How to analyze brand marketing from the perspective of “people, goods and places”?

With the booming development of new consumer brands, more and more companies are no longer focusing only on traditional sales logic, but are beginning to explore marketing methods from the perspective of brand building. Brand marketing is dynamic, systematic, and requires both innovation and change. The significance of formulating the right marketing strategy to the brand is self-evident. To this end, the author will disassemble the key stages of brand marketing from the three perspectives of people, goods, and venues, and answer the following questions:

• From factory to shelf, what is the biggest challenge in brand marketing?
• From channel distribution to media communication, there are two paths that need to be addressed to achieve sales.
• How to establish user relationships and connect people and goods?

1. From factory to shelf, what is the biggest challenge in brand marketing?

Let’s first look at how “what is marketing” was originally defined in history.

In 1922, Fred Clark gave the initial definition of marketing. He believed that marketing is the transfer of goods from factories to consumers' homes. This transfer process and the series of work done by distribution are called marketing. In 1960, the American Marketing Association continued to define marketing as: how to guide the flow of goods from producers to consumers. The series of business activities in between is called marketing.

The original definition of marketing is: "Marketing is circulation" , which is the circulation process of "how do I move a product from the factory to the shelf, and finally to the consumer's home".

So what challenges does it encounter in the process of commodity circulation? We believe that the real challenge in the process of commodity circulation is not in the process of distribution or moving goods from factories to shelves.

It’s about insight and how to move products from the shelves into consumers’ lives. This is the most important issue in marketing.

From a market perspective, if you invest manpower, material resources and financial resources, your products can eventually be moved from the market to the shelves.

Whether you open a direct store or find a distributor, whether you enter a supermarket or KV, or open a Taobao store or JD store, from the factory to the shelf, it is an easy problem to solve.

However, the biggest challenge in marketing is how to move this product from the shelf to the lives of consumers.

We say that from the perspective of circulation, the biggest challenge to marketing is not distribution but sales promotion.

Next, I will use a case to illustrate and share how we connect the shelves and get products from the factory to the shelves and then into consumers' lives. We know that P&G does a very good job in brand marketing, and the segmentation of its various shampoos is very clear.

For example: The core value of Rejoice is smoothness, making consumers' hair smoother, which is the core of Rejoice; the core of Pantene is hair care, protecting and repairing consumers' hair quality. The two products have different core differences.

So how do we do a good job of marketing for these two different shampoos to achieve better sales? Let’s look at Rejoice first. The greatest value of this product is its softness. Therefore, throughout the marketing and communication process, we must let consumers feel the function of smooth hair.

I remember that around 2006, Rejoice came up with a slogan called: "Start, make your heart beat."

This is in line with the general fantasy of Chinese men about women, especially for men who like the image of "long, straight black" women. Girls with black, smooth hair are most likely to make their hearts flutter. This is the value of smoothness.

Focusing on the core appeal of "starting and moving", all of Rejoice's brand marketing is themed on love, including the spokespersons hired by Rejoice, who all appear as couples.

From 2008 to 2016, the most representative communication campaign of Rejoice was the advertisement shot by Show Luo and Kai Hsuan Chen in 2008, which told a complete story: a boy and a girl were on a bus and they got to know each other because of the girl's beautiful hair. After the chance encounter, there was a date, then meeting the parents, proposing, and getting married. A total of 8 episodes of long TVC were shot during the whole process.

Because of this advertisement, Rejoice had a very good influence in China. At that time, Show Luo and Kai Hsu were hailed as the best screen couple in the advertising field.

All of Rejoice's copywriting is designed to show the value of softness and love to consumers, including heart-beating moments, can't let go, trigger a kiss, be brave to love, take this step; make love smooth, I believe in love again, Rejoice's wall of fate, etc. This is the entire marketing of the Rejoice brand.

Especially in 2014, when three spokespeople of Rejoice, Yang Mi, Kai-Hsuan Tseng, and Pace Wu, were pregnant at the same time, Rejoice used this event to do a large-scale marketing campaign on Weibo, saying that for women, making their relationship and pregnancy news public, and then taking this step to make love go smoothly, is a brave expression of women's inner declaration of love. This marketing direction of love guided the overall creation of the Rejoice brand, including how to hire spokespersons; what topics to post on Weibo and social media; which variety shows to sponsor, etc.

We see that it is love that brings an overall direction to Rejoice’s marketing, and this direction successfully allows Chinese consumers to feel the smooth function and know what value it can have in users’ lives.

Next, let’s take a look at Pantene, which is all about hair care, and can make your hair shiny, lustrous, and strong. Pantene's brand context, including a series of past copywriting, emphasizes inner strength, outer softness, healthy, radiant and shining hair.

From a brand perspective, these words not only make consumers' hair shiny, but also make their lives shiny.

Therefore, based on such a core value, Pantene’s entire VI is arranged around the golden design series, including the clothes worn by the spokesperson, product colors, etc. The purpose is to make you realize that its value lies in protecting your hair and making your hair shiny.

In 2019, Pantene launched a wave of promotional marketing for the start of the university semester in September. At that time, it invited two new-generation spokespersons to talk about how for college freshmen, going to college is the beginning of a new chapter in life, and they can change their hairstyle to make themselves shine differently.

Pantene communicates with young people in this way, allowing them to change themselves, shine, and rejuvenate their lives.

We know that many girls will cut their hair short when they are heartbroken or break up; just like a song by Gigi Leung, "Change your hairstyle after breaking up." Changing one's appearance and rediscovering one's unique value is a person's psychological state. So Pantene created a series of communications around breakups, encouraging everyone to rediscover their confidence and radiance.

Pantene's logic is very simple, it is all about hair care. The benefit that hair care brings to consumers is to make their hair strong and shiny. For consumers on the psychological and spiritual level, it can make them confident, independent and enable them to display their own value.

In what scenarios does a person feel confident and independent? Pantene chose the beginning of school as the occasion because this is when people have the greatest need to be confident, independent and to shine.

Therefore, Pantene gradually extended the function of its hair care products to scenarios such as breakup salons and college freshman admissions.

So, although both are brands under P&G, Rejoice is about love and Pantene is about breaking up, the difference between the two is huge. This is actually because users can perceive different values ​​in different scenarios.

I just emphasized the scenario, but please note that the consumption scenario does not represent the place where the product is purchased or used.

So, what is the scenario?

Scenarios refer more to the times and occasions that can best stimulate consumer demand and make consumers feel the value of the product.

For consumers, scenarios can stimulate their needs and accurately target the target group.

The targeted groups are different in different scenarios. To do marketing well, you need to overlap consumer expectations with the value of the product. Because the product is a portal that helps you find your place in the lives of consumers.

So at this stage, the most important thing is that you find the scenarios in the lives of consumers and occupy their lives. Especially now, various Internet companies and Internet products focus on user scenarios. The reason why many companies fail is not because their products are not good enough or consumers do not need them, but because their products cannot find usage scenarios in consumers' lives.

No matter what industry you are in or what products you make, if you want to occupy the lives of consumers, you must be very clear about what kind of scenes in the users' lives you are capturing; does this scene really exist in the users' lives, or is it something you imagined?

What I just talked about was the first advancement of marketing: from channel distribution to scene occupation.

2. From channel distribution to media communication, there are two channels that need to be solved to achieve sales

So, in order to achieve sales, in addition to providing a channel for consumers to purchase, you also need to convey product information to consumers through communication. Generally speaking, there are two aspects to sales:

1. Distribution issues: Can consumers get access to your products?
2. The communication issue is whether consumers can access information about your products and whether they know your benefits and advantages.

In the field of fast-moving consumer goods, people generally agree with the concept of HBG , which actually comes from two points:

1. Permeability. Can you keep up with the distribution of this product? Can consumers buy it whenever they want? Is it easy to buy?
2. Product exposure. Do consumers know about your product?

Information symmetry is critical to achieving sales. We know that there is always information asymmetry between companies and consumers. Consumers do not know whether the company's products are good or not? What's good about it? What is the difference between this product and competing products?

This highlights the necessity of marketing. Marketing first solves the shelf problem, then solves the problem of getting consumers to buy, and finally solves the problem of whether information is symmetrical. In the 1950s, the advertising industry proposed one of the earliest theories: the USP theory. This theory holds that companies should let consumers know what benefits and advantages they can get from your products in every advertisement.

By the 1980s, information symmetry had become a mainstream school of thought in marketing. It advocates actively sending signals to the market, telling consumers the differences between their products and services, making them visible, touchable and experiential, so that information between consumers and businesses becomes symmetrical, thereby promoting purchases.

Including in the 1990s, we look at the integrated marketing communications proposed by Schultz, which advocates that marketing and communication are integrated and that information transmission plays a vital role in marketing.

When we get to know the Chinese advertising industry, we find that they generally have two routes: one is high-end, doing integrated marketing communications; the other is brainwashing advertising through media bombardment.

The former is that companies spend a large amount of money on various media to surround the consumer group from all directions. This is the integrated marketing communication method that 4A companies prefer. The latter is mainly about some local companies making a fuss at the advertising level, shooting all the advertisements into brainwashing advertisements, and then bombarding the consumers with media to force them into their minds and make them remember.

There is a typical example of a brainwashing brand called Liuliumei. In a single advertisement, the phrase “eat Liuliumei when you have nothing to do” was mentioned 11 times.

Everyone thinks that information transmission is very important for marketing, but I think that true information integration does not start from the media, nor does it involve spending money like crazy to make consumers remember. Instead, it starts from the minds of consumers and uses labeling to make consumers remember and adapt. For consumers, remembering something depends on labels, which means that companies need to extract labels for consumers to remember during information dissemination.

Today is the era of mobile Internet, and corporate marketing cannot be separated from labeling, clickbait, and keywords.

For example, have you ever visited the SK-II Tmall flagship store? If you scroll to the bottom of its flagship store webpage, you can see a line of small words: Magic Water, Big Red Bottle, Little Light Bulb, Little Pudding, Ex-Boyfriend Mask, etc.

These are nicknames or terms given to SK-II products by consumers, and are not official registrations or filings for the products. What we often remember is not the product name, but its code and label. For example, the word "Fairy Water" uses a very popular term to convey the functions of SK-II Facial Treatment Essence.

Another example is the “Ex-Boyfriend Mask”, which is actually a skin care mask, but after using this code name, it not only expresses its function, but also expresses women’s emotions and attitudes.

This is the method of using labels to extract the typical features of the product and vividly describe the functions of the product, so as to circle users and connect their emotions and feelings. For example, meal replacement shakes for lazy people who want to lose weight are targeted at people who want to lose weight but don’t want to spend too much time.

The clearer the labels you put on your content, the easier it is for consumers to identify you from the massive amount of information, especially in today's era of information explosion such as the Internet and big data. In fact, the simpler and more accurate your labels are, the more your marketing information will stand out from the vast world.

After all, marketing is about helping the right people find the right products and achieving connection between the two parties.

I just talked about channels, and next I will talk about information. In the PC era, the main way for consumers to find things is to search. In order to ensure that consumers can find you, brand marketing is done by buying keywords.

In today's mobile era, platforms will use recommendation mechanisms based on data. Whether it is Douyin or Taobao, you have to label your brand and match your brand label with the target audience so that your marketing can be successful.

So, how to do core marketing in this era of mobile Internet? How to establish user relationships and connect people and goods? On the one hand, there are people. People are divided into groups. Different groups have different labels and different purchasing characteristics. On the other hand, there are things. Things are products of different categories and types.

We say that the key to bringing things together and dividing people into groups is labels. Sales can only be achieved when the labels of objects are connected with the labels of people.

How does marketing achieve information integration?

I think the key is not to spend hundreds of millions a year, or to get wide exposure in major media or all media.

The key is to attach the most accurate label to reach your target audience.

3. How to establish user relationships and connect people and goods?

In addition to considering how to connect information, products and people through channels, we also need to consider what kind of relationship we want to create between products and users. In 1985, Barbara proposed key marketing , viewing marketing as a process of interacting and establishing relationships with consumers.

We say the purpose of a business is not to create purchases, but to build relationships. Once a solid relationship is established, purchasing will be a natural and easy process. Moreover, the closer and longer-term your relationship with your users, the longer-term your profits will be.

Based on this route, CRM customer relationship management was proposed in 1999 - how to establish a solid cooperative relationship with consumers.

Including Kotler, the "father of modern marketing", who believes that marketing 1.0 is about products, marketing 2.0 is about consumer demand, and marketing 3.0 is about value marketing.

Not long ago, Kotler proposed Marketing 4.0 : establishing digital connections with consumers through big data communities, e-commerce platforms, content platforms, etc.

From these concepts, what he has always focused on in marketing is actually how to establish relationships with consumers.

To give another example, when L'Oréal entered the US market in the 1970s, its marketing focus was not on promoting the advantages of its brand and products, but on the concept of "Because I am important, I deserve to use such expensive hair dye."

This became an instant hit in the United States at the time, and the phrase "I deserve it" later became a slogan used by L'Oreal worldwide today; but in the 1990s, when L'Oreal invested in TVCs in China, it changed the slogan to "You deserve it."

Although this is just a change in pronouns, the entire logic of selling things has also changed: "I deserve it" is a user value; but "You deserve it" means that the product is very good and worth your use.

This has something to do with the relatively conservative values ​​in China at the time. Consumers were not used to making attitude declarations such as “I want something, I deserve something”.

So L'Oréal grasped this change in detail and changed its marketing logic.

It was not until 2018 that L'Oréal in China began to align its marketing with women's values. In recent years, L'Oréal has expanded its target groups to include not only women, but also men, and even some people who are neither men nor women. It begins to encourage diverse values, becoming "we all deserve it", thus blurring gender characteristics.

This is about building relationships with consumers. It is not only about information transmission, but more importantly, it is about socializing with users, interacting based on their lifestyles and values, and speaking words that they identify with on a psychological level. Only in this way can the brand establish a very close relationship with users. Therefore, marketing is the occupation of consumers' living space, information space and psychological space.

You need to use brand copywriting scenarios to lock in the market and occupy the user's living space ; use labels to define the brand so that consumers remember you and know you, thereby occupying the information space ; you need to connect with consumers and occupy their psychological space . These are what I believe to be the three most core concepts and three most important rules for achieving brand marketing.

Author: Empty-handed

Source: Empty Hands (ID: firesteal13)