself is a hot topic. When brands combine AI with product promotion, there will definitely be new and unique things. With just a little help from media channels, it can be ignited.

Well: color, emotional atmosphere and soothing value, big-name marketing, and AI product promotion, these four points can be tried this year; in addition to them, those related to cross-border, health, and reverse operations are also good choices.

In summary

The more difficult it is, the more you need to invest in product promotion.

When the outside world becomes uncertain and no one knows what the future will be like, focusing more on strengthening brand promotion may be the best way to reduce customer acquisition costs.

Data reference:

[1] “China Digital Marketing Trend Report 2022”. Miaozhen Marketing Academy, Global Digital Marketing Summit GDMS, Media 360

[2] “2022 Big Data Beauty White Paper”. Big Data, Big Data E-commerce Research Institute, Euromonitor (2022, 11.15)

[3] “Advertising Industry Outlook Report 2024”. Mediaocean (2024, 01.27).

Author: Wang Zhiyuan, public account: Wang Zhiyuan