Why does the promotional copy of the same brand have such a different effect when it is released in a different city?

Marketing is a war of perception .

When we want to place an advertisement, if we even get the cognitive status of the target users wrong, then we have lost the battle before it even begins.

Advertiser Q is a homegrown building materials brand in City A. It has been rooted in City A for 20 years and has a market share of 40%. Its advertisements can be seen on more than 20% of the city’s buses, so it is well-known to everyone.

At the beginning of this year, Q crossed regions for the first time and opened two stores in the neighboring city B. Similarly, it also hired a lot of bus body advertisements to run all over the streets, the so-called "brand promotion."

After running around for more than two months, Q thought that the people in City B probably already knew him, so he planned to take advantage of the peak season for building materials sales and work with stores in City A to do a factory purchase promotion.

In addition to the normal bus body and platform advertisements in the two cities, Q also placed some advertisements on the information flow platform specifically for this promotion, thinking that "this is the first joint promotion, so I have to make the impact bigger."

However, the results of the campaign were unacceptable to him: with the same advertising fee of 20,000 yuan, nearly 240 customers in City A signed up for factory purchases, while City B did not even have 30 customers.

"The creative ideas and targeting are exactly the same, and the promotional efforts are both strong, so why is there such a huge difference in the effects?" Q thought about it for a long time and couldn't figure it out. He didn't know what went wrong with this information flow ad .

In fact, if we review the entire promotion process, we will find that the root cause of this problem is that Q overestimated its brand influence in the minds of users in City B.

In Q's opinion, the buses on the streets have helped him promote his brand. As long as the activities are exciting enough, users will definitely pay attention and participate.

But he didn't know that in an industry like home improvement, which has low attention and high participation, it usually takes a long time to cultivate the process of users going from not knowing a brand to being willing to actively follow the brand and make purchases . During this cultivation period, if you want to run advertising for sales purposes, you need to consider many influencing factors.

The most critical thing is to examine whether users are aware of the brand and whether the degree of awareness is high or low . Only if they are aware and recognize the brand can they enter the sales circle.

Since awareness of the brand is the first step, it is necessary for us to first understand what brand awareness is.

Brand awareness refers to the degree to which consumers understand, remember and recognize a brand. It is specifically manifested in the degree to which consumers think of or identify a certain brand when they think of a certain category of products.

In practice, we can divide brand awareness into four levels based on how easy it is for consumers to remember a brand :

• No awareness,
• Prompt awareness,
• No awareness
• First, mention awareness.

These four levels are in the shape of a pyramid , developing from the bottom up, and the difficulty of realization gradually increases.

Let’s first talk about the lowest level of non-awareness , which means that users have no impression of the brand.

For example, Q's promotion in city B this time invested 20,000 yuan and received over 170,000 exposures, but received less than 30 sales leads. If the targeting and other delivery strategies are correct, it can be basically determined that the users in the city who are currently paying attention to decoration information have very low awareness of Q. Most users have no feeling when they see the advertisement, do not recognize it, and do not want to click on it; even if they click in to see it, they think it is an unfamiliar brand they have never seen before. "There are so many flooring brands. Why should I disclose my personal information to a brand I have never seen before?"

If consumers can remember a brand after being prompted or hinted, but do not fully understand it and only have a rough or unclear impression in their brain, then it means that the promotion of this brand has been somewhat effective and has reached the second level of the pyramid - prompting awareness .

Taking this case as an example, assuming that the 30 clues currently received by Q are all valid, then it is possible that some of the registered users’ understanding of Q is at this stage.

The next level, unprompted awareness , means that consumers can remember a brand without any prompting.

For example, when we mention cars , we will think of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, etc. When we talk about platforms for placing information flow advertisements, we will immediately think of Toutiao, Tencent, and Sohu . The advantage of being easy to think of is that once consumers need to purchase such products, they will give priority to these brands.

The highest level, and the most difficult to achieve, is first-mention awareness , which is the first brand in a product category that consumers can think of or name without any prompting.

Generally speaking, consumers have a strong preference for such products and have a certain degree of brand loyalty. For example, when it comes to cola, it is Coca-Cola ; when it comes to mobile phones, it is Apple, and so on.

Taking this case as an example, when users in City A want to buy flooring, they will give priority to Q, which is the number one flooring brand in the eyes of a considerable number of users in City A.

In view of the present case, although Q’s brand advertisements have been running on the streets of City B for more than two months, how many users with home improvement needs are there on these bus routes? What is the coverage level? How many people watched it? Remember? Interested? Wait, these questions are full of uncertainty. So when Q wants to do a big promotion, problems arise:

The so-called city-wide product promotion is far from enough to make users who need to buy flooring think of Q unconsciously. It may even backfire and "guide" users to think of the local popular and highly reputable brand X - such a result is obviously contrary to Q's plan.

According to the original plan, Q hoped to occupy City B just like he occupied City A. However, the less than 30 clues confused him. How should he promote the sale next?

According to the core idea of ​​"Positioning", advertising is only effective if it is presented from the perspective of the recipient of the information.

Q's mistake was that he ignored the feelings of the information recipient, that is, the users. He thought that the users were already familiar with the brand, so he just pushed the promotion straight forward.

But the user's response was: "Who are you?" and then ignored...

From the user's perspective, if you want him to pay attention to you and buy something, you must first let him know who you are. If he is interested in you, he will proceed to the next step of evaluation. If he thinks your product is good and needs it, he will pay attention to your recent situation and promotions and continue to generate the next step of sales behavior.

Therefore, the solution to this promotion problem lies not in the product, nor in the advertiser's own mind, but in the user's mind . What advertising should do most is to focus on the cognition of potential users and adjust advertising strategies according to the cognitive status.

In other words, if Q wants to replace Brand X and become the first flooring brand that users in City B think of in the future, the subsequent promotion will have only one purpose: to strengthen users' awareness of Brand Q.

So how can we enter the minds of users and gain their recognition?

As mentioned above, we can divide brand awareness into four levels according to how easy it is for consumers to remember a brand: no awareness, prompted awareness, unprompted awareness, and first-mentioned awareness. Correspondingly, we can also divide users into four levels according to their different levels of awareness :

• Insensitive users , that is, they have no knowledge of the brand at all;
• Growth users , that is, they need to be reminded to remember a brand;
• Hesitation users , who know a brand but only consider it as an alternative;
• Loyal users have a strong preference for a certain brand and a certain degree of brand loyalty, and they put it in their first choice.

In practice, it is necessary to focus on targeted creativity based on the demands of users at different levels in order to maximize the promotion effect.

Users at this level have a high level of brand awareness, so just giving reminders is enough when promoting.

For example, when launching a new iPhone, just writing the product name or releasing a product photo will trigger a strong urge for the die-hard fans to buy it.

If you want to do a promotion, you can also feel free to show your promotional strategy to users. For example, during the Double 11 period, the advertisements placed by major well-known e-commerce brands on information flow platforms directly put the promotional information as the focus of the appeal in the creativity. User awareness is high, and the creativity does not need to be convoluted.

Starting from users who are in the hesitation stage, brand promotion requires careful thinking. In theory, the maximum value must be emphasized , and the displayed value should be used to stimulate the needs of potential users and stimulate user conversion .

It should be noted that although users at this stage have already listed a certain brand as an alternative, the brand must have a sense of crisis. The opportunity lies in that as long as your promotion is in place, it can trigger a re-ranking in the user's mind, and may even make you the first choice of purchase. However, if your promotion is unpopular, you will most likely be kicked out as an alternative.

According to research by Dr. George Miller, a psychologist at Harvard University, the average person's mind cannot process more than seven units at the same time , which is why there are usually only seven units of things that must be remembered, such as the Seven Wonders of the World. In other words, excluding the top-ranked brand, there may be only six alternative brands that users can remember at most . So, if your performance during the alternative period is not as good as the other five, it will be easy for you to fall out of the user's attention zone, and you may even be forced to be squeezed in by a brand with outstanding performance at the next level.

For users at this level, you need to constantly stimulate their desire to learn more about the brand.

So under what circumstances would users want to know more?

When you have questions or hit a pain point.

Correspondingly, we can use the question-and-answer format, which is a creative template for solving problems, to stimulate users' desire to learn more.

A typical example is “If you are afraid of getting a sore throat, drink Jiaduobao .”

This creative template is actually similar to the approach of search ads . Search ads often combine problems and solutions into titles . The advantage is that the keywords are clear, making it easy for users to search and understand.

The same is true for information flow advertising. We need to consider the user's reading habits. Normally, in a title, the user will first see the words related to him, so presenting problems such as getting angry directly will be more likely to attract attention.

What needs to be noted here is that we are not at the first or second level, so we cannot mention a certain brand name right away. We can explain why we recommend a certain method or provide supporting evidence, and then say that this is an XXX brand product after the user has recognized it.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, marketing is a war centered on cognition . When users often feel that what you say is exactly the same as what they want to know and it happens to be helpful to them, they will be willing to learn more about you and slowly help you move up to their circle of purchasing options.

The promotion barriers are the greatest at this stage. At this stage, the most important task of advertising is not to sell immediately , but to let everyone know you.

A more appropriate appeal method is to fully present the original appearance of the product (category or concept appeal in the market) in the information flow advertising creative, in order to attract a group of potential customers first.

Take the advertiser Q mentioned in this article as an example. Because he is well-known in City A , he is the first brand that many users with decoration needs will consider. Therefore, when he directly appears on the information flow advertising platform in the form of promotional creativity, the relevant users will not reject it , and may even think that this is a useful information that is helpful to them, and they are willing to click and participate.

However, in City B, a brand new city, although Q has been running bus body advertisements for two months, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and coverage. For most users, Q is still a new thing , and it is not enough for them to be willing to believe, understand, and buy. Therefore, the entire campaign shows that not only the number of form submissions is very low, but the click-through rate of all direct promotional creatives is also very low .

In other words, if the brand and value have not yet been understood and perceived by users, no matter how vigorous the promotion is, it will be useless. Only when users have reached that level of awareness, will price promotion be useful.

In summary, how users perceive the brand is very important, just like who the copy is addressed to, which is the most important issue in the copy . Therefore, when you are handling an information flow advertisement, if you are not clear about the level of awareness of users you want to reach, then don’t rush to launch it. Follow the strategies mentioned in this article, find the right users and then make the next step of launch. As the saying goes, sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood.