Do internet celebrity brands rely purely on marketing?

With the development of short videos, a group has emerged strongly in front of the public - Internet celebrities. Gradually, terms such as internet celebrity economy and internet celebrity brands have emerged, and they have now become magnets for increasing consumers annually. However, we all have certain prejudices against a series of things related to internet celebrities to a greater or lesser extent. Take how it became popular, for example, was it purely due to marketing? Did it become popular because of its unscrupulous capital operations?

Have you noticed that nowadays when you walk into shopping malls and shopping streets, the commercial area design, visual effects and merchant settings are constantly strengthening the interactive function with consumers?

That is to say, through experiential commerce, consumers' stickiness to the mall can be strengthened, so as to increase consumers' stay time and promote consumption.

In fact, this experiential consumption has already extended to another battlefield - the new consumption field.

For brands, it is particularly important to formulate more precise development strategies in the era of experience economy.

Recently, Wang Zhiquan, partner of Yunting CEM, gave a keynote speech on the topic of "Brand Growth Strategies in the Experience Economy Era", which provided detailed analysis on multiple aspects including the 0 and 1 of new consumer brands, the entire customer experience journey, the customer data touchpoint feedback mechanism, and customer experience supporting the improvement of the entire brand chain, triggering many in-depth discussions.

1. Good marketing is not the same as good new brand

What are the 0s and 1s for the sustainable development of an emerging brand?

Now a large number of cases, including some professional media articles, have analyzed that the first step for a new brand to start from scratch is marketing.

So, do all new brands have to focus on marketing from the beginning? Can we achieve sustainable brand growth if we do a good job in marketing?

Here’s a picture to share with you:

• On the left is the marketing content of Zhong Xue Gao, which has been popular recently. After careful packaging and promotion by KOLs and KOCs, it has attracted the attention of a large number of consumers.
• On the right are some core viewpoints that were extracted after collecting feedback data from all user reviews of this brand on the entire network and conducting intelligent analysis.

Zhong Xue Gao's consumers are more concerned about the product's taste, texture and experience. As you can see, the most significant indicators in consumers' evaluation feedback are those related to product taste, texture and experience.

On the contrary, the product appearance and design highlighted by the brand in a large amount of marketing are not the primary focus of consumers.

Earlier, some media summarized the wild growth of emerging brands into three marketing strategies: first, find KOLs and KOCs to post 5,000 grass-planting articles on Xiaohongshu, then publish 2,000 questions and answers on Zhihu, and finally find top anchors such as Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi to promote products, and mid-level anchors to build channels across the entire network. In this way, you can basically create the prototype of a new brand.

We believe that in the long run, it is uncertain whether this heavy marketing model, especially high-investment marketing strategies, can enable the brand to continue to grow.

For example, a certain beauty brand that everyone is familiar with relied entirely on Xiaohongshu’s heavy investment in bloggers’ product promotion and promotion articles to gain popularity. However, judging from the financial report it released, its annual marketing expenses are even close to its revenue.

So this path is not easy to replicate, which is also the topic we will discuss today.

Marketing is an indispensable means for the growth of emerging brands. It can be sustained but not heavily or excessively invested. For the emerging new brands, this path is also not replicable.

The 0 and 1 of new consumer brands in the era of stock homogeneity The "1" of the growth of emerging brands that we are discussing with you today refers to the ability to help the brand grow continuously and bring long-term value returns.

As can be seen from the above picture, building brand product power, brand power, and experience innovation capabilities... this is the long-term value that emerging brands must adhere to in the future.

The modern economy has evolved from a product economy and a service economy to an experience economy. Consumers are willing to pay a higher "experience premium" for some new experiences and perceptions. Only a good experience process can cultivate consumer loyalty to the brand.

2. The entire customer experience journey requires attention

For the growth of emerging brands, business is essentially a "customer-centric" journey that starts with cultivating user minds, continuously improving user loyalty, promoting conversion and repurchase, and being willing to recommend it to more consumers.

The picture below is the user journey of a brand we once broke down. Let’s do some analysis with you based on this picture.

Customer Journey Map (Taking the Home Appliance Industry as an Example) We will decompose the customer journey from the user's perspective.

It can be seen that from the time the brand is known to users through omni-channel marketing and promotion, to the time users conduct product research and comparison, to customer service consultation and answering of questions, and then to the ordering, delivery, and maintenance stages, users throughout the entire chain have been maintaining behavioral interaction and experience feedback with the brand.

During the entire journey, brands and users have touchpoints, and each touchpoint generates a large amount of data and feedback from users about the brand's purchasing experience, usage experience, and service experience.

Brands must not only obtain and collect these experience feedback data in a timely manner, but also be able to quickly make improvements and respond based on these feedbacks. This is the key for emerging brands to achieve sustainable growth in the future.

Customer data touchpoint feedback at different stages As you can see, at every stage of the brand realizing its commercial value, users provide feedback to the brand through various social platforms, e-commerce websites, customer service consultation, payment links, including logistics distribution, after-sales links and other touchpoints.

The good or bad of these experience evaluations not only affect the retention and repurchase of existing users, but also have a greater impact on attracting new users.

Therefore, my point is that emerging brands must provide good customer experience at every touchpoint in the user journey.

Experience triggers customer feedback, which feeds back to brand iteration. To sum it up briefly, providing good customer experience can support the improvement of the brand's full-link operational efficiency. Each node can trigger customers to generate a large amount of feedback and experience data.

Through improvements we can feed back to the brand and optimize our products, services and markets to do better.

Data can drive the upgrade and optimization of products, services, and marketing. We divide the data that companies are most concerned about into three categories:

1) Business data

This is indispensable for all companies, including product sales data, industry size, market share, marketing investment data, etc.

We define this type of data as result data, and the company's top management cannot find out the reasons for "this result" through this data.

2) User behavior data

This type of data can help you understand users’ accurate behaviors and activity levels, including user purchases, clicks, retention information, purchase paths, etc.

This type of data can help brands gain insight into user behavior habits and improve problems in the marketing process.

3) Customer-centric feedback from users at every touchpoint in the customer journey

We call this type of data experience data. Through multi-dimensional intelligent analysis, we help brands improve customer experience at every touchpoint and truly find the reasons for the "continuous growth" or "lack of growth" of emerging brands.

3. Experience determines the value and effectiveness of marketing

Digital capability is a skill that an emerging brand must pay attention to and practice during its growth. After helping a group of emerging brands grow over the past few years, we have summarized our own digital construction methodologies.

Combining the middle-office capabilities of data and algorithms, we help companies improve customer experience and solve user feedback issues in every application scenario where brands interact with users, thus forming a closed-loop effect.

The process of building a closed-loop enterprise digital capability through data, algorithms, and scenarios requires the following steps:

① It is necessary to establish the ability and means to obtain data, collect all data from each touch point, and conduct comprehensive analysis, including connecting internal and external data of the enterprise. Only when these data are combined can they help brands to comprehensively analyze the problems that arise in each link from multiple dimensions.

② Relying on the capabilities of AI and algorithms, we built a set of fine-grained indicator analysis models to conduct intelligent analysis of consumer evaluation information, uncover users' real demands and opinions, and convert customer feedback into corporate action improvement suggestions, thereby improving consumer reputation and customer experience throughout the entire journey and helping brands achieve sustainable growth.

4. Brand Case - Ubras

CEM helps Ubras upgrade its experience. As we all know, this is a new consumer brand that currently ranks first in the industry in the women's underwear market segment.

In the process of building digital capabilities, we helped Ubras collect all the e-commerce review data and social media data from the entire network, and conducted some in-depth analysis through our self-built AI model, while also analyzing all competing products.

In terms of actual results, we found from the feedback of Ubras' e-commerce customer service director that we not only helped brands improve their work efficiency, but also assisted Ubras in the development of new products and exploration of new industry opportunities.

As we all know, Ubras took the market by storm with its single product, "wireless bra". Then, it continued to listen to user feedback at every touchpoint, upgraded the experience in a timely manner, and launched a series of new products such as size-free bras. Finally, it developed into a leading brand in this niche segment.

From the above cases, we can see that if emerging brands want to achieve sustained growth in the future, customer experience is what they must pay attention to - this is the core of the future growth of the entire brand.

Investing heavily in phenomenal marketing in a short period of time is not enough to support a brand to go further.

At the same time, the entire customer experience capability runs through every link in the customer journey, so there is room for improvement in every touchpoint. This is the real "moat" for brand growth.

V. Conclusion

1. Customer experience determines marketing value and effectiveness

The effectiveness of all large-scale early marketing investments will ultimately be verified by whether the customer experience is good and the resulting user conversion and repeat purchases.

2. Experience creates greater added value for the brand

More and more new users are willing to pay the premium for the brand's "good experience", which is what Yunting CEM has always emphasized.

That is, in the future, customer experience will drive the "Matthew effect" in the industry, and companies that do well in customer experience will always maintain a leading position in the industry.

Companies that do not pay attention to customer experience and do not do a good enough job will not only have poor user reputation, but also very weak user brand loyalty.

New consumer brands need to continuously upgrade and innovate the experience.

The consensus is that customer experience is a top-priority project, and the company's founders and core executives must be the people in the company who pay the most attention to customer experience. For example, many company founders will declare themselves to be the brand's chief experience officer.

Only by continuously upgrading and innovating customer experience can the company meet the ever-changing needs of consumers and thus enhance user loyalty.

Editor of this article: Arya

Source: Yunting CEM