The ups and downs of brand marketers this year are all in these 16 keywords

Today's marketing has gradually transformed from "widespread advertising" to a process of occupying consumer cognition. This article reviews several major events that will affect brand marketing in 2022 from the perspectives of events, platforms, tracks, and marketing. Let's take a closer look.

When talking about the year 2022, which is about to pass, what is the first keyword that comes to everyone's mind? To be honest, so many things happened this year, and it seems that nothing happened. Whether for brands or individuals, 2022 is a year full of challenges and variables. Of course, it is also a year of survival and reshaping hope.

This year, DaoFa also recorded the stories of many brands and marketers. Before the end of 2022, we will review with you the major events that have affected brand marketing, including the plagiarism of "Xiao Man", the popularity of Oriental Selection, "Ice Cream Assassin" Zhong Xuegao, and the return of Li Jiaqi. We also see that Douyin is becoming a key platform for brand growth, from hot products to brands, full-link collaboration, refined operations, and brand private domains have become key trends.

Back to brand marketing itself, cost reduction and efficiency improvement, global operation, people-oriented, and business focus are the keywords that all brands cannot avoid. And future opportunities may be hidden in the fields of big health, small happiness, home appliances and digital products, and pets.

It is DaoFa's mission to build a good Chinese brand. This road may not be smooth, but we will overcome all the difficulties. We believe that Chinese brands have enough resilience. DaoFa will always be with the brand, accompanying it in the next year and every year.

1. Events

Keywords: "Xiao Man" plagiarized, Oriental Selection went viral, "Ice Cream Assassin" Zhong Xuegao, Li Jiaqi returned

The first screen-sweeping event in the marketing circle in 2022 occurred on the second solar term in summer - Xiaoman. On that day, Audi released the TVC "Xiaoman" in cooperation with Andy Lau. "Why worry about profit and loss? Xiaoman is better than everything." At that special time, this poem touched the nerves of countless brand people and became the copywriting that has received the most resonance in the past five years.

But less than 24 hours after it went viral, "Xiao Man" crashed. Douyin blogger "Peking University Brother Man" revealed the inside story of Audi's "copywriting" in "What is it like to have a copywriting with over 100 million views plagiarized?" Overnight, the phenomenal advertisement turned into a plagiarism scandal, and along with it, the systemic problems hidden in the marketing circle also surfaced.

The last advertisement that went viral was the "To the Craftsman" campaign that New Balance collaborated with Jonathan Lee 8 years ago. So we found Cai Meng, the creative manipulator behind "To the Craftsman", and talked to him about "Xiao Man".

Judging from the content alone, "Xiao Man" is undoubtedly a success: "The advertisements that have swept the screen have all found topics that can resonate with the public. The "Xiao Man" screen sweeping was at the right time, tapping into the current social sentiment - at a time when people are generally depressed, it soothes everyone's mood in a very obscure way. It tells everyone to still have hope for the future and accumulate strength to wait for the future to come. It is very measured and hits people's hearts."

Nowadays, the development of social media has accelerated the diversification and fragmentation of the world. The topics that everyone cares about are becoming more and more vertical and difficult to resonate with. This is why there are fewer and fewer works that have swept the screen in recent years. Because of this, "Xiao Man" is even more precious.

But plagiarism is the original sin after all. The creativity that the advertising industry once advocated is being replaced by "traffic" and "growth". The failure of "Xiao Man" is essentially the result of the marketing circle's lack of awe for content creators. They are willing to pay for media but not for high-quality content and copyrights. This concentrated outbreak has given the industry an opportunity to reflect. If the failure of "Xiao Man" can awaken the industry's attention to originality, it can at least bring us one step closer to an era of respecting creativity and originality.

Although Xiaoman failed, people’s demand for good stories and good content remains strong. On June 10, the live broadcast room with the best storytelling skills, “Dongfang Selection”, quickly became popular in an unexpected way.

After dissecting the wealth code behind the success of Oriental Selection, we found that sincerity is the ultimate weapon. While brands are racking their brains to create stories, New Oriental teachers all come with their own stories. Yu Minhong, who is at the end of his rope and condescends to save himself, and Dong Yuhui, who comes from a grassroots background and is frustrated. The true feelings flowing in the live broadcast room are somewhat projected by the audience.

The popularity of Dongfang Zhenxuan coincided with the 618 promotion and the absence of top anchors, which to some extent can be regarded as hitting the dividend of the times. But the most important thing is that the content quality of Dongfang Zhenxuan's live broadcast room is high enough and differentiated enough. Teaching English and talking about history in the live broadcast room is still the only one so far.

The success of Oriental Selection is hard to replicate. After all, not all brands have a founder like Yu Minhong and a dramatic life story, and not everyone has the solid speaking skills and knowledge reserves of New Oriental teachers. But its popularity has given brands a revelation: good content is the core driving force. As the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem gradually shifts towards content and brand advertising, brands need to learn how to tell stories.

As for how to tell a good brand story, the ice cream brand "Zhong Xue Gao" has taught everyone a lesson. On July 1, the topic of "Ice Cream Assassin" rushed to the top of Weibo's hot search, and Zhong Xue Gao was deeply in the center of public opinion. The topics discussed by netizens ranged from "Why is Zhong Xue Gao so expensive?" to "Is it a quality problem if it does not melt at room temperature for an hour?" to "The founder is suspected of making insulting remarks about women." The situation has evolved from a complaint to a public relations crisis. The Knife Skills Research Institute interviewed industry insiders to discuss from a professional and marketing perspective whether Zhong Xue Gao was unfairly criticized as an ice cream assassin and became a hot search.

Zhong Xue Gao positioned itself as a high-end brand in its early days, focusing on online channels. When the domestic high-end ice cream market was still blank, it focused on imported ingredients, combined with traditional culture, and designed the ice cream into a tile shape to differentiate it from the affordable ice cream on the market. Therefore, when the brand was first established, it did not receive much criticism due to its price.

However, if we use the 4P theory to analyze Zhong Xue Gao, we will find that although it is positioned as high-end, its products, prices, channels and publicity have not formed an organic whole. It lacks channels that match its high-end positioning, and it fails to tell a good brand story at the publicity level, so that the brand premium lacks sufficient brand significance to support it.

Expensiveness should not be the original sin of domestic brands. Pursuing cost-effectiveness is equal to absolute low price. If consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for quality and brand, then domestic products will always be associated with cheapness and low quality. However, brands should also realize that even high-end brands should pay attention to "cost-effectiveness". If consumers spend more money but do not get the expected higher quality products and services, collapse is a matter of time.

Before the end of the third quarter, the marketing circle finally received good news - Li Jiaqi returned. At 7 pm on September 20, Li Jiaqi, who had disappeared for 109 days, resumed live streaming without any warning. Daofa also recorded this significant day in the first place.

On the first day of his return, 27 brands including Huaxizi, babycare, Jiaonei, and Anta appeared in the live broadcast room, with a total of 63.528 million views. After disappearing for three months, Li Jiaqi proved to the market that he is irreplaceable. Brands all said, "Without Li Jiaqi, we can't achieve our KPIs, and we are looking forward to his return every day."

For many new consumer brands with limited budget resources, Li Jiaqi is an important boost to rapid sales growth. For consumers, Li Jiaqi means extremely cost-effective products, and his live broadcast room is a place where they can "buy with their eyes closed" without worry.

During the three months he disappeared, brands waited while turning to Douyin and self-broadcasting to find new growth channels. Li Jiaqi's brief disappearance made everyone realize that they cannot rely too much on a certain IP or channel. When brands have their own top anchors, a new balance may be reached between anchors and brands. Although the balance of discourse power still leans towards the anchors, the arrival of a new live broadcast ecosystem may only be a matter of time.

2. Platform

Keywords: From hot products to brands, full-chain collaboration, refined operations, brand private domain

After two years of wild growth, the live streaming e-commerce ecosystem has proved the uniqueness of its business logic with irrefutable data cases. As the daily active traffic of platforms represented by Douyin and Kuaishou has peaked/growth has slowed down, many brand merchants have now entered an era where stock competition and local blue ocean opportunities coexist.

In the past year, we have observed the following phenomena:

1. The hot-selling product strategy is not outdated. On this basis, both mature and emerging brands have realized the necessity of balancing business and brand building.

Taking Douyin e-commerce as an example, this year it has successively increased its investment in malls and searches, including international brands such as L'Oréal Paris and national brands such as Camel. With the help of these shelf scenes, they can provide Douyin users with a more comprehensive SKU. Among them, Supor proposed that "traditional brands can also adopt the explosive product strategy"; emerging brands such as Lifen have entered the high-speed hair dryer track with big single products and quickly formed a consumer mind.

The enrichment of shelf scenes does not mean weakening the importance of short videos and live broadcasts. On the contrary, brands that have already gained advantages in short videos and live broadcasts can generate traffic for their shelf scenes.

We can also find a significant phenomenon: whether it is Douyin e-commerce or Kuaishou e-commerce, the traditional "channel brands" that started with the supply chain are accelerating "branding", such as Douyin brand shirt Lao Luo and Kuaishou brand high-end women's clothing MOMO ERA.

In addition, given the platform support policies, regional well-known brands/industry belt merchants have also developed significantly on these platforms, and excellent service providers such as Doraemon, Qi Fei, and Lu Tu have emerged.

2. Under the competition of existing stocks, in the limited living space, brands must achieve full-chain collaboration

Last year, brands might only promote products on Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Weibo, and convert them on Taobao, JD.com, Douyin, and Kuaishou. This year, brands with spare capacity are using third-party tools to optimize the intermediate links, while small-budget brands are focusing on Douyin and Kuaishou, achieving multi-position and full-link optimization and coordination on the same platform.

This kind of synergy is represented by the Douyin e-commerce FACT+ model and the Kuaishou e-commerce STEPS model. It can be observed that the launch of the new model further promotes win-win results. The platform can take more marketing budgets from brands, and brands also gain more long-term development opportunities on the platform. More and more brands are building internal operation teams to comprehensively develop short video, Dabo, self-broadcasting, shopping malls, search and other businesses.

3. Especially under the constraints of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency", refined operations have become the mainstream, and the concept of brand private domain has become more and more widespread.

In the second half of this year, Internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com have intensively emphasized "reducing costs and increasing efficiency." The same story is told by brands, mainly reflected in their more refined operations in common scenarios/links such as short videos and self-broadcasting.

It is worth noting that with the deepening of refined operations, the brand private domain is no longer limited to the early WeChat communities. Now there are brand Douyin/Kuaishou/Xiaohongshu fan groups, plus store members in the Douyin and Kuaishou platform mall scenes, brand fans attracted by Douyin and Kuaishou accounts, etc. In this regard, brands rooted in Kuaishou e-commerce have their own fan operation methodology, from the subtleties to the humanized design of experience wear that must be paired with formal wear, to new fans joining the club, fan live broadcasts and fan-exclusive benefits, consumer experience and brand awareness are closely linked.

It can be seen that in the live e-commerce scenario, extending the user life cycle value (LTV) is still a compulsory course for brands. This also echoes what the annual theory of knife skills says, that the future is an era of "crowd strategy". When a brand cultivates "super users", the power it can exert will be beyond our current imagination.

3. Marketing

Keywords: cost reduction and efficiency improvement, global operation, people-oriented, business focus

Since Ren Zhengfei’s “pass the cold air to everyone”, “cost reduction and efficiency improvement” not only exists in emerging companies, but is increasingly appearing in internal meetings and company speeches of traditional giants - Liu Qiangdong said not to use PPT to make up stories or tell lies to deceive people, Ma Huateng said that each business should be responsible for its own profits and losses, and don’t talk to him about buying volume anymore, and Alibaba also repeatedly mentioned the term “cost reduction and efficiency improvement” at the performance meeting where it released the Q2 financial report for fiscal year 23 at the end of September.

In the year 2022 that is about to pass, DaoFa has also talked with many brand founders and practitioners about the "cost reduction and efficiency improvement" process their companies have experienced this year. We found that founders and business leaders are paying more and more attention to "accounting" and hope to see clear benefits for every expense that needs to be spent. For example, DaoFa learned that a leading new consumer company calculates its ROI on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu on a weekly basis. At the same time, when doing content seeding, it also pays more and more attention to its conversion efficiency rather than simple traffic exposure.

As the two giants of operating costs: labor costs and production costs, they also experienced the most detailed accounting this year. Both at home and abroad, they have experienced a new round of adjustments this year. Due to the difficult operating situation in 2022, many companies have begun to think about which are the core businesses of the company and can bring long-term compound interest value, and which are just "marginal businesses", so as to get rid of fat and gain muscle, and thus find the key engine of company growth again.

In terms of adjusting the personnel organizational structure, more and more companies have begun to cultivate the multi-line capabilities of core personnel to ensure that the business they are responsible for can be closed in their hands; at the same time, they also encourage basic employees to master more skills to achieve "maximum department efficiency."

Business can be focused, departmental talents can be concentrated and one person can handle multiple positions, but the multi-channel, segmented, matrix-like form of China's marketing environment is difficult to reverse. The multi-platform layout of Yidou, Shuangwei, Hongkou, and Kuaishou is still the most widely used and efficient method. However, unlike the previous indiscriminate content transfer, capable companies began to produce platform content based on the tone of different platforms. Therefore, many companies have established special Xiaohongshu departments and Douyin e-commerce departments, and achieved a closed loop internally.

Companies with limited staff and budgets have begun to focus on high-potential, high-growth, and high-exposure platforms, such as TikTok, and they are often incorporated into e-commerce departments that need to speak with results. Other platforms are outsourced to third parties, or the company's marketing and brand teams are concurrently responsible for the work, keeping the operation low.

However, in order to attract more potential consumers, brands have to operate in the entire domain to obtain more public domain traffic. Opening the traffic entrance is the first step. This year, many brands have begun to take the second step, that is, in addition to some people who can quickly convert in the public domain, they will also attract the converted and unconverted traffic to the brand’s own fish pond - the private domain, and cultivate it, from a single "harvest" to "repeated harvest", from using one product to make them repurchase, to creating more products and scenarios to make them buy repeatedly.

But now there are no ignorant consumers. The target audience of brand marketing has also changed from the simple "white-collar workers living in first-tier cities" to more specific and vivid people. "Crowd strategy x DTC" has thus become a way for contemporary brands to continuously gain compound interest.

In recent years, many emerging brands, whether it is Xiaoxiandun and Jian'ai, which started with categories, or Babycare and YINyin, which started with a specific group of people, have greatly strengthened the emotional connection between brands and users through sophisticated user operations and leading brand content. On this basis, brands launch more new products around the group, and consumers are also happy to buy more products - forming a self-growth, people-oriented virtuous circle.

Even in 2022 when budgets are tight, many brands have allocated part of their money this year to hold user activities to enhance the cultivation and recall of super users. For example, Haowangshui's "Marrying 100 Girls" invited 15 KOLs and 85 brand fans on 38.com, and used a budget of 300,000 to leverage 10 million+ voices; Daren Tang opened pop-up stores and slow pop-up stores in Shenzhen, Shanghai and other places, inviting brand fans to become "store managers for one day" and conduct telephone interviews with product users, "using the voices of one group of users to heal another group", and this part of the material has become their most touching brand content.

4. Track

Keywords: Big health, small happiness, home appliances and digital products, pets in the "post-epidemic era"

These words have been on the table since 2020. Looking back on this year, the consumer market has experienced several pauses and restarts. Each restart has been dubbed "post-epidemic". In the new vitality, different track trends are revealed. Take the two major annual shopping festivals as an example.

The first day of the 618 promotion this year coincided with the first day of Shanghai's "restart". After three months of silence, the market ushered in the first wave of retaliatory consumption. At that time, we interviewed several brand founders and brand marketing agencies in different tracks, and everyone proposed that "big health and small happiness" would be the keywords for consumer categories in the next decade.

Specifically, under the big health category, we can further divide it into health food, nutrition and health care, fitness equipment and other categories. In terms of phenomenal level, "Yi Zheng Gen" has become a popular brand that has swept the screen. It has achieved a daily output of 100,000 bottles in just three months since it was launched in the convenience store channel. Behind the popularity of ginseng drinks, it is the concept of Chinese tonic that is becoming popular. Dao Fa has noticed this emerging track since the beginning of the year.

As early as January, we conducted a brand interview with "Guanzhan", the pioneer of the instant fish maw category, and analyzed the logic behind this generation of consumers' choice of tonics and the changes in their eating habits. We also provided a methodology for how Chinese tonic brands should unify physical value, spiritual attributes, and social responsibility to build the foundation of the brand.

Then, in March, we conducted a concentrated track observation of emerging brands centered on niche ingredients such as ginseng, wolfberry, and donkey-hide gelatin. At that time, brands including "Neiwen", "Tiaoli", "GENBEN", "SHAN Palace Xiaoshan" and "Fangfang" were almost all in their start-up stages. We got a glimpse of their efforts in product innovation, whether it was putting ginseng slices into chocolate or using new technology to restore the old-fashioned paste state. The opportunities behind them were all the new population's pursuit of health.

In the second half of the year, we kept observing this track, reported a number of new brands, and also kept up with the latest situation of the track. We found that Chinese nourishing food, which was originally centered on "edible", began to integrate more and more with the body, mind and spirit in the process of brand building, and simultaneously promoted healthy lifestyles such as meditation and sound therapy. This is also in line with the concept of "big health". As for small happiness, it is more reflected in consumers' emphasis on the emotional value carried by the brand.

Looking overseas, lululemon has built its own moat with "mindfulness", while in China, some personal care and health brands have linked their brand concepts with emotions and made "communicating with consumers' emotions" a marketing focus, such as the functional food brand "JOLIYOYO" that focuses on "emotional health" and the personal care brand "REVER" that creates an innovative "emotional space".

DaoFa has also reported on a group of new brands dedicated to alleviating the anxiety of urbanites. They have opened up a new incision for consumer product entrepreneurship in the market. In the second half of the year, during the Double Eleven shopping festival, although the platforms did not announce sales, an internal consumption data showed that most categories experienced a double-digit decline during the biggest shopping festival of the year, with only the "home appliances and digital products" and "pets" categories experiencing positive growth. The reason behind this is directly related to the substantial increase in the time users spend at home.

In the home appliance and digital track, Daofa also talked with several brands with different routes this year. For example, the popular high-speed hair dryer brand "Lifen" sold 440 million in the first half of 2022 alone. Its main product is "Dyson alternative", and the price of high-speed hair dryers has been reduced from thousands of yuan to 599 yuan, and even the SE version will be further launched at the end of the year, with the price reaching 399 yuan; high-end brands such as the emerging smart home appliance brand "Dreame" have raised prices as a whole this year. During the 618 period, Dreame's omni-channel sales performance exceeded 400 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 900%.

In addition to the changes in price ranges, this year, the brand has also taken a key step in brand upgrading, from its previous focus on technology and product parameters and performance to shaping the brand's image of "a high-quality, family-oriented man" and finding resonance from the user's perspective.

To a certain extent, these two brands reflect two different routes. On the one hand, they make small and affordable products in the context of "Made in China", and on the other hand, they form a positive cycle of cost reduction under the circumstances of technology empowerment and increased product volume. Since consumers' imagination and demand for intelligence are always ahead of technology, this industry will always have opportunities. "All the business done on people can be done again on pets" has become a reality in 2022.

In addition to pet food, there is also a broad field of pet supplies, pet medical care, and pet services. Especially in terms of services, there are one-stop services such as pet blind dates, photography, weddings, childbirth, and funerals.

Regarding the development of China's pet market, Daofa conducted a roundtable interview with "Crazy Puppy", "CATLINK" and "Fur Planet FURFURLAND" this year. They said that the domestic pet industry is still in the transition stage from rapid development to mature categories, and it will take 5-10 years to enter the mature stage; at the same time, each brand has its own entry point, whether it is high-frequency and urgently needed food or pet smart products, there is room for branding.

In the process of brand building, consumer trust is very important, and products are the most important part of gaining trust. The consumer experience cycle is very long, and China's young pet brands still have time to calmly and deeply cultivate.

Author: Guan Cong

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