The marketing logic followed by Apple and Huawei (focus on 3 key points)

The topic I will share today is "Cognitive Marketing ", which includes three aspects: functional marketing, value marketing, and cognitive marketing.

What is Feature Marketing?

For example, which Chinese rice brand do you think ranks number one, or what kind of rice do you like to eat? Northeastern rice, or more specifically Wuchang rice (of course there are other good rices too).

You can see the attribute introduction on the promotional page below, which is functional marketing.

To make it easier to understand the mechanism behind functional marketing, let’s give another example.

Suppose you are a man, and you find a small meeting room in your company to talk to your girlfriend on the phone. At this time, a female colleague pushes open the door of the meeting room and shouts: "Xiao Wang, I put your materials on your desk!" How would you react? You receive this message but most likely you won't end the call. You will say "OK, thank you" to her and continue calling.

Many times, functional marketing is similar to this, where customers receive a lot of product information, but there is no actual behavioral change. What is the reason for this?

Because the mechanism behind promoting actual action transformation includes two aspects: the received information flow and the received energy flow.

Let’s change another example. This man was talking to his girlfriend on the phone in a small conference room. A female colleague came in and made a joke. She quietly walked up to him and said, "You're pressing on my hair." Just seven short words made the male colleague panic.

Because when he hears the information, energy is also generated at the same time, and energy is the actual effect of brain neurons.

In an era of product scarcity, we like to introduce products from an internal perspective, telling how great the quality is, how good the functions are... hoping to impress customers with this. Often, you talk for a long time and the other party receives a lot of information, but the other party's behavior does not change.

From the perspective of user mind and user cognition, there are three main reasons :

We see thousands of logo and functional ads every day, and they usually have three problems:

(1) No user touchpoints. Because users have limited attention and no patience to read large amounts of information.

(2) Not a user demand. Eating is a basic need for users, but eating Wuchang rice is not a basic need.

(3) No number of users. It is difficult to generate natural traffic and it is difficult for users to grow on a large scale.

Can you achieve the following effect with the functional marketing mentioned above: You are sitting in the office, and someone calls and says, "Hello? Is this XYZ? I heard your rice is very good, I want to buy some."

I think that Internet traffic is not a quantity, but a vector, which has both quantity and direction, so there is the following formula:

Traffic = Number of users × user demand × user touchpoints

When doing functional marketing, you must have a deep understanding of the definition and connotation of traffic.

The value marketing promotional poster is concise and does not contain much information, but we can clearly see that this poster does not talk about the product functions and does not mention functional configurations such as the engine and gearbox.

Just these six words: The deeper it is hidden, the sharper it becomes. Some people were moved after watching it, while others were not.

The slogan on Dianping.com’s homepage is also very simple: Discover quality life. It's boring to many people. It's a big brand talking small, and you might feel it's powerful.

On the contrary, small brands’ boasting will have no power at all. For example, if you see a red wine whose brand you don’t even know says “discover quality life” on it, you will feel indifferent and have no energy.

As everyone knows, there was a famous diamond advertisement in 1947 (Diamonds are forever). You can tell your wife that diamonds are actually useless and it would be better to buy something to eat with them.

But it is useless to say this, because everyone has already symbolized it as love, and feels that buying a diamond is like taking out insurance for love.

The more information users receive, the harder it is to awaken their energy. Therefore, we need to introduce the value of the product to customers at the same time and use value points to stimulate user consumption. Creating user value beyond functions is value marketing.

There are two common problems in value marketing: differentiation and spreadability.

(1) Differentiation

Still taking the car as an example, if we remove all the brand logos on the poster and only leave “the deeper the hidden, the sharper the edge”, can you guess what car it is? No, because there is no differentiation.

Value marketing can be transmitted in a positive direction, but is not easy to transmit in the negative direction. What does this mean?

That is, users can be stimulated by seeing advertisements, but when making consumption decisions, they are unlikely to think back to the brand. For example, when you are consuming "quality life", it is not easy to associate it with "Dianping", right?

(2) Transmissibility

People's attention is highly fragmented nowadays, and people like me in our forties are no longer the main communicators on the Internet.

What kind of content on Weibo and WeChat is easy to spread? Usually there are three characteristics:

The first is liking what you hear and what you see (emotional consumption);

The second is empathy (emotional consumption);

The third one is that it is useful to me (utilitarian consumption).

From the user's perspective, all three belong to energy consumption.

To do value marketing, we must deeply understand these three dimensions and dig deeper:

Value marketing = functional consumption + energy consumption + time consumption

Function is a standard feature of the product. We still have a lot of potential to tap in the field of energy consumption (emotional consumption, sentimental consumption, utilitarian consumption). In the Internet age, there is an additional dimension called time consumption, which is worth exploring in depth.

For example:

What does Zhang Xiaolong mean when he says “ Mini Programs are for use and then leave”? It saves time. WeChat is a social app that consumes time, while mini programs are tools that help you save time.

The underlying logic of the entire Internet application is time consumption, and its business logic is attention economy.

First, let’s look at the example of Melatonin. This advertisement is a scene-triggered marketing. It does not mention the product functions at all, nor does it mention the customer’s sense of value (similar to “discovering quality life”). It does not stimulate emotional consumption. In short, there is very little information, but it stimulates scene-driven.

Scenes are also a kind of utilitarian consumption, which is related to me and useful to me.

If we were asked to define Melatonin in one sentence. That is, Melatonin is a supplier that provides solutions to the difficult problem of what gifts to give to elders when showing filial piety to young people in China's third- and fourth-tier cities. It is a service product, and the product is only part of the solution.

Melatonin uses vulgar advertisements to constantly stimulate consumers. Another similar brand is Hengyuanxiang. People cannot withstand such stimulation and are easily formed into conditioned reflexes, associating two unrelated things, A and B, thus forming cognition.

It just so happens that A here stands for gift, and B stands for Melatonin. It gradually settles in the minds of some consumers and turns into common sense. Sales based on common sense do not require heavy explanation. This is the psychology and finance principle of cognitive marketing.

I call this approach scenario-driven cognitive marketing .

Suppose Melatonin was promoted in another form, if the poster looked like the one below, that would be functional marketing.

But how do customers know what “youthful and healthy products” are? What does the 15th anniversary of a best-selling product have to do with me?

If there really is an advertisement placed here, would someone passing by this room come here specifically to see the advertisement? Won't. This type of functional marketing advertising has no user touchpoints and loses at the starting line.

To improve sleep, parents can take sleeping pills or use sleeping pillows. There are many alternatives.

Therefore, the more you explain the functions, the more you will guide the user's mind towards cognition, the lower the conversion rate and the slower the conversion speed. When a customer starts to demand features, the deal is basically over.

The more rationality is explained, the more hesitant the decision-making becomes. This is the drawback of functional marketing.

From the perspective of user cognition, let’s look at the Huawei mobile phone poster case:

Who do you see first when you see this poster? Look at the beautiful woman.

What do you look at second time? Master of portrait photography. The text part is easy to recognize because it is our native language.

The third look: look at the Leica logo or the HUAWEI logo.

The fourth eye may scan the small line of words in the lower left corner. I looked at it four times in total, each lasting only 1-2 seconds.

Although the time is short, your cognitive process is like this: the beautiful woman attracted me (user touchpoint), I recognized that this phone is a master of portrait photography, and then I saw the brand symbols of Huawei and Leica.

I call this approach category-driven cognitive marketing .

There is only one leader in an industry, for example, the leader in mobile phones is Apple. But an industry may have multiple categories. Category is not as simple as market segmentation. Market segmentation is an industry term, not the source of energy that consumers perceive in their minds that can ultimately influence their decisions .

Huawei mobile phones actually occupy two categories in the minds of consumers.

First, it impacted some of Samsung 's business-sensitive consumers, formed import substitution, and became the number one domestic high-end mobile phone category in China;

Secondly, it impacted some of Apple’s selfie-sensitive consumers in WeChat Moments , and with the help of Leica for commercial enhancement, it became the number one in the portrait photography mobile phone category.

The core of category marketing is to establish differentiated perception in the minds of consumers. Let me add that being first in a category is the best way to differentiate yourself.

The camera phone category is a relatively large category in the minds of consumers and can accommodate multiple brands. The OPPO phone is another camera phone that obviously cannot directly impact Huawei phone users. It must differentiate itself with clearer, 20 million front and rear camera features, and seize its own living space by sinking its channels and users.

Above, we introduced two common cognitive marketing methods: one is scenario-driven cognitive marketing, and the other is category-driven cognitive marketing . Of course, cognitive marketing is much more than just these two methods.

Cognitive marketing = differentiated cognition + differentiated communication + differentiated cognition

Cognitive marketing is based on the premise of differentiated cognition.

We at Grayscale Cognition have done some research on cognition. In addition to dealing with product overload, information overload, and scattered attention, cognitive marketing has another entry point: chaotic decision-making.

The biggest impact of mobile Internet on us is that it disrupts our normal decision-making process. Part of our consumption has transformed from purposeful consumption to purposeless consumption.

Purposeful consumption is a user demand. Usually we make a list in our minds, such as how much food and oil we will eat next week, when we will buy a house, etc.

Aimless consumption means that your decisions are not within the scope of your short-term needs. You may see someone in your circle of friends saying that a certain movie is good. Even if you have no desire to watch the movie, you may still receive energy from your friend's words, cross the threshold, and go watch the movie.

Another possibility is that you liked it after watching it and forwarded it to your friends circle, thus voluntarily transforming from a consumer to a channel for the movie. When this kind of dissemination exceeds a certain threshold, it may help a film transform from a commercial event into a social event.

The core of business is decision making. The core of decision-making is cognition.

Cognition is a mental relationship that includes two types: information flow and energy flow. (There is also an implicit cognitive flow, which I will not expand on today.)

Energy flow is real and it is not just chicken soup for the soul. In 2002, Kahneman, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, had a theory: when the human brain makes decisions, it is divided into two systems. System 1 is more emotional and easy to make deals, while System 2 is rational, consumes a lot of energy, is slow, is not easy to make deals but is prone to laziness.

I call Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 human nature and cognition (our cognitive marketing is very different from Kahneman's theory).

When customers make purchases, whether it is 2C or 2B, the more functionality is introduced during promotion, the more it will pull people towards the cognitive level. The customer's decision-making time will be longer, the decision-making cycle will be longer, and the transaction rate will be lower.

Conversely, if common sense is formed at the cognitive level, but energy is received at the human level when making decisions and exceeds the threshold, the decision-making cycle will be short and the transaction rate will be high.

For example, Steve Jobs is a master in this area. He followed the Japanese Soto Zen monks Suzuki Shunryu and Otogawa Kobun in practicing living Zen, and had a very good grasp of the human mind between cognition and human nature.

For example, the iPad is neither a necessity nor a pain point, so why do many of us buy one at home and may even buy a second one? Why would you buy it if it's not used often?

To do cognitive marketing, we must fully understand the mind and cognition, and must form a high-compression information flow and a high-compression energy flow, so that rational needs can be expressed emotionally, and walk between the two . Cognitive marketing is not black or white. There is a huge gray area in between, and there are also many gray rules that can be put into practice.

In reality, many companies are not strengthening their brands, but expanding their trademarks. Because, what is registered with the Industry and Commerce Bureau is called a trademark, and what is registered in the minds of consumers is called a brand .

A brand has an obvious characteristic: if it cannot sell at a premium higher than the industry average, it is not called a brand. This is explainable at the mental and cognitive levels.

A brand is actually a kind of consciousness. Consciousness comes from thinking, and thinking comes from memory. (This involves brain science, which is more complicated to expand, so I won’t go into detail today.)

We believe there are three battlefields: product battlefield, mental battlefield, and financial battlefield.

Where does brand premium come from? A primary premium (commodity premium) will be formed between the mental battlefield and the product battlefield, and a secondary premium (financial premium) will be formed between the financial battlefield and the mental battlefield.

As long as you can develop a little at the level of user demand and user cognition, your product can be sold at a high price, sell quickly, and sell well; if you can develop a little more from the level of user cognition to capital cognition, you can sell it at a higher price, sell faster, and sell better.

The categories I am talking about are different from what everyone usually talks about. I think:

• No matter how small a country is, it has political sovereignty; no matter how small a category is, it has commercial sovereignty.

• Categories without commercial sovereignty are either self-satisfied or transitional, serving as a place to accompany the prince in his studies.

Categories cannot be planned; they are developed naturally and constructed through cognition. They integrate consumer cognition with the genes of the company itself.

Cognitive marketing = differentiated cognition + differentiated communication + differentiated cognition

The subject's differentiated cognition is the sending end. If you want to carefully control the receiving end, then the sending end's cognitive ability must have a super cognitive advantage.

At the end, let’s review today’s content.

Cognitive marketing focuses on:

1. How do consumers make decisions?

2. Do enterprises have commercial sovereignty?

3. How do consumers perceive the company?

4. How does capital perceive enterprises?

5. Being first in a category is the best differentiated recognition.

That’s all for today’s sharing. I hope it will be inspiring to you.

The author of this article @曹升 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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