6 new marketing trends to teach you how to tell a good brand story

In the first half of 2023, the consumer market gradually recovered, and brand actions became more frequent. The author of this article summarizes six marketing trends worth paying attention to in the first five months of this year, and how to combine these six new marketing trends to improve brand promotion effects. Let's take a look.

In the first half of the year, the consumer market gradually recovered and brands took more actions. From short films, copywriting, packaging to offline experience, we saw many refreshing brand practices.

In this collection, DaoFa summarizes 6 marketing trends worth paying attention to in the first five months of this year. You can see:

• Inviting a famous director to shoot a short advertising film, what kind of brand expression ambitions do "pidan" and "Sumida River" have?
• Why did "Liangbai Kai" spend 3 million yuan to only change the font color and bottle shape?
• With the diversification of communication media, what does an effective copy that can add points to a brand look like?
• Young people love to worship Buddha. How can brands learn from “temples” and grasp the emotions?
• When shooting female advertisements, how can you avoid making mistakes and still go viral?
• When using experiential marketing to dominate Xiaohongshu, what three key points should brands pay attention to?

1. Film and television expression: "When brand advertising begins to roll back, we talked with emerging brands that cooperate with famous directors such as Wong Kar-wai and Bi Gan"

Starting with Apple and Chen Kexin’s New Year short film “Three Minutes”, more and more brands are choosing to work with famous directors to shoot brand short films, including emerging brands such as pidan and Sumida River.

The benefits of doing this are obvious:

• Famous directors are highly popular among the public and are easy to become popular;
• A famous director can tell stories, has his own visual language, and can ensure the quality of the content.

It is too superficial to only consider these two aspects. So why do brands choose to cooperate with famous directors? How to balance the director's pursuit of art with the actual demands of the brand?

There are many opportunities for pidan to choose to cooperate with director Bi Gan. For example, the director himself has a cat and is a pidan user. The concept he conveys is consistent with the style that pidan insists on. So there was an opportunity to cooperate on "Broken Sun Heart".

In pidan's view, brand promotional videos should be untied from sales. Because promotional videos focus on conveying the brand spirit, the content does not need to pay special attention to commercial expressions directed at sales. However, brands still need to consider their own tone, short film style, and target audience, and choose appropriate distribution channels to further improve exposure efficiency.

Therefore, the main line of the short film is to cut in from the brand perspective of "Why do humans need cats?" This leaves a lot of room for the director to create art. He only needs to think about how to convey this spirit through a very personal visual language.

Director Wong Kar-wai has had wonderful advertising collaborations with many international brands. In Sumida River's view, this collaboration is a "different" attempt for both parties. He chose to collaborate with Wong Kar-wai because his works have always been full of emotional resonance and humanistic care.

Sumida River advocates that coffee is not only a flavorful drink, but also a medium that connects people and conveys love and kindness. Starting from this humanistic perspective, it retains director Wong Kar-wai's humanistic care, lens language and aesthetic style to a great extent, and succinctly expresses the theme of the brand short film.

2. Effective packaging: "A conversation with Pan Hu: What is the secret of sales exceeding 10 billion yuan for packaging design for Luckin Coffee, Jinmailang, and Tsingtao Beer?"

Packaging upgrades are common, but it is rare for a product to become a hot topic. The renewal and upgrade of Jinmailang’s “Boiled Water” is a special case.

This article interviewed Pan Hu, the designer behind the new packaging of "Liangbai Kai", and talked about why just changing the font color and bottle shape is worth 3 million? What is the key to making packaging "effective" and bringing in sales?

In Pan Hu's opinion, product packaging must strike a balance between artistry and commerciality. "Effective packaging design does not need to be too complicated. The key is to 'solve problems'."

Pan Hu believes that using packaging to boost sales is not a false proposition, and he has also made many successful cases. A good packaging design can bring immeasurable benefits to the brand. Jinmailang Ramen Fan, Tsingtao White Beer, and Coconut Cloud Latte are all successful practices verified by the market.

The underlying logic of packaging design is also very simple - insight into user needs, implementation of the best solution, and help products win in the market. Design works are the product of the combination of sensibility and rationality. In Pan Hu's view, when he is amazed by a product, it is already successful. Such designs are often difficult to explain logically.

3. Effective copywriting: "Why are 80% of brand copywriting ineffective?"

No matter how the content format changes, copywriting is always the foundation of marketing activities. Today, marketers need to create a large amount of brand content for multiple platforms, but very few of them are truly effective, and only about 20% of good copywriting has a bonus effect on the brand image.

So how do we define “good”?

DaoFa interviewed Mr. Karate, a copywriting expert with 15 years of experience in advertising, to trace the origins and discuss how to write effective brand copy.

During the interview, Mr. Kong Shou shared his views: good copywriting needs to meet three basic conditions: concise, meaningful, and starting from the consumer.

So how do you convey your brand story and understanding of consumers in simple language? The key is to find the brand’s “core text”.

That is the core text information of a brand, including but not limited to the brand's slogan, brand story or core values. "Official accounts, Xiaohongshu, product videos and other content should all be derived under the systematic guidance of the core text," Kongshou said. "The fundamental reason why the copywriting of many new consumer brands is empty is that the foundation of the copywriting is not solid enough, resulting in only some abstract and grand values ​​when communicating with consumers, but they cannot be implemented."

After finding the core text, what the brand needs to do is to repeat it continuously in ten thousand ways on different occasions, through different media, and to subtly influence the minds of consumers.

"Good copywriting should be able to stimulate consumers' emotional response. However, this response may not be emotional value, but a knowing smile or a touching moment, which ultimately depends on the product value. In short, it is about what you can bring to consumers," Kong Shou said. "I am not trying to make consumers fall in love with this brand. Consumers are very fickle. Ultimately, a brand is not about making consumers fall in love with it, but about being remembered."

IV. Emotional Marketing: "In terms of controlling young people's emotions, can brands not compete with temples?"

Young people began to burn incense and pray to Buddha and buy bracelets. In the travel guides on Xiaohongshu, temples have become an important travel destination.

What psychological and cultural characteristics of young people are reflected by going to temples to check in? What efforts have the temples made? Can such social culture and supporting actions provide some reference for brands?

In this article, the Dao Fa Research Institute explores the psychological factors behind "burning incense". Young people go to temples to seek spiritual comfort and resolve their anxieties about studying, working, and making money. The pressure and competition of modern society make young people feel anxious and uneasy. Worshiping Buddha is just a way to release anxiety and seek spiritual comfort.

Many consumer brands are also playing the "placebo effect" card. They make their products into mental placebos, so that even if the actual status quo does not improve, the user's condition can actually be alleviated because the user "expects" or "believes" that change will occur.

By reviewing the marketing strategies of Lingyin Temple and Faxi Temple, two popular temples in Hangzhou, we found that it is no coincidence that temples create hits.

They accurately target young people, hit their emotional pain points, and convey Buddhist culture to resonate with young people. Then they create consumption scenarios by burning incense and worshipping Buddha, and attract traffic for bracelet amulet products. If your brand is still worried about not being able to attract young people, you might as well find inspiration from temple marketing.

5. Female Advertising: Creative Apple Talks about Female Advertising: Motivation, Courage and Blank Space

There are many brands that talk about women's issues, but why are there always only a few that stand out? How can we avoid making mistakes when discussing gender issues? How can we write a copy that will be remembered?

The Knife Skills Institute invited creative Apple, who is one of the main creators of the project "MY BODY TO ME" and "Gender is not the boundary, prejudice is."

Apple once wrote "Gender is not a boundary line" and "Dare to love is the biggest adventure in love; dare not to love is the greatest freedom in love" and other popular copywriting that has become well-known to consumers in recent years.

In Apple's view, "The core of feminism is that you have to respect the weak, the less successful, and the powerless." When it comes to social issues that you don't understand very well, such as gender issues, the easiest way to avoid them is to admit that you don't understand and let someone who knows show you.

Although it has produced many successful works, Apple believes that it is still on the road to writing good copy. Regarding good copy, Apple's standards are accuracy, blank space, and beauty.

For a film to go viral, there are several important things that must be done:

1. Insight is better.
2. The expression must be appropriate.
3. The communication must be accurate.

Even if you do all three of these things, you may not win. Advertisers can only do all three things and then wait for the wind to come.

6. Experience Marketing: "Shanghai Rose, which has been all over Xiaohongshu, brings these three insights to store experience marketing"

From the giant roses at the Bund BFC to the giant bouquets at Zhang Garden, the Knife Skills Research Institute found that the reason these brands were able to dominate Xiaohongshu was essentially because they had done a good job in experiential marketing.

American futurist Alvin Toffler once predicted in "Future Shock" that "the experience economy will surpass the service industry and become the next economic form after the service economy."

Dr. Robert Schmidt systematically pointed out in "Experiential Marketing" that it is to redefine and design the way of thinking about marketing based on the five aspects of consumers' senses, emotions, thinking, actions, and associations.

From the successful practices of Samsung, IKEA and Haagen-Dazs, we can see that experiential marketing has evolved along the direction of "sensory satisfaction-emotional belonging-spiritual totem-value target" .

We reviewed the experiential marketing cases of brands such as I DO, Decathlon, McDonald's, KFC, Bananain, HARMAY, and Sandunban, and tried to give you some inspiration from both old methods verified by history and new ways of brand exploration.

Author: disturb

Source: WeChat public account "Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)"