Why is brand strategy the highest strategy?

What touched me most was what Mr. Jiang Nanchun proposed: the importance of cognitive advertising. Founders and company leaders should focus most of their energy on planning brand strategies. Once you find the brand positioning that captures the user's mind, launch a saturation attack immediately. As the article says, the key to a saturation attack is not the investment return ratio, but ensuring victory. I hope this concise content will be helpful to you.

1. Brand strategy is the highest strategy

1. There are only two types of media: one is called traffic advertising, and the other is called cognitive advertising.

Traffic advertising is like the Viagra model. It works immediately after taking it, but the downside is that you have to take it again tomorrow. And the cost of traffic continues to rise. Cognitive advertising is Liuwei Dihuang Pills. Although it requires a course of treatment, it is a better cure for the symptoms than the root cause.

2. Is traffic more important or brand more important?

Many people believe that brands are important but slow to warm up. Although traffic costs are becoming more and more expensive and need to be spent every day, it is difficult to accumulate value. In order to raise funds quickly, the main money should still be spent on traffic.

But money will eventually run out.

Some people think that a brand is slow to gain popularity because you haven’t found the positioning in the minds of consumers (positioning is either to create a new category or to find a feature that distinguishes it from competing products). If you really find that point and use large-scale advertising saturation attacks to create a cognitive advantage for the brand in the minds of consumers, then not only will the number of orders and sales rise rapidly, but you will also fundamentally get rid of the competition of homogeneity and pure price wars and establish a barrier in the minds of consumers, because consumer cognition will be preconceived and difficult to change once formed.

It is certainly important to continuously attract traffic and increase orders, and to continuously subsidize users to cultivate habits, but what is more critical is whether consumers have a clear understanding of the brand positioning you want to express in their minds while receiving these traffic and subsidies, and whether these traffic and subsidies can help strengthen and amplify consumers' perception of your brand.

3. Brand recognition is more lasting and mental recognition is difficult to change

In the real world, differentiation is often temporary, and when others immediately begin to imitate , homogenization seems difficult to avoid.

Technological advantages, differentiated advantages in business models, etc. are not real barriers. They can often only create a time window for you. If you can use the hammer of a saturation attack to firmly drive the advantage of differentiation into the minds of users during that time window, and make your brand the spokesperson for a new category or new feature, you will have the opportunity to build a deeper moat, which exists in the minds of consumers. Because consumers' minds are difficult to change and have limited capacity, they like to be first, so the first often gets 70% of the market's profits. If you are not among the best, you will often have slim profits or even suffer losses.

2. How should the brand be positioned?

1. Either ban the category or create new features, otherwise it will be difficult to prevent competitors from entering

Over the past many years, there have been four paths for corporate development. The first is to find brand positioning, create new categories, or create new features. This is the biggest feature of a company, and many companies have therefore evolved into new business species. Then, within the time window, launch a large number of saturation attacks to enter the minds of consumers and ultimately gain a unique mental advantage.

Whether it is a traditional industry or an Internet industry, there is no need to view Internet+ as something magical. The most important thing is to return to the hearts of consumers. The success of many brands is not due to the adoption of Internet-based transformative measures, but simply because they have found new value and position in the minds of consumers.

Mr. Xie Weishan from Junzhi Company helped Xiangpiaopiao find a unique positioning again: a beverage that relieves mild fatigue and hunger, which created many scenarios.

Because feeling a little hungry and sleepy is normal, you will feel a little hungry and sleepy after working in the afternoon, working overtime at night, and watching football or TV series at midnight. When it is linked with these scenarios, his sales scenarios increase greatly. Moreover, the brand is positioned as "made from New Zealand milk and Indian black tea, and drunk by 1.2 billion people every year". This certificate of trust has rebuilt consumer confidence.

2. It doesn’t matter who you are, what matters is how others perceive you

Positioning should return to common sense. Common sense is the cognition that already exists in the minds of consumers. The real world is just an appearance, and the perception in consumers’ minds is the reality.

Positioning must conform to the minds of consumers. Cognition and common sense are difficult to change, so common sense should be used to establish positioning.

For example, consumers believe that good supplements are ginseng, bird's nest, deer antler, and cordyceps. Dong'e Ejiao leverages this perception to carry out associated positioning, positioning Ejiao as a precious and high-value supplement. The letter of trust comes from Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica: There are three treasures for nourishing the body, ginseng, deer antler and donkey-hide gelatin.

In ten years, the price of Dong-E E-Jiao increased from 20 yuan per catty to 2,000 yuan per catty, and its market value increased from 2 billion to 30 billion.

Why emotional advertising like Nike's can't be learned? Because this kind of advertising is the privilege of successful people. I believe Nike would not have used this type of advertising when it started its business .

Why are there so many emotional advertisements nowadays? It is because homogeneous products cannot find a unique positioning and can only turn to pursue emotional resonance with consumers. Even if they are well-filmed and touching, will consumers pay for such touching moments?

The Immortal Knight of Public Bank is very impressive. Will you choose Public Bank because of this? This type of advertising cannot give consumers a unique reason to choose you, create a cognitive advantage in the minds of consumers, and gain consumer preference.

If you are afraid of getting a sore throat, drink Wanglaoji; if you feel tired or sleepy, drink Red Bull; if you are a little hungry or sleepy, drink Xiangpiaopiao. This is the taste of Master Kong; and FedEx's next-day delivery is the truly lethal and sales-enhancing advertisement.

If you are not a powerful person in the market, you should stay away from so-called emotional and image-based advertisements.

3. Positioning should find differentiated value

Take Focus Media as an example. Its annual revenue of over 10 billion yuan actually depends on one thing: it bet right on elevators. Elevators are the infrastructure of urban civilization, representing four words: mainstream population, necessary, high frequency, and low interference.

These four words are the most core and scarce resources to ignite a brand today. Today, there are 400 million urban residents, and 200 million of them watch Focus Media every day. 5,400 brands invest in Focus Media every year. Focus Elevator Media, 120 cities, 1.1 million elevator posters, 180,000 elevator TVs, and an average daily reach of 500 million urban mainstream people.

I summarize Focus Media’s positioning as: detonate the mainstream and invest in Focus Media.

Compared with television, the 200 million consumers covered by Focus Elevator Media every day are the mainstream urban consumer group aged 20-45 with middle and high incomes, and these people are no longer the main audience of television today.

Compared with the Internet, Focus Media has greater brand explosiveness.

There are many entrances to the mobile Internet , content and information are exploding, advertisements are difficult to remember, and consumers have the right to actively choose, so they tend to ignore advertisements.

For social media, news users mainly watch the content, and what advertisers should do most is to implant public relations content. The right bet must be made on video patch ads. A few popular dramas such as "Descendants of the Sun", "The Mystic Nine" and "Ode to Joy" have made the right bet. Otherwise, it will be difficult to ignite the brand. Even if there are some mainstream people with middle and high incomes watching popular dramas, they now often choose to buy VLPs and pay once to watch the show without ads.

In short, branding should focus on cognition, category, characteristics and differentiation.

3. How should the brand be spread?

1. Key points for successful brand communication

I think a successful brand communication probably needs three integrations:

From the perspective of active information model, the key lies in how to integrate into social hot topics and hot events; how to integrate into major social entertainment; from the perspective of passive living space, the key lies in integrating into the core life trajectory of consumers.

Integrating into social hot topics and events means using Weibo and WeChat to combine social hot topics to create content that can be spread. This method is effective and low-cost. Individual cases such as Xiaomi and Chu Orange are very successful but difficult to replicate and can only be encountered by chance.

This approach had a chance of success when Weibo was popular, but in the current era dominated by WeChat, commercial brand communications tend to be spread in small circles and have not actually attracted widespread attention in the entire society.

To integrate into the major entertainment of society is to choose the right core TV programs, the best dramas and seize the rise of the Chinese film market. Programs like Jiaduobao's "The Voice of China", Liby's "I Am a Singer" and Yili's " Where Are We Going, Dad?" are still very successful.

There are thousands of programs on TV, but the only five or six that people can widely remember are these five or six, and they must bet on their title sponsors. There are dozens of commercials in the programs "The Voice of China" by Jiaduobao and "I Am a Singer" by Liby, and you can't even remember most of them. Last year, the title sponsorship fees for the top five programs were around 300-400 million yuan, but this year the fees have risen to 500-600 million yuan, which is a big challenge for many new economy brands.

Regarding core entertainment, besides TV programs, there are movies, which grow at about 50% every year. Rapid growth every year.

Integrating into the core life trajectory of consumers means implanting advertisements into consumers’ passive and closed living spaces such as apartment buildings and office buildings, making them their only choice in that time and space.

For example, there are 120 channels at night, but only one channel at the elevator entrance. You pass by hundreds of bus body advertisements and bus shelter advertisements on the road every day, and you may not remember what brands they are. However, the framed posters in the elevators of apartment communities have an average of six posters in two elevators. You see the first advertisement when you go out in the morning and the last advertisement when you come back in the evening. After going up and down in the elevators for a week or two, these elevator posters are often the ones that impress you the most.

In today's information fragmentation era, the targeted advertising model is actually a gathering model, that is, it gathers 200-300 million urban mainstream consumers in the closed living space that they must pass through, forming a high-frequency compulsory arrival and thus generating a powerful brand detonating ability. Focus Media is often able to make a less well-known brand very influential among the mainstream population within a limited time window, such as CAR Inc., Ele.me, etc.

2. Once a brand finds the right positioning, it should seize the time window to launch a saturation attack

Why saturation attack? Many people believe that you can achieve twice the result with half the effort. But when crossing a big ditch, you should never try to cross half of it first and then try to cross the other half. So when it comes to increasing advertising budgets, management shouldn’t ask, what is the return on investment? Instead, they should ask:

How much should we invest to ensure victory?

How to conduct a saturation attack? Funds and resources should be used to capture the minds of consumers, while spending energy and resources day after day on attracting traffic and pursuing so-called short-term order effects will ultimately make it difficult to break away from long-term homogeneity.

Subsidy wars and price competition often prevent a company from becoming truly competitive and profitable.