10 new marketing methodologies for brands!

New brands are ushering in a new round of growth opportunities.

I have attended many industry summits recently. During my exchanges with brand founders, investors, and traders, I discovered that compared to the previous two years when new brands had to cross the river by feeling the stones, the new marketing environment is now growing wildly. A number of new marketing methodologies have emerged this year, which are effectively empowering new brands.

On the one hand, some new brands have summed up a lot of practical experience based on their development history in recent years. For example, my good friend Junping told me that although he took many wrong paths, he finally figured out that a brand is about "setting up camps and fighting stupid battles."

On the other hand, institutions and platforms have also accumulated a batch of mature consumer data and started to empower brands from different dimensions. For example, today I attended Alibaba's m awards annual ceremony, which focused on the Double Eleven actual combat PK and selected 35 awards in 13 major tracks from nearly 200 participating brands.

This is also the first award I have seen in China that directly targets actual marketing practices. At the award ceremony, I also found something interesting: in addition to paying attention to the growth of brand data and traffic, Alimama also launched the M-ARK Marketing Power Ark Evaluation System for the first time, which can combine Alibaba's marketing data and consumer insight data to provide brand people with a full-link brand retrieval system.

To put it simply, the M Awards, which took five months to select, is not only Alibaba’s first brand digital marketing award, but also summarizes a series of practical marketing methodologies to empower new brands based on Alibaba platform data. It is understood that its main application scenarios not only cover the marketing power evaluation of a single marketing campaign, but will also serve as the main upgrade of the second m awards, providing scoring guidance for the quantifiable performance of participating brands in different tracks.

So what new value, significance and reference will this new platform action bring to new brands and new marketing?

After carefully studying the 35 award-winning cases in this red book, I discovered 10 new marketing methodologies. Next, I will divide them into 10 tracks and combine them with corresponding cases to share my observations with you.

01 Insights into new groups: Pursuing trends and fashion is their outlet for self-expression and emotional release

First, let’s talk about our findings from the case of KFC, the winner of the M Awards’ annual marketing award.

As a household name in catering, KFC has a very good brand foundation. It has been testing the waters of e-commerce since 2016, with its GMV doubling every year. In 2019, it also became the first brand on the Alibaba platform to exceed 100 million in sales. But on the other hand, in addition to rapid growth, how to recruit new customers efficiently and how to innovate models have become two major challenges facing KFC.

To this end, the brand has launched a series of actions to target new consumer groups, mainly based on the three major marketing keywords of fashion crossover, breaking the circle to attract new customers, and full-area promotion. For example, through the collaboration with KARL LAGERFELD, it has accurately reached young people who like fashion and advocate classics; launched the "Colorful Selection" program, which offers more fried chicken coupons for more purchases, thus lowering the threshold for user selection; and leveraged the traffic of popular IPs such as "The King of Karaoke" and Viya to attract new customers.

Ultimately, these actions brought significant growth to the brand, with GMV reaching a new high of 47.41 million, a year-on-year increase of 54%, becoming the top 1 in the food category and the top 1 in the local life industry. New visitors accounted for 88%, and KFC sold a total of 3.66 million pieces of fried chicken in 2020 Tmall Super Products.

In its case, I saw that in addition to studying the consumption preferences of new groups, what is more important is for brands to capture the preferences expressed by users. Accurately reaching target consumers is actually about converting the brand into a user language.

In the award-winning case of KFC, the brand's insight into the demands of its core group is that the pursuit of trends and fashion is an outlet for their self-expression and emotional release. Therefore, by teaming up with KARL LAGERFELD, the theme of "the more classic, the more fashionable" was adopted to accurately reach the target TA.

This case also gives us another revelation. On the marketing side, through the two-pronged approach of "global grass-planting + live broadcast matrix", the joint investment inside and outside the site, and the linkage of brand-effect advertising combinations, it can effectively help brands break the circle in Taobao, reach more new customers, and achieve product and sales synergy.

02 New explosive product strategy: cross-category and cross-brand breakthrough

The winner of the annual dark horse award is Pop Mart, but what is surprising is that this winning case also revealed some hidden concerns about Pop Mart’s brand growth.

Data shows that in the first half of 2020, POP MART experienced negative GMV growth among its core strategic population, and there is an urgent need to deepen penetration among the core strategic population, the overall relationship between consumers and brands, and increase the size and activity of its membership.

To this end, Pop Mart mainly adopted two major strategies to achieve the brand's counter-cyclical growth and positive growth cycle, allowing the brand to successfully create explosive products and achieve the brand's own highest sales in the past six months.

First of all, the brand customizes cutting-edge products for four target user groups: Gen Z, sophisticated mothers, new white-collar workers, and senior white-collar workers. Taking the Dimoo series as an example, trendy shoe lovers, musicians, designers, game players and other groups are included in the target marketing circle and optimized during the delivery process. In the end, the penetration rates of the four major strategic groups all increased significantly, with the overall penetration rate increasing from 15.01% to 31.66%, among which the Gen Z penetration rate increased from 14.9% to 33.4%, achieving a significant leap.

Secondly, leverage Tmall’s marketing IP to create a hotspot for the brand itself. For example, in September when there is no traditional gift-giving season, POP MART and Tmall Super Brand Day jointly created a large-scale event called "Born to be Fun and Online". Through TVC, challenges, offline activities, interactive games, and continuous creation of benefits and topics, an event that embodied the brand spirit was created on the occasion of POP MART's tenth anniversary.

It is worth mentioning that these two strategies of Pop Mart have also laid the foundation for some effective marketing growth methods for other new brands. For example, the double-coupon subscription method of "1 yuan = 40 yuan coupon" can be used to lock in sales and users in advance; small games enhance consumers' in-store interactivity and activity through online and offline connections, and accumulate into some gameplay worthy of reference.

03 Opportunities for acquiring new customers: The key to expanding the traffic pool is not to be limited by user labels

In the new customer marketing track, ALIENWARE, Samsung and WHOO won the gold, silver and bronze awards respectively. Overall, the winning cases of these three brands demonstrated the key points of new customer acquisition from different angles.

Through the analysis of Alibaba platform data, ALIENWARE directly focused on four high-end group portraits: "Exquisite and wealthy women", "Fashion designers", "95 digital control", and "Fashion gamers" for product research and development, breaking the brand's original perception of "gaming laptop" and integrating video editing, graphic design, music art and other fields.

At the same time, it broke through product boundaries and joined hands with Modern Sky's label Sound Blance to create an immersive cloud concert, linking the site inside and outside. This will help break the circle and communicate with high-end and female people across the entire network.

In the Samsung case, the company used store broadcasts and KOL joint live broadcasts to attract new customers in a multi-dimensional and all-round manner. At the same time, it used joint marketing to solve the problem of the group's multiple products, such as the Black Box and Diamond Exhibition, and promoted them in different dimensions through different channels.

WHOO mainly uses live streaming, with over 100 "four super head live streaming + small and medium-sized expert live streaming" to help brands achieve a double boost in sales and traffic, and uses product stratification and rights stratification to reach consumers, helping brands to achieve efficient conversion.

From the cases of these three winning brands, in addition to keywords such as high-value consumers, stratified and precise new customer acquisition, and live streaming linkage to break the circle and attract new customers, the more critical action of these brands is to not be limited by user labels and to expand the user traffic pool.

04 New product marketing strategy: from insight into consumer trends to the explosion of new products

In the new product marketing track, Oreo, Pop Mart, and Levi's respectively achieved the explosion of new products by creating sub-hit products, breaking the IP circle, and cross-border collaboration, and won the m awards.

During the epidemic, the biscuit category as a whole has declined. In this situation, Oreo's goal is to break through with new products, break through the interactive limitations of the category, and break the circle. Therefore, on Tmall Super Brand Day, they reproduced the hit product of four years ago, the "eat and listen to music" retro biscuit music box, and joined hands with Tmall and musician Jay Chou to launch a marketing campaign of "staying playful and playing to the fullest". It was eventually sold out in 1 second on Super Brand Day, and the price on Xianyu doubled.

For Pop Mart, as the trendy toy brand continues to expand its circle, consumers' favorite IPs and styles have become more differentiated. The brand needs to increase the success rate of new product launches. Therefore, based on the big data of the Alibaba system and driven by data, the new product "Molly's Day" found a complete set of operational ideas. Eventually, the brand became the No. 1 in Molly's history in terms of sales and the first series to exceed 100 million.

Levi's, through its new co-branded products with Nintendo's Mario game, quickly gathered the brand's high-potential audience, celebrity audience, and cross-dimensional audience to drive traffic for its new products. At the same time, the attempt to break the circle has also accumulated experience for Levi's to enter the two-dimensional field, and it will continue to cooperate with IPs such as Hello Kitty and Snoopy.

From insights into consumer trends to the explosion of new products, these three cases reflect the growth methodology.

05 Cross-border marketing: Taking IP cross-border as a foothold, constantly breaking through the boundaries of traditional marketing

In the cross-border marketing track, the winning brands are KFC, Joyoung, and Dove, and the marketing keywords mainly focus on youth, global promotion, and joint IP.

For example, Joyoung has teamed up with classic animation IPs, such as Line Friends, Hello Kitty, and Pokémon... to break the dilemma of homogeneity of small household appliances. In addition, in the live broadcast track, Joyoung created a virtual anchor "Yangzai" to attract people born in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, through celebrity live broadcasts, expert live broadcasts, and store live broadcasts, Joyoung established a well-defined live broadcast matrix. Ultimately, during the Double Eleven period in 2020, Joyoung's Super Live Broadcast Day guided payments of over 10 million yuan through store live broadcasts and expert live broadcasts.

Joyoung broke the "dimensional wall" of the original brand and deeply integrated with the two-dimensional IP to achieve a breakthrough in the brand. It not only continued to innovate in product categories and technologies, but also combined short videos + live broadcasts to continuously break through the boundaries of traditional marketing.

It is also worth mentioning that Joyoung’s IP cross-border collaboration is not just a superficial attempt, but extends to all product categories, constantly strengthening the brand’s new image. From new categories such as sandwich makers, electric hot pots, milk pots, and health pots, to segmented consumer scenarios such as portable kettles and kitchen knives, with the upgrading of products, Joyoung's IP products have also extended from the low price band to the high price band.

In general, through the case of Joyoung, we can see that it is an effective trend in brand cross-border marketing to access big data, determine the direction of IP and categories, screen out trend categories and high-potential categories, and establish a population value assessment matrix during the IP launch phase to determine the core and opportunity operation populations, and depict population portraits and product preferences.

06 Content Marketing Strategy: Transforming Brand into a Culture

The winning brands in the content marketing track are 3CE, Oreo, and Huggies. In these winning cases, rather than using content to plant seeds, it is more like using content to deepen consumers' understanding of brand culture.

Take 3CE as an example. As a new cosmetics brand, 3CE has firmly grasped the content preferences of young people, interpreted the brand into "trendy culture", and is well aware of the driving force of grass-roots promotion for the rise of brands. Through the promotion of trendy people, 3CE has quickly penetrated into young people and become the representative of the new generation of cosmetics trendsetters.

More importantly, 3CE has joined hands with Alimama to gain data insights into more detailed and potential groups of people, match them with the best products, and maximize the matching of people and products. At the same time, 3CE links off-site promotions and on-site advertising in terms of data and links, and uses performance materials to test and optimize creative ideas in a timely manner. In addition, through Alimama's AIPL population model and high-quality advertising resources, 3CE can effectively recruit new members in a short period of time, reserving strength for the brand's future development.

07 Member Marketing: Refined and Tiered Operations

In the membership marketing track, BESTORE won gold, silver and bronze awards through its omni-channel membership activation on Double 11, Bear Electric Appliances relied on its full-link membership operation practice, and Chando won gold, silver and bronze awards through its private domain renewal and population breakthrough.

Among the award-winning cases of Bestore, in addition to using big data insights to identify "new white-collar workers" and "sophisticated mothers" as the brand's key attack groups, another action was to leverage Tmall's 88VIP and establish the first 88VIP member interconnection platform by directly upgrading to Bestore Black Card membership with one click.

At the same time, Liangpin Puzi has also linked member-themed activities with the 88VIP benefits design, constantly stimulating member activity with attractive benefits such as membership lucky bags, half-price new products, snack experience halls, and super benefits on member days. On Double 11 in 2020, Liangpin Puzi added nearly 320,000 new members, with the member activity rate increasing by 181% compared with 618, and the member repurchase rate increasing by 2.10%.

It is worth mentioning that in this case, Liangpin Puzi leveraged the power of the data middle platform to gain concrete insights into the characteristics of the crowd and analyze their characteristics and interests. It then customized different communication content and items based on the differentiated demands of different segments of the population, linked the platform's highly matched rights and interests activities, and combined with the full-domain serialized media layout, ultimately achieving the goal of increasing both member activity and conversion and repurchase, thereby achieving effective member operations and sales explosion.

08 Youth Marketing: Arouse the passion of young people

In the youth marketing track, Philips has broken through the siege through three major cases: precise marketing by joining forces with trendy IPs and KOLs, Dyson's new product "Little Fairy Purple" breaking the circle, and L'Occitane joining hands with Luo Tianyi and Li Jiaqi.

It is worth noting that in the case of L'Occitane, the brand conducted research to understand the needs of young consumer groups, and conducted in-depth analysis of consumer population characteristics, product consumption preferences, entertainment preferences, etc. around core consumers and GenZ. Ultimately, the brand classified the characteristics and consumption personalities of young people, refined operations, stratified goods, highlighted product advantages, and achieved matching between people and goods.

For example, the ACG circle is a group of two-dimensional young people who love ancient style, LO skirts, and games. This group of people has obvious characteristics, that is, they love to stay up late, stay at home, and have serious "laziness cancer". In response to this, L'Occitane has launched a refreshing verbena body care series specifically for this group to awaken the otakus and stay-at-home girls.

For example, in 2020, it cooperated with the famous ACG IP and virtual idol Luo Tianyi, found a group of ACG circle consumers born after 1995, interacted deeply with the brand, and teamed up with Li Jiaqi, the popular "Lipstick King", to promote the brand's hand cream, and created a cross-dimensional live broadcast of Li Jiaqi X Luo Tianyi, creating widespread momentum for the brand in the most youthful way. In addition, L'Occitane also invited Zhu Yilong and Zhao Liying to form celebrity endorsements. Through celebrity recommendations, the brand's topic volume was continuously amplified and the volume of dissemination was expanded. Finally, with the help of the plant planet filter of the Douyin Challenge, secondary dissemination was triggered.

Behind these actions, brands are using more refined operational strategies to impress young consumers, and behind them is a data-driven approach to efficiently link product and sales.

First, through digital analysis of the target population, we can understand where Generation Z is, what they value, and what they love; second, we can further refine the stratification of Generation Z and match different products, communication content and channels according to different consumers; finally, we can boldly cooperate with the circle IPs that Generation Z loves to create a cross-dimensional innovation model of "two-dimensional IP + experts/celebrity", and ultimately achieve the goal of breaking the circle and attracting new customers, accelerating the rejuvenation of the brand, and realizing the simultaneous improvement of brand voice and sales.

09 Node marketing: Seize the big promotion nodes such as Tmall 618 and Double 11

For growth-oriented brands, major promotional events such as Tmall 618 and Double 11 have become the main battlefields for competition. In this field, Honor 2 created a super human-machine ensemble through the 618 super new product promotion, Balabala achieved water storage and president live broadcast through the major promotion, and Freefangs won corresponding awards through cross-border joint models during 618, Super Product Day and Double 11.

Taking Freeplus as an example, we have accumulated a set of methodologies that can be used as reference in terms of how to grasp each marketing node and achieve growth goals.

First, with the help of Alibaba's big data to enable deep insights and combined with brand positioning, we found the most effective way to amplify brand potential, such as brand collaboration. With the support of Alimama’s extensive tools and data, we developed strategies for co-branded products. Secondly, the brand used the platform’s IP activities to accumulate momentum, which played a very good role in driving growth. The brand builds multi-peak promotional marketing throughout the year and cooperates deeply with Alibaba's marketing nodes, such as March 8th, June 18th, Joyful Gathering Day, Super Product Day, Double 11 and other major promotional nodes and marketing activities, ultimately achieving efficient bursts.

Freeplus’ GMV generated through node marketing accounts for nearly 80% of the store’s annual GMV.

It is also worth mentioning that the platform IP activity page before the big promotion can also promote the final outbreak.

10Interactive Marketing: Explore new market growth points and step out of the brand's "comfort zone"

In the interactive marketing track, three major cases have emerged: Guerlain's 10th Golden Anniversary, UNDER ARMOUR Super Brand Day "Turning Bitterness into Sweetness, Selling a New Taste of Sports", and Amul brand's full-link interaction with consumers to jointly create a trendy community.

What is more interesting is that during Super Brand Day, UNDER ARMOUR teamed up with Tmall’s marketing IP to expand its reach to Generation Z and female groups.

For example, by staging a UA fashion show on Taobao Life, strong interactions were created; with international superstar Dwayne Johnson, fitness KOL Zeng Ke Ni, Han Dongjun, Olympic champion Jin Yuan and other stars, the power of idols was used to deepen the theme of Super Brand Day "Turning Hardship into Sweetness" and further circle the crowd; and in terms of product creation, limited edition candy gift boxes with a sense of contrast were used to interpret the new taste of the exercise process and convey the spirit of UA's true sports through the products.

This deep insight into the behavioral habits of the target group, through popular methods and language, and creative interactive games, connects the brand and the target group. Through easy-to-understand brand interactive experience, the Super Brand Day achieves brand, group, and product breakthroughs.

At the same time, in terms of marketing, the brand is also making efforts both inside and outside the site. On the one hand, through the concentrated outbreak of off-site media matrices such as Weibo, Zhihu, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Keep, etc., it comprehensively covers young sports people. At the same time, through Alimama's omni-channel marketing products, such as Super Exposure and Brand Special Show, it comprehensively improves the efficiency of brand breaking through the circle.

11 New Marketing Growth Logic: From "Traffic Thinking" to "Consumer Operation Thinking"

In addition to the brand-effect track, m award also approaches the ecological partner track from three angles: creative planning, media strategy, and data insight. In the cases of these three dimensions, in addition to brands making in-depth use of Alibaba's big data, service providers such as Lirenli Makeup also rely on Alibaba's big data to conduct secondary processing and interpretation and improve overall delivery efficiency.

For brands, as Alibaba's official marketing platform, Alimama's actions to a certain extent also represent the development trend of the platform, revealing the direction in which marketing can be leveraged - Alimama is helping merchants utilize Alibaba's data technology and ecological power.

On the one hand, if a brand wants to grow, the platform is the best enabling partner and can provide support such as traffic; on the other hand, if the platform wants to achieve its own growth, it also needs to leverage the momentum of the brand. In the five-step method of new consumer growth, I also said that brands must build their own marketing closed loop, that is, to achieve a closed loop effect through precise e-commerce traffic, product portfolio, conversion acceptance, and crowd operation.

Through observation of these leading brands, m awards has summarized a set of methodologies suitable for brands to achieve super-linear growth; from a strategic perspective, m awards focuses on the Double Eleven actual combat PK. It is not only the first award in China that directly hits actual marketing, but also Alibaba’s first full-eco brand digital marketing creation camp, mobilizing Alibaba’s ecological resources and data capabilities.

Today at the conference, Alimama also officially launched the second M Award, officially kicking off this year's most commercially valuable marketing event.

It is worth noting that this year we will not only continue to be committed to building the cohesion of brands and ecological partners, and fully incubate the number one player with super-linear growth; this year we will also focus on creating a panoramic brand digital marketing weather vane, launch the m awards monthly magazine, and focus on marketing practice to bring everyone cutting-edge marketing trends, popular brand marketing cases, practical marketing product empowerment, etc. At the same time, brands, ecological parties, and media parties can also independently submit or recommend monthly outstanding cases. The TOP1 popular work will also have the opportunity to directly enter the m awards annual marketing case.

At the same time, the second m awards will also provide more targeted creative camp empowerment training for brand and ecosystem parties, and focus on the two marketing practices of 618 and Double 11, providing brands with more diagnostic marketing suggestions from the data dimension.

In my opinion, the essence of the m awards super award is to explore a series of bottleneck problems in brand growth through the sorting out of top cases, such as: rapid growth of new products, breaking through the growth bottleneck of traditional brand marketing, acquiring new customers/Generation Z consumers, etc. After each winning case, Alimama will also summarize a red book of m awards practical methodology to empower the growth of more new brands.

Alibaba's ecological resources and data capabilities are enabling brand growth in the ecosystem from the value dimension through refined information processing.

For us brand people, these methodologies also reveal signals of future brand growth.

As Alibaba Vice President Jia Luo put it: "In the digital marketing era, brands need to focus on new groups, new products, new categories, new ideas, new content and new technologies in order to break through the growth trend. These six marketing "new forces" will become the key to brand success. ”

Author: Doris

Source: Doris