Brand marketing core competitive strategy!

As consumer demand and preferences change, in the consumption 1.0 era, consumers will pay more attention to the "price-performance ratio" of the product itself before consuming it, and choose the most economical and affordable products.

In the era of consumption 2.0, consumers' commodity consumption has advanced. In addition to paying attention to the functional attributes of the commodities themselves, they also pay attention to the "price-performance ratio" of the commodities, and "appearance is justice."

Today, we have entered the era of consumption 3.0. How much consumers are willing to pay for a product depends more on the inner experience the product can bring to them and its value to "self".

When people are willing to pay for scenes, moods, and quality, the old term "value for money" has disappeared, the once popular "price for appearance" has been upgraded, and a new Internet term "price for heart" has emerged . Chinese consumption is undergoing a leap from "value for money" to "price for appearance" and then to "price for heart."

Today's consumption has changed from material needs to experience needs, and from the previous monotony to the current personalized customization. It is no longer the case that a brand can stand on the stage and say that its product is good and the people below the stage will agree.

Consumers will experience whether the product is like this. Using the old methods to build a brand is nothing more than walking into the old conservative alley, which is obviously no longer applicable to the current path of brand building.

We firmly believe that today, the modern brand methodology has been reversed and the creation of new brands should be closely related to the consumption path. The first half where channels were king has passed, and the second half is where products and users are king: good products – massive users – word-of-mouth marketing – brand.

That is, only after having good products can you win the recognition and recommendation of consumers, add to word-of-mouth marketing, and form the entire brand.

With good products and good reputation, when the brand is promoted to the public, what consumers receive is a 90-point brand, rather than a blank brand with no reputation in the market.

So, how can we shape the core competitiveness of a brand with products as the center?

1. Setting the tone: good design

Teacher Liang Ning once said: A brand is something you are willing to take selfies with.

Huang Hai of Frees Capital also proposed a concept called mapping rate. "The aesthetic bonus is directly related to the picture-taking rate, which refers to the percentage of every 100 users who purchase a product who will spontaneously take photos and share them. This indicator can indirectly reflect the aesthetic tendencies of the new group of people."

What does this mean? Contemporary Chinese people's persistent pursuit of good looks is beyond imagination. Under the dominance of young people's aesthetic tendencies, the appearance economy is accompanied by a depression in aesthetic dividends.

And what corresponds to the aesthetic bonus? The brand “premium effect” created by good-looking products.

One is the efficiency of information transmission. Today’s consumers receive information at an explosive rate. Brands must first let consumers appreciate your talent (product) or be attracted by your appearance, and then consider whether to continue to understand, like, and buy from you.

Second, the product’s genes contain hints of a better life. For example, when consumers choose a product, apart from factors such as usability and functionality, what they choose is the meaning of self, a label as a person in society, and some signals in various aspects such as aesthetics and attitude.

Therefore, we will find that aesthetic thinking is reconstructing traffic growth and even the entire business logic. In particular, cross-border collaborations and innovations in various product packaging have been extremely popular in the past two years, and in essence they are all about playing the "visual aesthetics" game.

So, how should brands create a sense of design for their products?

Good design must meet 4 elements:

• Symbolic sense
• Interactive
• Design
• Differentiation

1. Sense of symbols

How to make consumers remember you and your products quickly? Create a cultural symbolic sense for the product.

Common symbols include colors, packaging, themes, etc. that represent the brand. They not only convey the brand style preference, but also awaken consumers’ sense of familiarity and intimacy, and can easily bring in traffic.

For example, the well-known Hermès orange, Tiffany blue, and Super Wenheyou are no longer just a restaurant, a "culture + catering" behemoth that brings together Changsha's popular restaurants, but can also be called a tourist attraction and a famous tourist check-in spot in Changsha.

The same is true for Cha Yan Yue Se. Now consumers' memory and positioning of Cha Yan Yue Se have far exceeded the level of selling milk tea: it is a brand, a culture, and now it has become a landmark in Changsha. When you go to Changsha, you must eat stinky tofu and crayfish, and you must also drink a cup of Orchid Latte.

What does this tell us? A brand without symbolic connotation is not qualified to have a relationship with users.

2. Interaction

Good looks are the basis, fun is the surprise, and details are necessary.

Santonban creatively designed the small can packaging, taking the mini and cute route. And there is a clever design. The small cans of different flavors of coffee are numbered differently and sorted from 1 to 6 according to the degree of roasting. The smaller the number, the more prominent the flavor and the relatively obvious fruit acidity. The larger the number, the thicker and more bitter it is.

The advantage of doing this is that it allows female users to discuss coffee just like they discuss lipstick colors. By symbolizing the professional and unfamiliar coffee content, consumers, even those who are new to coffee, can easily get started.

Although it seems unconventional, Santonban’s unique and attractive packaging design not only forms a unique brand symbol, but also encourages users to take photos, share and spread the word, which actually reduces the user’s communication cost - reducing the “cognitive cost” and enhancing the efficiency of “social communication”.

This is the contentization of product design. If we want to tell consumers how good a product is through social media marketing, we must first have a product story. Innovative product design means that the product has a story to tell, and we can find an output point when promoting it, providing consumers with social currency.

3. Design

How did good looks come about? It's by design. For a good product, we must pay attention to design and integrate design.

CHALI tea uses a fan as its brand logo, and makes tea bags into fan shapes. There is a folding fan design in the box. The addition of the Chinese folding fan pattern comes from CHALI’s slogan - "Be a tea fan." The word fan has two meanings, which means "love for tea" and also expresses the aesthetic pursuit of oriental aesthetics.

In terms of product design, CHALI Tea’s most classic flower and fruit tea series uses familiar hand-painted illustrations to depict the “flower” characteristics of flower tea. The full-page layout outlines the ripe fruits and the branches and leaves. The collision of bright, rich warm tones creates the vitality and vitality of the harvested fruits, giving people a pleasant scene experience.

It can be seen that CHALI has always taken Chinese culture as the core of its brand, that is, "CHALI Tea, Chinese Style", combining tea with the national trend culture accepted by consumers, making drinking tea a traditional yet trendy thing.

4. Differentiation

There are so many homogeneous products on the market that brands have to rely on price wars to seize the market. You will never be able to compete with others, as others will continue to lower their prices, creating a vicious cycle. However, the market is not won by lowering prices, but by relying on truly core products to win the competition.

How to be different?

Differentiation is the only principle for any enterprise to participate in market competition. A small business can be used to support a family, but if it wants to grow bigger and become a benchmark in the market, it must be sufficiently differentiated.

Mango sago, known as a "post-modern dessert", is a classic Hong Kong dessert, but it can be found in many milk tea brands, and many innovative versions have been derived: some add mango ice cream, some use fresh cream instead of coconut milk, and a lot of effort is put into the decorative plating. However, only one brand has made differentiated improvements in the dessert cup packaging, and that brand is 7fensweet.

Xie Huancheng, the founder of 7fentian, is a man with very strong insight. He found that most desserts in dessert shops are served in bowls, which cannot be eaten in the restaurant or on the go, and are not convenient enough. The cup format of milk tea shops can make up for this shortcoming, so he thought of improving the bowl desserts into cups that are easier to carry, creating a highly differentiated demand feature.

At the same time, 7fensweet's "drinkable desserts" focused on the "mango drink" sub-category and launched the super single-item cup of mango sago, which occupies a unique position in the minds of consumers and makes mango drink = 7fensweet.

By innovating new product features, consumers will naturally think of 70% sweet when talking about mango sago. This also allowed 7fentian to break out among strong tea brands such as Heytea and Nayuki’s Tea!

Through the case of 7fentian, we can summarize how to make products stand out from many competitors and substitutes?

Find the differentiation.

Distilling the brand's differentiated characteristics in the product category is to help consumers make effective choices among many competing brands and reduce decision-making costs.

Experience is the greater value of a product, and design increases the added value of the product. This is also the design concept that my former employer MINISO has always implemented. We must stick to design, and only when consumers feel that the value of the product far exceeds its price will they pay for it.

If a brand only focuses on price, it will be a dead end. Only when the product aesthetics and quality assurance are established, and then the price is discussed, can the brand be competitive.

2. Build word of mouth: good products

I have always emphasized that if you can't do a good job in supply chain, you shouldn't easily engage in physical retail. Of course, the same is true for Internet companies now. The supply chain is directly related to the quality of the product.

MINISO has very high requirements on its suppliers. In every field, it selects the world's best suppliers and does not even accept third place.

Most of these suppliers are foreign trade suppliers from the Canton Fair. Because they focus on several major customers such as Europe, the United States, and Japan, and have long implemented European, American, and Japanese standards, their manufacturing standards are often higher than those of domestic factories.

By cooperating with them, MINISO enjoys the benefits of foreign trade manufacturing level, which also makes our product quality comparable to that of international brands.

Take perfume as an example. During their research, the MINISO team discovered that the perfumes on the market today are either international brands priced between 700 and 1,000 yuan, or no brand at all, which represents a gap in the market.

At the same time, like sunglasses, perfume is also a super profitable industry, with gross profit margins of more than 50 times. Even today in China, not everyone can afford such expensive perfume, not to mention that perfume is a fast-moving consumer product and a mass consumer product that is used very frequently.

After discovering this pain point, MINISO sought cooperation with Givaudan, a world-class spice supply chain.

Givaudan has a history of more than 200 years. It supplies products for major brands such as Dior and Chanel, and has 11 factories around the world. MINISO has cooperated with them to develop a "Flower Youth Series" perfume and defined it as the first perfume in consumers' lives.

Just like consumers’ first car or first house, MINISO’s perfume is their entry-level product. It continues the style of high quality and low price, allowing them to easily own it, selling at prices of only 15 yuan, 29 yuan, or 49 yuan.

The concept of buying your first perfume in life, coupled with its great value for money, made it a hit product as soon as it was launched.

My favorite product of Nayuki’s Tea is the “Baqi Orange”—two Sunkist oranges, one sliced ​​and one juiced, paired with two types of lemons. The base of the tea is made from jasmine tea from two different origins, plus fresh jasmine flowers, giving it a very rich taste.

Behind this hit product is the aspiration of Nayuki's founder: "A cup of good tea, a soft European bread, and a special encounter with beauty at Nayuki."

At Nayuki, in addition to being the founder, Peng Xin defines herself as the chief product development officer and chief product manager. Peng Xin is deeply involved in product research and development. In order to develop new products, she tried them from morning to early morning, drank more than 40 cups of products, and persisted even after vomiting, to find that "just right" feeling.

She participates in the research and development, iteration and naming of almost every product. She also reads every consumer's feedback about the products on Weibo, and personally follows up on the space design of every store.

In contrast, when I was doing consulting for companies, I experienced a lot of things like this. Most of the top leaders of companies would know nothing about the products if you asked them about them, and would have to ask their subordinates. They will say, I don’t care about the product, I only care about the overall direction.

However, once the direction of the enterprise is determined, does it need to be managed every day? The boss is the one who holds the steering wheel. In addition to strategic layout, product research and development is also the most core part (especially for product-oriented retail companies).

The direction and strategy of a company have nothing to do with consumers. They are more concerned about whether the company can provide them with the products they need.

Whether the company's top leader puts enough effort into the product determines whether the product is competitive, and whether the product is competitive determines whether the company is competitive.

You can’t learn to swim unless you jump into the water. When it comes to product creation, don’t be the one “standing on the shore”. The top leader must devote himself/herself to product research and development, because the final decision on whether the product goes to market is made by the top leader of the company.

In the process of creating explosive products, many companies easily fall into a misunderstanding. In order to satisfy users, they spend a lot of time and effort to develop a large number of products, but in the end they find that no product is perfect, and sometimes it backfires and causes more users to be lost.

In the face of this phenomenon, I often suggest that brand founders ask themselves three questions before creating a hit product:

• Why should consumers buy products from you?
• Are the popular products you customized what consumers want?
• Is this what 60% of the target user group want?

Cutting, giving up and leaving are the key concepts of home storage. In fact, they are also the core focus of the product. So my philosophy is that it is better to make one product with extremely high cost-effectiveness than to make 1,000 pretty good products.

Because when focusing on making an ultimate product, a brand will spend a lot of energy, time and cost. In this process, it has helped users to eliminate products countless times, solved users' difficulty in making choices, saved users' time costs, and at the same time improved store efficiency.

Therefore, while focusing on making products, brands are also required to learn to find users’ “pain points”, meet “urgent needs”, and pay attention to high-frequency consumption. Product innovation that cannot match consumer needs is meaningless.

For example, the white T-shirt, which has an almost 100% hit rate, innovates brand products in a minimalist style to solve the pain points of users in dressing, while meeting the attributes of high quality and low price. It focuses on the four dimensions of "high appearance", "high quality", "high technology" and "high social attributes", and targets the pain points of simplicity, comfort, high cost performance that male users are most concerned about. With a white T-shirt, it has become the number one brand of men's clothing on Douyin and Tencent.

Today's market has no shortage of good products, but what it lacks is competitive products. Enterprises must transform their innovative advantages into core product advantages in order to gain sustainable competitive advantages.

3. Focus on interaction: good experience

I have always firmly believed that in the future, consumers' consumption of intangible products (experiences) will far exceed their consumption of tangible products.

If online shopping platforms such as Tmall and Taobao solve the richness of tangible product consumption, then offline new retail will solve the experience of the consumption process.

MINISO has a standardized "store setting benchmark" and a uniform decoration style for all its stores, all of which are designed to give customers a perfect immersive experience:

One is "shop". The store’s decoration design and atmosphere should be appealing to consumers and make them feel convenient, comfortable and happy during the entire process of visual browsing and purchasing goods.

The other is "Shang". The most important thing for a store is to sell products, so how to display products effectively is something we have been thinking about seriously.

Based on "store" and "business", MINISO has established a series of standardized systems to guide the unified decoration and display style of stores around the world.

1. Eight principles of display

Based on its own characteristics of "mainly small products and large customer flow", MINISO has tailored a series of display principles, collectively known as the "Eight Principles".

• Obvious: All product packaging must face outwards so that it is clearly visible to customers.
• Rich and full: first, it refers to the rich and varied categories of merchandise; second, it refers to the neat and full display of merchandise.
• Easy to pick up: Maintain a certain space between products and between products and shelves to make it convenient for customers to pick up products.
• Classification display: Classify and combine goods according to category, performance, shape, color, price and other standards.
• First in, first out: Products with shelf life requirements are displayed from the inside to the outside according to the production date.
• Related display: Classify and combine goods according to related factors such as season, purpose, and consumer demand.
• Vertical display: Products with multiple brands are displayed vertically from top to bottom to enhance the sense of hierarchy and clarity.
• Prime position display: High-profit merchandise, seasonal merchandise, and special promotion merchandise are displayed in the most prominent locations.

2. Restrain marketing

The business environment we live in today is full of ideas about making quick money, and not many people are willing to calm down and provide good service from the user's perspective.

A common phenomenon is that when most brands hold store promotions, they want to spread promotional materials in every corner of the store. But MINISO is different. The marketing promotional materials we use in our stores, from poster design to audio and short videos, are almost to the point of strict restraint.

All poster materials, audio and video materials delivered to stores by the group must be ordered from the brand center, or approved by the brand center before they can be uniformly delivered to stores. In addition, the materials and content delivered each time must follow the prescribed cycle and must be replaced regularly.

Store POP focuses on product display, store announcements and videos also serve the store, and promotional materials for marketing activities are only displayed on the LCD screen at the checkout counter.

The former is to ensure the consistent output of MINISO's brand image; the latter is to allow consumers to simply enjoy the fun of shopping in the store and avoid being disturbed by advertisements.

3. Good service, no shopping pressure

In the catering industry, Haidilao's service is a model. In the retail industry, MINISO’s service was once considered a wonder in the industry.

The strangeness is mainly reflected in the fact that MINISO first provides extremely cost-effective products, and then provides minimalist "light service". Light is a very subtle emotional connection, that is, the clerk will only appear when the customer needs it.

Therefore, MINISO has three "no" indicators: no service, no sales promotion, and no shopping pressure.

There is no sales promotion. The store only has shopping guides for cosmetics. The most important core tasks of the store clerks are just four:

• Display: Arrange the goods neatly as required
• Hygiene: Keep the store clean
• Anti-theft: Ensure the safety of goods
• Cashier: Store cashier work

The purpose of doing this is to provide users with a better experience environment. Only when the user experience is good can we impress the users themselves, and only when you are sincere can you move people's hearts.

This "three no" indicator has always guided the service principles of famous creative products: the best service is never to follow customers one-on-one, causing invisible pressure on customers, but "it's best if no one shows up when I don't need you, and you happen to be in front of me when I need you."

As an indicator to measure customer satisfaction, MINISO also invented a term: "Customer Expression Index Theory".

That is, the facial expression of a customer from the time he pays the bill to the time he walks out of the store. If he looks happy while rummaging through the items in his shopping bag, it means he is very happy with his purchase and has a good user experience. If he has no expression or looks embarrassed, it means he has doubts about this shopping experience.

Based on this "Customer Expression Index Theory", we will summarize and optimize our service experience and make iterations again and again.

The above is just some of the shared content.

Author: Sister Mulan

Source: Mulanjie (ID: mulanjie-)