Building a brand organization: An article explains the functions and differences between the brand department and the marketing department

Brand and user experience are the foundation of business growth, helping companies achieve customer acquisition and establish customer relationships. Market change is a strong driving force for growth. By launching new products, expanding product categories, occupying new groups and scenarios, and entering new channels and regions, brands can achieve growth overnight. The author of the following article introduces three situations of the brand department. Let's take a look.

One of the great benefits of working in the advertising industry is that you can get in touch with all walks of life and all kinds of client companies. Based on my 16 years of experience in advertising companies, I have directly served nearly 20 clients and have contacted and negotiated cooperation with about 200 companies. In these companies, the establishment of brand departments can be roughly divided into three situations:

1. The Marketing Department has a Brand Department

There are many names for the marketing department. Some companies call it the marketing management department, marketing center, or set up a separate marketing company. Under the marketing department, there are usually several functional departments or groups, including product department, brand department, media department, public relations department, event planning department, channel department, etc. These functional departments are responsible for different marketing tasks.

The product department is responsible for developing and planning new products, designing product packaging, and formulating pricing strategies; the brand department is responsible for formulating brand strategies, building brand pyramids, planning and creating slogans, advertising films, graphic design main visuals, event marketing, new media content, etc.

The media department is responsible for formulating media strategies and purchasing media resources, including television, outdoor, and the Internet. Some media departments are also responsible for the business part, such as celebrity cooperation, cross-industry cooperation, and cooperation with public welfare organizations.

The Public Relations Department is responsible for public opinion management, promoting the company through media releases (especially when launching new products, participating in industry exhibitions, and adjusting corporate strategies), extinguishing public opinion crises, maintaining media relations on a daily basis, and establishing good cooperation with editors of television, newspapers, websites, and new media;

The Event Department is responsible for planning and executing events, mainly including offline promotions, channel and terminal promotions, exhibitions, press conferences, etc.;

The Channel Department is responsible for channel development and maintenance.

2. Brand Department and Marketing Department are on par

The brand department is responsible for online, mainly advertising creativity and media placement; the marketing department is responsible for offline, mainly channel development and channel promotion. The product department is a separate setting.

Regarding the functional differences of this department, in addition to my professional experience, I also went to recruitment websites to look at nearly a hundred recruitment needs for brand directors (managers) and marketing directors (managers), and studied their job responsibilities and requirements, in order to look at the differences between the brand department and the marketing department.

1. Main responsibilities of the Brand Department

(1) Brand system construction

Responsible for market research, consumer insights, brand strategy planning (including brand positioning, brand core values, appeals, mission and vision, etc.), brand manual and VI design, and overall brand management and promotion work;

(2) Brand communication and promotion

Advertising creation, copywriting, visual control, content output and self-media operation, event planning, e-commerce planning, public relations hype, formulation of annual marketing plans and writing of proposals, formulation of media strategies and media plans (including influencer placement), etc.

(3) Product planning

Follow up the entire product development process and ensure timely launch, product positioning, optimize product portfolio, product sales tracking, and analyze product feedback and user usage;

(4) Corporate culture construction

Build product culture, brand culture, design corporate culture manuals, help companies complete brand training and team building, etc.

2. Responsibilities of the Marketing Department

(1) Market planning

Responsible for market research, formulation of market strategies, planning of annual, quarterly and monthly marketing plans, including event planning and event marketing;

(2) Channel promotion

Responsible for channel development and maintenance, formulation and implementation of channel sales policies, responsible for agent communication, assisting agents in opening stores, managing sales outlets, etc.;

(3) Sales

Lead the team to make cold calls and promote sales, develop and negotiate with customers, collect sales leads and customer information, establish customer files, attract customers and sign orders, supervise contract signing and payment collection, maintain customer relationships, and cooperate with the sales department to formulate and implement plans and complete sales tasks;

(4) Training

Training sales teams, training dealers and terminals, various conference trainings (investment promotion meetings, kick-off meetings, etc.).

From this division of responsibilities, we can see that there are overlaps between the two, but there are also very distinct differences. The brand department is mainly responsible for "pulling", relying on the brand's own strength and charm to attract consumers, mainly through advertising and media communication; the marketing department is mainly responsible for "pushing", directly promoting products to dealers, channel dealers and end consumers through channels and personnel promotion, mainly through channels and terminal promotion.

3. Brand Department Manages Marketing Department

This situation mainly occurs in large companies and large groups. Group companies usually have multiple product brands, and the specific operations of these sub-brands belong to the various branches and subsidiaries under the group and are managed by their marketing departments.

A brand strategy department is retained at the group level to be responsible for coordinating and coordinating the development of different product brands, formulating company-level brand strategies, and promoting corporate brands.

However, in reality, the management function of the group brand department often remains at the theoretical level, and it cannot actually direct the branches and subsidiaries. The reason is simple: the financial and personnel rights of the branches and subsidiaries are not under the control of the group brand department, and its KPI is the performance and profit of each brand, rather than whether it meets the group brand management requirements. Therefore, the actual result is that the marketing departments of the branches and subsidiaries operate brands according to their own ideas, and the group brand department has become a decoration.

Although the group can introduce some brand management systems and outline documents to strengthen management, the effect is limited. In practice, I found that the only effective measure is to bring the media purchasing rights of each branch and subsidiary under the unified management of the group, that is, the main marketing budget of each sub-brand should be approved and issued by the group brand department. With financial power, the group brand department has the final say and the group's will can be implemented.

Of course, doing so also has practical benefits, that is, unified procurement can strengthen the company's negotiation and bargaining power with the media and reduce the company's media costs.

From these three different situations, we can actually see that there are two major problems with the brand organization settings of many companies:

1. The brand department has become a castle in the air

Although everyone thinks that branding is very important, and the brand department is responsible for the highest-level strategy and planning of the enterprise, and provides weapons and ammunition for various departments, you will find from actual operation that the brand department is not responsible for sales and is far away from the front line of the market, so the brand department of many enterprises often does not have much marketing funds to spend. Without money, you naturally have no say in the enterprise.

The departments with money don’t listen to the brand department, but if the performance is not good, then the departments will first blame the brand department. In many companies, the brand department is an absolute cost center, while the sales department is the profit center.

If you observe those internationally renowned large companies and Fortune 500 companies, you will find that many companies start with people who work on technology or products as CEOs, and when they become bigger, the head of the sales department often becomes the CEO. The reason is that the sales department is responsible for making money for the company and therefore has the most say in the company.

In addition to sales, there are also people with backgrounds in finance and operations who become CEOs, but you rarely hear of people with a background in branding becoming company CEOs.

2. The brand department has actually become the advertising department

In many companies, the brand department is said to be responsible for formulating company strategies, but in reality, it is responsible for advertising creativity and content production. People with high emotional intelligence say that they are the brain of the company, while those with low emotional intelligence become the material makers. If the sales department needs a roll-up banner, they ask the brand department for it. The brand department is an advertising material library, and its role is to purchase media traffic through advertising, thereby achieving customer acquisition.

This practice was acceptable in the past. The brand department would make the commercials and main screen, the media department would take them for placement, the event department would use the main visuals in terminal materials and vivid presentations, and the channel department would send them to dealers.

But today, content, media and channels are infinitely integrated, and this disconnection is a huge problem. Creativity must be considered in conjunction with the media and channels in which it is placed to achieve the greatest effect.

Especially in the Internet era, traffic has shifted from traditional media to digital platforms. In order to cope with the new digital situation, many companies have begun to set up new departments, such as adding digital marketing or new media departments under the marketing department, or setting up independent e-commerce departments, traffic departments, operations departments, etc. outside the marketing department.

Companies no longer rely on media advertising to acquire customers, but instead use digital advertising, content operations, live broadcasting, and private domain operations to acquire customers and grow. As a result, the brand department, which was originally responsible for advertising creativity and delivery, has become a thing of the past. In particular, the emergence of growth departments has become a strong alternative to marketing departments, posing a severe challenge to traditional brand organizations.

In March 2017, Marcos de Quinto, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of Coca-Cola, retired. Coca-Cola then abolished the CMO position and established a CGO (Chief Growth Officer), which was held by Francisco Crespo. The goal of Coca-Cola's structural reform is to help the company regain young consumers at a time of slowing growth, respond to the trend of the soft drink market shifting to healthier beverages, and regain high growth. The specific approach is to integrate marketing business with business leadership strategy, user services and business operations, and the CGO will be responsible for leading them together.

This move sparked huge controversy, with some saying that "this means Coca-Cola no longer trusts the global CMO to drive the company's long-term growth." Moreover, the CGO role is no longer held by people with a marketing background. Traditional marketers are in an unprecedented crisis, and other companies are beginning to follow Coca-Cola's lead. In its "2020 Corporate Forecast Report," Forrester, an American market research firm, pointed out that companies such as McDonald's, Uber, and Johnson & Johnson have abolished the CMO position. According to a report by executive research firm Spencer Stuart, the proportion of Fortune 500 companies with a CMO position has dropped from 74% in 2009 to 70% in 2019[1].

However, two years later, Coca-Cola abolished the CGO and restored the CMO position. Manuel Arroyo, President of Coca-Cola Asia Pacific, will be the new CMO and will be responsible for global marketing including creativity, marketing operations, design and corporate brand knowledge.

The business leadership strategy, user services and business operations that were originally under the charge of the CGO were split up and assigned to the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and COO (Chief Operating Officer) respectively.

Although Coca-Cola has changed back, it makes people think: What is the relationship between brand, marketing and growth? How should brands promote growth? In the last lecture "Social Brand", we mentioned this topic, and in this lecture, we will answer this question.

Growth should be composed of several parts: strategic growth, traffic growth and operational growth. Strategic growth is mainly about business strategy and brand composition, finding new potential markets and establishing brands in these markets. Traffic growth comes from media placement and channel development. Operational growth comes from the management of customer relationships and the creation of social positions.

Drucker, the father of modern management, said it most clearly: an enterprise has only two functions, marketing and innovation. Innovation is to make good products and technologies to create value for customers; marketing is to find markets and users for enterprise innovation and create customers for value.

Marketing is the most fundamental function of modern enterprises, and brand is the most important tool for marketing. Brand can help enterprises acquire customers, achieve differentiation, create competitive advantages, and establish continuous customer relationships. There is no doubt that brand plays a central role in today's marketing.

The core of marketing promotion is to do two things:

1. Establish a brand;
2. Get traffic.

The marketing department is actually made up of two parts: the brand department (which may also include the product planning department) as the brain, and the rest of the departments are responsible for traffic and customer acquisition. The brand is the brain, and traffic and operations are the hands and feet.

Whether it is the currently popular information flow, programmatic delivery, content, influencer recommendation, private domain, live broadcast, or traditional advertising, public relations, channels, activities, as well as exhibitions, sales meetings, cold visits, etc. commonly used in B2B marketing, the essence is to find traffic.

Traffic is the flow of customers. The direction of customer flow changes with the times, but there is no essential difference in traffic. It is just a measure of customer acquisition cost and efficiency.

Replacing the marketing department with the traffic department and the growth department has its value, which is to find more efficient ways to acquire customers and cheaper traffic. The decline of CMO and the rise of CGO reflect a significant trend in marketing, that is, in the past, customers were acquired by spending money, but now they are acquired by daily operations . Marketing is moving towards operations and daily life.

Traditional brand marketing relies more on buying media space, which was later replaced by buying digital traffic, and now it has become managing one's own traffic and media to ultimately achieve customer management and establish a sustainable traffic pool. However, its disadvantage is that it regards traffic as the root of growth, weakening the central role of the brand.

So how do we implement change today to create a more efficient brand organization?

4. Under the premise of growth as the goal, marketing functions are divided into three sections

1. Brand Growth Department

Today, companies need to build a real brand department, not a fantasy department that is only responsible for planning but not execution, nor a material department that is only responsible for creativity and design but has no say in the company's strategy. To this end, the brand department must implement vertical integration, responsible for integration from strategy to execution, and the brand is directly responsible for growth, so I call this department the brand growth department. It is mainly composed of three modules:

The first module is brand strategy.

This module is responsible for the planning and formulation of brand strategy.

Brand strategy is closely related to market strategy and corporate strategy, but many people cannot tell the difference between the three. Simply put, market strategy mainly defines who the target customers of the company are, what the product value is, where the market segments are, and essentially determines what needs the company wants to meet.

Corporate strategy covers market strategy, which includes not only the demand side but also the systematic planning for the supply side, including products, costs, technology, key resources, supply chain, etc.

Brand strategy is a systematic thinking and planning on how companies can use brands to drive market growth, including how to define brands, how to manage brands, how to operate brands, etc. Specifically, brand strategy includes the following four items:

(1) Construction of brand system

This item involves how to build a brand from scratch and determine the basic elements of building a brand, such as naming, trademarks, etc. In a nutshell, the brand system includes product system, visual system, text system, personality system, content system, etc., which constitute a brand pyramid.

The most basic is the product system, which plans product lines, establishes representative items, and clarifies the role and function of each product in the brand;

The second is the visual system, which involves determining the brand name and designing the logo, as well as making good visual presentations such as VI, packaging, and product design language;

The second is the text system, which sorts out the brand mission, vision, values, brand concept, brand core value, brand promise, brand positioning, appeal, brand statement, brand story, etc.

Finally, there is the personality system (including brand personality, image, role, archetype) and content system (brand story, IP, etc.). Of course, these two are not necessary options for building a brand.

(2) Brand asset management

Brand management involves, firstly, evaluating the actual effects of brand building and promotion, so as to adjust the implementation of brand communication and promotion; secondly, evaluating the health and sustainability of the brand, so as to revise the brand strategy and determine the direction and route of brand development.

This assessment looks at the brand's performance in terms of awareness, recognition, brand association and loyalty, which are the results of brand building and are also components of brand assets.

Many large companies and brands will seek out a professional market research agency to issue a brand asset assessment report every year, which is equivalent to a physical examination for the brand.

(3) Brand portfolio strategy

Also known as multi-brand management, it refers to how to handle the relationship between different product brands, between product brands and corporate brands, and between product brands and endorsement brands (technical brands) when a company has multiple product brands. How can a company implement brand extension and how can it create a second, third, and more brands?

(4) Integrated brand communication

Formulate annual and mid- to long-term communication and promotion plans for the brand, set the brand's annual communication theme, and comprehensively consider the combination of various communication and promotion methods to implement brand execution.

Among these four items, the first one involves the constituent elements of the brand, what elements the brand is composed of; the fourth one involves the promotion elements of the brand, what means can help build the brand; the second and third items involve the management elements of the brand, and the object of brand management is various brand assets and multi-brand relationships.

The entire third part of our "30 Lectures on Brand Thinking" talks about the various components of a brand, and the fourth part talks about the remaining three items.

The second module is the content middle platform.

Its function is to be responsible for the production and management of creativity, design, and content materials, including graphics, short videos, topics, events, installations, peripherals, etc.

In the traditional era, advertising was the center of brand communication. A company’s creative output in a year might be just a TVC, a few main graphics plus material extensions, and one or two annual events. Creative management was relatively simple.

Today, brand communication requires a large amount of content. Many companies are tweeting, posting microblogs, posting short videos, and doing live broadcasts every day. Advertising also requires creative materials that are tailored to each individual. So how to efficiently produce content and how to manage and review content has become a difficult problem. Therefore, it is necessary for companies to build a powerful content middle platform to strengthen content production and management.

First of all, in the production process, the content middle platform establishes a content community to attract consumers to share, post orders, share their own stories and evaluations of product use.

Internally, we build a content library, continuously accumulate various content materials, and then organize and label them for use by marketing personnel, sales personnel, and even channel dealers, so that they can quickly search for suitable content materials for their own business promotion and truly play the role of content-driven growth.

For example, the instant messaging software Skype has established a relatively complete content library. It searches for a large number of user stories and classifies them into 15 categories and more than 130 tags for classification and management, including performance, art or design, beauty, education and food. Each website visitor can search for the corresponding story through three options: industry, product or language [2]. Secondly, in the publishing stage, the content middle platform must also assume the responsibility of reviewing and managing content materials. In 2022, many brands had marketing failures, such as the "women's feet are 5 times more smelly than men" in P&G's tweet and the brand name in the L'Oreal advertisement was written as "Oreal". These are all big brands, and it is incredible that such low-level mistakes occurred. The problem actually lies in the review and management of content.

In the past, a brand only worked with one or two agencies, such as a brand agency and a media agency. But now many big brands have numerous agencies around them, including advertising companies, creative hot shops, public relations companies, media companies, digital marketing companies, self-media agency companies, private domain companies, e-commerce companies, live broadcast companies, event execution companies, content production companies, MCN companies, etc.

These marketing needs of enterprises have only emerged in recent years, so these agencies have been established for less than two years. The quality of the companies varies, and the employees are diverse. Most of them have not received systematic marketing training and lack industry experience and marketing knowledge. In addition, the turnover of personnel is high, and a group of people are replaced every few months. Many orders are done by freelancers, so it is easy to make mistakes in the execution process. In order to attract traffic and attention, they often create controversial content, thus causing brand crises.

However, the brand side simply cannot review all of them. There are too many content materials released every day, and the company has a large number of self-media accounts. If each one has to be reviewed by the company's marketing department before being released, it will not only seriously affect efficiency, but the marketing department actually does not have enough manpower and time to do it.

However, when negative public opinion emerges, consumers will not blame these agencies. In the end, it is the companies that get scolded, and it will have a great impact on brand management and corporate performance.

In this case, it is necessary for companies to integrate different promotion departments and conduct unified supervision of content materials disseminated externally, such as formulating a set of rules for content creation, which ones are allowed to be published and which ones are not, what are the standards for creating content, and not creating content that violates common sense, social morality, and corporate values. When encountering controversial content, a higher level of review must be conducted.

This is very necessary.

The third module is communication and promotion.

Its responsibilities are to be responsible for brand communication and marketing promotion, including advertising, public relations, media, digital, new media, events, business, terminal and channel promotion, etc.

Today’s marketing communication has shown a trend of integration. Enterprises need to use a combination of multiple media and multiple promotion methods to carry out marketing. Therefore, it is necessary to break the past practice of separating online and offline, traditional and digital, and integrate them into one department.

2. User Experience Department

The key to good user operations is not private domains or group building, but the improvement of user experience enabled by digital technology. Only by creating a perfect user experience for customers can we achieve sustainable growth. This requires the merger of stores, channels, e-commerce, private domains, and membership management, which are the main departments that reach consumers, into the user experience department, which will study how to manage customers, how to create a perfect experience for customers, and how to strengthen customer relationships based on data and technology.

For example, Nike proposed in 2017 to promote the company's performance through a comprehensive digital layout, and to increase the proportion of digital channel revenue from 15% at that time to 30% within five years. Subsequently, Nike formulated the "New Membership Launch" membership plan.

Under this system planning, Nike took the lead in completing the digital infrastructure project, which will——

• Official website (Nike.com)
• Tmall flagship store (including Nike and Jordan brands)
• APP ("NIKE", trendy shoe community "SNKRS China", two fitness platforms "NRC" Nike Running Club and "NTC" Nike Training Club)
• Mini Program (NIKE)

Connect all of them and establish a unified digital membership system.

Then, Nike converted all the customers who purchased in offline stores and the people who reached online traffic into registered members of its own channels, and directed them to the official APP system to establish a private domain. In 2020, Nike's global membership increased by 55 million, reaching 70 million in 2021, with a total number of members reaching 250 million. Under the membership system, Nike also interacts with customers through online training courses, offline circle activities, KOL live broadcasts and other content and social behaviors. This approach not only strengthens customers' sense of identity with the brand, but also has a significant effect on improving customer conversion and repurchase, and increasing LTV (customer lifetime value) [3].

In October and November 2018, Nike opened two more digital concept stores, Nike Shanghai 001 and Nike New York 000. In the stores, Nike will adjust the product display in the store based on online sales data to ensure that the shelves are filled with the most popular products of local consumers recently; consumers can use the Nike application in the store to quickly select clothing sizes and colors and complete checkout at any location in the store.

In June 2019, Nike also created a new executive position - Global Chief Digital Information Officer. Ratnakar Lavu, who holds this position, was previously the Chief Technology and Information Officer of department store Kohl's, responsible for all information technology, digital business and retail technology. Previously, he also served as Chief Technology Officer of Redbox, the largest video rental company in the United States[4].

It can be seen that Nike's core strategy in recent years has been to drive retail innovation with digitalization, provide customers with faster and more personalized services, and better experience, and establish unified digital customer touchpoints. It has also sought new brand growth points through digitalization, experience, and operations.

Another example is lululemon. Growth Black Box once summarized its strategic framework based on lululemon’s financial report.

In 2011, lululemon believed that it had five growth engines: technological products, cool stores, customer experience, training and culture, and community relations .

In 2015, lululemon reduced its strategic framework to three items: brand & community, product, and customer experience, with innovation sitting at the center of these three .

In 2019, lululemon further clarified its strategic framework as “The Power of Three”: innovative products, omni-channel user experience and new market development [5].

From the evolution of this strategic framework, we can see that the unchanging strategic focus of lululemon is innovative products and user experience. Stores, community groups, brand culture, and training have all been gradually integrated into the user experience, and the unique and distinctive user experience actually represents the brand and the customer's perception of the brand.

In addition, lululemon's emphasis on developing new markets in recent years means that it has grown into a major international brand, and global market expansion has become a new growth engine.

3. Market Transformation Department

The purpose of the Market Transformation Department is to gain insight into and capture new business opportunities. It is responsible for the development of new products, the development of new markets, and the innovation of new consumer groups and consumption scenarios. The definition of the word market that I initially accepted is " market = demand + purchasing power ". Customers have demand and have real purchasing power, which is a real and accurate market for enterprises.

The essence of the market is demand, but demand is often difficult to grasp and define, so we focus on the specific manifestations of demand, such as population, category, region, channel , etc. Just like we said the female market and the elderly market, the smart watch market and the beverage market, the third- and fourth-tier markets and the northern market, the wholesale market and the retail market, these are all markets.

The market transformation department should always pay attention to customers, explore new needs, and then seize this demand through category innovation, new product development, channel development, regional expansion, and scenario innovation. For many companies, the growth brought by new categories, new channels, and new regions is the most significant. For example, Anker. In its early days in 2011, Anker was just a channel dealer selling chargers to overseas consumers through Amazon, but now Anker has become a leader in Chinese brands going overseas; its product line has also developed from the initial single category products to the current multi-category, multi-brand product matrix.

Behind this is Anker's strong product and technology strength, and behind the products and technology is Anker's organizational innovation. Anker's founder Yang Meng said that he has been investing more energy in organizational change since 2019, hoping to turn success from accidental to inevitable through organizational innovation[6]. In the fast-growing and fast-dying consumer electronics industry, only through organizational innovation can a company's operating methods and capabilities be transformed into systems and processes to become a company that continues to win.

Anker's rapid growth comes first from product category innovation. Anker has a view called the "shallow sea theory", which means that if the consumer electronics market is compared to the ocean, then smartphones, PCs, and TVs are trenches, while mobile power banks, sweeping robots, and wireless headphones are shallow seas.

Everyone wants to do deep sea business, but most of the ocean is made up of shallow seas, which means hundreds or thousands of small categories. Anker's strategy is to do shallow sea business and continue to succeed in many subcategories.

Since Anker made its main charger brand well-known, it has successively launched the smart home brand eufy (2016), the smart audio brand soundcore (2017), the smart projector brand NEBULA (2017), as well as the smart office audio and video hardware brand AnkerWork (2021) and the consumer 3D printing equipment brand AnkerMake (2022). In 2020, Anker's revenue was 9.353 billion yuan, of which charging products accounted for 44.3%, wireless audio products accounted for 22.7%, and smart hardware products accounted for 32.7%, forming a healthy growth structure[7].

Its product innovation and category expansion are mainly due to successful consumer insights. Anker has a term called VOC, Voice of Customer, which refers to product development lifecycle management based on user voice. In the early years, Anker's main channel was Amazon. Amazon does not provide user portrait data to brands, but it has a large amount of high-quality product evaluation and rating information. Therefore, Anker collects these user feedbacks, organizes them into a table, analyzes them by category, and improves products accordingly.

Later, Anker upgraded it to the VOC system, which automatically captures, translates, and labels data, and does a lot of cleaning and calibration, greatly improving data analysis capabilities. In addition, this system also has multiple data dimensions, including user data (user portraits of each category or region), product data (users' positive and negative comments on the product, functional point requirements), market data (category size, growth rate, price range, leading products and competition), etc.

With accurate data insights, product decisions, R&D, and promotion will have a more scientific basis. Anker has formed a complete set of operating mechanisms and organizational systems around VOC, which has become an important driving force for growth.

For example, the first generation of Anker's eufy home camera received hundreds of negative reviews from users due to its imperfect product functions. After noticing these evaluation data, Anker quickly fed them back to the product development and quality teams, urging them to quickly iterate the second generation of products. The product rating immediately increased from 3.6 to 4.8 points, and sales also saw strong growth[8].

Another example is that in 2018, Anker decided to enter the smart security market. At that time, 96% of the market share was controlled by leading brands. However, Anker still decided to enter the market in anticipation of the market's continued growth prospects in the next 5-10 years. But where is the opportunity to enter the market? Anker found through consumer data that 73% of users are very concerned about their data security, 60% of users are willing to pay a premium for privacy, but 93% of users are unwilling to pay monthly fees.

Seeing this unmet demand, Anker created a security product that stores data locally, does not require monthly fees, and does not require concerns about privacy leaks in the cloud. It also made significant improvements in battery life and ease of use, thereby successfully capturing the market[9].

Anker's second source of growth comes from channel expansion. It initially relied on Amazon, a mainstream online channel in Europe and the United States, to expand to countries and regions such as Europe, North America, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

In 2016, Anker successfully entered more than 3,000 Walmart stores in the United States. Walmart's high standards and strict requirements promoted the upgrading of Anker's offline business capabilities and organization. Subsequently, Anker successfully entered offline retailers such as Target, Costco, and Best Buy, and expanded to the offline retail systems of developed countries such as Germany, Britain, and France.

Now, Anker has begun to set up "country representatives" in each country, taking the country as the center, employing a dedicated team to carry out localized marketing and promote customized products based on local consumer characteristics and culture.

• For example, in Japan, the company mainly promoted white products and released Japanese minimalist TVCs. With the help of the local team, it successfully occupied two mainstream e-commerce channels in Japan, Amazon and Rakuten.
• In the United States, short films in the style of superheroes that conform to American aesthetics are released;
• In Europe, brands are placed next to wall sockets to create real consumption scenarios;
• In the Middle East, as the local retail system is underdeveloped, we recruit local agents to open brand flagship stores in shopping malls.

It can be seen that Anker's growth has two major engines. One is product innovation supported by the VOC system, implementing a multi-category, multi-brand shallow sea strategy; the other is global expansion, entering different countries and regions, and coordinating online and offline channels. Brand and user experience are the foundation of corporate growth, helping companies to acquire customers and establish customer relationships. Market change is a strong driving force for growth. By launching new products, expanding categories, occupying new groups and scenarios, and entering new channels and regions, brands can achieve growth overnight.

The Market Transformation Department is responsible for expanding territory and discovering new markets. The Brand Growth Department is responsible for occupying this market and acquiring customers through brand power. The User Experience Department is responsible for cleaning up the battlefield and retaining customers through high-quality experience and user operations to make the business more sustainable. All three departments aim to grow and work together to help the company grow bigger and stronger.

References

[1] “Outsiders should not tell insiders what to do! Coca-Cola re-establishes the position of Chief Marketing Officer, the myth of Chief Growth Officer is shattered!”, author: Li Ke, source: Fast Consumer Goods, 2019-12-23;

[2] David Aaker, Brand Tag Story: Using Stories to Build Corporate Competitiveness, Machinery Industry Press, November 2020;

[3] [5] “12,000-word analysis of lululemon: a combination of “wizard” and “hedgehog””, source: WeChat public account Growthbox, 2022-01-11;

[4] “To strengthen digital business, Nike appoints its first global chief digital information officer”, source: Jiemian News, 2019-06-12;

[6] “Mysterious Anker and the underlying logic of globalization”, source: public account “Qin Shuo’s circle of friends”, 2022-02-11;

[7] Zhejiang Securities-Anke Innovation (300866) In-depth report: A model of branding of the "Shallow Sea" 3C track;

[8] "100 million users around the world support 10 billion revenue, Anker's new story of digital overseas travel | The Secret of Digitalization", author: Judy, source: 36Kr, 2022-11-10;

[9] "Building a benchmark brand, traveling through the industry cycle, thinking about "Anker Innovation" globalization | MBGS Review 2022", source: Morketing, 2022-10-10.

Author: Kongshou; WeChat public account: Kongshou