Whose nerves were touched by Pechoin’s “high dissemination, low conversion”?

Recently, Pechoin ’s amazing advertisement has set off waves in the circle of friends .

From the initial approval of the advertisement to the mixed reviews after the conversion data came out, it completely aroused public emotions. Bigwigs from various industries also expressed their opinions, with an even split between praise and criticism, leaving us ordinary people unsure of whose arguments to believe.

But in my humble opinion, this could be Party B's self-indulgence or people just asking too much. As for the event itself, whether you support it or not is just a matter of different definitions of the event. We don’t need to worry about who is right or wrong. What we need to do is to figure out the essence behind each other’s arguments.

OK, let's sort out the mainstream views first:

• Ads without conversions = garbage
• Brands talking about conversion = rogue
• Poor channel = unfair
• Product is not outstanding = wasted time

Before discussing these viewpoints, let us first talk about some conceptual issues involved in these viewpoints: What are the differences between brand, public relations, marketing , advertising, channels, and products?

First, let’s talk about brand. Kotler, the father of modern marketing, defines it in Marketing:

A brand is a specific set of features, benefits, and services that a seller offers to buyers over the long term.

How to understand it? A brand is ultimately a feeling. In other words, a good brand can make me feel good, and even if I pay a little more, I think it is worth it. Brand building is a long-term process and cannot be achieved by just one or a few communications.

Let's talk about public relations:

Public relations is to use a series of purposeful and planned communication methods to enable stakeholders to form the cognition and perception we want.

How to understand it? Public relations, after all, is an impression. In other words, good public relations can make me feel very comfortable. To put it simply, I am willing to deal with you. Even if you are lying to me, I am willing to believe you. Public relations work is also long-term, and the information conveyed to different objects and roles is different.

Let’s talk about marketing:

If branding and public relations are theoretical, then marketing is practical. Its purpose is to profitably meet customer needs. Its essence is to attract and retain customers.

How to understand it? The reason why marketing is easily misunderstood as sales is that the purposes of the two are too similar. They are all about selling goods and making a profit. However, the so-called profitable satisfaction of customer needs in marketing is actually to use a series of means to let people know about the products and generate a desire to buy. In the end, a win-win situation is achieved: the customer satisfies his needs and the company makes a profit. Formally speaking, this is a one-to-many situation. Its focus is on the general public. Sales are often one-to-one or even many-to-one. Its emphasis is on personal psychological control. Even if you don’t need the product, the salesperson will make you feel like you need it.

Next, let’s talk about advertising: the above three aspects are basically all medium- and long-term matters, and strictly speaking, they are strategic issues, and they all point to direction. Advertising is different. It is more of an operating method.

How to understand it? Advertising has three main entities: advertisers, media, and presentation content. Its single purpose is clear, and it conveys a clear message to the audience. In marketing, advertising is classified as sales promotion. This is why advertising guru Claude Hopkins said: "The only purpose of advertising is to sell products." This is also the biggest point of contention this time.

• Those who hold an appreciative attitude believe that the coverage, exposure and discussion of this advertisement have achieved the purpose of "delivering a certain clear message to the audience."
• Those who hold an opposing attitude believe that if no conversion is brought about, it can only mean that the event was a self-indulgent event, which can easily make people obsessed with the carnival of data and ignore the actual effects. Especially in today's society, data falsification has long been an open secret.

Grandpa Deng once said, "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat." After the reform and opening up, result-oriented thinking has become increasingly mainstream. Coupled with the spiritual inheritance of advertising predecessors, more and more people like to talk about results.

After talking about advertising, let’s talk about channels. Like advertising, channels are also a type of operating method. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines channels as: organizational units within a company and the structure of agents, wholesalers, and retailers outside the company.

How to understand it? Channel means how and where you plan to sell. The first is whether you sell it by yourself, find someone to sell it, or sell it in partnership with others. The second is whether you plan to sell online or in a store. The most important issue here is how you distribute the products so that the audience can find the products and complete the purchase as soon as possible.

Finally, let’s talk about products. Why do I talk about products last? This is because the product is the foundation of everything above. Only if the product is good can the so-called strategies and operations mentioned above be worth discussing. If the product is not good, then everything is meaningless.

Let's summarize the above information:

1. Products (entities or services) are the foundation of life
2. Brand is the purpose, and we need to achieve this purpose. We must adopt two strategies: public relations (creating a good impression) and marketing (seizing the market). Under the guidance of these two strategies, based on the public relations strategy, we can choose advertising and events as the two means of operation to complete it. Based on marketing strategy, there are more means (the most typical ones are (4P, 4C, 4S, 4R)

After understanding these basic concepts, let's analyze the current mainstream arguments:

01 Ads with no conversions = garbage

There are two types of advertising based on their strategic purposes: the first is what we often call public relations advertising, which aims to let people know of your existence and have a good impression in their minds. The second type is what we call marketing advertising, the purpose of which is to get people to buy.

We won’t talk about the first type. Everyone knows that there is no conversion in public relations advertising. Its purpose is only to make a good impression on the audience. Focus on creating an atmosphere.

The second one is the focus of our discussion. The generation of purchasing behavior generally goes through the following stages: contact → cognition → attention → experience → paid conversion.

In other words, the conversion rate of an advertisement depends on the smoothness of every link. If there is a problem in any link, the user will terminate the purchasing behavior.

Well, it seems that advertising only plays a teasing role, and the conversion still depends on the control of the entire purchasing process. Then why is there a saying that "the only purpose of advertising is to sell products."

To understand this, we have to go back to the social environment at that time. Kotler once shared his views on the division of marketing eras:

• Marketing 1.0 era: In the industrial era long ago, industrial machinery was the core technology, and marketing at that time was to sell all the products produced by the factory to people who could pay. These products are usually relatively rudimentary and are produced to meet mass market needs. In this case, the goal of the enterprise is to achieve product standardization and scale, continuously reduce production costs to form low product prices, and attract more customers to buy. Henry Ford's Model T can be said to be a microcosm of this marketing strategy. He once said: "No matter what color car you need, Ford only has black." This is the era of Marketing 1.0, the product-centric era.
• Marketing 2.0 era: appeared in today's information age, and its core technology is information technology. Marketing work in the Marketing 2.0 era has become more complicated because consumers have more information than before and can easily choose between similar products. At this point, the value of the product is defined by the consumers, as they vary greatly in their preferences. In view of this, marketers must segment the market and develop the most advantageous products for a specific market.
• Marketing 3.0 era: the rise of the value-driven marketing era. In this new era, marketers no longer view customers as simply consumers, but as complete human individuals with independent thoughts, hearts, and spirits. Today’s consumers are increasingly addressing their inner anxieties in the hope of making this globalized world a better place. In the chaotic and noisy business world, they strive to find companies with a sense of mission, vision and values, hoping that these companies can meet their deep inner needs on social, economic and environmental issues. Simply put, they seek products and services that not only meet their functional and emotional needs, but also their spiritual needs.

The same is true for advertising. In the early days, information was not well developed and product distribution was more regional. You only needed to deal with the people around you to achieve good sales results. But in today's society, with the lack of boundaries and serious product homogeneity, the role of advertising is becoming increasingly diminished.

In other words, the more closed the environment is, the more obvious the effect of advertising is. Therefore, early TV advertisements and current WeChat soft-text advertisements can achieve good conversion effects.

As a non-native communication channel such as H5, the conversion rate depends more on whether a "seamless shopping experience" is created.

02 Brands talking about conversion = rogue

This is probably what all public relations practitioners fear the most. Because the ultimate goal of public relations communication is not to sell products directly. But the spectators who don’t know the truth will never understand.

Just imagine how ridiculous it would be if a public relations company was burdened with the KPI of selling goods. This is like sending a military strategist to the battlefield to kill the enemy during war, which is putting the cart before the horse.

I have said before that public relations work is to use a series of purposeful and planned communication methods to enable stakeholders to form the cognition and perception we hope for.

To put it simply, it means promoting and interpreting relevant facts from a perspective that is beneficial to the enterprise. The most famous one is this picture

Especially now, the emergence of opinion leaders among customers and the growth of their voice in the Internet world are enough to make advertising pale in comparison. Not only do they have a large number of connections on social channels, but they are also quite knowledgeable in certain areas.

The best way to avoid being misunderstood by others is to create a sufficiently transparent and convincing communication environment. This is what public relations practitioners should focus on most.

If Party A doesn’t understand, then it will be a disaster for the PR practitioner.

03 Weak channels = unfairness

As mentioned earlier, what advertising practitioners fear most nowadays is that the advertisement is too good, but consumers are unable to buy it.

For example, you are a fish chef, and the restaurant says it wants to assess the number of orders for your dish. However, your dish is not on the menu when customers order it. Later, it is added with great difficulty, but the restaurant suddenly holds a promotion, and your dish is the only one that does not have a discount. Despite this, you have won regular orders from some customers with your skills, and as a result, buyers are often unable to buy ingredients. In the end, the restaurant still holds you accountable.

For advertisers, channels are not something they can control. Due to various reasons, customers cannot get what they want in a timely manner, which will inevitably lead to loss of user interest.

Why do we keep emphasizing “seamless shopping experience”? The most fundamental reason is that we hope that customers will not be disturbed by external factors when choosing corresponding products. Now users’ attention is fragmented. If users quit at a certain stage, it may mean that you have lost this opportunity.

04 If the product is not outstanding, then it is a waste of time

We buy something to satisfy a need we have. Nowadays, commodity homogeneity is becoming more and more serious. Once any product becomes a hit, there will be countless competitors following suit.

In the early days, Alipay firmly sat on the top spot of third-party payment. Later, with the emergence of WeChat red envelopes , WeChat Pay rose in one fell swoop, and a situation of two giants competing for supremacy began.

There used to be a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) strategy in marketing, which states that advertising must arouse consumer recognition. And this recognition essentially comes from the product.

In the early days, USP focused on the product itself, centered on the product and the communicator, and rarely considered the target of communication. By the 1970s, the pursuit of practical benefits from purchasing had gradually shifted from meeting basic needs to pursuing psychological and spiritual satisfaction of consumers. After the 1990s, it was combined with brands. It not only helped companies sell products, but also took on the new mission of building and growing brand assets.

However, its core still comes from the competitive positioning of the product, which is the choice of the advantages that the company's products or services (services are an extension of products) have over those of competing companies.

In other words, product quality is the foundation. If you can't even talk about high-quality products, today you may be eliminated in minutes.

In summary, the above arguments are all correct, they just explain the events from different perspectives. As newbies, what we need to do is to clearly understand the differences and not lose our own thinking. Only in this way can you grasp your position well.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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