How can cross-border e-commerce gain brand advantages?

Today, China's cross-border e-commerce is developing rapidly and the industry has great potential. Many people are entering the cross-border e-commerce industry. In cross-border e-commerce, in addition to product categories being very important, brand is also one of the things that merchants need to consider. The author of this article shares his thoughts on how cross-border e-commerce can have brand advantages. Let us learn about it together.

1. The current dilemma faced by cross-border e-commerce

With the complete supply chain efficiency of mainland China and the rise of third-party platforms such as Amazon, a large number of large cross-border e-commerce sellers have been cultivated, including well-known ones such as ZEBO, Aoki, Tongtuo, Paton, etc. These sellers occupy the top position on various platforms such as Amazon, usually with full-category operation strategies, hundreds of listings, dozens of accounts, and various wolf-like operation teams, with annual sales of over 100 million US dollars, which is very impressive.

These are also the core competitive advantages accumulated by these cross-border e-commerce companies during the cross-border dividend period, but is the truth as glamorous as advertised in various cross-border media? Or is it ultimately just the emperor’s new clothes? After calculating the financial data at the end of the year, how much is the net profit? According to my observation, the net profit of most extensive cross-border e-commerce companies does not exceed 6%, and some even make losses. After working for a whole year, they find out that they are working for Amazon for free. What's worse, their accounts are often blocked, resulting in losses of tens of millions.

The retail price range is mostly between US$15 and US$30. Many of the brands consider themselves to be "small and beautiful" and are not recognizable to consumers. Their products have no brand premium at all. In the minds of foreign consumers, what they buy are just products on Amazon, and they know nothing about the seller's brand.

What is even more frightening is that once the platform has any unfavorable policies, cross-border e-commerce companies will lose everything overnight; no users, no other retail channels; if cross-border e-commerce companies are still simply selling goods in 2021, they will soon be eliminated by the times.

Domestic cross-border e-commerce has cost advantages and product advantages, but no brand advantages at all.

2. Opportunities for cross-border e-commerce brand development

Now is the worst of times, and the best of times.

With the continued upgrading of consumption and the arrival of 5G mobile phones, we have ushered in an opportunity to develop our brands.

Generation Z is more welcoming to new brands. Channel fragmentation, the pursuit of personalization, and industry verticalization have led to the rapid rise of many vertical brands that understand consumers better.

For example, d2c brands such as Casper and Dollar Shave Club are revolutionizing the way online shopping works and are gradually winning the hearts of consumers of different categories.

Over the past five years, these disruptive startups have had an average compound annual growth rate of approximately 200%.

Manufacturing is our advantage. As long as cross-border e-commerce companies can master their own user data and understand user preferences, and in turn carefully develop products to meet the needs of consumers, they will be able to build a successful brand through branded operations.

What is a brand? Why is it necessary to build a brand?

To put it simply, a brand is about making others remember who you are and what makes you different at the first moment.

It is the connection established between the brand image and the consumer's mind, just like when one thinks of the car with the best safety performance, one immediately thinks of Volvo, and when one thinks of the mineral water that tastes a bit "sweet", one thinks of Nongfu Spring.

Brand is the most valuable intangible asset of an enterprise.

With a brand, consumers use emotional thinking instead of rational thinking when making purchases. Full trust reduces sensitivity to price and shortens the time it takes to make purchasing decisions. This also solves the endless price competition among cross-border e-commerce companies. This is the power of the brand.

3. 8 steps for cross-border e-commerce companies to build brands

1. Step 1: Market Research

Before a company does brand positioning, it first needs to fully understand the industry, field, competitors, and itself. Only in this way can you clearly position yourself.

For cross-border e-commerce companies, which often have multiple categories, they can choose to enter the category industry with the largest sales volume, because they already have a certain market share and user base. Without market share, talking about brand is just empty talk.

Market research includes:

• Market analysis: market analysis, market size, development potential, and current market share of the category;
• Consumer analysis: analysis of consumer tendencies, consumer consumption motivations, consumer decision-making and behavioral characteristics, and consumer media preferences;
• Competitor analysis;
• SWOT analysis of the company itself.

2. Step 2: Identify target customers and target markets

Based on market research data and the company's own conditions, choose the target market and target customers that are most beneficial to you.

For example, target market: European and American market; target customers: people aged 25-40 who like to listen to music.

The global market is mainly divided into the American market, the Chinese market, the European market, the Japanese market, the Middle East market, the Southeast Asian market, and the Australian and New Zealand market. Each market requires different brand marketing strategies and resources.

The target customers can be divided into different groups according to their age: 10-25 years old, 26-40 years old, 41-55 years old, and 56-76 years old; each group is in the same era as a person, with similar hobbies, habits and behavioral tendencies.

3. Step 3: Brand positioning and brand story

Brand positioning is the most critical link in a company's branding, which determines the future development direction of the brand. Once the brand is positioned, all the company's resources from top to bottom should be centered on brand building.

There are several ways to position your brand:

Positioning by product selling point:

Nowadays, most of the concentrated advertising bombardments we see on TV are positioned according to the product selling points, such as the positioning of Xiaoguan Tea: rare ingredients hand-picked at the place of origin + master craftsmanship; such as the positioning of the domestic headphone brand 1More: 1More-hearmore (multi-driver unit headphones). The method of positioning according to product function selling points is simple and crude, easy to understand, and quick to take effect. However, with the development of technology and the continuous upgrading of demand, companies need to continue to innovate, otherwise it will be difficult to maintain it for a long time. Therefore, it is more suitable for companies with strong internal R&D and innovation capabilities, which 99% of China's cross-border e-commerce companies do not have.

Positioning by category:

Finding a blue ocean of product categories with less intense competition, great potential, and high-speed channels seems to be the best choice for cross-border e-commerce positioning. For example, Anker, which is positioned in the mobile phone accessories category, has quickly become a Chinese brand in this category that can compete with the old European and American brand Belkin thanks to the rapid development of mobile phones in recent years and the globalization of the Amazon platform.

The category positioning method requires companies to have a deep understanding of user needs, constantly adapt to innovative changes, and develop vertically personalized explosive products.

Based on emotional positioning:

According to emotional positioning, it is to achieve a certain emotional connection with users. For example, Hu Tao Li, Jiang Xiaobai, and Heytea in China.

Interact with users and build brand IP through content and personalized scenario marketing.

For cross-border e-commerce, it is very difficult to position the brand based on emotion. The reason is that there is no localized brand team, no understanding of overseas culture and user psychology, and no ability to output high-quality content.

Therefore, if it is a startup brand, emotional positioning is not suitable. It is basically the managers' self-entertainment. During the promotion, it is difficult for consumers to form an impression of the brand and recognize it quickly.

4. Step 4: Branding and packaging design

Brand design includes CIS brand identification system, CI design, packaging design, website design, space design and all other brand images that need to be displayed to the outside world. Brand design should avoid frequent changes in design style and lack of consistency.

Brand designers need to clearly understand their brand definition and connotation, and design from the perspective of brand design standard management.

The current popular design trends are:

• young
• Fashion Brands
• Light Luxury
• lifestyle
• subversion
• Cross-border

Recommended brand fonts are Handwritten Fonts (natural personality) and Sans Serif Fonts (simple and straightforward).

5. Step 5: Product Planning

Products are the foundation for cross-border e-commerce to establish a brand. Huawei, as a leader in domestic overseas brands, has always insisted on investing 10% of its sales in product research and development.

For cross-border e-commerce, due to the lack of industry accumulation and investment in vertical and meticulous operations, it is difficult to have brand products that combine product industrial design, functions, solutions, and quality control. Most of them still rely on cost-advantaged products to compete in the market.

By building brand awareness through products, there is actually a great opportunity to create your own brand world by improving product design and quality control.

When planning products for a brand, you can follow the following series:

Brand flagship products – products with high-tech features, high-end positioning, establishing the height of the corporate brand, high-profile promotion, and concentrated resources for rapid dissemination.

Hot-selling products - without market share, a brand is just empty talk. Through hot-selling products, we can build the market foundation of the brand.

Potential new products – Explore potential new products that may explode in the next two years and get ahead of your competitors.

Promotional products - Promote products against competitors and undercut them on price.

6. Step 6: Brand official website

The brand’s official website is the most direct online display of the brand’s IP. The brand’s official website should serve as the brand’s experience center for its consumer-centric strategy, the base camp for brand content marketing, and the central hub for brand digitization and traffic diversion to third-party platforms.

The official website of a cross-border e-commerce company must have both e-commerce functions and clear brand content.

The most important things for cross-border e-commerce to build a brand official website are: website design, website UI, website content, website user community, and customer service support.

Regarding website design, if the website is built with Shopify, customized design is often required because the template lacks personality. The higher the customization requirement, the more expensive it is. Shoipfyexpert's quote is generally between US$5,000 and US$30,000.

The purpose of optimizing the website UI is to provide users with a better shopping experience. From opening the website homepage to the way the mouse hovers when clicking and browsing the product page, adding to the shopping cart, payment, order confirmation, and order logistics tracking, each step must be clear and smooth, especially for young people who lack patience.

UI design tasks:

• Determine the overall visual guidelines of the interface, such as visual style, module design, Icon, etc.;
• Interactive dynamic design such as Hover effect, loading effect, dynamic effect, etc.
• Define the presentation of the interface in different states such as error, warning, blank, etc.;

For products that are somewhat complex to use, such as smart hardware, consumer electronics and other categories, it is crucial to provide comprehensive support information and immediate and convenient customer service communication.

Many companies around me operate their brand official websites as independent websites, with the main purpose of selling goods. They put a lot of hot-selling products that they don’t want to close and do a lot of advertising and promotion. These are not very desirable for branding.

7. Step 7: Brand Content

Building a brand is a slow process. Instead of forcibly promoting a brand that users are not familiar with through advertising, it is better to calm down and create good brand content, and slowly penetrate into the minds of users through content marketing.

Brand companies need to establish their own brand content system: including: product descriptions, product scenario stories, product photos, videos; brand stories; product reviews; brand award-winning activities and other PR content.

Content marketing is the most effective way to build a brand at present. Unfortunately, there are almost no companies in China that can create their own brand content with their internal teams. On the one hand, this is because of the limitation of English as a non-native language, and on the other hand, creating brand content requires innovation and time. It requires top-down support from the company and strong promotion and planning from the brand department to ensure quality.

Things to note when outputting brand content: it must be continuous, high quality, and purposeful.

Among all forms of content, video is undoubtedly becoming more and more popular. Good video content can make brand communication more effective.

8. Step 8: Brand Communication

No matter how good the wine is, it will be hard to sell it if it is not well-known. Brands need content, and content needs to be spread.

Common brand communication methods include paid advertising, PR, social influencer marketing, and sales promotions.

Paid advertising: Paid advertising here refers to advertising with the main goal of brand exposure.

The mainstream paid advertising channels that promote branding awareness include Facebook and Youtube. For brands, a certain proportion of the budget should be invested in brand advertising every year. There are many paid advertising media channels, the main thing is to find the one that suits you. Brand creativity, targeted audiences, and continuous delivery are the key.

It is best to invest in the brand's personality and create a brand culture through advertising. A successful brand is not only a successful product, but also means a positive cultural concept that is consistent with the brand association. "What cosmetics companies sell is not perfume, but a certain culture, a certain expectation, a certain association and a certain honor." Injecting more cultural connotations into advertisements can subtly cultivate people's favor and loyalty to the brand.

PR: refers to the use of media public relations to shape brand awareness and establish brand trust. In particular, exposure in well-known industry media is something that other means of communication cannot achieve. Doing PR overseas is very different from doing it in China. It is recommended to hire professional PR colleagues in the United States to be responsible for PR event planning and integrated marketing.

Influencer communication: A popular way overseas is to continuously output a large amount of brand-related content on INS and Youtube through Microinfluncer and biginflucer.

Sales promotions: including giveaways, contests, etc., can generate good sales responses in the short term, but rarely have long-term benefits and effects, especially for brand image. Extensive use will reduce brand loyalty, increase customer sensitivity to prices, dilute the brand's quality concept, and prompt companies to focus on short-term behavior and benefits. Therefore, you must be cautious when making giveaways and remember not to use them frequently.

How should a cross-border e-commerce company form a brand team? A soul designer who understands the brand, a new media user community operator, a product launch manager who is responsible for the entire brand selling point and branded content, a PR specialist, and the most important one, a brand director.

IV. Conclusion

Due to geographical restrictions, when a brand goes overseas, it should first focus on online digital marketing to integrate product and sales, increase market share, accumulate early seed users, and use word-of-mouth marketing and content marketing to expand brand promotion.

Choose Amazon first as a channel, and then try crowdfunding when developing innovative products. By increasing brand awareness through successful crowdfunding projects, offline agency channels will naturally come to you. Only by developing both online and offline channels at the same time can a cross-border brand go the way of the world.

Author: Uncle Monkey God Talking About Brands

Source: Uncle Monkey God Talking About Brands