Brand dividend

This article mainly analyzes the eleven elements of brand dividends under the current conditions, and concludes that the current situation is an opportunity for new consumer brands to grow and have the opportunity to win the brand and market competition in the next 10 years. It is suitable for people who want to promote their brands to read in order to find the right market positioning.

1. New consumer brands

The reason why these consumer brands grow so fast is that they have mastered the omni-domain growth method of brands in this era, fully utilized every growth opportunity driven by the new X, and turned the opportunity into leverage. The four major levers seized by these new consumer brands are onlineization, content dividend, crowd dividend and brand dividend.

2. Online

The Internet and mobile Internet have completed the onlineization of corporate commerce. Today, online business is not only a new channel or new retail sector for consumer goods, but also a core business in itself. It is not a marginal department, but a growth center that the entire company needs to revolve around. The onlineization of consumer goods marketing is far from over and is still evolving.

There are two major trends in online development:

1. Online retail continues to penetrate: sinking, aging, and young people's behavior migration

For example, after this wave of epidemic, online shopping is no longer exclusive to young people. Even the middle-aged and elderly in my country have begun to use online retail. Before, the middle-aged and elderly disliked online retail platforms such as Pinduoduo, Taobao, JD.com, Meituan, and Hema. They felt that the quality of things bought online was not good and they were all scams. The epidemic has caused her behavior pattern to change drastically. The continuous penetration and growth of online business is a powerful lever. Online retail is a channel that can directly reach consumers. If a company can carry the wind of online retail and decisively transform itself into an online company, it can leverage this lever.

2. Online retail will transform from online shelves to online consumer experience

There are two very popular words this year, the first is live streaming sales, and the second is private domain traffic.

Why are live streaming and private domains so popular? The main reason is that online retail has evolved from shelf-based, to content-based, and now into the next stage of experience-based, service-based, and humanized. In essence, they have transferred the experience, BA sales services, and many humanized communication links that originally belonged to offline stores to online. In this way, online Taobao is no longer just a shelf for buying and selling things, but a real shopping experience.

Therefore, the benefits of onlineization have not stopped, but continue to expand. If brands can continue to quickly extend the offline shopping experience online through high-speed and low-cost methods such as private domains and live broadcasts, then this wave of trend dividends has just begun. Douyin has developed shopping carts and video accounts to sell goods, further promoting the development of live broadcasts.

3. Content dividend

The content dividend is not only the traffic dividend of the content platform, but also includes three other dividends: content form dividend, content blogger dividend, and content aesthetic dividend.

1. Content format bonus

For example, why did the "double microblogs" become a bonus in the past period of time? Because it was just the era of pictures and texts of Internet self-media. But in just two years, pictures and texts have become short, medium and long videos, and long videos have become live broadcasts. But in each form, the suitable categories and bloggers are far from reaching their peak. Many bloggers are still in the stage of switching from text to video and from video to live broadcast.

Whenever there is a change in form, there must be dividends. For example, when the short video form appeared, beauty products benefited. For beauty products, it is most important to allow consumers to clearly see the changes before and after makeup. In the era of pictures and texts, beauty products are easier to attract consumers through popular science articles on public accounts, but in the era of short videos, the expressiveness of pictures and texts is far less than that of videos.

Anything that has obvious changes in status, such as some cosmetics brands that can quickly show effects when applied on the face, can use the dividends of short videos to quickly gain volume. Nowadays, the transition from short videos to long videos is the next wave of popularity. Now is the stage from UGG to PUGG, which categories will benefit? Thinking about this question can reap the next wave of content dividends.

2. Content blogger bonus

Although many brands are actively entering the field of short videos and live broadcasts, many brands have not found a content format that is truly suitable for their own platforms, let alone a blogger that is suitable for this content format. During the period of content format transformation, if brands can find bloggers who are also in the transformation period and reserve a position with them in advance, they can reap a wave of dividends.

3. Content Aesthetics Bonus

This is the biggest bonus among the content bonuses. People’s current consumption of content is far from satisfying their desire for content. People like to buy beauty products, Pop Mart, and toys, but in essence, people consume their content.

4. Crowd dividend

Those born in the baby boom in 1988 are now in their 30s and have become the backbone of society and the main consumer group. In addition, many people over 20 have also just started their careers and have a certain level of spending power.

Why are Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves and Nothing But Thirty so popular? Because they both hit the common complaints of 30-year-old women. The earliest batch of post-90s are 32 years old this year. There was a period of time before when women all went to buy SK-II. Because SK-II focused on the group of single women at that time, conveying the idea that women do not need to get married and do not need to be bound. Now there are many new single women in society who are over 30 but still unmarried. So which brand can speak for the new post-90s and 30-year-old women, which brand can take advantage of this wave of brand dividends.

New values ​​are already rising behind the scenes. If you can hit the values ​​behind the new women, you can let them speak for you. This is the bonus of the new population. The Z generation has begun to become the mainstream of consumption (brand marketing rules for the Z generation circle), the number of single people has reached 240 million, and the number of people living alone has reached 97 million. (With the arrival of the single economy, how can brands seize the opportunity? These are huge population dividends. I will not expand on the analysis of these two groups in this article. If you are interested, click the link to check it out.

5. Branding dividend

New groups need a symbol. In this social and circle-based society (you can read my book "Circle Business-Finding the Future of Enterprises"), everyone wants to find their own organization. For example, the Lolita circle, the Hanfu circle, and the Fan circle. Correspondingly, each brand should also have its own brand symbol or religious symbol. The homogeneity of products is too serious, so we finally realized the need for brands.

Perfect Diary is very smart in this regard. It has cleverly established the Perfect Diary mind and brand symbol for cosmetics priced below 100 yuan. Consumers are easily willing to buy low-priced products. If the product can also be well adapted to platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, it is equivalent to achieving symbolization behind the branding, which is icing on the cake. The four levers bring different growth rates and acceleration to different categories.

For example, beauty products have reaped all the benefits of onlineization, content, new groups, and branding. Although the onlineization of skin care products is not as powerful as that of makeup, its leverage should not be underestimated. Food/beverage categories are still mainly driven by offline, and the benefits of onlineization are relatively small. However, food and beverages in the past were all branded. The reason why Yuanqi Forest can break through the circle is that it taps into the new needs of new groups - people who want to drink delicious beverages but don't want to get fat.

The "four levers" have different accelerations for different brands. Some categories can quickly reach 1 billion, while some categories grow relatively slowly. Therefore, last year, almost all entrepreneurs first entered the category of beauty products, and cosmetics entered the first wave of the red ocean. Compared with the offline drive of consumer goods in the traditional traffic era, large penetration, large channels, hard advertising, large PVC, and the characteristics of being driven by goods rather than people, the core levers driving the growth of consumer goods today have become online, e-commerce, online experience, people and brands.

6. Brand Thinking

When traffic is as valuable as gold and there are too many competing products with low barriers to entry, the most important thing for companies to focus on is branding. Brand is the biggest source of traffic, and the way of thinking about branding needs to be different from before. This change is reflected in: the change from traffic operation to crowd operation; the change from discounts to content; and the change from currency-centered to brand mind-centered.

Therefore, the growth of new consumer brands needs to focus on the following five core areas:

1. Strategic positioning

When strategically positioning yourself, you should be able to gain insight into and identify the crowd, find category opportunities, and study the platform attributes and value of different platforms, including “Weibo, Douyin, and Hong Kong B” and other platforms.

2. Content seeding

There is still a lot of room for development in short video and text live broadcasts, KOLs, and KOCs.

3. Close the loop of online retail

Including how to obtain accurate traffic, how to combine products, the conversion and retention of traffic, and the operation of the crowd.

4. Private Domain Feedback

It includes user stratification, user shopping journey management, and mutual guidance between private and public domains.

5. Focus on brand innovation

The various parts of the enterprise "machine" are packaged in the brand, including the selection of brand symbols, brand associations, brand image building, and the establishment of the relationship between the brand and consumers. Without a brand, the enterprise machine is only a semi-finished product.

7. Strategic Positioning

First, find a strategic position through category opportunities, crowd insights and brand attributes. If you choose well, it will be easier to do things later. It can be understood that choice is more important than effort. If you position well, many traffic strategies in the later stage will easily achieve rapid growth.

First of all, there is the category trend. Why do many new consumer brands choose to enter the market from only one category in the initial stage? Santonban entered the coffee category from a new segmented scenario: people are used to drinking coffee in stores, or ordering takeout, or making coffee with hot water at home. But Santonban created a scenario of drinking coffee with cold water, allowing consumers to drink their own coffee even on the plane. Perfect Diary's entry into the price range of less than 100 yuan is also very appealing. There were no good brands below 100 yuan in the domestic beauty market before. The emergence of Perfect Diary is refreshing.

The second angle is crowd insight. New consumer brands can start with new crowds, such as new women, those born in the 1990s, and singles. These people do not have sanitary napkins that they identify with, so brands can develop sanitary napkin products specifically for the needs of this group of people. Once brands have done a good job of crowd insight and discovered new content forms and formats, they need to choose the right platform based on their own characteristics, and then enter some categories that are suitable for this platform.

For example, short videos are very suitable for status changes and cognitive contrasts, and Xiaohongshu is very suitable for the appearance economy. Then the brand can start with these keywords. The more keywords can be captured, the more strategic positions can be seized. Strategic positions are dynamically changing. Ultimately, success still depends on occupying the category mind, not just a single point explosion. For example, can I only think of Santonban in my mind when it comes to instant coffee, and the first thing I think of when I think of makeup is Perfect Diary? If not, it is just a single point hit product, it has not settled in the mind.

The series of problems that Perfect Diary has encountered in the past two years is that it has achieved a good strategic positioning, but the subsequent work of occupying the mind is not thorough enough, which has a lot to do with their own understanding of the brand.

8. Content seeding

Content seeding can create a hit product, but content marketing is not only a good traffic delivery platform, it is also a lever for integrating product and sales, and even a brand tentacles. When delivering content, don’t just limit yourself to the form and medium of content delivery, don’t just consider traffic, but consider how to convey the uniqueness of the brand in the content, and bind the brand and effect at the same time. Content marketing is not only the task of the growth team, but also requires the strong attention of the brand team.

9. Online Retail Closed Loop

Online retail closed loop. That is, through precise e-commerce traffic, product combination, conversion acceptance, and crowd operation, a closed loop effect is achieved. Online retail is no longer a channel, but a core-driven business. Taking Taobao as an example, online retail has changed from the original shelf logic to an experience-based shelf, and from a shelf to a TV shopping channel; while short videos are just the opposite, such as Douyin, which is moving from a TV shopping channel to a shelf, and both are gradually being integrated. Now the logic of doing e-commerce has been updated.

Online retail has become an integrated channel that integrates content seeding and harvesting. Taobao is also changing from the original rough traffic operation to a high-power brand private domain based on crowd and category operation. Even Taobao’s second floor has begun to operate brand private domain. Therefore, I think Taobao will need more operators in the future. They need to know how to bind the brand words brought by external content seeding, and then use them to target category words, leverage the free traffic brake of the Taobao public domain, and seize the brand lifeline of the private domain.

10. Private Domain Feedback

Through content seeding and e-commerce closed loop, people who are interested or have finished consuming are introduced into the private domain, and then the core group is locked in and further refined operations are carried out. The essence of the private domain is two parts, one is private traffic, and the other is refined operations.

The epidemic has boosted the popularity of private domains and live streaming in China, but what has become popular overseas? The answer is robots. For example, after entering the page, there will be a one-to-one customer service to help you with online skin care diagnosis. In fact, robot services are essentially the same as private domains and live streaming in China, except that brands have moved many offline experiences and the empathy between people and sales to online. The essence of private domains is humanized operations, not traffic operations.

The reason for establishing an IP and a persona is actually to project the brand into a person, let this person serve the target user group, collect private domain data, and then use it to co-create the brand and users.

11. Brand Innovation

Brand marketing is to lock in the core group of people, form brand awareness, and bring compound interest effects. In fact, if the first four steps are completed, a high-quality consumer product has already taken shape. It can not only be in place, accurately delivered, and have content dividends, but also find the right traffic entrance for e-commerce operations, and can guide traffic to private domains for secondary repurchase operations, which can basically achieve good GMV and sales.

So why do we continue to spend money on brand marketing? Branding is like adding a buff. If a consumer product does not have a brand, then every time it launches a new SKU, it is equivalent to starting from scratch, and it has to buy a new wave of traffic every time. Many people will say at this time, I also know that branding is important, but who would dare to invest money in brand communication if they don’t see any effect?

Brand building is not the same as brand communication. Without a certain level of accumulation, confidence and sales, I do not recommend consumer brands to engage in big brand communication. Because the price is too expensive, if there is no sales, it will be a waste of effort. Brand building is something that can be done on the first day. Brand building is the effect of repeated voice and compound interest, which is the addition of effects. It can be done from the first day of the brand's establishment, and it does not require a large amount of advertising. On the contrary, you can convey brand awareness and establish a brand effect through every content delivery, every voice, and every cross-border event.

Now is the opportunity for new consumer brands to grow. Visionary brands need to occupy the growth trough and win the brand and market competition in the next 10 years.

Author: Liu Yichun

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