Ten marketing trends for 2022

At the end of 2019, there was a very popular joke, which was "2019 is the worst year in the past ten years, but it is the best year in the next ten years." This joke was posted by Wang Xing on his social account, and it became popular on the Internet and attracted a lot of recognition.

That year, China's economy ended its rapid growth and the "capital winter" struck again. A large number of industries, including the rapidly growing automobile industry, declined sharply, and the new Internet dividend also showed signs of peaking for the first time. The keyword of that year was "It's so hard for me."

Therefore, many people agree with the first half of the joke, but do not think the second half is correct. But unexpectedly, this sentence came true. The new coronavirus pandemic hit the following year, and until today, the world has not escaped the troubles of the epidemic.

This year, the cover of China Business Network Weekly is the word "HARD", which means difficult. Earlier this month, "The Top Ten Shrinking Industries in 2021" showed the difficulty of the current situation this year. The layoffs at large factories at the end of the year reminded me vaguely of a similar situation at the end of 2019. The long picture of layoffs circulating on the Internet (the information is false) actually contained a lot of information from that year.

Marketing is to a certain extent a barometer of the economy. Gartner's report shows that the marketing budget of the companies surveyed this year fell from an average of 11% of company revenue in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021, a drop of 4.6 percentage points.

The tone at the end of 2021 is extremely similar to that of 2019. But looking back on this year, at least people have seen signs of economic recovery. Whether it is the accelerated development of vaccines or the successful hosting of major events such as the Olympics, people are full of hope for the future.

Looking ahead to 2022, some marketing trends that have shown certain signs this year may represent the future direction.

1. Brand marketing investment picks up

For most brand owners, two years of the pandemic have made their marketing budgets conservative, but in the past two years, brand owners have also found ways to compete in the epidemic environment. It is not a wise choice to expect to significantly increase the advertising budget after the epidemic is over. How to maintain advertising and maintain brand advantages while coexisting with the epidemic is a must for brands.

In my article "Should we cut advertising budgets during the epidemic? Shouldn’t! ” believes that brands should maintain their advertising budgets during the epidemic to maintain their brand and competitive advantages. In 2022, brand owners will realize this problem in the context of the epidemic and gradually get their marketing investments back on track.

Recently, the "2022 China Digital Marketing Trends Report" jointly released by Miaozhen Marketing Science Academy, Global Digital Marketing Summit GDMS and Media 360 shows that 54% of advertisers believe that China's overall marketing investment will increase in 2022, an increase of 7 percentage points compared with 2021, of which 10% believe that it will increase significantly. 58% of emerging advertisers believe that marketing investment in China will increase. And 88% of advertisers believe that the advertising is for brand goals, namely to strengthen the brand image and enhance brand awareness.

Regardless of the development of the epidemic in 2022, it is an inevitable trend for brand marketing investment to return to normal.

2. Private domain traffic continues to occupy the center position

As a marketing concept, private domain traffic has been discussed and studied for more than three years. The reason why private domain traffic is so popular is essentially determined by two reasons:

First, as the Internet dividend is approaching, it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to take advantage of the Internet dividend and obtain traffic in the public domain in a low-cost manner.

Second, as the proportion of digital marketing increases, companies are paying more and more attention to the input-output ratio of marketing. Especially in the special circumstances of the past two years, the marketing budgets of many companies have been greatly reduced, which has further accelerated their process of expanding private domain traffic.

The popularity of private domain traffic is because every brand wants to take control of its own destiny rather than the platform or KOL.

This year's battle between Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and L'Oreal is essentially a battle between the brand's private domain traffic and the KOL's public domain traffic. From a historical perspective, this struggle will continue to accompany the evolution of brands and markets.

Private domain traffic was born in the years when Internet traffic was nearly 40 billion. It was widely discussed and applied in the years shrouded by the epidemic, and thus became the consensus of brand owners. The ultimate goal of a brand must be to maximize its private domain traffic. Only in this way can it achieve high profits while achieving high sales.

Judging from the development process of brands in the Internet environment, brand building of private domain traffic will still be a core topic next year and will also become the norm for brands in the future.

3. Brand channel competition: brand self-broadcasting will become the norm

This year, the dispute between Li Jiaqi, Viya and L'Oreal has shaken the marketing circle. Some people believe that as a big brand, L'Oreal should not ignore the interests of consumers, and it is wrong to give higher prices than other channels in the live broadcast rooms of Li Jiaqi and Viya. Others believe that as a big brand, L'Oreal should not be "held hostage" by channels, and it has the right to set its own prices.

Let’s not discuss who is right or wrong for now. What this reflects is the struggle for the right to speak between brands and channels. For brands, they should realize that leaving their fate to the top anchors is not a wise option, because the high channel fees of the top anchors make it difficult for brands to make a profit.

A more favorable approach should be to build one's own brand moat. In this regard, as for live streaming, brand self-broadcasting has become a widely accepted consensus, and the Wei Ya incident at the end of this year also accelerated this process. After going through the stage from zero to one, most brands have begun to pay attention to self-broadcasting. They broadcast live regularly every day to sell goods directly to consumers while providing them with a series of guarantees.

Brand live streaming is a very representative manifestation of D2C. If in the past on Taobao, brands only interacted with consumers face to face in the form of stores, today on live streaming e-commerce platforms such as Douyin, brands are interacting with consumers directly in person.

The dispute between anchors and brands is a question of "big stores bullying customers" or "big customers bullying stores". This issue has never been static, but has been cross-evolving. If a brand wants to take control of its own destiny, it still needs to continue to build its own brand. When it comes to live streaming, self-broadcasting is a good choice.

4. Celebrity marketing is on the decline, while digital economy marketing is on the rise

In 2021, too many celebrities have fallen from grace, from Kris Wu to Leehom Wang to Viya. Whether they are internet celebrities or high-quality idols, they have all been involved in scandals, which has hurt the brands that use them to endorse or advertise. This has also made more and more brands realize that using celebrities as endorsements is a risky behavior.

On the other hand, the digital economy has accelerated its rise this year, with concepts such as the Metaverse, NFT, and Web3 emerging one after another. Like Liu Yexi on TikTok, whose followers increased by 1 million overnight, the topic of beauty and the metaverse exploded on social networks.

Compared with celebrities, virtual idols have advantages such as being malleable and less likely to fail. Once a virtual idol becomes a brand spokesperson, they can continuously create value for the brand. Currently, large platforms such as BAT and many big brands have begun to create virtual idols and regard them as an important part of brand assets.

If the Metaverse is a trend, then it will become a trend for brands to embrace the Metaverse and do targeted marketing. This trend is not just about creating a virtual idol, but also includes building their own Metaverse, creating their own NFT works, and so on. In the future, brands will increasingly integrate marketing into the virtual economy.

5. Traditional brands accelerate their embrace of new e-commerce

This year, the first New E-commerce Conference was held in Changchun. The conference released the "New E-commerce Research Report", pointing out that new e-commerce is a new form and model of e-commerce that has emerged with the development of a new generation of information technology, with users at the center, and by reconstructing the links of "people", "goods" and "places" in traditional e-commerce.

From a conceptual point of view, new e-commerce is old wine in old bottles in the form of social e-commerce, live streaming e-commerce, etc. in recent years. However, from a time dimension, compared with the previous shelf e-commerce, the emergence of new e-commerce has basically not exceeded 5 years, so it is truly "new".

For most traditional big brands, entering shelf e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com has gone through a stage from rejection to hesitation and then to full embrace. Today, these big brands are also hesitant to enter new e-commerce platforms. They may consider that new e-commerce platforms require large investments and are risky, or they may feel that new e-commerce platforms do not suit their own style, or they may be trapped by their past successful experiences, etc., and therefore have been slow to fully invest in new e-commerce.

However, judging from the trend, it is inevitable that brands will accelerate their entry into new e-commerce platforms such as live streaming e-commerce, short video e-commerce, and social e-commerce. It is only a matter of time before most brands fully invest in these platforms.

With the rise of platforms such as Douyin e-commerce and Kuaishou e-commerce, and their increasing share of the entire e-commerce market, major traditional brands will accelerate their embrace of new e-commerce.

6. New consumption is divided into two parts: half sea water and half fire

New consumer brands have been a hot topic in the past year or so. These brands have benefited from the increasingly mature industrial chain on the product side and extremely segmented positioning on the marketing side, as well as the use of traffic algorithms to find a wide range of people, thus achieving a certain degree of success. Compared with the advertising model of old consumer brands that use advertising to gain market share, the model of new consumer brands can be called a traffic model, and this model is generally considered to be low input and high output.

But there are also problems, as I said in "There is no shortcut for brands in the second half of new consumption": the continuous investment in traffic costs has not allowed brands to achieve sustained exponential growth; after the initial surge, the ceiling of brands has become lower and lower; giants have entered the market one after another, the pressure of new consumption has increased, and the market cost has also become higher and higher; due to the high valuation in the early stage, it is difficult to obtain continuous financing in the later stage...

As the capital market cools, the saying that new consumption has entered the second half of the year is becoming more and more common. In the second half, the latecomer advantage of new consumption brands is no longer there, and facing the attack from traditional big brands, they are gradually finding it difficult to cope.

In 2022, new consumer brands will face differentiation. New consumer brands that have gained early market advantages will continue to expand traditional marketing investment, directly start a head-on war with giants, and expand their market share, such as Yuanqi Forest, Heytea, Huaxizi, etc., while new consumer brands that have not established a brand moat may face difficulties in financing and continuing to expand market investment, thus ushering in a difficult time.

For the marketing market, new consumer brands that gain brand advantages will become an extremely active force in the marketing field. In any case, this will bring about a new era of consumption.

7. Marketing of the grass-growing economy on all platforms

The grass-planting economy is a concept that has been talked about in the industry since the birth of short videos. It is connected with "discovery shopping" and first appeared on Douyin, where consumers planted grass because algorithms recommended products of interest, which ultimately promoted their consumption behavior.

Today, almost all content communities and platforms are dominated by algorithms. The way information is distributed has changed from people looking for information to information looking for people. From this perspective, any platform can actually plant grass.

For example, on Zhihu, some people buy something because they see interesting answers. On Douyin and Kuaishou, some people buy something because they see short videos they like. On Douban, some people buy something because they see books and movies they like. On Bilibili, some people buy something because they see food they like.

Douyin e-commerce proposed the concept of interest-based e-commerce this year. In this scenario, when consumers come to the interest-based e-commerce platform, they first look for content of interest to relax. During this period, the platform directly distributes the goods to consumers through the products attached to short videos or through live broadcasts. After consumers become interested in the goods, they will purchase them.

In theory, the promotion of interest-based e-commerce is not limited to content e-commerce platforms such as Douyin e-commerce, but can be carried out on any content platform. For brands, they should share their products, brand stories and even values ​​on major content platforms. this

In fact, many brands are doing this. Almost all brands of a certain scale have entered content platforms with a large number of users to promote their products and brands.

8. Low Desire and Emotion-to-Value Consumption Binary

As the world's largest consumer market, China has always been a complex entity. There are white-collar workers who value quality consumption, and there are young people from small towns who value cost-effective consumption. They are like two parallel worlds and do not disturb each other in their own worlds.

In today's China, the consumer society is extremely well manifested. Consumption can satisfy one's inner expectations. What distinguishes people from others in the consumer society is their consumption habits and products.

Baudrillard said: "The difference in consumption lies not in the difference in the use value of the product, but in the difference in the symbol of the product... People never consume the product itself (use value), but always regard the product (from a broad perspective) as a symbol that can highlight you, or use it to allow you to join an ideal group, or as a group with a higher status to get rid of a group with a lower status."

However, the particularity of China's "consumption stratification" is that, on the one hand, consumers who have entered the stage of rational consumption have begun to reduce their desires and pursue the No Logo principle. As a result, products such as Uniqlo and Muji are selling well, and platforms such as 1688, Pinduoduo, and Xianyu have a large number of users. Therefore, the term "substitute" has become a popular Internet term this year.

On the other hand, consumers who are upgrading their consumption have begun to define themselves through consumption. These consumers attach great importance to "value for money" rather than cost-effectiveness. The so-called value for money means that the purchased products are in line with their own personality and can position themselves, such as co-released products with favorite celebrities and artists, exclusive limited edition products, etc. This is also the reason why Yeezy Shoes and Pop Mart are selling well and why Dewu is so popular.

China's consumer market is beginning to enter a dualistic stage. Both the low-desire and "emotional-value" markets represent future trends and have sufficient potential. For brands, they need to think about which market their target consumers fall into, or say "only children make choices, I want them all."

9. Chinese brands go global, foreign brands become “Sinic”

The raging epidemic has disrupted the globalization process of many brands, but it does not affect the general trend of brand globalization. The globalization here not only refers to the globalization of big brands, but also the globalization of small brands.

With the rise of national strength and the saturation of the domestic market, it is a trend for big brands to go overseas and occupy overseas markets. Transsion in Africa, Huawei in Europe, Shopyy in Southeast Asia, TikTok in the United States and so on all represent this trend.

For small brands, with the globalization of e-commerce, they have also ushered in a good opportunity to go overseas. For example, SHEIN has become popular in the United States, and a large number of small sellers have occupied the top sales position on Amazon. In the future, with the strength of TikTok, a group of Chinese brands will inevitably rise with the help of TikTok e-commerce.

Some signs show that Tesla is becoming more and more Chinese, such as domestically produced cars being sold abroad, Tesla will build a second super factory in China, and Musk often speaks for China. In November this year, Uniqlo also opened its global flagship store in Sanlitun, Beijing. For some brands, as the local market becomes saturated, how to fully occupy the Chinese market is a question worth considering.

In recent days, the BMW Group’s annual media communication meeting (note, it is the Group), with the theme of “Home in China”, reflects this trend. How to better please the Chinese market and the emotions of Chinese consumers has become a compulsory course for multinational brands.

10. The first World Cup in the post-epidemic era: the topical World Cup continues

One of the major hot topics next year is the World Cup. This will be the first World Cup after the epidemic. Fans who have been waiting for more than five years will usher in their first carnival after the epidemic.

For marketers, World Cup marketing is not just about sponsorship and advertising. Today, the World Cup has become an integrated marketing of brand participation and topic discussion. For example, Mengniu's unintentional campaign "I am Messi, I am so panicked now" during the last World Cup, and Vatti's campaign "France wins the championship, Vatti will refund all the money" during the last World Cup, they not only placed advertisements during the World Cup, but also formed topics of discussion among the whole nation. Although these topics have a lot to do with luck, they embody a feature of the "Topical World Cup" era: a user-participatory World Cup.

As the first World Cup after the epidemic, there should be many brands participating in the marketing. It is worth looking forward to what clever marketing methods the brands will use.

Conclusion:

The above are the marketing trends I listed for 2022. 2022 will be a year of all-round recovery. The same is true for marketing. Next year, brands will pay attention to the input-output ratio and will begin to increase brand investment to get marketing back on track.

At the same time, most brands will face transformation. Traditional brands will face transformation in products, channels and brands, and new consumer brands will face transformation from niche to mass.

On the consumer side, upgrading and downgrading will exist as two poles for a long time without interfering with each other.

These have raised new challenges for brands. 2022 will not be an easy year, but the word recovery will definitely be the main theme of this year.

Author: Xunkong

Source: Xunkong’s Marketing Revelation (ID: xunkong2005)