The secret of long-term brand sales

Whether it is a small brand or a big brand, only by becoming a long-lasting product that represents the brand can it become a super brand. This article will provide you with the answer to how to make the brand sell for a long time.

01

Creating best-selling products is the pursuit of almost every branding company. In the era of Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin, hot products driven by the new X are becoming more and more popular ( the new X refers to new consumption, new scenes, new groups, new media, and new lifestyles ). However, hot products, apart from being popular for a while under the guise of a gorgeous Internet celebrity brand, are rarely sold for a long time.

Not to mention the early internet celebrity brands such as Huang Taiji and Diaoye Beef Brisket, current brands such as Nayuki's Tea, Heytea, Perfect Diary, etc. will easily follow in the footsteps of these brands.

Ten years ago, there were many terms for hot products, such as fist products, star products, and cutting-edge products, among which the most well-known was big single products. For example, the Golden Crown Brown Sugar Plum Candy that Nianzhi has served is a super big single product, and a big single product sold for nearly 1 billion.

Big single products are not as eye-catching as hot-selling products, but in terms of size, today's hot-selling products are not in the same league as the big single products of the past.

02

It is actually meaningless for a product to explode in the short term through Internet hype. It is easy for the faster it starts, the faster it dies. We can look at the current situation of Perfect Diary and Huaxizi. These cases are enough to alert us that products must complete the transformation from best-selling to long-selling before they can contribute profits to the company.

Wahaha's Nutri-Express sales exceeded 20 billion yuan. Wangzai milk sales exceeded 11 billion yuan, and Mengniu's Deluxe sales reached 15 billion yuan... These products have become long-selling products in the market. During the Shanghai epidemic, in addition to Coca-Cola, Nutri-Express and Deluxe milk were the most popular hard currency among consumers.

03

Whether it is a hit product or a big single product, the business logic is to concentrate superior forces and fight a war of annihilation, that is, it is better for a single product to achieve 1 billion yuan in sales than for 10 products to achieve 100 million yuan in sales each. This is particularly important in the context of consumer stratification. The fragmentation of social structure has made the product logic of "one Spring Festival Gala to satisfy the people of the whole country" no longer applicable.

04

The post-95s and post-00s have become the new force of market consumption. With the emergence of new groups, new consumer brands have also begun to rise. The emergence of new consumer groups has given rise to the emergence of hot products driven by new Xs. Hot products are essentially derived from unmet needs in the market, which allows new consumer companies to avoid the sight of giants and find market opportunities.

Such market opportunities usually appear in new populations, new prices, new categories, and new cognitions.

05

New groups: In recent years, cosmetics brands have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. The most important reason is that the emerging groups born in the 1990s and 2000s have developed a strong self-pleasing mentality. They are more independent and open than traditional women, and they pursue self-realization more.

New price: As a rising star, Santonban has found a price gap of 5-10 yuan between Nestle and Starbucks, and its taste is better than the 10-yuan coffee in convenience stores such as 711 and FamilyMart. New category: WonderLab was established in 2019, and discovered the potential of the milk tea flavored meal replacement milkshake category, which is specifically designed to serve post-95s women who want to eat meal replacements to lose weight but also like the taste of milk tea.

As a result, WonderLab achieved sales of 60 million yuan in its first year. New cognition: Post-90s consumers choose cosmetics not only based on brand advertisements, but also on the ingredients of cosmetics. Therefore, hyaluronic acid, amino acids, and niacinamide have become the cognitive focus of cosmetics consumption decisions.

06

The emergence of hot products must be based on the maturity of the supply chain. If the supply chain is not mature, it is impossible to achieve high cost-effectiveness and large-scale supply. Supply chain capabilities determine the cost structure, product advantages and delivery capabilities of the enterprise.

07

New channels have broken the distribution pattern of customer traffic in the original channels, and small brands can take advantage of the "virtual" to enter, commonly known as the "traffic dividend". In recent years, the offline channel dividend comes from shopping malls, and the online channel dividend comes from new media and e-commerce platforms.

In 2017, Perfect Diary was founded and targeted Xiaohongshu, and quickly rose through massive KOL and KOC content marketing. Later, "Xiaohongshu planting + Zhihu endorsement + Douyin and Kuaishou bringing goods + Tmall harvesting" became the standard model for channel marketing of new consumer companies. However, in 2022, this model is no longer useful, and Perfect Diary's stock price has fallen to a point where even its parents can't recognize it.

08

Hot products are good, but they are not a long-term solution. Hot products in the Internet era are too easy to follow the trend and it is difficult to establish differentiated barriers. For example, from 2018 to 2020, the number of online brands of small kitchen appliances increased from less than 500 to 850. All brands have the surname "Xiaomi" and have Internet celebrity faces.

When there is a lack of differentiation barriers between brands, the ultimate beneficiaries are always upstream and downstream partners. For example, when brands compete for e-commerce traffic, Tmall and JD.com make money; when brands compete for KOL exposure, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya make money; when brands compete for hyaluronic acid content, Huaxi Bio makes money... When good products are scarce, consumers buy hot products; when good products are popular, consumers buy brands.

If you can't ensure that your product is so good that competitors can't copy it, then brand is the best moat.

09

Countless brands have verified that only when a hot-selling product or a big single product becomes a brand can it continue to sell well in the market for a long time and contribute continuous profits to the company.

10

Hot products believe in the Internet thinking, that is, GMV = traffic × conversion rate × customer unit price. Compared with the visible effect figures, they are unwilling to study the illusory brands. This mentality of greed for immediate benefits and certainty often falls into another trap after the popularity of hot products fades - product and effect integration.

Brand is the result of a company's long-term, overall, and consistent business behavior, while effect is the immediate performance of a company's promotional and inducement behavior. The principles of brand advertising and effect advertising are fundamentally different, so the integration of brand and effect is nothing but self-deception.

If the brand department talks a lot about brand-effect integration, and the sales department also talks a lot about brand-effect integration, then why not merge them into a "brand-effect integration department"? From now on, the brand director and the sales director will be collectively called the "brand-effect integration director." The progress of an enterprise or even society must be the result of each department performing its duties and competing with each other, rather than the result of harmony and compromise.

11

Hot products are born and die quickly. In addition to the poor product function and quality, the most important factor is the unstable market demand. For example, consumers buy bubble masks to experience the surprise of bubbles and buy divination tea to satisfy their curiosity.

These novel selling points cannot be based on real demand. For a hot-selling product to develop into a brand, it must first be rooted in a market with stable demand and will not be uprooted by external disturbances.

12

Product value is always the foundation of brand value, and a super brand must be supported by super product value. Estee Lauder's Little Brown Bottle is the first essence in the history of skin care products. In the era when extraction technology was backward, Estee Lauder innovatively added bifida yeast extract and hyaluronic acid, and proposed the concept of sleep beauty and cell repair.

As soon as the Little Brown Bottle Essence came out, it became a big single product of Estee Lauder. In the past 39 years, the Little Brown Bottle Essence has been iterated 6 times, and the iteration speed is getting faster and faster, ensuring the experience and reputation of this big single product.

13

The biggest headache for hot-selling products is that consumers remember the category but forget the brand. Therefore, new consumer companies should take advantage of the market heat to make the unique perception of hot-selling products the core association of the brand.

One of the most effective ways is to use the brand association of popular products to supplement product lines. After Estee Lauder's Advanced Night Repair Essence won recognition for its anti-aging and repairing effect, it launched Advanced Night Repair Eye Serum in 2011, Advanced Night Repair Eye Cream in 2013, and Advanced Night Repair Double Mask in 2015.

From then on, Estee Lauder's little brown bottle became a unique association of the brand, just like the curved bottle of Coca-Cola, and became synonymous with anti-aging and repair.

14

Whether it is a hit product or a big single product, only a long-lasting product that represents the brand can become a super brand. Looking at the super brands in the consumer industry, consumers first think of such products, such as Lancome's Little Black Bottle, Shuanghui's King of Kings, and Luzhou Laojiao's Guojiao 1573.

New consumer companies born out of the Internet, in addition to researching hot-selling products, also need to study how to brand best-selling products. Only brands can make a company's products go from being popular to long-selling.

Author: Liu Yichun

Source: WeChat public account "Liu Yichun's Brand Business Innovation (ID: shangyeyiguohui)"