One article explains brand positioning!

A brand is the position that a product or service occupies in the minds of customers, and brand positioning is about finding this position and occupying it.

A brand that can occupy a position in the minds of customers has huge advantages in business competition. Let’s take the catering industry as an example. Under normal circumstances, the rental cost of the catering industry accounts for 25% to 30% of the total cost, but Haidilao’s rental cost is 4%, and Tai Er Pickled Fish’s rental cost is 11%.

The fundamental reason is that these brands occupy a position in the minds of customers. Haidilao occupies the position of hot pot, and Tai Er occupies the position of pickled fish. When customers want to eat hot pot or pickled fish, they will take the initiative to find Haidilao and Tai Er.

So wherever Haidilao and Tai Er open, customers will go there. In order to get these customers, the business district will give rent reductions to Haidilao and Tai Er. From another perspective, the profit logic of business district operators is to recruit brands that have their own traffic, such as Haidilao, Starbucks, Tai Er, and KFC, so that traffic is guaranteed, and then charge other brands.

The brands are the guests who come to the business district, and the business district is the shops that attract investors. For brands like Haidilao, the customers are bullying the store, while for other brands, the store is bullying the customers.

This is true offline and online.

For online brands that can bring their own traffic - such as Huawei phones, Apple phones, Tesla, Estee Lauder, etc. - e-commerce platforms will actively provide subsidies in order to encourage customers to download them to their mobile phones.

For brands that cannot bring their own traffic, the platform will continue to increase traffic fees. Online traffic fees are offline rent fees. Most of the work of e-commerce platforms’ big data, artificial intelligence, and engineers with annual salaries of one million is to calculate for these brands that cannot bring in their own traffic.

For e-commerce platforms, the best result is to prevent them from making money (all profits must be converted into traffic fees), but they will not starve to death.

The key core of a brand is to occupy a position in the minds of customers, and brand positioning is to find this position. The first step to finding this position is to establish external thinking.

External thinking seems simple, which is to look at your own brand from the perspective of external customers. But external thinking is difficult. Think about how often you can put yourself in their shoes when communicating with your family, colleagues, and customers? The first step in educating a child is to be able to think like the child, rather than asking the child to think like you. How many people can do this?

Nongfu Spring encountered a public opinion crisis in 2021 because it advertised that the raw materials for its sparkling water products came from Fukushima, Japan. Yes, it is the Fukushima that dumped nuclear waste water into the sea.

From the perspective of the company, the brand wanted to take advantage of the popularity of Japanese products and did not consider the cognitive status of external customers at all. This is internal thinking.

In fact, when Nongfu Spring went public in 2020, we believed that it had lost its customer mindset. If it went public just for money, it would mean a bigger crisis. The reason is that Nongfu Spring actually launched a product called "Tanzan".

First of all, most people don’t know the second character. Secondly, this brand name is easily associated with “anthrax,” a highly contagious virus. Within the company, they all recognize the name, so they think external customers will also recognize it. This is internal thinking.

Another example is the Dongpeng Ceramics brand, which promotes itself as a health expert. Yes, you read that right, it’s “expert”, not “expert”. Because he thinks he is a tile maker and an industry expert, he calls himself a health expert. Dongpeng Ceramics did not realize that "brick expert" is a derogatory term among external customers.

The correct approach can be referred to Nongfu Spring, Wanglaoji and Yunnan Baiyao.

Nongfu Spring perfectly mobilized this perception - natural water is healthier than purified water. It claims in the media and advertisements that purified water is too pure and cannot replenish necessary minerals, which is particularly harmful to growing teenagers. Although most minerals are taken in through food, customers have this perception in their minds.

Nongfu Spring did not create something new, but instead mobilized something that already existed in the minds of customers.

Wanglaoji is positioned as a beverage for preventing heatiness, and is distributed through Sichuan and Hunan cuisine channels in Guangdong. These dishes are spicy, and diners are anxious about getting sore throats. Preventing sore throats is a concept that customers understand immediately. For the same price, cola cannot prevent getting a sore throat, but herbal tea can. So of course you should choose herbal tea.

When Yunnan Baiyao launched the Band-Aid, foreign brands had already occupied a monopoly position. Yunnan Baiyao Band-Aid has found a niche: a Band-Aid containing hemostatic drugs. Claiming there is medicine that will get better faster. This is also a concept that customers can understand immediately.

Following the external thinking, we continue to move forward. Half of the mouthfeel is the heart.

Most of the time, customers buy the feeling, not the product itself. This is a deeper understanding of external thinking.

Not every super girl wearing Lululemon is a yoga expert. People who drink Wanglaoji as a beverage do not necessarily do so to prevent getting a sore throat. Not all of the main group of people who buy SUVs will go off-road in the mountains on weekends. Not all people who wear Nike really like sports.

They're just consuming that feeling instead of actually doing it.

Some people can't get used to drinking Moutai, and some people can't get used to drinking Jiang Xiaobai. However, people who are not used to Moutai will say that they are not yet accustomed to the taste of the liquor, and people who are not used to Jiang Xiaobai will say that Jiang Xiaobai tastes bad.

If customers’ lips become chapped after using a lipstick that costs 100 yuan, they will say that the lipstick is bad. But if they use a lipstick that costs 1,000 yuan, they will most likely suspect that it is their own lips that are bad.

Pepsi has conducted blind taste tests in the past, and used large-scale advertising to tell customers that Pepsi tastes better, which increased sales significantly. Crown Cola has also conducted a blind test experiment, and the results showed that Crown Cola tastes better than Coca-Cola, but it did not help increase sales.

The only difference is that Pepsi converted the blind test results into cognition and told customers through advertising. But Crown Cola doesn't.

Yuanqi Forest initially defined itself as fruit-flavored soda water, and later defined itself as sugar-free sparkling water. Although they are the same thing, five bucks a bottle of fruit soda is a bit expensive since soda water is only two or three bucks a bottle. Fruity soda is still soda.

But sugar-free sparkling water is very cheap at 5 yuan a bottle, because sparkling water usually sells for more than 20 yuan a bottle.

Sugar-free sparkling water and sugar-free cola are the same thing. Coke can also be made transparent, and sparkling water can also turn brown. But the clear cola just doesn’t feel like cola, and the brown sparkling water doesn’t feel like sparkling water either.

In addition, sugar-free cola does not seem as credible as sugar-free sparkling water because cola is known to contain sugar. Diet Coke is as untrustworthy as a square wheel or a round cell phone.

Why do we think that brands like Wanglaoji Beer, Bawang Herbal Tea, and Moutai Beer are bound to fail? Because in the outside world's perception, Wanglaoji is herbal tea, Bawang is anti-hair loss shampoo, and Moutai is sauce-flavored liquor. Wanglaoji Beer has no chance in external perception, and the same goes for other brands.

Following the external thinking, we move forward again. Customers think in categories.

Hotpot is a category, Haidilao is a brand. Herbal tea is a category, and Wanglaoji is a brand. Natural water is a category, Nongfu Spring is a brand. Economy SUV is a category, and Haval Motors is a brand. Smartphones are a category, and iPhone is a brand.

Customers first recognize a need and then search in their minds for a solution. This solution manifests itself in the real world as a category, which is usually named by a word. The success of a brand lies in occupying this word and becoming the representative of this category.

For example, if a customer is hungry, this is a demand. Then I searched for solutions in my mind and thought of hot pot, Sichuan cuisine, Hunan cuisine, sauerkraut fish, grilled fish, hamburgers, etc. These solutions are categories. Haidilao, which occupies the hot pot category, Tai Er, which occupies the pickled fish category, and KFC, which occupies the hamburger category, will become the customers' first choice.

This is the ultimate success of a brand.

The success of a brand is occupying a category, or it can be said that the success of a brand is occupying a word. Because a category is usually a concept formed by a word.

For example, Haval Motors occupies the economy SUV category.

Prior to this, Haval Motor's parent company Great Wall Motor was the second-to-last domestic automobile brand.

Hotpot brands that imitate Haidilao all focus on service. When Haidilao opened in their cities, their business was taken away. Customers will think that Haidilao is the hotpot brand with the best service, so why should they come to you?

The right approach is to create a new category, such as Banu. Banu pioneered the new category of tripe hotpot, and in the eyes of external customers, it is another brand different from Haidilao.

We always talk about innovation, but if the innovation is in an existing category - such as innovation in catering services - then it is creating new customers for Haidilao.

Banu Hotpot, which has created a new product category, has innovated in products such as tripe and duck intestines. This kind of innovation is sustainable.

Another typical case is the ROBAM high-suction range hood. Before ROBAM Electric Appliances created a new product category, range hood brands included Haier, Midea, Fotile, Sakura, etc. All of the brands offered free filter replacement or a ten-year warranty, etc., and homogeneity was very serious.

ROBAM Electric Appliances realized that Chinese kitchens produce a lot of fumes and that customers needed range hoods with strong suction power, so it created a new product category, the high-suction range hood. All of ROBAM Electric's innovations are focused on high-suction technology, which is constantly updated and iterated to build a brand moat.

Competitive thinking is a continuation of external thinking.

If we delve into the minds of external customers, we will find that competition still exists in cognition. Since customers consider Haidilao to be the representative brand of hotpot, it becomes difficult for other brands to make a difference in this category.

Brands with a competitive mindset will create categories such as Chaoshan hotpot, seafood hotpot, health hotpot, and mutton hotpot.

It needs to be emphasized that the competition we talk about in brand positioning is competition in cognition, and the cognition we talk about is cognition in competition.

Talking about competition without cognition, or talking about cognition without competition, is biased.

Let’s start with a famous failure case of Haval Motors, which is of course an extremely successful brand. But they also made a mistake in competitive thinking, and the cost of this mistake was in the billions.

Haval Motors' huge success in economy SUVs has ignited its desire to enter the mid-to-high-end SUV market. From the perspective of the company, since Haval can beat joint venture brands and foreign brands in the low- and mid-end SUV categories, it can also do so in the mid- and high-end SUV categories.

So Haval Motors launched the Haval H8, priced between 200,000 and 250,000 yuan. In order to achieve success in one fell swoop, the configuration of Haval H8 is designed according to the price range of 300,000 yuan.

But the customer didn’t agree. Because the Haval brand is closely tied to the economy SUV category, a Haval car priced at 250,000 yuan feels inferior to a Subaru or Honda of the same price.

In the mid-to-high-end SUV category, Haval Motors has encountered strong competitors.

Another famous failure is Coca-Cola. When Coca-Cola and Pepsi had not yet expanded into the third-tier markets, Fanta Cola relied on the channel advantages of its parent company Wahaha to achieve annual sales of 7 billion.

However, as Coca-Cola and Pepsi's channels expanded, Fanta could no longer be sold. Because customers think Fanta is an imitation brand, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi are the authentic ones.

The correct way is Laoshan Cola. Laoshan Cola adds Chinese patent medicine ingredients and Laoshan water to its products, in fact creating a real Chinese cola. So from the perspective of external customers, Laoshan Cola is not an imitator of Coca-Cola, but a new category.

A more correct approach is Wanglaoji. In fact, there is not much difference between herbal tea and cola at the product level. If Laoshan Cola is cola with a lot of Chinese patent medicines added, then Wanglaoji is cola with Prunella Vulgaris added.

However, Wanglaoji does not define itself as Chinese cola, but as herbal tea. Opening up a new category is crucial.

A little-known fact is that in order to make better herbal tea, Wanglaoji's parent company, Jiaduobao Group, closed its green tea and black tea brands.

The Jiaduobao Group believes that there are strong competing brands in both green tea and black tea, and it is difficult for it to stand out in other people's categories. Herbal tea is different, it is a new category created by Wanglaoji.

Due to trademark leasing issues, the Wanglaoji brand left the Jiaduobao Group and returned to the Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Group. Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Group has launched products including Wanglaoji Beer, Wanglaoji Cola, Wanglaoji Sugar-Free Herbal Tea, Wanglaoji New Tea Shop, and Wanglaoji Liquor.

We believe that these new products will disappear and even dilute the brand value of Wanglaoji.

Using one brand to launch multiple product categories is a brand extension behavior, which is not beneficial in the long run. We are more optimistic about expert brands.

For example, Alibaba uses expert brands such as Tmall, Taobao, Cainiao, and Fliggy to launch new product categories, General Motors uses Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, and Baojun to launch cars of different grades, and Procter & Gamble uses Rejoice, Head & Shoulders, and Pantene to represent shampoo brands with different positioning.

The phenomenon of brand extension always occurs because brand extension has short-term effects. Most decision makers often pursue short-term effects and selectively ignore long-term consequences.

In the long run, specialist brands outperform extended brands.

Wuliangye’s brand value was diluted due to its unrestrained brand extension, and it eventually lost its leading position in the liquor market to Moutai.

When bulk liquor that costs a few dollars is endorsed by the Wuliangye brand, then Wuliangye that costs a few hundred dollars does not seem so valuable.

In the long run, specialist brands outperform extended brands.

After an expert brand occupies a category, what needs to be done next is to expand the category. For example, Coca-Cola’s promotion of the cola category is a prerequisite for ensuring the continued existence of the Coca-Cola brand. The competition between Wanglaoji and Jiaduobao for the top brand of herbal tea has resulted in no one caring about the prosperity of the herbal tea category, and the end result is a lose-lose situation.

Hengshui Laobai Gan is the leading brand in the Laobai Gan category, but the potential crisis of Hengshui Laobai Gan is that the Laobai Gan category is not prosperous enough. The prosperity of a category requires the participation of many brands.

If the Laobai Gan category shrinks, Hengshui Laobai Gan will suffer the greatest loss. The correct approach is to learn from Dong'e Ejiao, which has continuously raised its prices, attracting many brands to join the Ejiao category. After the category booms, the leading brands benefit the most.

Because for Dong-E E-Jiao, its competitors are not only other E-Jiao brands, but also nourishing products such as Cordyceps sinensis, sea cucumber, and deer antler. Dong'e Ejiao not only needs to give customers a reason to buy Dong'e Ejiao instead of other Ejiao brands, but also needs to give customers a reason to buy Ejiao instead of other tonic products.

The combination of external thinking and competitive thinking is positioning thinking.

If we remove the circle of competition, positioning thinking becomes external thinking. If we remove the circle of mind, we get external thinking.

It should be emphasized that the positioning thinking model exists in cognition, not in facts. For example, Gree may not be the best air conditioner in reality, but it is perceived as such. For example, WeChat is not actually the inventor of instant messaging software, but it is perceived as such.

This is also the source of a controversial view in positioning theory: perception is greater than fact. We believe that correct brand positioning is to mobilize the potential energy in cognition and transform this potential energy into a real market structure.

For example, before entering China, Tesla had already been recognized as a leading brand in the smart car category. Although the fact is that it is not the best smart car, customers don't know it. So even if it is sold at a high price, it will still sell well.

Positioning thinking is very similar to the 3C strategic model proposed in "Built to Last". We still need to continue to emphasize that the difference between the two is that the positioning thinking model exists in cognition, while the 3C strategic model exists in reality.

Everything originates from external thinking. I am often asked how to achieve true outside thinking. Fundamentally speaking, the ultimate of external thinking is to attain enlightenment, become a Buddha, and become a sage. The Confucian saying "a sage is always selfless, and takes the people's heart as his own" means that a sage who governs the world cannot have a small ego, but must take the wishes of the people of the world as his own.

The Taoist saying "Always be free of desire in order to observe the wonders of things" means letting go of one's own desires and observing the truth of events. The Buddhists put it more thoroughly, "One should not dwell on anything and give rise to the mind", which means that one should not cling to any specific thing, and one should let go of desires such as greed, anger, hatred, infatuation, arrogance and suspicion.

External thinking is difficult to do, but there are some secular methods.

One is to observe other industries, because when you look at others, you naturally think from a customer perspective. Then look at yourself from the perspective of an external customer.

One is to look for effective tactics in the first-tier markets. We call it tactics determining strategy and strategy driving tactics.

The bottom-up arrow means finding effective tactics from the first-line market and upgrading them into strategies. The top-down arrow means implementing this effective tactic in all aspects of business operations.

Cannons, tanks, crossbows, and trains have all been upgraded from effective tactics to strategies in wars, and communication tools such as Taobao, WeChat, and Douyin have also been upgraded from effective tactics to strategies in business wars.

In Napoleon's time, cannons were just one of the tactics used to complement infantry and cavalry. The common way of fighting was to bombard with artillery, and then infantry and cavalry would fight in battle. But Napoleon upgraded the cannon from an effective tactic to a strategy, using it in concentrated, large quantities and quickly on the front lines.

Often the battle was over after a barrage of artillery fire.

The tank was invented by the British, and the French tanks were superior in both quantity and quality to the Germans. But only in the German army was tank warfare used as a strategic tool. The German army used tanks in a concentrated and rapid manner, with infantry loaded onto trucks and following the tanks.

The French army used tanks as a tactical tool and dispersed them among the infantry battalions. On local battlefields, dozens of German tanks often besieged three or five French tanks, and the German army had a clear advantage.

The advantage of a crossbow over a bow and arrow is that it does not require a lot of training and does not require much physical strength. However, in countries other than Qin, the crossbow was only a tactical supplement, and the bow and arrow were still the main weapon. Only the Qin State realized the value of the crossbow and equipped its army with it in large numbers.

Most brands’ attitude toward new media tools like WeChat and TikTok is like the French army’s attitude toward tanks. Just as a tactical supplement, recruiting three or five people is enough.

Others open offline stores to sell goods, but Perfect Diary opens offline stores to add customers on WeChat. The offline store is just her experience store and brand showroom, not the main sales channel.

For brands that use self-media as a tactic, they use offline stores to sell products and online stores to build their image. For brands that regard self-media as a strategy, offline stores are the image and online stores are the focus.

"More suitable for the physique of Chinese babies" is an effective tactic that Feihe Milk Powder discovered in the first-tier market and upgraded it to a strategy. Feihe Milk Powder holds 300,000 offline promotional meetings a year to explain to customers why Feihe Milk Powder is more suitable for Chinese babies.

Beingmate has also discovered this effective tactic, but has not upgraded it into a strategy. Beingmate simply uses "international quality Chinese formula" as one of the reasons to buy, printing it on the top and bottom of the packaging. Feihe milk powder puts this sentence in the most obvious position on the waist.

The business philosophy that tactics determine strategy holds that strategy exists in the front-line market in the form of effective tactics, and the decision maker's task is to discover it and promote it.

In fact, this is also part of **'s thinking. Tactics determine strategy, which comes from the masses, and strategy drives tactics, which goes to the masses.

Brand positioning must take into account the external customer's perception and the competitive environment in that perception, and also look for effective tactics in the outside world. But this alone is not enough. For example, Xiangpiaopiao took into account customer perception and emphasized its advantageous position in a timely manner, but it still disappeared.

Because after positioning our thinking, we still have to move forward.

Trend thinking.

This is also the reason why we are not optimistic about the Liangbaikai brand. The trend in drinking water is from purified water (cleaner than tap water) to mineral water (purified water with minerals added) to natural water (naturally contains minerals) to spring water (contains minerals from deep springs).

Each generation is upgraded from the previous one.

Boiled water has returned to the stage of tap water. In the minds of customers, boiled water is boiled tap water. At this stage, boiled water only relies on the channel advantages of its parent company Jinmailang. If Yilibao or Nongfu Spring's channels decline, boiled water will have a hard time.

Trend is the greatest energy.

The representative brands of new tea drinks, Heytea and Nayuki, are actually in the milk tea business compared to the cup milk tea brand Xiangpiaopiao. Xiangpiaopiao upgrades street milk tea into cups, while Heytea and Nayuki upgrade the ingredients of street milk tea to fresh milk, whole leaf infused tea and fresh fruits.

Nayuki, which leads the trend, went public in June 2021, while Heytea, which went public a little later, was valued at 60 billion. Seen as one of the only two brands that can become the next Starbucks.

Xiangpiaopiao, which missed the trend, suffered a loss of 80 million yuan in 2018 and only made a profit of 20,000 yuan in the first half of 2019. Once again, the profit increased from 20,000 to 100 million. By the first half of 2020, the loss was nearly 100 million yuan.

We will continue to talk about Haval Motors, which is the best example of predicting trends.

In 2009, Haval Motors was just a small brand under its parent company Great Wall Motors, which had sedans, pickups, SUVs and other models. The market environment at that time was: sedans accounted for 70% of the market share, and SUVs only accounted for 5%.

The consulting firm's advice is to focus on economical SUV models. What Great Wall Motors doesn't understand is that sedans clearly have a larger market share, so why should they focus on developing this aspect and instead invest resources in a small market?

The consulting company explained that SUV models will become the mainstream models in the future. In the 40 years from 1965 to 2006, the market share of SUVs, pickups and crossovers in the US auto market grew from 11.2% to 65.1%. What happened in the United States will happen again in the Chinese market.

Although sedans have a large market share, Great Wall Motors lacks competitiveness in this area and the future market trend is also downward.

Strategy is about leveraging strengths, avoiding weaknesses and taking advantage of the situation. Positioning thinking is about playing to one’s strengths and avoiding one’s weaknesses, while trend thinking is about going with the flow. A complete brand strategy is to combine the brand's advantages with the trends of the times, or to examine one's own advantages based on the trends of the times.

So we added another dimension to trend thinking: time.

The right brand strategy can speed up time. It took 40 years for SUVs to become mainstream models in the United States, but only 20 years in China. Because Haval Motors saw the trend and made this future come ahead of time through the right strategy.

So what is the correct strategy? Focus.

Concentrating superior forces is the first principle in war. One of the revelations of Mao Zedong Thought is to concentrate superior forces to defeat the enemies one by one.

The significance of focus is huge.

The right focus can make the future appear ahead of time. Haval Motors' focus on economical SUVs has attracted worldwide attention, with overall sales exceeding 5 million units, ranking first in the world.

Glass tycoon Cao Dewang mentioned Reese's book Focus in "Heart Like Bodhi":

Xibei’s success is inseparable from its focus.

Before Xibei came into the spotlight, its store was over a thousand square meters and it served hundreds of dishes. The area after focusing is within 300 square meters, and there are only 33 dishes. According to common belief, will business get worse after focusing?

In fact, it is precisely because of the focus that management costs have been reduced that Xibei has caught up with the trend of urban comprehensive stores expanding across the country, making Xibei the representative of northwestern cuisine.

A negative example is Quanjude. The large store model results in high management costs and is difficult to replicate nationwide. Less is more, self-sacrifice is gain. Focused thinking is far from popular in the catering industry.

Tai Er Pickled Fish only has one main dish, does not accept tables of more than four people, does not provide alcohol, and customers are required to pack their own food. The core idea is focus. Only by focusing can we reduce management costs and replicate our model nationwide.

We believe that the Tai Er model - focusing on single products, reducing non-essential services, and fast-food-style meals - will become the mainstream model for China's catering industry in the future.

We continue along the path of focused thinking.

Focusing is not just about focusing resources, it can also create an interconnected effect inside and outside the enterprise. Note that the effect of mutual empowerment is not formed within the enterprise, but rather inside and outside the enterprise.

Let’s take the new tea brand Cha Yan Yue Se as an example.

Outside the company, Cha Yan Yue Se is a new Chinese tea beverage brand that represents Changsha culture. Local customers in Changsha regard it as their own brand, and its Chinese style has also attracted the attention of customers outside the circle.

Within the company, Cha Yan Yue Se focuses on the Changsha market, focuses on a limited number of products, and focuses on mid-range prices. These actions allowed her to reduce internal costs and sell a 30-yuan product for 20 yuan and still make a profit.

The focus inside and outside the company has enabled Cha Yan Yue Se to establish an interlocking growth flywheel. This is the next thinking model we are going to talk about.

Worthy thinking.

The so-called matching refers to all the operational activities carried out by a brand in order to occupy a position in the minds of customers. Fitting requires consistency, synergy, and reinforcement.

First, internal operations must be realigned according to external positions.

Feihe milk powder is positioned externally as milk powder that is more suitable for Chinese babies, but it does not invest too much money in product research and development.

According to media reports:

In 2017, 2018 and 2019, Feihe's sales and distribution expenses were RMB 2.139 billion, RMB 3.661 billion and RMB 3.847 billion, respectively, accounting for 36.33%, 35.23% and 28% of its revenue, respectively.

The first thing that matters in commensurate thinking is execution.

There is no problem with the brand positioning of Betis Olive Oil (a brand invested by a top positioning company), and its brand potential is also higher than that of Olivilan. The outcome of the business war was that Olivilan, with its stronger execution ability, became the representative of the olive oil category.

Secondly, the allocation of enterprises should form the effects of consistency, synergy and enhancement.

Evergrande Ice Spring claims to be for beauty, then for the aroma of cooking, and then says it is specially used for making tea. This is a lack of consistency.

Guazi.com positions itself as a direct sales network without middlemen making a profit from the price difference. This has mobilized the external perception that "customers hate middlemen", creating a mutually reinforcing effect both inside and outside the company.

Nongfu Spring positions itself as a representative brand of natural water. Its public relations activities sponsor athletes whose "nutrients are easily lost and in particular need of replenishment"; it plans news and public relations events such as "stopping the production of purified water and advocating natural water"; it focuses on sponsoring events related to youth sports; and its television programs emphasize the differences between natural water and purified water, highlighting the nutritional content of natural water.

This is what matching is all about: consistency, reinforcement, and synergy.

We start with the external thinking of "perception is greater than fact" and move on to the three principles of worthiness. Cognition should be viewed as fact, but once the position in cognition is found, it must be implemented in fact.

Drucker believed that there are only costs inside a company, and the results exist outside. In fact, there are also costs outside the enterprise, and this cost is the brand communication cost. If a brand does not clearly define its position in customer perception, the company's operations will lack a consistent direction.

For example, Evergrande Ice Spring. On the one hand, it ties itself to Nongfu Spring, attacking the other party as surface water and claiming that itself is real mineral spring. On the other hand, it sells its product at a price of 5 yuan, which is much higher than Nongfu Spring. Not to mention switching back and forth between various spokespersons, wavering between using water for making tea, beauty and cooking.

Evergrande Ice Spring is simply the epitome of wrong operations. The ambiguity of your external position results in customers not knowing what you are and the cognitive cost remains high. The operating costs that enterprises need to manage should not be limited to internal ones; external cognitive cost management is more important.

If we look at the entire system of brand positioning from the perspective of focused thinking, we will feel that everything becomes clear.

Focus is the core tactic for building a brand. First, focus on a word, then focus on a category, and finally focus on a core group, market and channel.

Most brands fail to find the right word. For example, healthy tiles, oat noodles, weight loss toothpaste, heat-reducing beer, white appliance experts, etc.

Most brands that find the right words don’t focus on one category. For example, Wuliangye does not focus on high-end liquor, Haval Motors does not focus on economical SUVs, and Three Squirrels does not focus on nuts.

Find the right words and focus on the right category. Many brands have not continued to focus on a representative product. Either internal resources have not been reallocated, or the recognition of core customers has not been won.

Every step is a pit, and many brands have fallen into each pit. The one who is left is the winner, and the one who survives is the king.

We move on.

If we continue to focus correctly, is the task of brand positioning completed? No.

Brands that have completed the previous steps have simply become solutions and trust guarantees for customers. There are still many tasks to be done.

The founder of Heytea said: "The concepts we want to convey, such as coolness, youth, inspiration, and design, are very abstract and did not help the development of Heytea at the beginning. But once these concepts are strongly bound to the Heytea brand in the minds of users, that is the real success of Heytea. Even if the followers imitate everything I do, they cannot imitate this brand."

Having said that, we seem to have returned to the beginning: perception is greater than fact. Are customers buying products? Part of it is. But more often than not, what they buy is knowledge.

It is something on the cognitive level such as culture, concept, and spirit that is parasitic on the brand.

When customers give your brand as a gift, you become social currency. When customers regard your brand as a tool to measure the value of other things, you become a value tag.

When customers take pride in being able to buy your brand, you become a symbol of identity. When customers regard your brand as their purpose in life, you become a spiritual sustenance.

Many people confirm their self-worth through consumer brands. Brands also know this psychology, and only "you deserve" advertisements are available.

Does Nike sell shoes? Of course not. Let's end this article with insights from another marketing guru, Jobs.