The secret to sustained brand growth and three major marketing strategies!

Changes in consumer main forces and alterations in consumer demand have subtly changed the brand's marketing methods.

With user touchpoints being everywhere and a variety of communication methods, how brands can convey their advertising information to users and gradually cultivate their consumption habits has become a marketing issue for brands.

After carefully studying the cases of going viral in recent years, we found that the reason why these brands maintain extremely high popularity and competitiveness in the fierce competition is related to the brand’s marketing strategy. This may be the marketing secret to ensure the orderly growth of the brand.

1. Carry out marketing innovation to ensure the vitality and spread of content

Innovative marketing content is more vital and has greater dissemination power. In order to make the content more influential, brands have begun to innovate in product packaging, advertising copy, communication methods, etc., in order to maintain users' freshness about the brand and its content.

1. Stalk culture increases the interactivity and watchability of content

When talking about freshness, we cannot avoid the culture of memes. The memes that are popular among young users come from popular discussions among the public and are more fresh and discussed. It is an important way for brands to innovate their marketing if they know how to use memes from popular culture to stimulate the public's interest in brand marketing content and attract more users to participate in discussions on brand marketing.

For example, during the popular broadcast of "Creation Camp 2021", Liu Xuxu was forced to work and was called the most miserable worker. He became popular on the Internet because of his behavior of wanting to go off work every day and wanting to be eliminated. Therefore, Luckin Coffee seized on the joke that Lee Luxiu was forced to open for business and launched "Luckin YYDS". In terms of content creation, the decadence of being forced to work is continued, and the happiness of getting off work is expressed vividly. The last sentence of the advertisement, "Can I get off work now?", is the highlight of the entire advertisement.

The clever integration of popular online memes into the content increased the interactivity, watchability and novelty of the content, and also made Luckin Coffee's advertisement gain unexpected benefits. The number of views on Bilibili alone exceeded 2 million, with more than 180,000 likes, and more than 40,000 reposts and collections. This case of integrating memes has also been called the most successful example of "forced business."

In addition to incorporating popular memes into content marketing to give people a refreshing feeling, the use of homophonic puns to increase cultural connotations increases the watchability and novelty of the content. For example, during the Dragon Boat Festival, Wanglaoji and Wufangzhai, two century-old brands, joined forces to launch the "Ji Qi Chu Zong" gift box, which combines the traditional festival with Wanglaoji's auspicious culture and Wufangzhai's main product features, allowing the pun culture to stimulate the brand's energy and increase users' love and recognition of the brand.

2. Break through the circle with creativity and make marketing content personalized

With the increase in popular marketing cases, more and more brands want to implant the brand image or culture into the minds of users to pave the way for sales conversion. Those topical contents naturally become the point of brand marketing innovation.

As circle cultures represented by the two-dimensional world, Chinese culture, and figures come into the public eye, in order to make marketing more innovative, many brands have begun to innovate in line with segmented circle content to reach the brand's target audience in order to seize the blue ocean of the vertical user market.

For example, national style culture integrates Chinese cultural elements with people’s lifestyles, popular artistic expressions in the market, etc., allowing the content to highlight a different temperament. National style culture is also highly compatible and has successfully captured the minds of users.

Huaxizi and Perfect Diary in the beauty field, Panzi Women's Square and Huili in the clothing field, the film and television IPs "Nezha" and "Mulan", and "A Chinese Odyssey" and "Tian Ya Ming Yue Dao" in the game field, have allowed Chinese culture to successfully penetrate into multiple circles such as beauty, clothing, film and television, and games, demonstrating the extensibility of the culture itself, users' attention to circle culture, and the charm of breaking circle marketing itself.

At the same time, the innovative methods of content marketing itself have become diverse, showing the fresh experience that the innovative brand marketing content brings to users in terms of packaging, advertising content, and integration forms, successfully bringing users into the marketing set by the brand and achieving effective reach.

2. Cater to the needs of the times and innovate marketing concepts

Today, with a wide variety of marketing forms and contents, some new marketing concepts have also emerged, such as national trends and circle culture. Today, national trends have evolved into an effective marketing method for brands to penetrate young user groups.

It can be said that the emergence of the concept of national tide has provided an opportunity for brands such as Li Ning, Huili, and Peacebird to successfully counterattack. These brands that use national tide as a marketing gimmick have made their brands more stylish and cool in image, and have become a way for young people to express their individuality. Celebrities have also competed to promote products for brands that leverage the national tide, helping the brands achieve leapfrog development.

Some brands have reaped the benefits of domestic marketing, and naturally more brands will follow suit. If domestic brands want to win the local market, they need to establish closer ties with young people. The concept of national trend marketing is currently popular. While brands are borrowing the concept of national trend marketing, they can also create new marketing concepts to help brands achieve high exposure.

In addition to the national trend, its circle marketing concept is also born in line with the trend of the times. The two-dimensional culture represented by Bilibili and the circle of young users who show off their lifestyles on Xiaohongshu, etc., these people with obvious characteristics are divided to achieve innovation in marketing concepts. The development of the concept of national trend marketing is actually an affirmation of people's national cultural values ​​and an adherence to Chinese traditional culture. It proves from another aspect that people's cognition and identification of their own culture in the ideological field.

3. Special price economic model: C2M as the core to cover more audiences

For a long time, some platforms have been promoting the gimmick of high quality, low price and no middlemen. However, after user consumption becomes increasingly clear, consumers are becoming more and more sensitive to product prices. As a result, the special price economy model with C2M as the core (users directly reaching manufacturers) has become a new operating model for many platforms and brands. For example, Pinduoduo seized the initiative in the special price economy model. E-commerce retail giants have joined the special price economy field, including Taobao's Taote, JD.com's Jingxi, and Meituan's launch of Meituan Youxuan.

In addition to the platform operations adopting the special price economy model, many brands have also chosen the special price economy model to attract audiences with customized services, and the inexpensive and high-quality C2M has invisibly "encouraged" users to pay for the brand's operating model. Coupled with the huge user base that is sensitive to price, and with the audience's demand and attention, the special price economic model created by brands and platforms has naturally become an important strategy for brands to influence more audiences and open up the market.

The existence of price-sensitive people provides a fertile ground for the C2M-centered business model, and also provides an opportunity for brands to engage in customized marketing. In the future, the economic special price model will still have its own market.

Final Thoughts

If we observe the marketing market carefully, we can easily find that different brands are seeking different ways of growth. Some are pursuing steady growth based on marketing innovation, while some brands still insist on the "traffic" approach to quickly attract users' attention. Regardless of the growth method, brands want to maintain consumers' freshness of the brand and ensure the brand's attractiveness in their own way.

Whether it is the long-term attraction of marketing content, the innovation of marketing concepts to open up new cognition of users, or the use of special price economic models to promote transactions, they all invisibly affect the cohesion and popularity of the brand, and play an unexpected effect in this era, becoming an important tool for brands to attract users, and even making consumers trust and rely on the brand. Ms. Hua believes that in the next few years, more and more new marketing methods will be born and rise, and brand marketing strategies will become more interesting.

Author: Marketing Frontline

Source: Marketing Frontline