Let the brand sing, not hawk - the RAP rule every brand needs

A few days ago, Mr. TB (Song Zhiming) was asked in the "Boss Hall" program how he viewed "noisy hawking advertisements" VS. "good brand creative advertisements". TB said that advertising is an applied art, and the standard of a good advertisement is "touching people's hearts and promoting business". It can be understood this way: "touching people's hearts" means having artistic appeal, and "promoting business" means having applied combat effectiveness.

As a soldier who has the honor to fight closely with TB, I would like to expand on this important topic: How to avoid noisy hawking, how to make your advertisement more like a touching song, "both popular and commercially successful".

First of all, hawking advertising also has its advantages. Its biggest advantage, but also its biggest problem, is that it focuses too much on brand awareness, which is what some business owners often mention: "Make the brand famous in the shortest possible time so that everyone knows about it." The media were very happy when they heard this, because Daikin was going to spend money like crazy, but consumers were repeatedly tortured by noisy advertisements such as "Renrenche" and "Naobaijin" that had no bottom line and aesthetics. This did make everyone know your brand, but it also made everyone disgusted with your brand, and they would avoid or close such advertisements as much as possible.

Because the essence of advertising is to "promote business", I have always believed that the right way to advertise is to start with how to understand the word "business".

"What is business?" Your answer will likely determine the type of brand and advertising you create. The makers of those noisy brainwashing advertisements may think that business is all about money and hard transactions. Such thinking is unlikely to lead to good advertisements that touch people's hearts.

After having the honor of serving many excellent domestic and foreign brands, I have found that the best brands all have a common belief: they all believe that business is not about cold numbers and transactions, business = the meaning of life .

A successful business is one that continuously creates meaning in life for users. If you agree with this, I would like to introduce a friend to you. In the advertising world, he is not as famous as Big Idea, nor as suave as Insight. He is very low-key, so low-key that people outside the industry may not have heard of him. But he is very professional, rich, and profound, and can best convey the "significance of brands to people's lives". His name is... Relevance!

Relevance is generally translated as "correlation", but such a translation is too academic and monotonous, and is far from enough to reflect the rich meaning implied behind this word. English is not my native language, but after years of work, I understand that relevance means "resonance, connection, inspiration, coolness, and sense of the times..." Almost all the elements of a good brand are here.

For a brand, it is crucial to stay relevant. On the contrary, if a brand's CMO tells an advertising company that our brand lacks relevance, there will be many meanings behind this sentence: the brand may be aging, out of touch with the times, out of date, out of favor, ignored... In short, a big problem that needs to be faced has come, and the brand needs to be refreshed. If the refresh is not done well, it will be a turning point in the fate of the brand. Li Ning encountered this problem a few years ago. This is the ups and downs of a brand. I heard that Li Ning is recovering in the past 1-2 years. I wish our Chinese brands can regain their glory.

In fact, relevance is not only about brand communication, but also about products and experience. Just like today, many people still like Nokia and Motorola, but their products are too unrelevant and can only be missed.

Now that everyone understands Relevance, we can go a step further and summarize a RAP model that protects your brand from making noise and being offensive.

Many companies are "eager to do A but lazy to do R", but in the RAP model, R comes before A. This is to emphasize that before letting go of Awareness, we must first explore and define the brand's Relevance. We must think clearly about the brand's meaning in users' lives. Then, we must embed this meaning in every link and detail of advertising creativity, product creation, and service innovation, and open the door to interactive participation ( Participation ) with users in as many links as possible.

I won’t elaborate on Particiapation here. Whether it’s Xiaomi’s original “Sense of Participation” or other articles and books, they have talked a lot about it. The focus is on the change of brand roles: from command to guidance; from speaking to dialogue.

Whether it is RAP or Relevance itself, both are things that brands need to continuously cultivate over the long term. There is an old saying that goes "you will run out of money if you don't eat up all the food you have", and the same goes for Brand Relevance. No brand can be assured of sitting back and relaxing. For example, even a company as powerful as Nike dare not take anything lightly. Every year, Nike has a brand theme campaign with the internal code name "JDI" (JDI=Just Do It), and huge budgets and resources are invested in this campaign every year.

Although these theme campaigns are not intended to directly promote a certain product, they are intended to lead the spirit of the sport and establish an unbreakable relevance by interpreting JDI's new meaning and new content that keeps pace with the times for today's young people. but! Once the product has such a strong relevance and is good, will sales still be a problem? Think about it, among all the Nike products you and your family have bought, how many of them were purchased because of promotional ads, and how many were purchased because of the brand's image and meaning, driving you to walk into their stores and then find the right pair of shoes or clothes for you?

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