If you don't see through these 3 "moments", it's no wonder your strategic firepower is low

We know that a company’s marketing strategy is not just one, but a collection of multiple strategies. From the perspective of SDi's structure, it usually involves research strategy, expression strategy, communication strategy, interaction strategy and operation strategy; next, we will focus on discussing the communication strategy design with you.

How to design a communication strategy

In the discovery marketing theory (SDi), the corresponding core module of communication strategy is "implantation". Why implant? Because communication is inception, which is to influence the audience's perception and choice of the brand through the implantation of information.

In order to guide specific business practices, based on SDi, we further proposed a four-step communication strategy rule (SLTC rule) of "potential", "law", "calculation" and "action" under the "implantation" module.

The first step of the SLTC rule, “Situation”, means that the design of any communication strategy should start with our research and understanding of the brand situation;

The second step is “Law”, which means that our strategy design must conform to the user’s mental laws, cognitive mechanisms, and some basic principles related to this.

The third step is “Tactics”, which means we need to integrate the brand’s “potential” with the “law” of communication to make specific communication plans;

The fourth step, “Creative”, refers to the creative implementation of the communication strategy with creativity as the core.

Next, we will explain these four steps one by one in detail. This article wants to talk about the first step of the SLTC law, "momentum".

Before formulating communication strategies, marketers must first fully understand the various situations inside and outside the brand. Just like ancient doctors had to go through a diagnostic process of "looking, listening, asking and feeling" before practicing medicine; the formulation of communication strategies also requires assessing the "situation" first; the "situation" here roughly includes the brand's internal situation, external situation and overall trend.

1. Brand internal situation

Communication needs are the internal situation of the brand that we must first understand. Last time I heard a colleague talk about how, when a communication plan was one-third completed, they learned from an "insider" in a low-ranking position on the client side that the CEO actually hoped that this round of communication would also be beneficial to subsequent financing . Omitting this kind of key information indicates the risk of insufficient connection between the agency and the client. It also reminds us to try to understand the demands of decision makers more comprehensively before starting a project.

The seemingly well-organized demands of customers may be neither scientific nor reasonable to both parties. This situation is more common than we think : the demanders are not always strategy experts. They may make demands without knowing what they want. In fact, a qualified strategy maker should first examine the following two points when facing demands:

From the perspective of communication skills, is the demand itself worth discussing (for example, when proposing a creative advertising demand, what is the problem to be solved? Would public relations communication be a better way?)

More importantly, strategists need to constantly ask questions, question in a friendly and skillful manner, and ask questions in return to understand whether customers have an accurate understanding of the problems facing the brand.

Products are the second key to the internal situation of the brand. Strategists should experience the product deeply until they gain some insights and seem to have touched the intrinsic value of the product before they can consider strategies and creativity.

Unfortunately, this principle is obviously incompatible with the current popular "inspiration overdraft" model. In the "inspiration overdraft" mode, the strategist has held two meetings with the client, learned the most basic product concept, and then can't wait to have a "flash of inspiration". This approach not only fails to grasp the essential value of the product, but also easily leads to the homogenization of creativity and the routineization of strategies.

Users’ perception and behavior of products (brands) is the third most important key point in the internal situation of a brand. If conditions permit, strategists should implement thorough user insights to understand how users purchase and use products; the pain points and potential needs in the process; the impressions, attitudes and cognitions of users towards products (brands) and competing products, and verify this information with their own experience and perceptions of the products; at the same time, they should pay special attention to the users’ “value perception” (for example, what information triggers their interest in the product; if they think it is good, how will they tell their friends, etc.)

From any perspective, user insights are extremely important for the design of communication strategies; this is also the consistent position of discovery marketing.

Strategic design should try to take into account the brand’s own core capabilities, resources and budget, which is the fourth important aspect of the brand’s internal situation. Once I recommended a communication plan based on short videos to a new brand started by a media person, because they had no shortage of equipment, professionals or storytelling skills.

Strategy is an art of thinking and creating under the constraints of a specific situation, and budget is the most important limiting factor. In addition to understanding the budget plan of the demand side, we should also note that the budget is a very subtle issue. Its amount sometimes directly depends on the decision-maker's definition of "what" and "how important" communication is. Depending on the depth of his understanding of this matter, the budget may differ by several times. Therefore, in the early stages of a project, strategists should focus on how to come up with convincing information (such as key conclusions from user insights), because only by allowing decision makers to have a deeper understanding of the necessity and rationality of communication and reducing specious arguments can they have a chance to secure a more favorable budget.

2. Brand external situation

The life cycle of brands and categories is the first aspect to pay attention to in the brand’s external situation. The reason why it is called an external situation is because the life cycle of brands and categories is always relative. A five-year-old Internet "old brand" is at best just an "infant" compared to mature fast-moving consumer goods brands. For newly created brands and categories, early-stage communication should highlight functional value; for mature brands and categories, the focus should be more on emotion and ideology. Although this universal principle is often broken in some vertical fields (such as " Jiang Xiaobai " in the liquor industry), the premise of "keeping to the right path and being surprising" is to first know what is "right" and what are the general principles.

Category innovation has great advantages in communication. However, just like the hot products that pop up from time to time in the food and beverage industry, many categories that seem very innovative in the early stages ultimately prove to be short-lived, which has become a classic paradox in marketing.

There are two benefits to knowing this. One is that it can be used as a standard for the other party to judge customers. I have found that by comparing the degree of innovation of a brand in the entire category and thinking about whether this innovation can be sustained, it often helps us discover good customers. The other point is that as a strategy designer, for brands with a high degree of category innovation in the short term, we must pay attention to keeping a distance from trends in terms of strategy.

Identifying competitive relationships can be said to be the most important aspect of analyzing a brand’s external situation. SDi believes that there are two types of competitive relationship identification for a brand: horizontal and vertical - horizontal based on products and vertical based on values. In practice we emphasize the latter more.

For example, in the past I often used the chocolate market as an example. Take the Snickers brand, for example. From a horizontal perspective, its competitors may be Hershey or MMs in the same industry, but from a vertical perspective, from the value proposition of "reject hunger and be yourself", its real competitors are more likely to be other "solutions" for quickly replenishing energy (such as Red Bull).

Based on this understanding, not long ago when I was working on a community bakery brand upgrade project, through a lot of consumer behavior observations, we realized that the real competition for community bakeries today is not other baking brands or coffee shops or beverage stores, but community convenience stores. Gaining this understanding has a great impact on our subsequent strategy design.

Based on the identification of horizontal and vertical competitive relationships, strategists should list important competitors and then conduct further research: combined with user insights, strategists should analyze the value propositions, operating conditions, and marketing strategies of these brands; because the core issue that communication needs to solve is the differentiation of brands in the minds of users; and this differentiation can only be achieved by understanding the position of competitors in the minds of consumers from a deeper level.

3. The overall trend of the brand

Media change is the overall trend that strategists should pay most attention to. The most prominent feature of media change is the rise of new ways of information interaction, which is the most important "trend" for communication. For example, Xiaomi mobile phones in the past few years benefited from the huge dividends of Weibo; since then, whether it is WeChat , Zhihu, or the rise of audio, short videos and many self-media platforms , almost every prominent change in the media will be accompanied by the rise of some foresighted brands.

"The medium is the message", McLuhan's famous view, also means that in the long run, the way information interacts has a far greater impact on people than the content it carries. Media changes have affected people's lifestyles and given rise to subcultures. Subculture is another trend that strategists need to pay close attention to.

In today's grid-based mobile Internet environment, "your screen-swiping is my loneliness." The "cute and funny" represented by Xiao Ming and the "sexual indifference" represented by MUJI have long been subculture phenomena with high potential in specific circles before they became familiar to the public. Strategists' research on subcultures should be combined with the proposition of "understanding consumers' ideological and emotional needs" in user insights.

We need to see that since brands are also a cultural phenomenon at a deeper level, in-depth experience of different subcultures and thinking about the relationship between them and brands may also provide inspiration for strategies.

The content discussed in this series of articles belongs to the "value implantation" module in the "discovery marketing" theory.

Di——Innovate user value and create user awareness.