22 Predictions for the Marketing Industry

The marketing industry is changing so fast that it is not an exaggeration to describe it as explosive, just like the opening of "The Big Bang Theory".

"Positioning" has long been followed by "New Positioning", and Kotler has upgraded "Marketing Revolution 3.0" to "Marketing Revolution 4.0". This shows that in the field of marketing, it is obviously not feasible to rely on the market to verify theoretical models.

Marketers are always anxious about how to establish a systematic marketing system and try to figure out a mature marketing strategy. However, whether it is reviewing the existing industry status quo or looking forward to future industry trends, what ultimately matters in this volatile market is people's hearts.

After observation and reflection, Party A Finance has compiled forecasts for 22 marketing industries centered around "market, brand, platform, business, and user" for everyone to discuss and think about. This article has no commercial purpose, and colleagues are welcome to join in brainstorming and make bold predictions.

1. Integration of public and private marketing is inevitable

WeChat is the best sedimentation pool in the private domain.

Building a private domain platform requires long-term connections with users. The stable and large social relationships established based on acquaintance social interaction in the WeChat ecosystem is the best way to reach users.

If the private domain is compared to a ship, the public domain is the "great route" of the marketing industry. And every public platform with large traffic, such as Weibo, WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, etc., is a floating island on the route. Through a series of channels such as communities, short videos, live broadcasts, cloud stores, physical stores, one-to-one codes, micro-malls, service accounts, etc., public domain traffic is directed to one's own private domain, and turned into corporate user assets through marketing methods.

However, public domain marketing and private domain marketing must complement each other. For enterprises, the public domain pool requires continuous investment to bring in new traffic and conversions; and enterprises must accumulate their own private domain traffic pool in order to further improve their marketing repurchase rate, reach more old customers, and realize the conversion of user assets.

As long as the public and private domains can be connected, there will definitely be satisfactory market growth, which may be the final form of marketing in the second half of the Internet.

2. Private domain is not just SaaS

In 2021, private domain has become a hot word again. Many companies have achieved marketing results that are envied by their peers with the help of private domains. But more companies enter the market with great ambition and end up with embarrassment.

Private domain is not just a tool or SaaS, and it is not enough to just introduce a system. The traditional framework in the broad public domain will not undergo a qualitative change simply because of the introduction of a SaaS system, nor will it allow an enterprise to soar on the spot because of one or two traffic fission activities.

The most soulful part of the private domain should be the design of the new corporate organization. New management model, new profit driver, new growth logic, and new retention strategy.

Let me give you an example: How can a company continuously interact with private domain traffic users during marketing activities? How to improve marketing innovation in both content and products? What kind of team configuration does an enterprise need to ensure large-scale production and services for private domain operations? This is a "big job" that requires a complete transformation, and requires meticulous management of every detail.

3. Look forward to interactive advertising 3.0

As long as business does not solidify, advertising will never be out of date.

The 1.0 era of interactive advertising can perhaps be traced back to the text message interaction in the television era. "Edit 'male name' A 'female name' and send a text message to xxx to measure the love index of couples." Such primitive interaction became the beginning of public participation.

H5 in the 2.0 era was all the rage, whether it was games, draws, tests, or narratives, they were all great at sweeping the screen. The public who see this type of new interactive model for the first time are naturally very receptive to it. In the wild days, it was not uncommon for an H5 to bring in millions of dollars of goods. All kinds of companies, big and small, began to make H5s. The shoddy H5s not only exhausted the patience of users, but also quickly cooled down H5s, making them lost in the advertising model.

However, interaction will always be the magic weapon for performance advertising to attract users, and it is common to hear in the market that "the future will be dominated by interactive advertising." Currently, interactive advertising 3.0 has begun to emerge in the gaming field. According to data from some advertising platforms, the conversion rate of interactive advertising is 300% higher than that of video advertising in the same advertising position.

The future of the advertising industry will definitely be driven by the dual wheels of interactive advertising and video advertising.

4. Brand-effect integration is a false proposition

Brand effectiveness is undoubtedly the hottest word in the marketing circle in the past two years. In the era of Internet traffic, the influence of performance advertising has been further amplified, digital technology has made the three elements of people, goods and places more closely connected, and the public's consumption and decision-making path has been further shortened.

“Product and sales integration” is a false proposition. Brand and effect are not separated in themselves; they are two sides of the same coin. When a brand is strong enough, in every marketing campaign, brand elements such as symbols, sounds, images, and tonality will be the bait that evokes consumers' brand associations and memories, triggers positive experiences, and enhances the consumer information intended to be conveyed in marketing behavior.

Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral economics, introduced the operating mechanism of the human brain at the award ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002: it is the illogical intuition and subconscious department that dominates all people's daily decisions and unconscious behaviors.

Kahneman has a very vivid metaphor: thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; you can do it if you want to, but you won’t do it unless you have to.

The form, value and multi-scenario linkage of brand advertising will be redefined.

Whether it is "quality" or "effectiveness", companies always need to find content that matches their own values ​​and is liked by the audience in order to establish a close connection with consumers.

5. Youzan is not as good as Weimob in the short term

The epidemic has caused many businesses to transform themselves online and save themselves, and SaaS products have returned to the public eye. In the past year, Youzan and Weimao, which help companies open stores, have become the first step for many companies to transform online.

Although Youzan and Weimao are in the same field, their early strategic paths were different.

Specifically, Youzan's initial positioning was a "private domain traffic operation tool" that only provided tools to serve merchants, but would not actively help merchants operate and obtain traffic. WeMall is a service provider that focuses on e-commerce SaaS and expands its functional boundaries. Its core businesses include SaaS products and precision marketing.

WeMall has achieved its own closed loop by providing precise marketing services such as agency operation and advertising placement, which is also the core reason why it can make profits while Youzan is still in a state of turning from negative to loss.

At present, Youzan has transformed its core basic business strategies, which include lowering the threshold for small and medium-sized businesses, serving large customers with industry solutions, and creating a complete merchant ecosystem. This direction adjustment is indeed in line with market rules, but it also makes Youzan's own business structure overlap with WeMall.

Faced with the first-mover advantage of WeMall's vast user base and recognition, it is preliminarily judged that Youzan will be pushed into a very passive position by WeMall in the short term.

6. The biggest enemy of Weimeng Youzan is Jingdong Shangling

JD.com’s Shangling did not attract public attention until it went online at the end of 2020.

Official data shows that Shangling is based on JD.com's core e-commerce products and technologies, and mainly provides one-stop SaaS solutions for industrial belts, traditional retail, etc.

Relying on JD.com's own supply chain advantages, JD.com Shangling can provide a high-quality and rich product selection pool. Its digital empowerment of retail stores is naturally a higher level than pure online service providers such as WeMall and Youzan.

At the same time, based on JD.com’s own platform data and analysis capabilities, Shangling can make more realistic judgments about customer group consumption habits based on store consumption data, demographic characteristics and other data analysis, helping merchants to accurately locate target customer groups in the short term, thereby helping them to more accurately locate target customers, empowering merchants to understand their own customers and teaching them how to “fish”.

Therefore, it is the biggest enemy of WeMall and Youzan. Three years later, we will meet again and see the result. This post will be used as a testimony.

7. The positive news for Moutai is a joke, but the positive news for Focus Media is a fact

Everything is "good for Moutai" and it has almost become the metaphysics of A-shares.

If the performance of the company purchased is good, it is good for Moutai, because people want to drink Moutai to celebrate; if the dividend performance of the company purchased is poor, it is also good for Moutai, because people want to drink to relieve their sorrow.

But in fact, the company making money and the good news for Moutai is a joke, while the good news for Focus Media is the truth. Party A Finance has already mentioned this in the previous article "The good news for Moutai is a joke, while the good news for Focus Media is the fact". Because the performance of the company you buy is good, advertising is needed, especially when new consumer brands are constantly emerging.

New consumer brands have completed the growth path that traditional brands took 5-10 years to achieve in just 2-3 years. They can quickly seize the time window and grab consumers' attention through saturation, bombardment and exposure, thereby establishing brand awareness and trust, and thus taking the place of traditional brands. Behind the bombardment of new consumer brands,

As its share in advertising increases, it is Focus Media, a long-established offline media, that is increasingly benefiting.

Data shows that in 2020, Focus Media achieved operating revenue of 12.097 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company of 4.004 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 113.51%. In addition, Focus Media's growth continued in 2021: Focus Media's operating income in the first quarter of 2021 increased by 85.35% year-on-year; and its net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.368 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3511.27%. At the same time, it is expected that revenue will continue to grow further in the second quarter of 2021. In the first half of the year, Focus Media expects to achieve a net profit of 2.83 billion to 2.98 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 243.7% to 261.91%.

For advertising and marketing, the closer you can reach users, the more important it is.

8. iQiyi’s ability to attract money has been underestimated

iQiyi is definitely underrated.

The emergence of the theater mode is not only an upgrade for the long video industry, but also an opportunity for the audience to vote with their feet.

The era of theater brands, represented by "Misty Theater", with type focus, brand-based operations and high-quality, has arrived, and will be iQiyi's main battlefield.

Theatricalization will undoubtedly meet the segmented needs of mainstream audiences, reach the mainstream population through different interest tags, provide fertile ground for the explosion of popular products, and further stimulate major content producers and suppliers from the content production supply side.

At the same time, circle traffic can be accurately delivered, the branding model brings multi-dimensional business possibilities, and also gives birth to more monetization models for high-quality IP collections. The emergence of the theater label model has defined precise and hot-spot groups for brand marketing, extended the value cycle of theater marketing, and made the effects more focused.

There is also Qilin, which focuses on regional marketing on iQiyi. How regional brands can break through the circle has always been a difficult problem, but iQiyi Qilin may have recently found a way to do so. With the self-produced drama "Wind from Luoyang" as the main line, the Luoyang regional market will be revitalized, and then continuous promotion will be carried out to achieve long-term conversion.

Different from the traditional marketing model of "processing materials on supplied materials", iQiyi can intervene and play a role at the front end of the company's customer acquisition chain by putting value in front, thereby fully highlighting iQiyi's differentiated advantages.

We have reason to believe that regional marketing such as iQiyi Qilin will create double or even triple growth.

9. Smart screens will be a major driving force for commercial districts

The future is bound to be an era of interconnection of all things, and offline scene screens are destined to become popular in various shopping malls and plazas.

Offline scene screens will become the infrastructure of offline commercial scenes, and their role will be immeasurable. Among them, the interactive smart screen will be the best entry point for directing offline shopping mall traffic online. Through dual-screen interactive gameplay such as large screen (offline scene screen) and small screen (mobile phone), the dialogue mode between traditional business and offline customer flow will be rewritten, and the importance of business districts as offline traffic aggregation pools will also be re-examined.

As the foundation of the Internet of Everything, offline scene screens will achieve "time and space travel". The result of concentrated deployment of offline supermarkets will be the linkage of thousands of screens across time and space, becoming a carrier for upgrading traffic monetization channels and forming a closed loop of online and offline scene marketing.

10. Ground advertising: old mines produce new output

It is not difficult to find that there is actually a common idea running through the first five to nine: the competition for offline traffic is fierce, but offline traffic is actually "old mine produces new materials" and is rejuvenated.

Party A Finance believes that ground advertising, as the core carrier of offline traffic, will become a new growth point in the advertising and marketing industry in the future. Compared with online advertising that relies on big data and other precise delivery methods, the advantages of ground advertising are:

——Be closer to consumers and have more frequent contact with them on a daily basis;

——It will continue to appear in the user's field of vision during the delivery period and will not cause user fatigue or disgust;

——Some delivery scenarios are closely related to the products, making it easier to create associations between brands and products.

Of course, as one of the most primitive types of advertising, the advantages of ground advertising have been fully analyzed by predecessors, so I will not go into details here. At a time when the growth of Internet traffic is slowing down, instead of competing with other brands for online sales, it is better to shift focus and return to offline sales.

After all, the simpler it is, the more truth it has.

11. The new consumption battlefield has not yet begun

During this year’s 618, Tmall released a list with 459 new brands, ranking first in its niche segment.

From Li Ran in styling to Bebebus in car seats, it seems that the golden age of new consumer brands has arrived, and they are springing up like mushrooms after rain. However, Party A Finance believes that the current new consumer brands are merely “pioneers” and the main battlefield of new consumption has not yet begun.

Rice, noodles, grains, oil, sauce, milk, and tea, which are related to people's daily lives, are the real hidden giants. The "liquid gold" that is highly sought after by the capital market, such as Haitian Flavor Industry and Golden Dragon Fish, is worth hundreds of billions of yuan, but has also entered a period of stock price adjustment in recent days.

Get to the bottom of it. The reason is that although these companies have built brand moats, similar products are mostly highly substitutable, and the emergence of antitrust laws has left many opportunities for them to take advantage.

Although the sub-sectors are all vertical categories, their respective ceilings are limited. The above-mentioned consumer goods that support the daily lives of ordinary people are naturally endowed with vast markets and rigid demand attributes. Ice cream, beverages, and even beauty products are just outposts. The main battlefield for new consumer brands should take place in these tracks.

12. Tmall’s innovation capabilities will be differentiated

In the marketing circle, there used to be a joke that the three unified marketing strategies for the rise of new consumer brands are: the first step is to post 5,000 reviews on Xiaohongshu; the second step is to post 2,000 answers on Zhihu; the third step is to get top IP anchors such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and then build channels with mid-level anchors on Douyin and Kuaishou. After all these steps, the basic prototype of the new brand will be created.

The specific operation is certainly not that simple, but from this joke it is not difficult to find that the era of relying solely on Tmall and Taobao to create new things has passed. Short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, interest social platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo, and e-commerce such as JD.com have diverted too much attention.

Tmall’s ability to incubate and control the growth of new consumer brands will only become weaker and weaker.

13. Weibo is still the first frontier of public domain marketing

There is no doubt that although Weibo seems to be on the decline, it is still the first frontier of public domain marketing.

Here is a bold prediction. As the first launcher of corporate Blue V, Weibo is likely to redefine commercial Blue V and even provide a sub-table-level traffic entrance. This should be a new opportunity for Weibo's commercialization.

After all, apart from the entertainment economy, there are too many new consumer brands that need a voice channel. This channel must include: immediacy, interactivity, and officiality, and it must have sufficient social voice and a deep enough public domain traffic pool for new brands to tap into and divert traffic.

The above points can only be made through Weibo.

14. Video accounts do not have traffic dividends

In the era of mobile Internet, the logic of traffic marketing is becoming ineffective, and the epidemic has accelerated this process.

"Video accounts have no traffic dividends" is actually a positive judgment, because I believe in Zhang Xiaolong's control over the product. As long as he is at the helm, the WeChat ecosystem will not see any slogan-shouting movement, but will continue to move forward step by step.

Looking back to 2014, as soon as mini programs were launched, they became almost the most fashionable and hottest industry trend. Countless people believed that this was a huge wave of dividends, and they made plans, invested, and prepared for a feast of traffic. However, to this day, mini programs still exist in a subtle and silent way, without showing any overwhelming momentum.

Although it has quietly changed the WeChat ecosystem and the pattern of corporate online transformation; although now almost no company can leave the mini program.

Party A Finance speculates that it will take at least three years for the video account ecosystem to mature, and it will still grow in an equal, fair, rational and restrained way, rather than forcing growth by using traffic dividends.

This is the confidence of WeChat.

15. Video accounts have brand dividends

There are millions of merchants in the Taobao ecosystem, millions of internet celebrities in the Douyin and Kuaishou ecosystems, and millions of big public accounts in the WeChat ecosystem?

If we count merchant brand accounts, of course there are some, especially since many companies have linked to a series of tools such as shopping malls, online services, membership systems, and after-sales service through service accounts. If we add the video account ecosystem, is it possible for millions of new brands to emerge?

Those new brands that strive for self-reliance, or classic brands that believe in long-termism and meet various needs, gather in the video account and fight fairly, which may be where the brand dividends lie.

After all, there is no fairer and more suitable venue for public-private domain conflicts than WeChat.

16. Li Jiaqi’s video account project is worth a gamble

It is no secret that Li Jiaqi has joined the video account. This is one of the most worthwhile projects to gamble on in the future.

Currently, Li Jiaqi’s own private domain traffic is mainly composed of the official account "Li Jiaqi Austin", the corporate WeChat "Jiaqi Assistant" and the "Li Jiaqi Official Fan Group". The sedimentation link eventually leads to the community, which provides users with more refined products and services by collecting users' geographical and skin type information.

In the current ecology, the fan community is a private domain carrier that exists for four links, including live broadcast previews, after-sales service, product collection, and lottery. It is also the core channel for Li Jiaqi to repeatedly reach fans and improve consumer conversion and repurchase rates.

Public data shows that Li Jiaqi currently has more than 5,566 official fan groups, with each group consisting of 200 people. The number of fans in his WeChat group exceeds 1 million. From this point of view, the value conversion brought by his private traffic pool is immeasurable.

Isn’t it worth looking forward to the video account that is directly grafted into the WeChat ecosystem and can directly conduct live broadcast conversions among fan communities?

17. Crowd barriers have thickened

Party A Finance has conducted more than a hundred reflux experiments of various sizes with hidden information over the past year, and concluded that the differentiation among circles is more serious than imagined.

There is an invisible human wall that blocks the transmission path of most inertial thinking. The reason is that the public is divided up among more vertical and more segmented platforms or channels. Things that resonate with like-minded people may not necessarily be in line with public preferences, and things that do not resonate with like-minded people are likely to be drowned in the flow of general interest information, and only a few will be picked up.

Although the Internet has memory, it is also forgetful. Except for a few melons that can be kept overnight, most news spreads will end within two hours, and the long tail trace will not exceed 6 hours.

Unless there is a special situation, a balance between the resonance of the circle and breaking the circle across boundaries, and at the same time, the exploration and connection capabilities of new channels in marketing actions are very outstanding, breaking the circle marketing will be possible.

More likely, marketers will find themselves in an embarrassing situation of self-satisfaction.

18. Classic brand advertising is revived

Let’s take a look back at some of the most popular brand commercials from last year, among which must be Bilibili’s “Houlang” trilogy.

"The Next Wave" brought back the trend of "speech-style" advertisements. Later, there were the sequel to KFC's "The Next Wave" and Mengniu's "The Last Title". If we go back a dozen years, the other speech-style advertisements that became popular due to controversial topics were Jumei's Chen Ou's "I Spokesperson for Myself" and Vancl's "I am Vancl".

The audience's tolerance for flashy viral brainwashing ads has reached a certain threshold, but classic brand ads that are heartfelt and creative may have a chance to revive.

It is said that fashion goes through a decade-long cycle, and the same may be true for the advertising industry. Here is a small guess, perhaps Thailand's weird reversal advertising will recover faster.

19. SMS supports calling up mini programs

It’s not news that SMS can be used to invoke mini-programs. Previously, after clicking a link externally, jumping to WeChat in the middle page of the browser could also be used to wake up the app. Now there is no need for intermediate page transition. You can directly open the mini program after clicking the link.

WeChat also officially provides link generation capabilities. Through the server-side interface, you can obtain the URL Link to open any page of the mini program. It is suitable for opening mini programs from SMS, email, web pages, WeChat, and other scenarios, giving mini program users a short, flat, and fast user experience, which is a huge benefit for companies and marketing actions.

As a mini program rooted in the WeChat ecosystem, it does not need to be downloaded and can be used immediately. It naturally simplifies the steps compared to calling up the App and downloading. It taps into WeChat's huge user base, can achieve barrier-free reach to the target audience, greatly shortens the conversion path, and effectively improves the click-through rate.

20. Celebrity fan club mini apps may be an opportunity

At the beginning of the 21st century, celebrity-chasing websites were very popular for a long time, and Jay Chou’s Chinese website is still the main force. In the mobile era, many investors have tried apps for fan clubs and star-chasing.

These apps hide in the corners and grow on their own, but they are the first wave of harvesters of the fan economy. Let me give you two examples: idols and super star fan clubs. The former is more like a ranking software, and its idol list has almost become one of the commercial values ​​of celebrities. Fans of each idol sign in every day just to protect and sign in for their idols; the latter is more community-oriented. After registration, you can choose the stars of your interest, and then the software will provide exclusive and exclusive star content intelligently.

So the question is, since mini programs are so popular, why don’t fan circles develop mini programs for chasing stars? If it is made into a SaaS model, wouldn’t it be the perfect aggregation point for public and private traffic in celebrity fan circles?

21. Making things happen is good marketing

If something arouses the public's interest, then the logic of dissemination must be from basic text to pictures and then to video/audio. Therefore, marketing that creates trouble is good marketing.

Let’s take an example that has gone viral in the short video circle: the big V Da Lan received a Rolls-Royce from the home of the luxury car addict Lao Ji. After the two parties sent each other a video, it triggered a traffic frenzy.

This traffic is not simply the value of fans, but the precise user group. One video helped Lao Ji gain 20,000 followers in one day, receive 8,360 private messages in the background, import 6,300 people into the private domain, and the traffic import rate was 75.3%. Two days after the video was released, more than 100 million yuan worth of luxury cars had been sold, and another 900 million yuan worth of intended transactions were on the way.

Is this kind of thing good marketing? When talking to different people, you have to constantly update your tactics and stir up trouble. Obviously, Lao Ji, the car-driving drug lord, has done it.

22. Industrial PR is the destination

Let me predict that many traditional media people will transform into industrial media, and traditional public relations people will transform into industrial public relations. This is a good destination, and I personally suggest that the sooner the better.

For example, medical education, and entertainment advertising, industrial public relations and industrial marketing require advertising and marketing teams with industry awareness, not just people who understand marketing.

This may be verified by the cooperation case between Tencent Advertising and regional education. Dashan Education, a practitioner of OMO, Yuxiangjia, which focuses on aesthetic quality education, and so on... The quality education, vocational education, and grading of subjects for different school ages in the field of education all require some understanding of the entire industry in order to be able to target their efforts.

Author: Party A Finance

Source: Jiafangcaijing2019