90% of brand marketing doesn’t even have common sense

In the face of a rapidly changing era of traffic, marketers seem to have to know everything, including private domain traffic, live streaming, etc., which leads to them being busy all the time but with little effect in the end.

1. Changes and constants in marketing

After the explosion of mobile Internet, the marketing industry seems to be iterating faster and faster, with new concepts emerging one after another: private domain traffic today, grass-roots marketing tomorrow, and live streaming sales the day after tomorrow. Many marketers are shouting, "Sir, the times have changed." If we don't change, we will be beaten.

Under such circumstances, marketers seem to be getting more and more tired. A marketer who embraces change (is good at following the trend) may, based on market trends, do private domain work today, live streaming tomorrow, and short videos the day after tomorrow. He is in a constant state of anxiety in the busyness, fearing that he has missed something.

This phenomenon is not an exaggeration. Many clients I know do this. They are often anxious about changes in market trends. What they are anxious about is what they can do under these trends to make their boss see that they embrace change and still get some visible marketing results?

However, they seem to have never or never had the time to think about a question: In the complex market environment, what things remain unchanged? Things that are constantly changing are often just concepts and phenomena, while things that do not change are the essence. Being passively anxious and following changes all day long without thinking about the essence of the problem is tactically diligent but strategically laziness.

Every middle school student understands that as long as he has mastered Newton's laws, he can get the answers to 100 or 1,000 mechanics questions in various ways, and all questions are just variations of Newton's laws.

Today, the basic economic principles in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" are still valid and are essential basic knowledge for everyone studying economics.

Therefore, for many fields, what changes are the form and concept, and what remains unchanged is the principle, which can also be called the first principle.

So, what remains constant when it comes to marketing?

A few days ago, I saw an article shared by Bosideng titled "In the Age of Traffic, Bosideng is Not Anxious". Zhu Jindan, general manager of its brand center, said: Bosideng's experience sharing is based on essential thinking. The times are different, the media characteristics are different, but the essence has not changed. The formation of brand awareness is content + frequency.

Content + frequency, the complete expression is the correct content based on positioning + high-frequency coverage of consumers. I think this is close to the basic principle of marketing. Whether it is traditional advertising or planting grass on current short video media, their essence is content + coverage.

2. Marketing veteran Du Guoying has been making the same amount of money

Here I want to talk about a person, how he has won the market with the same strategy for many years in the ever-changing marketing environment. Most people in the industry know this person. His name is Du Guoying. Let’s take a brief look at his brand creation and marketing process.

In 1998, Du Guoying founded the "Beibeijia" brand based on the domestic "correction belt" market. With the help of overwhelming advertising, Beibeijia became a success, and Du Guoying earned his first pot of gold at the age of 25.

In 2003, Du Guoying launched the Haojixing learning machine for the domestic learning machine market. Du Guoying used Dashan as the spokesperson and vigorously promoted the word function of the product, achieving success again.

In 2009, Du Guoying founded E-book, which was positioned as a high-end notebook for business people. It was endorsed by Ge You and Feng Xiaogang. Its price was higher than the iPad released the following year. E-book was also successful and was eventually acquired by Tsinghua Tongfang for 1.4 billion.

In 2015, Du Guoying founded 8848 Mobile. In an era when smartphones have become a trend, it positioned itself as a high-end business person and used Wang Shi as its spokesperson. The price of its mobile phones ranged from 9999 to 25888. In 2016, 8848 achieved sales of 700 million yuan and a net profit of more than 70 million yuan. The clear positioning and consistent marketing strategy allowed it to make a lot of money at an era when many mobile phone manufacturers were losing money.

In 2016, Du Guoying launched Xiaoguan Tea, which once again positioned itself in the high-end market. The highest unit price was close to 20,000 yuan per catty. Many people bought it as gifts. In 2018, Xiaoguan Tea achieved sales of 2 billion yuan.

Judging from Du Guoying's experience, the brands he has built from 1998 to today span the traditional advertising era, the Internet era and the mobile Internet era. Logically, the marketing strategies in different eras should be different, but Du Guoying doesn't care about any media changes. He uses positioning (often high-end) + large-scale advertising by CCTV and Focus Media to make his products profitable in a short period of time.

To achieve this, it is simple and not simple at the same time. The simple part is that Du Guoying has been using the same two tricks for many years, and the difficult part is that Du Guoying has not been swayed by the rapid changes in the outside world, but has grasped the unchanging basic principles of marketing - content + coverage, and used this as a weapon to win the market.

When it comes to this weapon, I don’t believe that most brands don’t understand it, but they just find it difficult to do so. Ultimately, it’s the gap in cognition and concentration.

3. Make money steadily within your own understanding

In Thirteen Invitations, Xu Zhuoyun pointed out a problem in the current intellectual community: new ideals have not emerged, and old ideals have been put aside.

This is actually also a problem in the current marketing industry. In the chaotic and ever-changing media environment, many brand marketers are anxious to find new ways out without even digesting the old marketing system, but end up picking up sesame seeds and losing watermelons.

Du Guoying did not covet those small things, but only did things that he was sure of, thus maximizing his advantages and achieving success.

Buffett said that he would not invest in a business he did not understand. Back then, he did not invest in Amazon but invested in Coca-Cola and Apple. He was looking for something unchanging and doing something he was sure of.

There is a saying that you can never earn money beyond your cognition. This sentence can also be said in another way: you can steadily earn money that is within your own cognition. I believe that people who can do this can outperform at least 90% of people. Buffett only invests in businesses that he understands, and he outperforms 99% of investors.

Yanmi Moon, author of "Harvard Business School's Most Popular Marketing Course," once discovered through research during his teaching that when faced with fierce competition in the market, most companies focus on improving the weaknesses of their products in order to make themselves appear impeccable.

In the face of market competition, most companies do this (Source: Harvard Business School's Most Popular Marketing Course)

But few companies do the opposite, deliberately avoiding their disadvantages and concentrating on strengthening their advantages. For example, Huawei's chips do not have an absolute advantage over Qualcomm, and its design is not better than Apple's, but it has focused on strengthening the camera function of the phone, and has won the market with almost the most powerful camera function on the market.

Facing market competition, rare practices (Source: "Harvard Business School's most popular marketing course")

The differentiation strategy is not to achieve average performance in every link, which would be mediocre, but to concentrate on strengthening one's own advantages, using advantages to attract consumers and occupy the market.

Applying this principle to yourself means avoiding doing things you don't understand and maximizing your strengths. For example, Du Guoying did not do online marketing in the Internet era, nor did he do Weibo marketing in the Weibo era... He just insisted on doing what people today consider to be more traditional marketing.

For marketers, embracing changes seems not difficult, and it is undoubtedly about doing something new in the new media environment. On the contrary, it is difficult to stick to the basic principles of marketing and continue to implement them, because 90% of people lack patience and determination.

4. Bosideng's second rise by returning to the same

At the beginning, we talked about Bosideng’s marketing concept. Here, let’s talk about the marketing strategy that led to Bosideng’s second rise.

Bosideng once ranked first in the national category by relying on its professional down jacket positioning and CCTV advertising. When I was a child, wearing a Bosideng down jacket was a very enviable thing. However, Bosideng's subsequent development was not smooth sailing. The warm winter after its listing hindered its sales. Bosideng believed that single-season products limited its development. In 2009, Bosideng formally proposed branding, four-season products, and internationalization, and launched non-down jacket businesses such as men's and children's clothing.

But the problem here is that Bosideng did not solve the problem of down jackets and blindly expanded its product categories. The result is predictable. Bosideng's revenue fell from 9.325 billion yuan in 2012 to 5.787 billion yuan in 2015. The stock price also fell below HK$1 at one point. In 2017, Bosideng announced that it would cut its men's, home and children's wear businesses, focusing on down jackets and gradually starting its second rise. I would like to summarize the path of its rise in the following points.

1. Repositioning: Focus on down jackets

Bosideng first decided to focus on down jackets and do a good job in this category. Bosideng positioned itself as an "expert in down jackets" and reinforced this point in various external publicity. In recent years, Bosideng's external advertisements have remained basically unchanged, all with these few sentences:

For you in the cold wind

Bosideng has been working hard for 45 years

Bosideng down jacket

Selling well in 72 countries around the world

Won over 200 million people's choice

This is a typical repetition theory under positioning.

2. Marketing "export to domestic sales"

In recent years, there are many examples of "export to domestic sales" in the marketing field. For example, Huili, Feiyue, Li Ning, and even Lao Gan Ma and Ma Yinglong all became suddenly popular in Europe and the United States, and then the information spread domestically, affecting domestic consumers.

After clarifying its positioning, Bosideng also used the marketing tactic of "exporting to domestic sales" and participated in the New York Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week and London Fashion Week. With the rise of national trends, pictures and videos of Bosideng's national trend-style clothing designs were spread to China through the Internet, making many consumers exclaim that Bosideng has become fashionable.

In terms of improving fashion, Bosideng also cooperates with famous designers. In 2018, Bosideng cooperated with three internationally renowned designers from France, Italy and the United States. In 2019 and 2020, it collaborated with Hermès Jean Paul Gaultier to launch a series of high-end down jackets, which increased the brand premium.

3. CCTV + Focus Advertising High Frequency Coverage

Bosideng was once one of the brands that benefited from heavy investments on CCTV. Bosideng became a household name in large part because of CCTV advertisements. Today, Bosideng still sticks to this strategy. In the past two years, you will hardly see it doing any screen-sweeping marketing on new media. On the contrary, it still chooses the "unchanged" CCTV + Focus Advertising as its main external marketing channel.

The head of Bosideng's brand also talked about the reasons for choosing these two channels. He believes: "Elevator advertising has a high coverage rate in first- and second-tier cities, which is a weak market for Bosideng but urgently needs to be opened; in terms of reception status, the closed nature of elevators can reduce interference and improve the effectiveness of single-time contact; in terms of frequency of contact, elevator advertising can achieve high-frequency contact with consumers in the same residential or office building 2-4 times a day. So overall, these advantages are not possessed by other hard advertising media."

"Although CCTV has been impacted by the Internet and its ratings are on a downward trend, it has good long-tail coverage of third-tier and lower-tier cities and a good audience coverage of government and public institutions, and it has a certain ability to endorse brands."

In these "centralized channels", Bosideng's appeal is also very simple, which is to repeat the above-mentioned sentences over and over again. A typical example is its strategy in Focus Media in recent years: For you in the cold wind, Bosideng has worked hard for XX years. Every year, the advertisement simply changes the year's data. Some people may say that this is too lazy, but in my opinion, this is to carry out a demand to the end and build up the mind.

In this regard, Bosideng's approach is essentially no different from that of Du Guoying mentioned above, which is to achieve simple content + coverage. By achieving this, it has surpassed 90% of similar brands.

4. Price increase

Many domestic brands use a few tricks on the road to brand upgrading: 1. Improve the design, 2. Change the Chinese name to English name, and 3. Raise the price. For example, in recent years, Ordos changed its name to ERDOS, and Peacebird changed its name to Peacebird, and then gradually improved its design and increased its price.

If a product wants to increase its brand premium, raising prices is the only way to go. The only question is how to raise prices so that consumers can accept them. In recent years, Bosideng has been raising prices. It is reported that in 2019, Bosideng's average selling price increased by 20%-30%, and the price of the high-end "Dengfeng" series even reached 5,800-11,800 yuan.

I am in "Haidilao's retaliatory price increase is not advisable, how should a brand raise prices correctly? 》 I wrote about how brands should correctly increase prices. One of the points is packaging, product, and brand upgrades. When your products have been upgraded in all aspects and your brand is strong enough to have the ability to charge a premium, consumers will accept the price increase. For example, Xiaomi phones in 2012 did not have the ability to increase in price, but today Xiaomi’s flagship phones have justifiably increased in price.

In recent years, as Bosideng's design and quality have improved, its prices have been raised and its stock price has risen sharply. It can be seen that the market has paid for Bosideng's consumer upgrade.

5. Conclusion: What you think is outdated is often what you have not yet mastered

The head of the Bosideng brand said: During internal review and communication, everyone would jokingly call us "conservatives" because we didn't have so many trendy Internet gameplays. In my opinion,...brand communication should return to its essence, which is effective communication with the target group. We will also continuously review the effectiveness of our strategy based on this standard every year.

Going back to the essence, in fact, to put it simply, it is to use common sense, but in the field of marketing, according to my observation, 90% of companies cannot use common sense. They are either influenced by the slightest movement of new concepts in the outside world and try to use a small budget to leverage the popularity of the entire network, or they see that a certain brand is popular and want to copy their route. Most brand owners are trapped by anxiety and change, and find it difficult to make common sense based on the basic principles of marketing.

If you can use common sense in the field of marketing, you will win over 90% of people, not because you are so strong, but because others can't even use common sense.

You will never earn money beyond your cognition. In other words, you can steadily earn money within your cognition.

Author: Xunkong

Source: Xunkong’s Marketing Revelation