Why is brand advertising necessary?

In the consumer goods market, there are many sub-segments, and each segment is a typical massive market that is quickly formed from scratch. Only by growing into a mainstream brand in it can you enjoy the double dividend: the new category growth dividend and the mainstream category dividend.

However, to become a mainstream brand, it is not feasible to rely solely on channels and sales. Because nowadays there is a huge oversupply of goods, many brands are competing in the same channel, and consumers have too many choices. The key point of competition lies in the minds of consumers. Whoever is the first choice in the minds of customers will win the competition. It is necessary to establish a dominant position in the market and obtain brand premium by doing brand advertising , capturing the minds of users, improving their purchasing decisions and purchasing efficiency, and forming a trust barrier.

Short-term quick marketing is popular, but we must insist on long-term brand building

“Why do many companies no longer pay attention to brand advertising?” A CMO of a listed company interviewed by the author raised a thought-provoking topic.

This phenomenon mainly originates from the short-term fast marketing that has become increasingly popular in the digital age in recent years: using short-term "conversion" indicators such as marketing goals, sales business quantification and decomposition, ROI, etc. to replace long-term brand building such as brand definition, brand upgrading, and brand assets.

In her opinion, there are two paths for business development: one is to insist on building a brand, which will bring brand premium and better profits; the other is not to build a brand, but to take the low-price route and quickly seize the market. If an enterprise wants to grow and develop, it must follow the former route, become a mainstream brand, and weigh the long-term and short-term strategies of the brand.

Without brand advertising to accumulate and solidify brand awareness and trust, sales are unsustainable. Consumers may buy your product today because of the low price, but may turn around and try someone else tomorrow because your competitor has a lower price. Now more and more brands have discovered through practice that simply pursuing traffic and focusing only on transaction channels is not a long-term solution, because the cost of traffic is getting higher and higher and cannot be sustained. The essence of business will not change. Consumers make choices based on brands, and brands are the real lasting traffic.

Image source: The Long and the Short of It

Marketing experts Les Binet and Peter Field, who wrote an influential book on balancing long-term and short-term marketing strategies, The Long and the Short of It, put the balance at 60:40. This means that at least 60% of marketing resources should be devoted to brand building and 40% to marketing activities that promote short-term sales, with the understanding that short-term activities can bring short-term excellent performance, but continuous investment in brand building can provide excellent long-term business performance.

Only by doing brand advertising and producing longer-term marketing effects can we avoid homogeneous competition, open up blue oceans, and seize more incremental market space. Not all brand marketing activities are simply aimed at producing certain effects. Effects are not the purpose but the result of brand operations.

Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar China, once shared a set of data to prove the importance of brand building: in the later stage of the epidemic in 2020, the rebound rate of BrandZ's 100 most valuable brands was 29%, and the rebound rate of those with the highest loyalty was 50%, both higher than the rebound rate of China's MSCI benchmark index. She emphasized: "Brand building is not a cost, but the most important investment for any company to achieve high-quality and efficient development in the medium and long term." Brand is the truly lasting traffic and the core asset of an enterprise.

Brand advertising is a necessary path to mainstream brands

It is an extremely challenging task to build a brand and promote its mainstream popularity within a limited budget. Brand advertising is the only way for a brand to become a mainstream brand.

1. Use high-density coverage of brand advertising to achieve a saturation attack and achieve a detonating effect

When the advertising budget is large enough, it is easy for brands to fall into the trap of scatter-net communications.

Philip Kotler, the "father of modern marketing", proposed the STP theory. The reason why STP emphasizes market segmentation and even puts market segmentation ahead of brand positioning is because consumers in the market are scattered, so market expansion that casts a wide net is inefficient.

According to the STP theory, when the focus is on a key market segment, consumers are covered at a high density, and the market penetration rate reaches a critical point, the entire market will automatically explode and achieve exponential growth. 2% penetration in 10 markets is not as good as 20% penetration in 1 market. Because 20% of consumers in a market will trigger the remaining 80%.

Performance advertising is based on limited user data and will ignore potential consumers and influencers. It has insufficient market penetration and is difficult to reach the critical point of detonating the market. However, brand advertising can achieve high-density coverage in the target regional market and achieve a detonating effect after a saturation attack. Let decision makers, buyers, experiencers and communicators in the market receive brand information.

Brands need to be repeated, and constant consolidation in the mind can produce a compound interest effect. Nobel Prize winner in Economics Kahneman believes that the way to make people believe in a concept or a thing is to repeat it constantly, because it is difficult for people to distinguish between familiarity and truth; because the more familiar something is, the more we relax our cognition and make comfortable and easy judgments.

Therefore, before launching a brand advertisement, the first thing you should think about is: Is it powerful enough? Whether it is powerful enough to penetrate the minds of consumers and cross the turning point from quantitative change to qualitative change. If you cannot penetrate the entire country, concentrate your firepower on several provinces or cities and launch a saturation attack in these cities.

Taking Focus Media as an example, its value lies in detonating the brand by repeatedly impacting the mind. Because in the closed space of the elevator, repeated brand broadcasts can effectively influence users, subtly giving the brand a sense of familiarity, security and trust, which then becomes the consumer's unthinking choice in a certain category.

At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the world and the domestic apparel industry is struggling, Jomoo King has gone against the trend and reached a strategic cooperation worth hundreds of millions of yuan with Focus Media, using the Focus Media platform to strongly attract mainstream people and activate brand awareness. Behind the large-scale investment is its strategic confidence in getting rid of low-price promotions and building a market based on quality. The Jomoo brand advertisements have penetrated into the life scenes such as apartment buildings, office buildings, cinemas, etc. that the mainstream middle and high-end population in the city must pass through, achieving a concentrated impact on white-collar workers, gold-collar workers, and business people; and this group is the source group that leads the consumption upgrade. They value quality, brand, and taste, and are opinion leaders and word-of-mouth champions of brand consumption. They have the significance of a consumption weather vane and have extremely strong brand diffusion and penetration capabilities. One month after the launch, Jiumuwang released its 2020 National Day holiday battle report, with sales nationwide increasing by 44.1% year-on-year and pants sales increasing by 32.7% year-on-year.

At a time when communication is becoming increasingly fragmented and pulsating, the core of brand reshaping is by no means to "cast a wide net" to create more brand fragments, but to touch the hearts of the mainstream population as much as possible. The precise mental design of the brand + the core ignition of targeted media + the establishment of user stickiness and trust, coupled with solid product development, these factors have jointly contributed to the sales explosion of Jiumuwang.

2. Continuous delivery of brand advertising focused on pain points in scenarios to trigger new mainstream consumption

Always maintain a good balance between brand and marketing, keep your eyes on the ground but also look into the distance, adhere to the long-termism of the brand and grasp the phased transformation.

After 2020, content seeding and brand scenario shaping have increasingly become new marketing combinations. That is to say, brands should not only pay attention to social media communication based on content marketing, but also pay attention to brand potential communication in core life scenarios. Efficiently combining online and offline, content and scenario, and igniting the brand through "two Weibo, one Douyin, and one Focus" will become the most effective paradigm for future communication.

For example, during the epidemic, children were exposed to too many electronic products, which stimulated everyone's demand for eye-protection tablets. At this time, the Xiaotiancai eye-protection tablet was promoted with the unique selling point of "optical processing, no reflected light", and was very popular among parents. Qia Qia's little yellow bag tells everyone that "during the epidemic, you need to improve your dietary structure and eat more nuts to improve your immunity." It also seizes the pain points at a specific time and stimulates consumer demand.

Another example is “The weather is bad, use Dingdong to buy groceries”, which solves the pain point of the inconvenience of buying groceries on rainy days; “Make up for the pain of overtime with a big meal, order a takeaway meal from Xibei”, which meets people’s emotional needs for self-reward and self-compensation. There is also Zihaiguo’s slogans such as “Eat Zihaiguo when traveling”, “Eat Zihaiguo when working overtime”, “Eat Zihaiguo when watching TV series”, and “Eat Zihaiguo when eating alone”, which create a scene for dining alone and trigger new consumer demand. The advertisements in office buildings such as “Without Juewei Duck Neck, why work overtime” and in community elevators such as “Without Juewei Duck Neck, why watch TV series” have also triggered incremental transactions for Juewei Duck Neck. The advertisements have one thing in common – they are placed in Focus Elevator Media.

In today's media market, Focus Media, as an advertising media platform, has a special significance: it is the trigger button for scene transactions. Whether consumers are working in an office building or taking the elevator home, the last advertisements they see are Focus Media elevator advertisements. Focus Media is the core scene trigger point for e-commerce purchases and the core scene trigger button for three-kilometer life services.

The continuous placement of brand advertising in specific scenarios can add brand awareness to the minds of users. Elevators in residential apartments and office buildings are a scene that mainstream urban residents must pass through every day. Focus Elevator Media can form a high-frequency, mandatory and effective reach to consumers, and consumers are more likely to have a strong perception of Focus Media advertisements.

It is worth mentioning that at present, elevator media is shifting towards digitalization and intelligence in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and experience. Currently, under the intelligent mode of label screening, real-time publication, online monitoring and effect attribution, it can help brands connect nearby stores with online e-commerce, achieve seamless connection between life scenes and purchase scenes, convert attention into consumption power, and effectively help brands open up the online and offline marketing closed loop and convert "traffic" into "sales".

3. Establish a brand through brand advertising and enjoy high cost-effective and long-term traffic

We have found that companies that rely on traffic will ultimately be unable to compete with those that build brands. Companies that rely solely on traffic can only have short-term sales but may face longer-term weakness.

Brand is traffic. As long as the brand exists, it can continuously provide business opportunities and traffic. Therefore, for companies, they must do brand advertising to establish their brand in order to obtain a steady stream of free traffic.

For a product to gain "widespread recognition", it needs to be promoted through brand advertising; for it to gain "deep recognition", it needs to be promoted through social media content; and for it to "in-depth explanation of the product's advantages and faster subscription", it needs to rely on online precision advertising, offline shopping guides, live streaming and other means. If a company wants to grow bigger, there is nothing that cannot be lacking.

Traffic is the result of a brand winning people’s hearts. Why does Taobao have so much traffic? Because "the omnipotent Taobao" has formed an inherent impression in everyone's mind, why does Tmall flagship store have traffic? Because everyone knows that "brand flagship stores are all on Tmall, go to Tmall to find brands." Similar examples include JD Finance's "A friend who understands finance, go to JD Finance for financial management", Jomoo Wang's "The world's leading men's trousers expert in sales", Feihe's "More suitable for the physique of Chinese babies", and Qia Qia's "Mastering the key preservation technology, choose Qia Qia for your daily nuts." These brands have formed a conditioned reflex in the minds of consumers, thus forming a continuous and stable traffic.

The formation of this conditioned reflex is closely related to the elevator media that consumers come into contact with every day. The "2020 Chinese Advertising Slogan Inventory" released by Ipsos this year shows that among the TOP10 popular, highly recognizable, and mind-occupying advertising slogans in 2020, 47% of consumer awareness channels come from TV advertising, 56% from Internet media, and 83% from elevator media.

It can be said that from 2015 to today, most people’s collective brand memory is basically linked to Focus Media. There are two key points here: the first is the position it occupies, which can affect 300 million core middle-class groups who must work and carry out activities in cities every day; the second is its way of communication, which makes it the only window for inputting information in a certain period of time. With these two major advantages, coupled with its constantly enriched methodology, it has become one of the few core platforms that are still growing and detonating brands in this era.

In conclusion:

A company's vision and values ​​determine its brand and marketing focus strategy. If an enterprise wants to be evergreen, it must have strong brand assets. This requires it to have long-term thinking in its market activities, and to carry out advertising and marketing activities with the idea that "brand building is an investment". It should adjust its own demands to establish close relationships with consumers and let the brand be deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, because the brand is the moat! Brand is not only the core element to increase premium, enhance customer loyalty and improve customer retention rate. A brand is a guarantee of quality, a premium capability, and an emotional resonance with consumers. A brand reduces the cost of communication and transactions with consumers and enhances value perception and expectations. Whether it is retaining old customers or attracting new customers, whether it is increasing sales or raising prices, the brand is the core key.

Author: Media 360

Source: Media 360