What’s the point of doing business if you can’t find any competitors?
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How many times have you heard this? Anyway, I have heard it many times, whether it was my own experience or from hearing about other people’s cases. People who say this are usually the companies themselves, because in their eyes, their products are indeed unique: "Our wireless mouse uses self-developed patented technology to achieve wireless charging. It is a world first and currently has no competitors." “Our air purifier is the only wearable product and there is no competitor.” "Our app is the first social product that can reduce people's social pressure. There is no competitor." Well, according to their logic, every new movie is bound to be a huge success... Why? Because they are all brand new movies, the first in the world, and they have absolutely no competitors... Many people only focus on their own products and fail to see the entire market. They either don't correctly understand the true meaning of competitors, or they have no sense of competition at all. However, if you don’t even know who is competing with you for your job, then any decision you make may be like a boxer punching the air. Either nothing happens, or you hurt your back by punching too hard... 1. Who are your competitors? Anything that competes with you for your users is a competitor. 1. Competitive products Generally speaking, when talking about competitors, most people will think of competing products in the same industry. This is indeed true and easy to understand. However, many people prefer to ignore the existence of these competing products and advertise in a vacuum, such as the following slogan: "Drink Golden Dragon Fish Soy Milk for breakfast." This slogan makes no sense because it does not express its superiority over any competitor. There are many products that can be used as breakfast drinks, in addition to various brands of soy milk, there are also various brands of milk and coffee. So who is the main competitor of Golden Dragon Fish Soy Milk? I think it’s mainly other brands of soy milk. Although the Golden Dragon Fish brand is very strong in the edible oil category, it does not have any obvious advantages in the soy milk category. Its disadvantages are even more obvious: Can you imagine the taste of pouring a thick layer of peanut oil on a cup of soy milk? (PS, this is another failed brand extension case) Even if the brand name "Golden Dragon Fish" must be used, it does not explain "why you should drink Golden Dragon Fish soy milk instead of Yonghe soy milk". Here I would like to speculate that the person who wrote this slogan may have read Hua & Hua's "Super Symbols Are Super Creativity", because there is a sentence in the book that left a deep impression on me: "It is necessary to persuade consumers, not to explain or convince them." Yes, “Drink Golden Dragon Fish Soy Milk for breakfast” is an attempt to “persuade” consumers. However, if you want to really persuade someone, it’s not just that I drink because you say so, but you have to give me a reason to drink. (Remember the famous “queue-cutting experiment” in psychology? The emphasis is on the word “because”, not “please let me cut in line”.) Just like the slogan that H&H wrote for Hanting Hotel - "Love cleanliness, stay at Hanting", this sentence is both appealing (stay at Hanting) and provides a corresponding reason (cleanliness). More importantly: this also reflects our advantages over other hotel brands. (By targeting your competitors, I don’t mean you have to call out their names.) 2. Other products Sometimes, your main competitor may not be products in the same industry, but other types of products. This is the case with many health supplements, such as vitamin tablets. Although vitamins are a basic need for people, vitamin tablets are not. Because people generally adopt methods that have lower behavioral thresholds and do not violate past behavioral habits to meet their own needs. For example, if he occasionally eats more vegetables and fruits, or even drinks an extra glass of orange juice, he will think that he has supplemented his vitamins and will not think of buying health supplements because they are too replaceable. Therefore, the main competitors of vitamin tablets may not be other brands of vitamin tablets, but various products related to vegetables and fruits. In this case, simply promoting the product's raw materials, place of origin and big brand may not be effective. Instead, the focus should be on highlighting the product's relative advantages over fruits and vegetables. For example, the advertisement can say: "To get enough vitamins, you must eat 1 apple + 2 oranges + 3 tomatoes every day! Or, two tablets of XX vitamins a day! XX vitamins, rich in ..." This is much better because it is difficult for normal people to eat so much fruit in a day. Once users find that they cannot achieve the goal of "supplementing vitamins" through their original behaviors, they will actively look for new solutions. At this point, you can recommend your solution to them - buying your vitamin tablets. In contrast, if you simply emphasize how big your brand is or how authentic your raw materials are, users will not care about your advertising at all; they will just continue to take care of the farmers’ business. 2. What are the key disadvantages? The purpose of finding competitors mentioned above is to adjust one's own strategy according to the competitors, so as to achieve the effect of leveraging strengths and avoiding weaknesses. But sometimes, no matter how you play to your strengths, you still can't avoid your weaknesses. At this time, you should also find the "key disadvantages" that prevent your product from selling well, and then overcome them in a targeted manner. So what is the “critical disadvantage factor”? Take the Challenger space shuttle: On January 28, 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded, disintegrated and crashed 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts on board. The accident occurred because an O-ring made of solid rubber material suddenly failed, causing flames to burn from top to bottom, eventually causing the rocket to explode. In this accident, the performance of the O-ring was the key disadvantage. No matter how good the propulsion system, communication system or personnel collaboration method is, it will be of no use if it is not improved. The key to the key disadvantage factor lies in the word "key". There are many factors that limit product sales. Let’s talk about health products. Generally, there are several common reasons why health products do not sell well: The product is too substitutable , and eating other things can also achieve the corresponding purpose; The product lacks attention , and few people often talk about health supplements as a topic of conversation; The perceived effectiveness of the product is too low , and you won’t feel anything after eating it. The product has physiological risks , and there are concerns about side effects on the body after eating; The brand is not credible and people are afraid of buying counterfeit and inferior products; The products have social risks , and people are worried that if they take health supplements, others will mistakenly think they have health problems; The product has psychological risks , and people think that if they take health supplements, they are sick... With so many disadvantages, every company's products have these problems to a greater or lesser extent, and it is impossible to solve them all at once. So, what you need to do is to find the disadvantages that have the greatest limiting effect, and then concentrate your resources to make a breakthrough. For example, for some big brands, “credibility” and “physiological risks” may not be big problems, while “substitutability” and “perceptibility” cannot be solved overnight. In addition, since their main functions are mostly "neutral" (such as improving immunity, improving memory, supplementing calcium, nourishing health, etc., rather than treating kidney deficiency), there are no "social risks" and "psychological risks". Therefore, their key disadvantage is mainly "lack of product attention". Once this key disadvantage is found, a series of targeted work can be carried out. There are at least two options for dealing with a lack of attention for a product: Increase product topicality Find the right marketing channels 1) Increase topicality Except for some health products related to beauty and kidney-tonifying, most health products are indeed not very popular. If we really want to say that the rate is high, most of them are negative news topics, such as "An old man spent 200,000 yuan on health products, found out that he was cheated and committed suicide"... So, how can we increase the topicality of these products? Generally speaking, the topics that people pay attention to for a long time are nothing more than: sex, food, wealth, status, celebrities, offspring, cars and houses, etc. If you want to increase the topicality of your product, you should try to tie it to these hot topics. For example, in the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street ", Leo takes drugs every day. What physiological effects does this have? Why did he say that taking drugs allowed him to be in the best shape possible? Why are there no problems with the child he gave birth to? Why do (it seems) many celebrities and wealthy people take drugs? In fact, we can start with these topics, then provide people with answers from a scientific and health perspective, and gradually guide them to products. (Of course, we must pay attention to political correctness and avoid misunderstanding) 2) Appropriate marketing channels Since the product itself lacks attention, the product needs to actively influence consumers rather than passively wait for consumers to find the product. (Your attention is low, so who will come to you?) This requires choosing the right marketing channels to increase the chances of active exposure . Channels that actively influence consumers include: Weibo, Moments , targeted advertising, TV advertising, telephone sales, etc. These all instill product information in consumers when they are "unprepared". Relatively passive channels include: Baidu search ads, WeChat official account soft articles, Zhihu soft articles, etc. These are more likely to show product information when consumers are looking for health care product information themselves. To verify what I said, we can take a quick look at the advertising effects of the four major brands, By-Health, Nutrilite, Melatonin, and Dong-E E-Jiao, on the four major mainstream social platforms ( WeChat , Weibo, Zhihu, and Toutiao). First of all, I want to make one thing clear: whenever information about these four brands appears on social platforms, most of it is advertisements (especially WeChat and Weibo) or stock-related information. Few people actually talk about them as daily topics. For example, the following picture shows the search results for information with "Thomson By-Health" as the keyword , which are all advertisements... Source: FooAds OK, let’s take a look at the distribution of these four brands’ voices on various social platforms: Data source : FooAds It can be found that By-Health has made the most efforts on Weibo . Among these four platforms, Weibo is the one that can most actively influence users: as long as someone posts a Weibo related to health products, people who follow him will see it, regardless of whether they are interested in health products or not; WeChat official accounts are not so proactive, and users must be interested in the topic of health products before they will click in to see it. Now let’s take a look at the performance of these four brands on Baidu Index: (The higher the Baidu Index, the more interested people are in the brand, otherwise why would they search for it…) Data source: Baidu Index Obviously, By-Health has a much higher Baidu Index, which means people are more interested in it than the other three brands. It doesn’t matter if the pictures just now are not clear. The following table is the result of summarizing the above data: Source: FooAds & Baidu Index Those who put more effort into Weibo (that is, more proactively influence users) will also have more gratifying results (gain more attention) on the Baidu Index. Of course, the above statistics only include data from these online platforms, and these brands must have business resources in other channels, such as telephone sales and TV advertising. Therefore, there is not a completely linear relationship between these data and they are only for rough reference. In short, choosing the right marketing channel is very important, which is why Cui Yongyuan chose Weibo instead of Zhihu and WeChat... At this point in the article, you may have understood that I have only talked about two things in the entire article: "key advantages" and "key disadvantages" . If we expand on it a little bit, it's the "barrel effect". But unlike most people’s explanation of the “barrel effect” on the Internet, I think the “barrel effect” does not mean that “shortcomings determine your level”. This understanding is too one-sided. The real meaning of the "barrel effect" is: your success depends on whether you can break through the [key limiting factor]. The key limiting factor does not necessarily refer to your weaknesses, it may also be your strengths. Sometimes, the reason you cannot succeed is because your disadvantages are too obvious. For example, you have good conditions in all aspects, are good at dealing with people, and are very smart, but you are only 1.5 meters tall. However, some positions (such as public relations) attach great importance to image. At this time, your problem is that your disadvantages are too obvious. But sometimes, you cannot succeed because your strengths are not prominent enough. For example, your English is actually quite good and you have passed Level 6, which is one of your advantages. However, some positions (such as translation) require English proficiency to reach Level 8. At this time, your problem is that your advantages are not prominent enough. In short, if you want to succeed, you must discover your key limitations. Only by identifying these factors and issues can we clarify the direction of progress: focus on highlighting our relative advantages over our competitors, or focus on making up for our own disadvantages. The so-called "no problem" is actually the biggest problem! If you can't even find the problem, you will be like a headless fly, with no clear direction or goal, and everything depends on luck. Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising This article was compiled and published by @小云子you (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map |
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