It’s the end of the year, think about which unchanging marketing rules we should grasp in 2017!

“Sometimes I say to myself: ‘The whole picture in my eyes, the work in my hands.’ We want to see things from a vantage point, not only into the immediate future – a step or a half ahead of us, but into all of time, from the past to the present, and then to some extent into the distant future.

Even if I could find that prime position, it seems that what I actually need to do now is to make tomorrow's presentation a success, or prepare a plan for it, or tidy up my desk so that I can do my work properly, or most importantly, wash the coffee cup on the desk. In reality, what we do is a collection of practical, trivial things. But if we want to get to where we want to go while our energy is occupied by these trivialities, we need to keep some kind of guiding thought in our consciousness to help us navigate. ”

At the end of the year, I read Kenya Hara's words in "Design in Design" again, which made me feel a little absurd. This made me start to think about the daily life of a marketer . In this busy year, it is also necessary to do planning, creativity, proposals, and plans. Walking around in different cities, welcoming and seeing off people, meeting and talking, tidying up the desk, washing coffee cups...

In the basic structure of life constructed by these daily trivialities, on the one hand, we want to work hard to prove our progress, and on the other hand, we keep rewriting the scale of "progress" in our hearts, and we may even keep changing to new "yardsticks", which makes us feel a little confused and anxious.

Following this feeling of anxiety and thinking further, this vague and uncertain cognition of "progress" is indeed related to the fact that we all live in a gridded space where "your screen-swiping is my loneliness" and in a time and space generation with diverse values ​​and subcultures. However, the more important reason may be that the new information that comes to us on WeChat Moments every day has fostered our habit of being overly sensitive to "change" and the extremely rampant "possibility", and thus we have lost our "insensitivity" and become indifferent to facts that are difficult to change.

Therefore, rather than sharing with everyone, it is better to summarize for myself: if you want to overcome anxiety and gain deeper inner happiness and self-identity, it seems that you still need to think more clearly about "who you are and what you want to do?" and spend a long time focusing on some basic facts that are not easy to change; this is true for both people and brands; on this basis, the following 5 points are what I try to outline for marketers, which are the "panoramic" or "vision" in our hearts that will not change easily in the long run while we have "work in hand":

1. Brand is recognition

If marketers recognize that their work revolves around "brand" and that they are creating, managing, optimizing, and improving the brand, then we have to ask ourselves again and again, what exactly is a "brand"?

How can we talk about brand when it is invisible and intangible? There are many popular concepts, including IP, symbol, value, personification, traffic, attention, fan economy , etc. However, if we follow these concepts all the way to the top source, the so-called brand, I think, is nothing more than people's perceptual response to a name or a visual symbol, right? When we see, hear, or mention this set of information, are you able to realize it clearly? What emotions does it evoke in you? Like or hate? Which experience do you associate it with? What kinds of values ​​are equated? ——This is the brand.

Therefore, the core focus of the brand is not the product, but people’s “perception” of the product, and elevating it to a recognizable and valuable mark in the mind. This may be the origin of the brand. So I think that people’s understanding of brands today can be as diverse as possible, even if there are 100 kinds, but in the final analysis, its most basic logic is probably people’s cognition of what a specific symbol is, what it means and what value it has.

From SDi's point of view, one of the propositions of marketing is to build this kind of cognition.

Through this "starting point" we are able to clarify that the core of marketing lies in the "heart" rather than the "things"; product managers also have a marketing identity, because the product itself is a kind of "expression". From a cognitive perspective alone, new technologies are worthless. New technologies can only be recognized by users through the "expression" of the product (through the language of design and interaction). Only things that can be recognized are meaningful and valuable to you. So in the past we always thought that product managers were making products. In fact, fundamentally, they are just "expressing" around user cognition. Their work is only different from that of communication managers in expressing around user cognition in terms of language, means and form, but there is no essential difference.

2. Product is expression

Looking down from the perspective of product managers being “expressive”, in the past few years I felt that there was a question that was quite difficult to answer – does a brand need to have its own slogan? We think of some brands with very loud slogans, such as Nike, while others are not easy to remember, such as Starbucks; if a slogan is not a standard feature of a successful brand, why do we need it? Looking at this issue again today, I think the difference may just be which expression method you should use to convey the brand's value message.

Starbucks is good at conveying the brand’s value message through “spatial experience”, sofas, music, tables and chairs that are more suitable for communication, or some early Bohemian literary style... These basic experiences may be translated into “comfort” in our minds, or they may be interpreted as “romance” or “fashion”, it doesn’t matter; what matters is that these basic experiences create a perceptual response that is different from other competing brands.

Brands that adopt a similar approach first need their products to have a low threshold for reaching users and be highly convenient. On the contrary, categories with a high threshold for reaching users (such as cars ) rely more on "indirect experience" such as language, text, pictures, and videos to convey value messages. Therefore, when we examine the so-called brand marketing "style" or media preferences, whether it has its own slogan, etc., at the underlying level, it is actually a question of which media is more efficient in conveying brand value messages and which is more cost-effective. Here, products, advertising, content marketing , and public relations all become media for delivering valuable messages.

The significance of understanding that "product is expression" also lies in the simultaneous understanding of the marketing law that "direct experience is stronger than indirect experience".

For example, let us now imagine that there are only two brands, A and B, in the coffee market. Brand A believes that its core value is the good taste of its coffee. Drinking a sip of Brand A coffee and getting a sense of satisfaction on the taste buds is the direct experience of consumers, while emphasizing "ever drop is fragrant and leaving you wanting more" in TV commercials is an indirect experience. Brand A may be very confident that if consumers taste their coffee, they will make consumption choices that favor them, but the cost of allowing enough people to gain this direct experience and then realize that "Brand A's coffee is particularly delicious" is too high, so they may choose television or the Internet media to promise, output, and transfer this direct experience to consumers. This was a major proposition of our communication work in the last era.

Now comes the question. Since indirect experience is weaker than direct experience, now suppose that brand B also delivers similar value messages in its advertisements, such as "incredibly fragrant and unimaginable", this will affect consumers' value perception of brand A (because the premise of consumer perception is the ability to distinguish between different values). Now, even if brand A's coffee is really better than brand B's, its advantage in delivering direct experience (such as the number of stores or price) is not much stronger than brand B's, and it loses differentiation in the delivery of indirect experience, then brand A's sales will not necessarily be better than brand B's.

This example may make us more strongly aware that since the consumer's (human) perception system for receiving value information is multi-dimensional (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), and contains both rational and emotional parts; therefore, what marketers are actually doing is designing messages that match the various possibilities of consumer perception of value.

In view of this, if Brand A really believes that its core value is "delicious", then for Brand B, its best choice is to increase the output of direct experience (such as cutting all advertising expenses to open more stores than Brand B, and launching more marketing activities such as free drinks and cross-border experience), or design messages that are easier to activate consumers' perception of "delicious" than Brand B in the indirect experience (for example, there is an instant noodle brand whose core message in their advertisement is "good soup", and the pictures in the advertisement also focus on showing the soup part rather than the noodles part. Although the message conveyed in the end is nothing more than "the noodles are delicious", this "the soup is good so the noodles are delicious" logic solves the problem of making consumers more aware of this value through message differentiation.)

3. Expression is the product

In the part about “product is expression”, I want to emphasize that we should see the product not only as a “container” that carries the brand value, but also as a “medium” that expresses the brand value; and when the latter attribute is prominent enough, it becomes what everyone often mentions - “product is the best marketing”.

The example of the coffee brand we mentioned above can be said to be a concentration of our most important understanding of communication before the advent of the Internet era. It uses "expression" to convey the brand's value message. Expression is expression, and value is value. Expression is the description and interpretation of value. Therefore, A is still A, and B is still B. The two are completely different and clearly distinguished.

This way of thinking is the soil on which some traditional marketing theories, such as positioning theory, rely. For example, the central idea of ​​positioning theory is to use a concept to express a brand, corresponding to occupying a specific mental space of users: using "safety" to express "Volvo" and using "driving pleasure" to express "BMW"; it is very effective, but very boring; advertising based on positioning theory can only establish concepts for the minds of consumers, and cannot be the delivery of value itself. This is the limitation of positioning theory in the era. (When a brand says in an advertisement that the BMW is the ultimate driving machine, the advertisement has no residual value other than conveying this message about the BMW brand.)

The development of the Internet has given us a glimpse of a new possibility in marketing: in fact, in the future, not only A (product) can be B (expression), but B (expression) can also be A (product); product is expression, expression is product; A and B will become more and more similar.

“Expression is the product” means that all BGC (content created by brand owners, whether TV commercials, content on social media, public relations manuscripts, video micro-films, H5, short videos , etc.) can no longer be limited to the “interpretation” and “performance” of brand value. They must be more advanced than in the past and must directly carry and deliver value. In the future, the content released by brands, even if it is advertising, will be closer to “works”. They must be able to carry certain value like products. This is what is happening today. The essence of content marketing is the contentization and workization of “advertising”.

Brands in the future will only consist of two things: products and content. They are both value carriers and communication media. Traditional advertisements that only convey second-hand experiences will disappear. This may be the future of marketing.

4. Consumer Insights

Now many brands have established in-house content teams or even their own media studios, such as Red Bull Media House, so that people feel that more and more brands are "not doing their business". The real reason may be that brands have a new understanding of what their "business" is.

"Expression is the product" means that since the content produced by the brand will not stop at the level of conveying the "indirect experience" of the product, and willingly act as a "translator" as emphasized by positioning theory, the most important mission of our content, like the product, is to carry out value innovation. We should be committed to building resonance in attitudes, concepts and emotions with the brand (a wider group of people far beyond the single attribute of product consumers), helping them to better think about their own lifestyles and allowing them to gain a new perspective on problems. Based on this, brands have the possibility to commercialize everything related to their core values ​​(whether products or content). Even in the future, we might think of energy drinks like Red Bull as just a physical expression of an “energized lifestyle.”

To achieve this requires a change in the way of thinking and also places higher demands on the brand's insight.

Insight is the eternal core of marketing. Insight is the understanding of consumer needs and lifestyles. Without insight, how can there be value innovation? However, the more common situation now is that product managers do not talk about insights but models, and communication managers do not talk about insights but creativity. These are all strange "trends" that talk about fruits without taking the soil into consideration.

Regarding user (consumer) insights, I can now roughly perceive the following points:

1. Any questions that can be asked directly, any questions designed directly with the results we care about, such as "If we make the product like this, what do you think?" generally do not obtain any high-value information; there are several interesting points here:

The users' generalizations based on language logic deviate greatly from their actual consumption decisions. Usually, users will only know what they will do in a scenario that is very close to actual and real experience.

There is a considerable distance between what users express and their true perception of a matter, and to a large extent they themselves are unaware of the behavioral motives buried deep in their subconscious.

There can be a big gap between what users express and what we understand. Factors ranging from language and cultural differences to mood factors can all affect our mutual understanding.

It is extremely difficult to get users to let go of their social psychological burdens (such as considering the impact of "If I say this, how will the investigator see me, and how will others understand me") and state the facts very frankly.

Understanding this does not mean that we should not do user research, but it does mean that we should not oversimplify the way of gaining user insights through questioning (such as focus groups), nor should we classify ourselves as loyal supporters of the "insight is useless theory" just because we have conducted bad research and failed to obtain valuable information.

2. Perhaps due to the limitations of the information I have access to, from my observation, capturing user insights through social media backend data and big data analysis tools is still (at least for now) more "storytelling" than practical use. This means that social media scanning and data analysis, among other insight-generating methods, can only serve as a reference at best. Several issues arise: data scale, data monopoly, data fragmentation, data authenticity, and differences in data definition, understanding, and standards across platforms. These factors lead to high risks and costs in obtaining user insights through these methods, and the conclusions are often unsatisfactory. Taking a step back, even high-quality data is more focused on the user behavior itself (What), but lacks value in understanding the user's motivations and inner needs (How).

3. I suspect that in the future our means of insight will have to return to the first generation of advertisers, such as the insight spirit of David Ogilvy’s era: If you have a good idea, you might as well do the “mom test” first, ask more friends, listen to their opinions, ask what kind of perception these messages inspire in them, ask them about their existing knowledge and impressions of the brand and brand information; with curiosity, observe the current living conditions of the target consumers, and if you have the opportunity, make friends with them and even experience life together. In fact, I have not yet found a better way to understand consumers than to observe and communicate with them carefully.

5. Express opposition to the status quo

In the past, we seem to have never defined marketing in this way, saying that it is a kind of thinking about "value". But I think if there really is something "unchanging", while we use idealism to describe marketing as science and art, we should also acknowledge that it is a kind of "common sense" known to everyone: after all, we have to solve the problem of what to do so that people can understand, accept, like, and pay for it.

To be more precise, it is about what value you want to create and deliver for others.

Dig out the “less” from the “more”, strive for the “-” from the “+”; extract the “beauty” from the “ugly”; find the “fun” in the “lack”. These logically understandable messages are usually difficult for marketers to achieve in their daily lives. The reason is probably because we are too accustomed to "normal" and our tolerance for "existence is reasonable" is too high.

It is difficult to generalize whether some excellent brands have been able to grow from small to large because they embraced change or reflected on change, but we have indeed seen that some brands have become powerful because they were not satisfied with "normal" and because they raised objections to mainstream consciousness.

For example, the brand value of MUJI is more or less built on the reflection on the transitional consumption trends of the previous era - is it really good to just "buy, buy, buy"? Is it really worth it? Between frequent consumption and discarding unnecessary items, which lifestyle is closer to "happiness"? Are people's daily lives based on considerations for resources and the environment? Similarly, in the last century, I think MINI might have looked at the cold production lines and stereotyped car advertisements with a perspective very close to that of an art graduate, Steve Jobs lamented the absence of humanistic spirit in the field of science and technology, and Starbucks more or less felt that only intimate social interaction is the most concrete and real charm of a coffee brand.

So there is no need to be surprised why some brands, seemingly never doing any “marketing”, are able to approach a state of “quiet but with their own voice” - you know, placing “scarcity” in the midst of “abundance” is itself the best way to highlight the brand.

If you keep a certain distance from life, you can find similar insights everywhere. For example, perhaps just to attract children's attention, "Little Apple" became a "solution" for children in many consumer scenarios overnight. This makes people realize that they only need to focus on a very detailed point, such as how to tell children aged 6-10 "what is beauty" and how to make them have a certain awareness of true "beauty", which will also be a huge market.

Some time ago, I gave a friend a copy of the "Discovery Marketing SDi White Paper". Later, she told me that she gained more from reading the book than from reading WeChat articles. I thought it was so strange, as the text was exactly the same, and even the pictures and layout were exactly the same. Later, when I was chatting with another friend, he told me that it was not strange at all, as electronic media is a medium that lacks in intimacy! We also have very low trust in it, which really prompted me to think about McLuhan's "the medium is the message" again, and reconsider the issue we mentioned at the beginning, which medium for delivering messages should be matched with the user's perception system, which would be more intimate and more conducive to building a trusting relationship.

Insights like these might also include realizing that most similar brands advertise their presence three times a day, and that a frequency of once every three days is enough to greatly increase the attention paid to your content, and that in a business ecosystem where users are "accustomed" to harassing messages, you never use this method of "marketing", etc.

If increasing brand favorability is a KPI, what could be a simpler way than not doing things that are bad for users? From another perspective, imagine that "marketing" is a brand that you and I jointly manage. Then, is it possible for us to make some efforts so that it does not evoke too many negative perceptual responses from users?

Suddenly I remembered something that Yohji Yamamoto said:

"My profession is not just about fashion, it's about expression; expressing your opinions against the status quo. If it's not like that, then expression has no meaning."

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Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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