How to quickly analyze a marketing case in 6 minutes?

I understand a lot of principles, but they are not consistent with the actual application. There are still differences between theory and practice. The same is true when we analyze marketing cases. So how do we interpret an excellent marketing case? The author summarizes this and hopes it will be helpful to you.

"I understand a lot of principles, but still can't live a good life" is the feeling many people have about life, which shows that understanding principles and practical application are not the same, and there is still a huge gap between the two.

We also encounter the same confusion when analyzing marketing cases. After analyzing countless excellent marketing cases, we find that we still produce high-level works and projects.

After reading an excellent marketing case, if you cannot draw useful experience from it, it is nothing more than falling into the following three situations:

1. Lack of ability, experience and cognition leads to inability to understand or half-understanding ; this usually happens to newcomers who have not been in the industry for a long time, because due to the lack of sufficient knowledge and experience accumulation, they have difficulty understanding some professional issues.
2. It is impossible to find the reasons for the success of the case, nor to summarize the corresponding methods and routines ; in this case, either the analysis was not done carefully, or the ability to summarize and analyze needs to be further improved. After all, the study and analysis of things is a high-level ability that takes a long time to cultivate.
3. Lacking practical experience and execution capabilities, it is impossible to apply what you have learned ; it is like the principle of unity of knowledge and action, which most people understand, but the number of people who can actually achieve it is rare.

I believe that the above situations are also the pain points for many people when they are learning and studying marketing cases. Over time, they will have doubts about whether reading the cases is useful.

If you think about it carefully, you will find that this is a very normal phenomenon, because thinking that you understand and really understanding are two different things, really understanding and being able to summarize successful methods from them are also two different things, and summarizing methods and being able to apply them in practice are even more different things.

In the past two years, I have served as a judge for many domestic and international advertising competitions, reviewing thousands of marketing cases on average each year. Naturally, the speed of reviewing cases is getting faster and faster.

In the beginning, it would take me 20 minutes to read a case study, and I couldn’t guarantee that I would fully understand the key points. Now, I can basically finish reading it in a few minutes and clearly understand the core ideas and content.

The ability to understand cases faster and more efficiently is partly because the speed increases naturally after reading more, just like the speed of reading books naturally increases after reading more. However, the most important thing is to learn to focus on the key issues. After analyzing the most important issues, you can quickly extract the essence and viewpoints of the case and judge the pros and cons of the case.

Based on my own experience in case interpretation, I feel that there are six issues that need to be focused on, namely "background and goals, marketing strategies, communication themes and content, communication media, user paths, and marketing results." Let us understand them one by one with the help of actual cases.

1. What is the background and objectives?

The background and goal is to let the analyst stand in the perspective of the enterprise and understand the current situation of the enterprise and the significance of launching this marketing campaign: Why does the brand want to launch this marketing campaign at this time? What difficulties and problems do you want to solve? What results do you want to achieve through marketing behavior?

Take the joint marketing of Luckin Coffee and Coco Tree Coconut Juice as an example. After experiencing some turmoil, Luckin Coffee is still deeply loved by young people and its performance continues to grow. A large part of the credit comes from the launch of popular innovative products such as Raw Coconut Latte.

Therefore, Luckin Coffee continued to use the differentiated marketing strategy of product innovation, and joined forces with the well-known and popular national beverage brand Coco Tree Coconut Juice to launch the co-branded product "Coco Cloud Latte". This is also the first cross-border collaboration of Coco Tree Coconut Juice in 34 years.

2. What is the marketing strategy?

In short, marketing strategy is to sell what products to which people through what methods and channels; therefore, when analyzing the marketing strategy of a case, it is necessary to focus on the following questions: What target groups are targeted? What products are mainly promoted? What publicity actions are planned? What kind of promotional and operational activities are formulated?

In this collaboration between Luckin Coffee and Coco Tree, the marketing strategy is extremely clear; the product being promoted is, needless to say, the co-branded product "Coco Cloud Latte"; the core target group is naturally "loyal consumers of Luckin Coffee", and potential groups include "coffee lovers who like to experience new products" and "Coco Tree coconut juice consumers".

The integration of marketing communication and traffic actions is also relatively complete:

1. Official statements draw attention

Coconut Tree Group announced its first joint cooperation in 34 years, sparking the curiosity of netizens. Luckin Coffee then officially announced the joint product "Coconut Cloud Coffee" and adapted Coconut Tree's controversial slogan "This cup, drink from childhood to the atmosphere".

2. Spokesperson demonstrates how to drink, and the drink goes viral

Coco Tree spokesperson Xu Dongdong personally came out to explain how to drink it. Her classic and controversial posture attracted many netizens to imitate her.

3. Weibo topics and interactions create popularity

Weibo launched topics such as #Luckin Coconut Tree Co-branded Edition# and #Coconut Cloud Coffee#, started a joint paper bag PK voting interaction, and invited KOLs in the lifestyle, entertainment, and food categories to increase the popularity of the topic.

4. Xiaohongshu promotes the trend

A large number of Xiaohongshu KOLs and KOCs recommended the product, creating a feeling that young people would be out of date if they didn’t buy a cup and take a photo.

5. KOLs and private domains trigger screen swiping

With the support of a large number of marketing and news-related public accounts, Luckin's private community served as a seed base, triggering a screen-sweeping trend in the circle of friends.

3. Does the communication content address the needs?

First, whether the proposed promotional theme has an insightful insight into consumers and whether the information conveyed meets consumer needs or solves consumer problems; secondly, whether the corresponding posters, videos, graphics, H5 and other communication ideas and content can help the brand achieve the corresponding marketing communication goals.

The promotional slogan of Coco Cloud Latte, "This cup, from childhood to adulthood", is mainly to take advantage of the much-discussed slogan of Coco Tree Coconut Juice, "I have been drinking it since childhood", and it also satisfies consumers' entertainment and curiosity.

The matching promotional materials further promoted the self-propagation of the product on social media, such as the official announcement poster of Coco Tree Coconut Juice in the PPT style. Even the coffee tote bags and cup sleeves were designed in a highly recognizable earthy style, and there were also fun and interesting short videos on new drinking methods, which attracted many netizens to watch and imitate.

4. What are the marketing communication media?

When choosing communication media, there are three main factors to consider: the matching degree between media content style and communication content, the accuracy of media users and target audiences, and the matching degree between media tone and brand tone.

Because Coconut Cloud Latte hopes to become a hit product among Internet celebrities, the choice of media cooperation is naturally based on social media, including Xiaohongshu, WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, etc., through the content recommendations of social media KOLs, to attract more people to experience this new product and create a sense of fashion that everyone is drinking it.

5. What is the user marketing path?

It is necessary to sort out the paths for users to participate in each link of marketing activities and determine whether the paths are unobstructed, so as to provide users with a better participation experience while improving the effectiveness of marketing communications.

Let’s review the marketing path of the Coconut Cloud Latte product: the official self-media and private domain positions first announced it, social media topics and KOLs achieved large-scale dissemination, guided them to the online operation event page or offline store purchases, the spokesperson personally unlocked interesting drinking methods, which triggered consumers to imitate, and finally achieved secondary fermentation and dissemination on social media.

6. Do the marketing results match the goals?

In order to avoid ineffective self-entertainment marketing and get the desired results, it is necessary to determine whether the marketing results match the predetermined goals; if the predetermined goal is to accumulate private domain traffic, then the marketing results cannot be judged by data such as brand exposure and interaction; if the set goal is the degree of dissemination, then it is also wrong to measure it by sales results.

The goal of Coconut Cloud Latte is to create a hit product to drive sales, and the final result is very good. In terms of the product's popularity and topicality, the topic has been discussed more than 30 million times on Weibo, and the number of related notes on Xiaohongshu has exceeded 40,000, which has also triggered a screen-sweeping of the circle of friends.

The sales volume even set a record for single product sales. Despite the lack of Shanghai, the main market, 660,000 cups were sold on the first day of the product launch.

【Knock on the blackboard】

1. What is the background and objectives?
2. What is the marketing strategy?
3. Does the communication content meet the needs of my sister?
4. What are the marketing communication media?
5. What is the user marketing path?
6. Do the marketing results match the goals?

If you interpret marketing cases with the above six questions in mind and follow the corresponding steps and methods to practice deliberately, you will be able to absorb the essence of the cases effectively like a sponge!

Author: Lao Pao; WeChat public account: Lao Pao OG