The product logic and marketing strategy behind emerging brands

At present, emerging brands are developing at an unprecedented pace, and the growth rate of many brands has reached dozens or even hundreds of times the industry average. Behind this is a huge window of opportunity created by changes in the media environment, supply-side reform, technological development, and marketing strategies.

Of course, the macro environment is the same for everyone. Why do some brands succeed while others fail? In other words, how to build a cutting-edge brand from scratch? We talked to several leaders of emerging brands, agents, platforms and other industry parties, and found out some secrets for creating new internet celebrity brands.

Although these brands have different genes and brand concepts and are distributed in different tracks, they follow similar product development logic and marketing strategies. In the process of creating explosive products, digital and intelligent marketing have played a key role in their brand growth.

Demand mining: filling gaps or optimizing experience

Unlike many traditional brands that produce products first and then look for consumers, many emerging brands first discover the unmet demand in a certain segment, and then produce corresponding products or provide corresponding services to meet this demand, and new brands come into being. Therefore, in building a new brand, product selection is the starting point and one of the decisive factors for success.

GOTO's founder Chen Zineng never thought that shoe boxes for storing sneakers could become a big business. Chen Zineng likes playing basketball and sneakers. In his life experience, he found that there was a lack of effective supply of sneaker maintenance in the market.

GOTO trendy shoes storage box

"I have a pair of sneakers that I really like. I've worn them for several years, and the glue on the shoes has come apart. When I wanted to buy shoe repair glue, I found that there was no good glue on the market. Many people use the wrong glue when repairing their own shoes, such as 502, but 502 will make the shoes hard, and then the whole sneaker will be ruined. So I wanted to make a glue to help people repair their shoes, and with this little idea, I started to do it (GOTO)."

GOTO founder Chen Zineng was invited to participate in the Alibaba Mom m partner C position private meeting

Unlike Chen Zineng, Zhuben's co-founder Shen Donglai discovered that the beauty market was paying more attention to concepts such as domestic products and herbs, so he launched a plant-based makeup remover oil to enter the skin care market.

Zhuben Senyun Botanical Conditioning Cleansing Oil

"A current product can never meet all the needs of everyone in the market, so the needs of the crowd are the direction of our product upgrade. Looking at the market, not only our track, but also Yuanqi Forest has upgraded cola and adopted a cow to upgrade traditional milk. Therefore, based on the needs of the crowd, and the real needs, from the product side, and then through marketing and investment, do a good job of cost control, which is to do the basic work of building a brand from 0 to 1."

Shen Donglai, co-founder of Zhuben

There are also some demands that have already been met, but there is still possibility for optimization and upgrading. As long as the track is wide enough and the demand is not saturated, new brands still have opportunities. Especially for new consumer groups, they generally pursue individuality, pay attention to quality, and pay attention to health. Their requirements for products have shifted from functional satisfaction to emotional drive, from "pleasing others consumption" to "pleasing oneself consumption", and they emphasize the product's experience value and social value.

For example, contact lenses are not an emerging market. There are many brands in this market, including Johnson & Johnson, Bausch & Lomb, Cooper, and Vision Health. However, Moody’s founder Ci Ran believes that this category still has great market opportunities. In his first full-time job, he accidentally learned that contact lenses were the fastest growing category in Alibaba Health. “That’s when I started to learn about contact lenses, and two years ago I decided to bring my team to do this.”

Moody Color Contact Lenses

As a famous saying goes in the venture capital field: all traditional industries are worth redoing using the Internet.

"Consumers always need safer, more fashionable and more comfortable products. Looking ahead ten to five years, we will find that the world's largest contact lens country will be China. In this case, China needs to have its own contact lens brand, whether it is contact lenses or colored contact lenses." Ci Ran said.

Moody founder Ci Ran

But how do you discover these needs? On the one hand, of course, brands are required to maintain a keen insight into the market and always understand what the younger generation of consumers are thinking and need. On the other hand, it is also inseparable from the use of some digital tools.

Even though many third-party data companies or advertising companies provide such services, new brands prefer platforms that have first-hand digital capabilities.

Hot-selling product creation: targeted promotion for targeted groups of people

Many emerging brands were noticed by consumers and the industry by starting with a hit product. But all things are difficult at the beginning. It is very difficult to create a hit product from 0 to 1. A hot-selling product means that it has high sales and reputation, which means that the right product has found the right consumers. If we work backwards, the core of creating a hit product is to find the precise target group for a good product.

Recalling this process, Ci Ran still couldn't help but sigh, "It was too difficult."

Although he is a man, Ci Ran tried on contact lenses himself in order to experience the product, and jokingly said that he had "tasted all kinds of things." "The most difficult process from 0 to 1 is to locate and acquire new customers and verify where your target market area or concentrated customer base is. Because of the black swan of the epidemic at that time, there was a large number of population mismatches. In this process, Alimama gave us a lot of help. Whether using Dharmapan or other delivery tools, we quickly located the existing population that was more in line with moody consumers and enlarged this population."

Full of Hope Formaldehyde Removal Products

Wills Wang, brand partner of the formaldehyde removal brand Full of Hope, said, "The first step to creating a hit product is to let everyone see and believe that our product can really remove formaldehyde. But at the beginning, the ROI of information flow delivery was not very high. After introducing UD delivery tools, we were able to combine the top media information flow delivery with Tmall's strategic delivery, which greatly improved efficiency and increased ROI by 20-30%."

Wills Wang, Brand Partner of Full of Hope

The core of precise delivery lies not only in choosing the right channel, but also in making a good "roadmap" for deploying troops in the channel: what should be done at what stage, how to combine them, and how to achieve the highest ROI and more lasting effects.

Lin Chundi, vice president of Baozun Yingsai, said, "New brands all emphasize their brand positioning. Once you have positioned your brand and know what group you want to target, you can use newer channels to spread the message. Because media channels are very fragmented now, the big idea is very important, which is to say the same thing to target consumers in different scenarios and in different languages."

Lin Chundi, Vice President of Baozun Yingsai

As Wills Wang said, “It is hard to say that a product can become popular because of one thing done right, but it is because many right things come together and find the right time to become popular.”

Moore believes that for "explosive products", the premise of success lies in the successful "new launch" and achieving a sensation within the short period of time after the new product is launched on the market.

At the same time, after a product becomes a hit, in order to avoid “peaking at debut”, the brand also needs to rely on digital marketing to operate the brand in the long term.

Branding: Category expansion, mind-boggling and continuous digital operations

After launching a hit product, the brand has taken the most difficult step, but nowadays, it is difficult for a company to rely on just one trick to dominate the market. The most important issue that the leaders will face next is how to carry out brand operations. There is still a long way to go from a hot product to a well-established brand.

First of all, it is necessary to expand product categories, which is the only way for the brand to continue to be successful. After launching its shoe box product, GOTO gathered users together through the "box", and then continued to develop other services through the box, such as cleaning, storage, etc. "This is category expansion. We help consumers meet all their needs regarding collecting (sneakers)," said Chen Zineng.

GOTO newly upgraded seven-piece shampoo and conditioner set

Zhuben has taken a similar path, extending its product line from aromatherapy to body and hair care, and then to home and space, and making a multi-field layout with skin care as the starting point.

"We firmly believe that the future development direction of skin products is not only to meet people's simple skin care needs, but also to meet all aspects of people's physical and mental needs. Customized skin care will become the mainstream trend of this industry." Shen Donglai said.

Category expansion is about deepening the mind. The next step after buying volume is to continue to cultivate the user's mind. Pan Xinxin, Vice President of Yinli Media, said, "After a new brand opens up the market in a short and fast way, it still needs to shift to the mindset of the brand. For example, the current promotion model of a new brand is mainly based on single product promotion. The first step is to use off-site KOLs to promote products; the second step is to use Uni Desk to attract off-site traffic, and for the secondary use of content materials, split the crowd assets according to different circles, and use different materials for promotion in different circles; the third step is to use the paid advertising capabilities within the site."

Pan Xinxin, Vice President and Director of Gravity Media

At this stage, content marketing and KOL promotion are conventional means to strengthen consumer awareness, but in this process, attention should be paid to the stability of communication concepts and the diversity of means, so as to continuously bring freshness to consumers.

How to bring freshness? Lin Chundi said, "New brands need to constantly give consumers a refreshing feeling, and make them feel that what you are doing now meets their life needs."

The last step is the digital operation of the system. After creating popular products and expanding product categories, you need to target different groups of people and reach them repeatedly in a reasonable way to obtain traffic and conversions continuously and stably. Among them, comprehensively improving digital capabilities and forming a multi-dimensional growth model are the key.

In Will's opinion, it is far from over for Full of Hope to create a hit product. Only when three to five new products are successfully produced at the same time can the brand stand on its own. "All of these are inseparable from a systematic methodology. A systematic methodology is no longer the situation of thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge during the cold start, which was achieved through hard work. Now we need to keep going and continue to incubate products that are highly accepted by the market. We need to use highly efficient traffic strategies and digital management methods to improve the success rate and survival rate of our products one by one."

Shen Donglai also deeply agrees with this. "Digitalization and digital integrated marketing mean to our brand that more uncertain things have become certain things, and more inefficient things have become efficient things through the combination of digital intelligence, which reduces the risks of the entire business and people."

"Universal digital marketing is the key to improving marketing effectiveness, and new brands can use Alimama to place advertisements in more omnidirectional areas, not only in the Taobao system, but also in incremental platforms such as top media and traffic alliances," said Jia Luo, vice president of Alibaba Group and head of Alimama Business Group. "In addition, Alimama can accurately reach users through its covered portals such as UC, AutoNavi, Youku, Xianyu, and Cainiao. After reaching users, it can perform digital analysis of the crowd and further explore and transform digital capabilities to expose and reach these users and crowds again."

Many new brands, including Zhuben, Full of Hope, moody, and GOTO, have gained opportunities for leapfrog development through the intelligent digital marketing platform system created by Alimama.

"The core of brand advertising in the digital age is full-link digitization, and Alimama is shifting from traffic operations to people-centric consumer operations to help brands accumulate the most valuable consumer assets and brand influence. We provide a more comprehensive matrix of digital marketing products, a more comprehensive advertising and marketing methodology, and even more professional teams to coach new brands, helping them grow faster or more confidently," Jialuo said finally.

Conclusion:

Through conversations with several new brand leaders and marketing experts from agents and platforms, we summarized the product logic, marketing approach and business strategy in new brand building from three dimensions: blockbuster products to branding.

To sum up, we must always be user-centric. In the new product selection stage, we need to consider how to fill market gaps or optimize the experience; in the stage of creating explosive products, we need to find precise groups of people and conduct targeted detonation; finally, in the branding stage, we need to first expand product categories, then deeply cultivate user minds, supplemented by continuous digital operations.

Continuously creating value for users is the key to the long-term success of a new brand.

Author: TopMarketing

Source: TopMarketing