Universal formula for best-selling brands

We see that some of the once "popular" drinks, such as iced black tea, three-in-one instant coffee, orange juice, bottled condensed milk tea... are disappearing from our sight and shopping carts without us noticing, and are being replaced by 0-calorie, 0-sugar fruit-flavored sparkling water, boutique instant coffee, NFC juice ("not-from-concentrate juice") and some alcoholic beverages.

On the other hand, this is the rapid rise of emerging brands:

Xiaoxiandun has opened up a nourishing brand track and has become the top player in the industry.

Yuanqi Forest took the first place in sales of beverages in Tmall and JD.com’s Double 11 shopping festival.

New player Mikolando Cheese won the double championship in the cheese category of JD.com and Tmall.

Yuanfudao has surpassed other international brands such as Xueersi and Zuoyebang...

Some of the once "popular" drinks, such as iced black tea, three-in-one instant coffee, orange juice, bottled condensed milk tea... are disappearing from our sight and shopping carts without us noticing, and are being replaced by 0-calorie, 0-sugar fruit-flavored sparkling water, boutique instant coffee, NFC juice ("not-from-concentrate juice") and some alcoholic beverages.

The two worlds of ice and fire reflect that the industry contains huge new consumption opportunities and rapid brand changes.

Behind the rise of these popular brands, there is a common "how to play"

Hot-selling brand = brand uniqueness × marketing penetration × channel penetration

A. Brand uniqueness

B. Marketing penetration

C. Channel penetration

A. Brand uniqueness

Let consumers remember and buy it when they need it.

At this point, there will be an equation in the consumer’s mind:

Problem = Category = Brand

For example: quenching thirst = sparkling water = Yuanqi Forest

In this formula, the questions will be standardized and the categories will also be standardized.

Three and a half

For example, Santonban has not changed in the instant coffee market for decades. The best-selling product on the market is still Nestle's 3-in-1, and almost everyone has various complaints about this kind of instant coffee.

The differentiation of Santonban comes from the upgrade of freeze-drying technology in the supply chain to match the current needs of consumers. San Dun Ban’s differentiated product positioning is cold brew and super instant coffee, allowing consumers to drink better tasting coffee.

Yellow Swan

Previously, there was a brand of eggs called Lanhuang. The biggest selling point of Lanhuang eggs was that they were sterilized eggs.

The technology of sterilized eggs comes from Japan. Because Japanese cuisine includes rice with eggs and Sukiyaki pot uses eggs as a dipping dish, there is a requirement for sterilized eggs.

Therefore, a new consumer brand called Huang Tiane came into being. The biggest selling point of its products is sterilized eggs. The founder of this brand went to Japan, introduced a full set of raw food standards, rebuilt the supply chain and achieved sterile eggs, and has become a very good new consumer player in the egg market segment.

Wang Baobao

Cereal has long been considered an imported product and was not even considered a breakfast item for Chinese people. Previous cereal brands such as Quaker and Westmoreland actually treated cereal as a healthy food, with the main target audience being middle-aged and elderly people.

However, in foreign markets, there are already fancy cereals targeting young people and adding various ingredients, and they have been popular in China's overseas shopping market for a while. So Wang Baobao seized this opportunity and launched cereals for young white-collar workers with the main function of meal replacement, which changed the target customer group of the cereal category in China and seized the opportunity from 0 to 1.

In general, new consumer brands include newly established brands as well as classic and mature brands. Emerging brands are rising in both mature and emerging categories with differentiation, segmentation and regionalization strategies; while classic and mature brands are activating the market and expanding their user base through youth, value and technology. Emerging brands break through and attract new customers in mature categories, or create entirely new categories to occupy the minds of users; while classic and mature brands reshape their image and refresh their products in mature categories, or expand and launch new products in new categories.

B. Marketing penetration

Brands need to be deeply involved in every interactive scenario, and marketers must be sensitive to the trend of deconstruction in the entire society, using digitalization, personalization, old attempts scattered outside the traditional decision-making field, and new common sense gradually evolved from emerging cognitions to reconstruct the decision-making field and open up a new battlefield.

Both old brands and new consumer brands face the same environment - consumer stratification makes traffic extremely dispersed.

Therefore, new consumer brands use the full network planting and live broadcast dividends to launch a comprehensive saturation attack, quickly establish brand awareness, and use discounts to drive sales.

However, as the disadvantages of information fragmentation that put users in decision-making difficulties and the damage caused to brands by the low-price live broadcast promotion strategy across the entire network gradually become apparent, marketing that truly impresses consumers will return to the deep exploration of brand value and focus on precise detonation in scenarios that users are familiar with in order to establish long-term brand power.

If we look back at the start-up trajectories of many brands, there are basically two paths: public domain and private domain.

In the public domain, most people first define a track, then make the content popular, stand out in a large number of traffic channels, and finally plant the seeds among a huge number of people across the entire network. The specific steps can be broken down into: tracks with great potential, innovation, breaking out of the circle, and then using scale to force awareness, penetrate sales through all channels, and solve the pain points of a large base of people.

In the private domain, product research and development innovation comes first, followed by user trials, evaluations, feedback, and iterations. The products are also iterated accordingly, and together with users, we create some accumulated products. The accumulated core seed users will become the potential for new product research and development in the future, so many private domain brands use WeChat as their brand base to accumulate seed users and form private domain communities.

Whether it is public domain operation or private domain operation, we must face the following four types of platforms:

The first category is traditional e-commerce platforms;

The second category is question-and-answer community platforms, which carry the definition and explanation of brands and communicate with consumers;

The third category is video platforms, including short video platforms and medium and long video platforms;

The fourth category is social platforms.

They have different emphases on brand building and user operations in different dimensions.

Among them, as a gathering place for people with the greatest social influence and consumption power, each venue of the mainstream short video platform has a relatively independent way of promoting content. Brands need to choose a suitable platform for promoting content based on their products and target audiences. Let’s take a look at the diverse features of the major mainstream platforms:

Under the new consumption scenario, the strategies and rhythms of major platforms have also undergone more extreme changes, as well as new grass-planting models that are more suitable for various brands and stages: for example, Kuaishou has started to implement an upward strategy, Bilibili has created a consumption trend among young people, Douyin has launched the PUGC model, and Xiaohongshu has created a private domain.

Position the crowd, select products, focus on building social reputation, penetrate the core circle as the entry point, and convert results into the core goal... In the process of realizing a new consumer brand from 0 to 1, every step of the marketing strategy is crucial.

On the basis of choosing the right track and mastering the core thinking, if a brand wants to stand out in the ever-changing market and settle into a mature brand over time, it must also master the eight steps of "single product explosion":

1. Anchoring: Anchor the target group and hit the consumer needs;

2. Enter the circle: penetrate the vertical seed circle and test the effect of a large number of KOC accounts;

3. Product placement: Leverage the influence of some KOLs/celebrity to implant products;

4. In-depth digging: In-depth digging of circle big Vs and waist-level KOLs;

5. Breaking the circle: The city-wide entertainment KOL content crosses the circle and attracts public attention;

6. Harvest: E-commerce live broadcast, live broadcasters with goods to promote conversion;

7. Retention: private domain operations of brand social and e-commerce platforms;

8. Optimization: Data supports continuous KOL placement optimization and product optimization;

C. Channel penetration

Brands need to build new traffic pools. The probability of consumers choosing products in general scenarios has decreased. After the probability decreases, you will see that the overall traffic of standardized brands is declining. Therefore, in addition to the original scenarios (traffic pools), brands need to expand new scenarios (traffic pools).

Of course, when expanding new scenarios (traffic pools), we often encounter two key problems in products. The first is what was mentioned earlier: how to incubate explosive products sustainably. The second is how to expand the product line to more categories. Specifically:

First, since the market space for vertical categories is limited, new brands tend to focus on one vertical category in the early stages of their growth. Therefore, they often seek to expand into multiple categories in the later stages. This challenge is relatively greater, and we have rarely found very successful cases in the market.

Second, category expansion involves the issue of brand awareness and positioning, so it is not as simple as expanding the product line, but also requires reversing the public's perception of the brand. For example, if Zhong Xue Gao wants to start selling desserts, how to change users’ perception of the brand from “a store that sells ice cream” to “a store that sells ice cream and desserts” is a huge challenge.

We have said before that this stage often requires an upgrade and transformation of brand positioning - from positioning targeting front-end vertical categories to positioning targeting back-end categories/technology/scenarios. For example, Zhong Xue Gao can change from “selling ice cream” to “selling sweets”; Yuanqi Forest can change from “selling sparkling water” to “developing low-sugar technology”.

Developing new traffic from product consumption scenarios is one leg of the journey, while operating user traffic pools using digital means is the other leg of the journey. For a brand to achieve growth, it needs to walk on two legs.

So, how to operate the user traffic pool using digital means?

First, build a visual traffic pool.

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Secondly, discover consumption scenarios within the mobile user pool.

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Again, identify valid contacts.

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Finally, discover the potential customer list and convert them.

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Author: Media 360

Source: Media 360