The evolutionary path of brand marketing

With the development of mobile Internet technology, big data technology, and algorithm technology, brand marketing continues to evolve. This article starts from traditional brand marketing and explores the evolution of modern brand marketing. If you want to understand the evolution of brand marketing, you are welcome to read it.

01

The progress and development of brand marketing mainly comes from the development of the underlying core theory. Traditional brand marketing is mainly based on psychology, while modern brand marketing is mainly based on behavior (of course, marketing is also a highly comprehensive discipline, integrating sociology, psychology, behavior, and genetics).

In the past, in order to influence the consumer purchase decision-making process, when doing brand marketing, enterprises and professional companies mainly focused on various psychological variables, such as consumer cognition, consumer attitudes, emotional factors, learning, and memory, which led to various marketing theories. For example, brand theory focuses on influencing people's attitudes and emotions, while positioning theory (actual positioning is just a method, not a real theory) focuses on influencing memory structure.

The most classic consumer link model AIDMA divides people's decision-making into five stages: attention, interest, desire, memory, and purchase. The first four factors are psychological variables, and only the last one is a behavioral variable.

02

Since 2010, with the development of mobile Internet technology, big data technology, and algorithm technology, most consumers have been online 24 hours a day. Every person who can access the Internet has their behavior track captured and retained by different platforms, forming consumer behavior data. Different behaviors are packaged into "crowd consumption behavior packages" for precise sales, and merchants can quickly invest in traffic after purchasing.

Corporate brand marketing has also begun to pay more attention to various consumer behavior variables. In current brand marketing, among the consumer AISAS we often use, only the first two attention and interest are psychological variables, while the last three search, purchase, and share are behavioral variables.

The concept of "growth hacking" has become very popular in recent years. The growth hacking model AARRR goes a step further. Compared with all previous consumer models, whether AIDMA, AISAS, SIPS, AIPL, 5A, etc., the most essential difference is that every link of AARRR is a behavioral variable.

Acquisition is a behavior, activation is a behavior, retention is a behavior, revenue is a behavior, and referral is a behavior. Since it is a behavior, it means that every step of the relationship between the brand and the consumer can be quantified through data, so it is possible to understand and control consumers more accurately, and then provide precise direction and guidance for brand marketing.

In 2017, I organized some marketing companies on the island to write a book called "Three Major Marketing Algorithms". In the preface, I wrote the following point: Except for love, everything can be evaluated and quantified. Data and algorithms are the carriers of expressing value.

03

Although from a purely academic perspective, psychology and behavioral science have very close connections and intersections, and the behavioral school itself is also a branch of psychology.

But from a marketing perspective, the biggest difference between behavioral variables and psychological variables is that behavior is an objective existence that can be quantified, while psychology is an elusive subjective conjecture. Therefore, in the practice of brand marketing, we still separate consumer psychology analysis and consumer behavior analysis, so that we can provide more practical guidance. Behavior can be directly reflected in the data; while psychology can only be inferred through questionnaires, consumer interviews, and behavioral data. For example, if a person likes to party and participate in various social activities (behavior), then you can infer that this person is extroverted, confident and sunny (psychology).

04

The parent disciplines of marketing are economics and social behavior (as well as psychology). Economics is the father of marketing, and social behavior is the mother of marketing.

Most of the marketing theories we know today are based on psychology, but I believe that future marketing theories must be based on behavioral science. This change from psychology to behavioral science has greatly changed the way of building brands.

Brand building in the traditional era comes from the packaging of things. We package products with a name, a trademark, a symbol; a selling point, a positioning; an image, a story, a cultural value.

We try to add psychological added value such as attitude, emotion, and personality to physical products, so as to win consumers' recognition and purchase, and make the products generate premium. Brand building in the digital age comes from the operation of people. The various concepts and marketing tools we often talk about today, such as scenarios, communities, fans, interactions, private domains, and traffic pools, all start from how to connect with consumers and build relationships.

If you can identify a group of users, then in theory you can sell them anything you want. And when you build a relationship with consumers, they will spontaneously fall in love with you, support you, and stand by you. The reason why online celebrities are so popular with live streaming, such as Xiao Yangge, is actually a reflection of the gradual change in business. The fact that Li Ziqi's brand of snail rice noodles is so expensive and still so popular is also closely related to the shift in the focus of brand marketing.

Currently, brand marketing is at the crossroads of transition and transformation. If companies want to upgrade their brand marketing, they must take a two-pronged approach, combining brand building in the traditional era with brand building in the digital era to achieve corporate growth.

05

I am a running enthusiast. I usually pay attention to sports brands and I am also a heavy consumer of sports brands. In recent years, the domestic running shoe brand Xtep is rising rapidly, while the halo of brands such as Nike and Adidas seems to be disappearing in the Chinese market. Reebok, another well-known sports brand once owned by Adidas, has an even more miserable fate. In the few marathon competitions such as the Shanghai Marathon and the Xiamen Marathon last year, few people wore Reebok shoes. You may not know that Reebok once occupied the throne of the world's number one sports shoe brand and has a glorious history.

It invented the world's first pair of spiked running shoes and inflatable sports shoes. And fewer and fewer people are wearing Adidas running shoes. Judging from the performance in the Chinese market, Xtep's performance in branding in the digital age is much better than the two international giants. Xtep's new high-end running shoes are also recognized by more and more runners.

In fact, the root cause of Adidas' decline in the past two years is not that they didn't work hard, but the main reason is the outdated brand marketing ideas. Let's take Reebok, which is owned by Adidas, as an example. In recent years, Reebok has actually done a lot of brand upgrades. Starting with the replacement of the brand logo, the old logo was changed to a new one that is more vivid and powerful, symbolizing the physical, mental and social changes that fitness brings to people, which is more in line with the direction of fitness. The channels have also been changed accordingly. Reebok has signed contracts with several chain gym brands to carry out brand communication in the gyms and cooperate to develop fitness courses.

In China, it has signed many spokespersons, including Wang Deshun, Yuan Shanshan, Wu Lei and others. It has also played many new tricks in communication. In early 2015, Reebok launched the largest brand communication campaign in the company's history in the past 10 years, and also invested in the Super Bowl advertisement, which is known as the "American Spring Festival Gala". The theme of this round of campaign is called "Be More Human", which is translated into "Refine to Me" in China. It means to explore one's own limits and become a stronger self.

This series of measures did not help Reebok regain its former glory, and it ended up being sold. Moreover, the sale price was only 2.5 billion US dollars, compared to the 3.8 billion US dollars when Adidas acquired Reebok. The root cause of Reebok's failure was that its brand marketing ideas could not keep up with the new era. It did not make a change in marketing from the bottom up.

06

In 2016, I published a financial bestseller, "Circle Business". In this book, I spent a lot of space talking about a brand that was not well-known in China at the time, called lululemon. The way lululemon built its brand was to use the brand marketing method of the digital age. Lululemon does not have a marketing department, rarely advertises, and has never hired big brands as endorsements. So what did it rely on to achieve growth? In particular, its flagship product, yoga pants, sells for about 850 yuan, which is more than twice the price of similar products from Nike, Adidas, etc. Why can lululemon do this? Let me share with you.

Lululemon has built a systematic user community, which is spread through product educators, brand ambassadors, and user groups. Lululemon calls all its employees product educators, requiring them to be familiar with products and businesses like experts, so as to educate users well.

When recruiting store managers, lululemon gives priority to people in the news and coffee industries rather than those with a retail background, because lululemon believes that they are better at accepting and spreading brand culture. Lululemon even encourages executives and employees to take a mind-opening course called "landmark" to inspire their "true potential." The purpose of all this is to better spread the brand culture. In the end, lululemon's black pants transcended the product itself and were given a greater meaning. Not only did they change from professional fitness scenes to women's daily clothing, but they also became a symbol of women's awakening consciousness.

On the other hand, every time it enters a city, lululemon will dig out the 20 most popular local fitness coaches, yoga teachers, and dance teachers. From these candidates, lululemon will eventually select 4-5 winners as store ambassadors. The store will provide free clothing to the ambassadors, develop courses for them, and shoot promotional videos and photos; they will hang posters of them wearing lululemon products in the store; they will also put their promotional photos in local newspapers and indicate the name of the ambassador's yoga studio. In this way, brand ambassadors can divert traffic to the store. As an elite group with higher education, the ambassadors wear lululemon to show off their toned bodies and smooth muscle lines. They are the best advertisements for the brand and have a strong demonstration effect on ordinary consumers.

With the support of this user strategy, each store of lululemon has become a user base. Every time a store is opened, lululemon will do four things first:

1. Pop-up store preparation: First, look for a low-cost pop-up store to prepare for the early stage of user development;

2. Invite potential users: Invite target users to the store to take yoga classes and try on new products through an invitation system;

3. Connect with local yoga studios and brand ambassadors: Rely on brand ambassadors and product educators to stimulate word-of-mouth social marketing and penetrate into surrounding sports and fitness venues;

4. Open a physical store: When the time is right, open a flagship store in the CBD area of ​​the city.

Based on this user and store operation strategy, we can see that lululemon has gone through the process of "niche group loyalty → reputation formation → popularity expansion" in brand development. First focus on the community, and through interaction with these users and word-of-mouth spread, it will eventually become a well-known social brand. Community, social networking, and society are the growth path of a social brand.

07

The goal of brand communication is not just to spread an idea or slogan, but to influence actions. Compared with the functional, emotional, and value-oriented approaches that try to persuade consumers and make them fall in love with the brand, brand social networking and private domain operations directly start from consumer behavior and are more fundamental.

Gabriel Tarde, one of the three founders of French sociology, has a classic assertion: communication is imitation. He used the two factors of invention and imitation to explain all social life phenomena, and believed that human society is a cycle of invention, imitation, conflict and adaptation. Someone invented new ideas, new concepts, new technologies, and new products, which then triggered imitation by the masses.

In the process of innovation diffusion, it conflicts with people's inherent cognition and traditional habits, and eventually forms adaptation. Imitation is the soul of social life, the most basic social phenomenon, and the ultimate element of social behavior. Human beings are a group of individuals who imitate each other, and our society is composed of the spread and exchange of personal emotions and ideas caused by imitation. The relationship between people is mainly a relationship of imitation.

Therefore, Tarde said that imitation is communication. This sentence explains how advertising and brand communication work on consumers and help sales. The ultimate goal of a company's brand communication is to make consumers imitate the characters and behaviors in the advertisements to buy and use the products. The ultimate goal of communication is to form consumers' imitation from concepts, words to behaviors. The brand is passed on by word of mouth, and the group consumes and uses a certain brand.

Today, various content seeding on social media is mainly through lifestyle demonstration to influence others to imitate. For example, E in the morning and A at night, camping, plain water makeup, etc. are all memes. Good lifestyle marketing must be injected with memes. In the above content seeding, another indispensable point is the demonstration role of KOL.

Tarde summarized the laws of imitation. The first one is called the law of descent. It means that imitation is often from top to bottom. The lower classes and individuals always imitate the higher classes and individuals. This is the imitation that radiates from high to low. The second law of imitation is called the law of inside first and outside later. It means that imitation is from the inside to the outside. Any imitation behavior is first ideological imitation and then material imitation. The spread of ideas precedes the spread of expression. Therefore, in order to form imitative social behavior, ideas and concepts must come first.

In 2023, when companies upgrade and improve their brand marketing, they must first improve their brand marketing concepts and then upgrade and improve their brand marketing. In this way, you can avoid following Reebok's old path.

Author: Liu Yichun

Source: WeChat public account "Liu Yichun's Brand Business Innovation"

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