Seven thoughts on branding in marketing

Many brands actually lack consistency in the process of marketing. It is easy to change the marketing strategy, which makes it difficult to reuse the past communication materials and advertising materials. This is actually a waste of brand resources. The author of the following article explains his thoughts on brand marketing. Let's take a look.

01

Zhong Xue Gao recently plans to launch a sub-brand "Zhong Xue Bugao" with a retail price of 3.5 yuan. As soon as the news came out, it attracted a lot of attention from friends in the community. Let's talk about Zhong Xue Gao.

Zhong Xue Gao had obviously been taking the high-end route before, and its products were priced at more than 30 yuan, which actually destined it to be just a trial product for most people. There were actually not many user groups who could truly achieve continuous repurchases, and they were probably mainly concentrated in the core business people in first- and second-tier cities.

If Zhong Xue Gao wants to continuously stimulate early adopters to buy products, it needs to continue to develop and launch new products. However, this is actually a very tiring job, which is a bit thankless and ultimately very costly. It is not a good business and there is a risk of cutting leeks. This is why public relations crises such as "Ice Cream Assassin" and "Fire Unmelted" occurred later. The essence behind the public relations crisis is the public's dissatisfaction with the product and brand.

If you want to attract high-end core users to continue to repurchase and only focus on high-end users, then the user size and user region will be limited first, and there will be little significance for users to break out of the circle. There is no need to carry out extensive offline channel layout, so it is destined to be only a "small and beautiful" business, and there is no particular need to spend a lot of effort on social media communication.

Therefore, before this, I was not optimistic about the development prospects of the Zhong Xue Gao brand. Later, they also created the high-end dumpling brand "Li Xiang Guo", which actually had the same problems and challenges.

When I wrote an article two years ago, I also suggested that Zhong Xuegao should launch more affordable products to make their price-performance ratio better than that of its competitors. The brand power, experience, supply chain, and team of Zhong Xuegao in making high-end ice cream can actually give Zhong Xuegao more competitive advantages when it comes to its affordable ice cream product line. It will not be that difficult to work from high to low.

The launch of the affordable brand "Zhong Xue Bu Gao" actually confirmed some of my previous ideas, but what I didn't expect was that the price range of "Zhong Xue Bu Gao" was set at 3.5 yuan, which is lower than the product price range I had expected. This actually means that Zhong Xue Gao needs to work hard on offline channels, and will directly compete with the ice cream lines of companies such as Yili and Mengniu. "Zhong Xue Bu Gao" may still have the halo of the brand in first- and second-tier cities, but if it wants to penetrate into the sinking market and grab the sinking market share, it will be a tough battle.

02

Mengniu’s World Cup communication is a recent highlight marketing case. Especially with Messi dominating the screen on the day of the final, Mengniu also achieved a large amount of brand exposure.

The most interesting point in Mengniu’s World Cup marketing case is that it links the 2022 World Cup communication with the 2018 World Cup communication using the character of Messi.

The copy "I'm completely calm tonight" reminds people of the commercial filmed by Mengniu for Messi in 2018. At that time, the Messi commercial video was made into an emoticon package by netizens, with the text "I am Messi, and I'm so panicked now."

The highlight of Mengniu's World Cup marketing this time is that it has formed a coherent brand communication vein, rather than separating sports marketing. The benefit is that Mengniu has made full use of its past brand assets to form a combined force of user mental output, rather than a single point of effort. This makes people realize that Mengniu has been tied to the World Cup and Messi for many years, deepening its brand imprint.

Many brands actually lack continuity in the marketing process and are prone to switching places one after another. This makes it difficult to reuse past communication and advertising materials, which is actually a waste of brand resources.

03

Yesterday I talked to the owner of an advertising company that serves automotive clients. He found that in the past two years, brands in the automotive industry have also had a strong demand for direct-to-consumer (DTC) services. The digitalization of the entire marketing chain and user private domain operations have become particularly important.

Of course, the private domain here does not mean creating some WeChat groups or sending some small advertisements, but strongly binding user operations with products. For example, car companies have begun to make their own apps. Through the app, not only can the intelligent functions of key cars be realized, but it can also become a base for user operations. In this regard, the new wave of car-making forces such as Wei, Xiaopeng and Li Auto have done a good job, and other traditional car companies are also following up quickly.

In addition, automobile brands will conduct omni-channel marketing, and all channels will usually be covered. But in terms of content, in the past two years, more emphasis has been placed on the display of product functions in user scenarios. For example, in short video and long video brands, automobile advertising content will be more related to user life scenarios, rather than purely for brand exposure. Brand exposure must be accompanied by product strength and user scenarios.

The boss said that pure logo exposure and brand exposure plans are difficult to impress car brand customers. For example, simple naming in variety show marketing, or simply displaying the car brand logo, now very few customers are willing to pay for it. It is necessary to add product functional points and meet user needs in content implantation.

In fact, the new wave of car-making forces such as Wei, Xiaoli and Li Auto has brought many new ideas to the marketing and operation methods of the automotive industry. For example, a "crowdfunding" style of new car release is now popular. Wei, Xiaoli and Li Auto have a relatively flat internal organizational structure, and the overall operation is based on user thinking, and the feedback to the external market is also more agile.

04

If you think about it carefully, AIGC (intelligent content production) may have a significant impact on future content creation. We all know that content production methods are divided into UGC (user-generated content) and PGC (professional team-generated content). The emergence of AIGC may change the content ecology as a whole and increase the efficiency of content production exponentially.

Of course, AIGC will not completely replace UGC and PGC, just as robots will not replace the human brain, but the maturity of AIGC will continue to intensify the competition in artificially produced content.

We believe that the first mature application scenario of AIGC should still be in the field of advertising and marketing. In fact, on many advertising platforms, a large number of marketing advertising images are automatically generated by machines, and they will be dynamically updated according to data feedback. This is actually a kind of AIGC. For example, PS used by designers is essentially an AIGC tool, which greatly improves the efficiency of design creation.

Last year, we saw many new AIGC tools, such as the much-discussed AI painting, which is believed to replace designers; chatGPT, which is believed to replace search engines. In addition, there are video face-changing and Adobe's audio PS from previous years. Although these tools are "conceptual" in nature and not mature commercial products, the explosive growth of AIGC tools has shown that we are at an inflection point in the development of artificial intelligence.

It may take some time for AIGC to mature, and the commercialization of AIGC tools may take even longer, but the impact of AIGC on the future world and future content ecology cannot be underestimated, and there may be a large number of business opportunities to be explored.

05

It is already a very obvious trend for brand marketing to enter the Metaverse. This year, many AIGC-related topics have broken through the circle, further confirming the direction of the Metaverse. Of course, many brands’ so-called Metaverse marketing is the same, which is nothing more than releasing digital collections, collaborating with virtual digital people, and using virtual space to carry out activities.

But I think that as these metaverse marketing techniques, technologies, and details continue to improve, each brand will probably build a metaverse space scene (either by itself or through a third-party organization) to conduct user interaction, event operations, and brand communication in this scene. We have already seen similar cases in the metaverse marketing of some big brands.

In other words, I believe that every interaction between a brand and its users will be “gamified” in the metaverse, creating a brand-exclusive simulation business game for users, in which they continue to grow, live, and socialize as game characters.

Perhaps every brand enterprise will become a gaming company in the future. It can even be said that the metaverse space and game space of different brands can be connected to each other in the future. Then perhaps we will truly enter the metaverse world.

06

We all know that there is an Andy Bill's Law in the semiconductor industry, which means that although the performance of hardware is expanding rapidly, the performance that software needs to consume is also increasing, resulting in users not being able to experience the huge improvement in hardware performance. The performance provided by Intel is eaten up by Microsoft.

Andy Bill's Law will stimulate users to constantly replace hardware devices, and also form a certain cyclical pattern between hardware upgrades and software upgrades, forming a mutually dependent business coexistence relationship between hardware manufacturers and software manufacturers.

But obviously, Andy Bill's Law has long been invalid on the PC side, and what makes major mobile phone manufacturers uncomfortable is that it has also failed on the mobile side.

Currently, the hardware performance of mobile phones is already very excessive. The system resources cannot actually consume too much hardware performance. The configuration of three cameras is beyond most life usage scenarios. The pure hardware accumulation can no longer lead to a significant improvement in user experience, and it is even more difficult to stimulate users' demand for changing phones.

At the same time, games such as "Honor of Kings" do not actually require high hardware performance, because game manufacturers actually hope to lower the hardware entry threshold and gain more users in the competition. Games are not as monopolistic as Microsoft's operating system. Therefore, game manufacturers such as Tencent cannot form an "Andy-Bill" alliance with hardware manufacturers.

From this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why Xiaomi's performance is not satisfactory. Although Xiaomi keeps talking about "high-endization", its overall idea is still to rely on piling up hardware to launch new products, which to a large extent continues its previous "geek" style.

In fact, there are indeed performance-intensive software on mobile terminals. Apart from the operating system, VR and AR-related applications all require the support of hardware performance. Unfortunately, new experiences such as VR and AR do not have a popular and mature application, which means that they cannot break through the circle. At present, these applications are dispensable for users. At the same time, the opening of applications such as VR and AR also consumes a lot of battery. The bottleneck of battery technology has, to a certain extent, restricted such applications from entering users' daily lives.

In other words, the failure of the "Andy Bill's Law" on mobile devices actually involves multiple aspects of mobile devices, not just computing performance and software performance, but also other aspects such as battery technology. It is extremely difficult for a mobile phone to achieve a leap forward like the iPhone, which also explains why Luo Yonghao's Hammer made a lot of software-level optimizations before, but still failed commercially.

Of course, we believe that VR and AR are already very obvious directions of industry development, and these can all be combined with the metaverse, but it will take some time for them to truly become part of people’s daily lives.

07

The "Annual Speech" was originally a content product that shared the annual thoughts of personal IPs and added many talk show elements. Later, it was found that the communication effect was very good, and now it has become a "content + marketing" communication method.

Of course, the annual speech does not provide knowledge and insights. Think about it, after a week of watching so many annual speeches, how many can you still remember? Of course not much. The speech provides more emotional value.

It is undeniable that although the polishing of speech content does not lie in how much dry goods are provided, it is also extremely difficult to really make the audience willing to listen, have golden sentences, and have strong communication power. So I didn’t watch many annual speeches in the market before, but later I would watch them with a learning attitude to see how they grasped the rhythm of the speech and what the psychological emotions of the audience were when they said a certain part of the content.

In fact, many times when we analyze and study cases, we should have this kind of mentality, put aside our own arrogance and prejudice, and study and learn from what others do well.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran, WeChat public account: Spreading Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)