Top 5 marketing trends in the fourth quarter of 2021!

Where do new brands attract new users? What actions did they take to attract new users? What content presentation methods and marketing means are they using to gather or break through their own circle of people?

We have compiled the marketing trends that have attracted the most attention from brands recently, as well as those that deserve long-term attention from brands and service providers, hoping to provide brands with more brand marketing ideas.

The following is the main text, enjoy~

01Podcast marketing: new content occupies new channels and spreads brand concepts

More and more new consumer brands are beginning to test the waters of podcast marketing.

The DigipontClub Institute of Knife Skills (ID: DigipontClub) noticed that in the first half of 2021 alone, many cutting-edge brands have launched their content on the podcast channel, including leading brands in various fields, such as Sandonban, Yongpu, NEIWAI, Ramen Says, etc. In addition to these consumer brands, luxury car brands such as Lexus, e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, content brands such as New World, and international environmental organizations such as Greenpeace are also trying to launch podcasts.

Overseas, brands have long regarded podcasts as a fixed option for advertising. Chanel, Gucci, Guerlain, Hugo Boss and others all have brand podcasts to share the inspiration behind product launches; in China, the podcast format did not begin to explode until 2020. In the second half of 2020, coupled with the wave of new consumption, domestic brands began to intensively cooperate on podcasts.

DigipontClub (ID: DigipontClub) observed that the reason why emerging brands choose podcast as a channel for marketing is mainly due to its "four highs" advantages, namely "high-quality content, high emotional resonance, high user value, and high cost-effectiveness."

"High-quality content" is guaranteed by professional hosts in various fields, and "high-resonance emotions" benefit from UGC hosts developed from podcast enthusiasts. These two different types of content attract "high-value listeners" who are willing to "pay for knowledge" and "pay for emotions." “High cost-effectiveness” is because the cost of podcasts is lower than other methods. According to what the vice president of Xin Shi Xiang mentioned in the podcast "Jin Jin Le Dao", the average price of WeChat reading is 1.5 yuan/time, the average price of Bilibili viewing is 0.6-1 yuan/time, and the average price of podcast listening is only 0.05-0.1 yuan/time.

After investigating and interviewing some players in podcast marketing, we summarized the four current directions for selecting podcast marketing targets: using professional hosts for endorsements, using hosts with similar tones to convey brand temperament, using emotional hosts to mobilize users, and using the voices of founders/investors to build personal IP.

Compared to selling products that emphasize conversion rates, the role of podcasts for brands is more about impressing users and establishing longer-term connections through long-term immersion, thereby subtly shaping the brand image.

02 Corporate Social Responsibility Marketing: A Key Attribute That Drives Brand Growth

Corporate social responsibility has become a key attribute driving the growth of many successful brands in today's market. It includes environmental responsibility, philanthropic responsibility, moral responsibility and economic responsibility.

But many people have a misunderstanding about corporate social responsibility, thinking that it is something that only large companies can afford to consider, and therefore social responsibility marketing is also exclusive to big players. In fact, small companies bear higher social responsibility in marketing.

For new consumer brands, especially DTC brands, incorporating social responsibility into their brand culture is the best way to highlight their brand characteristics. For example, EVERLANE is committed to promoting supply chain transparency and seeking benefits for third world workers. As a pioneer in pure beauty, Drunk Elephant has implanted concepts such as safety, non-toxicity, and transparent ingredients into consumers' minds and changed its product packaging to recyclable and sustainable packaging.

If corporate social responsibility is the cornerstone of brand culture and values, then when a disaster occurs, a company's rapid response is the best opportunity to establish its brand image and materialize its corporate social responsibility. For example, during the Henan flood, fast food brands such as Mo Xiaoxian and Tang Daren also responded quickly and became important supplies to support the disaster-stricken areas. According to Baidu Index, the search index has increased significantly after Tang Daren announced his donation of supplies to support the disaster-stricken areas in Henan.

When consumers use higher premiums and more money to vote for the values ​​​​represented by a brand, what they expect is not just that the company provides better products and more thoughtful services, but they want the brand to express their emotions and opinions to society on their behalf. Therefore, when a brand engages in social responsibility marketing, “unity of knowledge and action” is the foundation. It includes but is not limited to: the company's products and behaviors are consistent with the brand concept, the donations proposed by the company are completed 1:1, and the brand concept is continuously improved according to social and cultural trends.

03Sex Marketing: Grasping the Scale of “Flirtatious but Not Obscene”

"Sex and sexual behavior are used to sell everything, but it is banned from selling sex products for women and non-binary people," Rodriguez, CEO of Unbound, a US sex technology company, told Business Insider.

China, as the largest producer of sex toys and also the largest market for sex toys in the future, has yet to produce well-known brands like Durex and Okamoto. How should domestic sex toy brands eliminate the outside world's misunderstandings and prejudices about their products and even the industry, take advantage of early market dividends, enter the market in a hurry, and occupy the brand mind through reasonable and legal marketing methods?

The DigipontClub (ID: DigipontClub) analyzes the marketing methods of sex toys from the perspectives of overseas and domestic markets. A careful observation of the marketing trends of foreign sex toy brands shows that, on the one hand, with the support and endorsement of celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Pepper Potts in "Iron Man", Dakota Johnson, who plays the female lead in "Fifty Shades of Grey", and supermodel Cara Delevingne, sex toys are labeled as "trendy", "avant-garde", and "brave", using the celebrity effect to destigmatize them. On the other hand, foreign brands are equating "sex" with beauty and health, making customers feel that they can think about their sexual behavior like other health or fitness issues.

Domestic brands use sex education as an entry point to establish a professional brand image. The official account of the original female sex toy brand Daren Tang has released a large amount of sex science content. The brand also plans to launch related courses. NetEase Chunfeng, a sex toy brand under NetEase Yanxuan, not only set up a sex knowledge science column #风姑娘的星期三科普# on its official blog, it also cooperated with NetEase Audio Library to produce a podcast "Pleasing Yourself is More Than Just for One Night" to encourage girls to face their needs bravely. Two other common strategies are to use KOL as a communication outlet to attract the attention of vertical groups, to create a buzz in small circles, and to increase the cultural attributes of the brand through collaboration with artists and art IP collaborations.

The difficulty of erotic marketing has never been in acquiring traffic, but in grasping the right measure. How to grasp the scale of "romantic but not obscene", how to de-sexualize and vulgarize, and how to make brands and products accepted by the general public in an open and aboveboard manner are the directions for future exploration.

04Brand co-branding: mature brands are big and refined, emerging brands are small and beautiful

Brand collaboration has become a trend and is even becoming increasingly prevalent. As brand collaborations become more common, the room for imagination in terms of content is getting smaller and smaller, gradually degenerating into a pursuit of a wider range and greater quantity. How to solve consumers’ aesthetic fatigue? How should brand collaboration update itself? The Digipont Club (ID: DigipontClub) found that new and old domestic brands have different ideas about brand collaborations, and have also developed unique ways of playing.

As a listed company, Tsingtao Beer is more cautious in brand co-branding. Almost all of its co-brandings have certain strategic purposes: the cooperation between Tsingtao Beer and New York Fashion Week is to promote the national trend, and the cooperation between Tsingtao Beer and the Beijing Winter Olympics is to promote national sentiment with the help of the word "good". Its "Night Owl" series of co-branding originated from the co-branding with the "Midnight Diner" movie IP in 2017. By exploring the value of late-night scenes for beer, it outputs the "night owl" culture in all directions and also takes advantage of the opportunity to complete a refresh of brand image recognition.

Yongpu, a boutique coffee brand that opened up the market through collaborations, has already done more than 400 collaborations. In the minds of consumers, “everything can be kept pure”. But Yongpu’s attitude towards collaborations is not static. According to CEO Tiepi, Yongpu has its own unique rhythm of collaborations. He divided Yongpu's joint plan into three stages:

Phase 1: Let the brand survive first. At the end of 2014, Yongpu had only 300,000 yuan in start-up capital when it was founded, so it could only choose low-cost methods for publicity and promotion. At that time, it was very rare for consumer products to be jointly branded, so Yongpu carried out very extensive joint brands from 2015 to 2018, and the volume of joint products accounted for 60% of the brand's overall volume.

Phase 2: Rebuilding the brand image. In 2019, Yongpu created the brand super symbol "Shi Duanzheng", and redesigned the brand packaging on this basis, reducing the co-branding ratio to less than 10%. At this stage, Yongpu’s collaboration is more for innovation. For example, it collaborated with the yogurt brand "Jane Eyre" to create a new way of drinking coffee or eating yogurt; the second is to collaborate with the low-alcohol wine brand "Berry Sweetheart" to create a new low-alcohol finished wine with real coffee liquid added.

Phase 3: Refresh the definition of “co-branding”. In Yongpu’s view, co-branding is not just about products and products, but can also be done with platforms or even virtual non-entities.

Whether it is the caution of old brands or the daily and lightness of new brands, although there are no barriers to co-branding, no method can be directly copied.

05Celebrity Marketing: Matching the three-layer traffic structure to achieve geometric growth

Dao Fa Research Institute’s good friend Zan Yi CEO Wu Dongwei & FANDOM shared with us the latest methodological summary of celebrity marketing: celebrity marketing “readiness”, the driving force of celebrity traffic structure, and the geometric growth theory of product × effect × sales.

“Readiness” is an indicator used to measure brand owners’ level of preparedness. The "readiness" of celebrity marketing is more reflected in the brand's brand power, channel power, product power and the team's marketing capabilities.

First of all, the brand’s “readiness” is reflected in brand power, including brand awareness, industry status, brand reputation, etc. If the brand power is insufficient, two problems will arise: first, the brand cannot invite the ideal star; second, even if the brand can invite the star, consumers feel that the two are not a match, which affects their willingness to buy.

Secondly, the brand’s “readiness” is reflected in channel power as a wider range of channels that allow consumers to easily purchase products. Thirdly, the brand’s “readiness” is reflected in the product’s differentiated functions and good consumer reputation, which in turn is manifested in daily recommendations on social media and positive reviews from users on e-commerce channels. Finally, a brand’s “readiness” is also reflected in the star marketing experience and capabilities of its team.

Once the brand is ready, you can start celebrity marketing. When choosing a star, you need to clarify the following two issues: understand the star's traffic ceiling and traffic composition, and determine whether the brand's core advantages and resources match the selected star's traffic.

The traffic that celebrities bring to brands is divided into three layers: the first layer is the celebrity’s private traffic, that is, the fans that celebrities have accumulated on social media; the second layer is the topic traffic that celebrities have on social media, that is, the attention that celebrities gain through hot searches, news, and KOL secondary creations; the third layer is the celebrity’s public awareness traffic, which is mainly ordinary passers-by consumers.

Different types of stars have different traffic structures and corresponding playing styles. Generally speaking, stars with the first level of traffic are usually called traffic stars, and he/she may also have the second level of social media topic traffic for a period of time; stars with the second level of traffic are more diverse, and are usually topical guests, contestants and characters in popular variety shows and TV dramas. This type of star has a timeliness of one to three months; stars with the third level of traffic are mostly actors and singers with high national popularity and high public visibility.

When a brand chooses a celebrity, it also chooses the traffic structure behind him/her. Brands should determine the star’s traffic ceiling and minimum in advance - that is, the maximum and minimum number of people and purchasing power that the star can mobilize given a given budget. Therefore, brands need to plan the budget for the celebrity signing stage and the media placement stage in detail, and match celebrities based on their own marketing resources and advantages, rather than selecting celebrities and then matching their own resources.

After a brand completes a contract with a celebrity, another task that cannot be ignored is to set up a system to measure the effectiveness of celebrity marketing. Simply put, the returns of celebrity marketing can be divided into three periods: short, medium and long. The short-term return is the traffic in the private domain, the medium-term goal is the social media topic traffic, and the long-term goal is the improvement of brand awareness and the accumulation of traffic. Only by taking a three-pronged approach of product, effectiveness and sales can we calculate the return on investment of most brands’ celebrity marketing.

There are three different marketing models for the three-level traffic system of celebrities: one is "brand-traffic star-fan operation-live broadcast/e-commerce acceptance"; the second is "brand-topic star-personality marketing-information flow delivery/purchase"; the third is "brand-national star-brand marketing-omni-channel acceptance"; the third model is "brand-national star-brand marketing-omni-channel acceptance".

Author: Knife Research Institute

Source: Knife Skills Research Institute