Brand Proposal: How to Write a Proposal?

This is a proposal I wrote for a small appliance brand last year, so I will explain and share in detail how to understand the needs, what my ideas are after understanding the needs, and how to do it in the end.

1. Review of Demand

Let’s first review the brand’s needs, which can be summarized into five points:

1. The brand believes that youth is its growth, and hopes to improve the operational efficiency of the crowd based on the tone of youth;
2. The brand currently has many categories and hopes to make reasonable category planning;
3. The brand will launch many new products and hopes to operate new products;
4. The brand will have a large number of marketing and delivery activities on and off the site, hoping to empower marketing from the consumer operation end;
5. We hope to have a reasonable evaluation system to verify that our operations are efficient.

2. Understanding of Demand

1. Why do we make such a demand?

When I receive a demand from a brand, the first thing I think about is why the brand makes such a demand, so I use two approaches: one is to read external reports; the other is to communicate with the customer by phone to understand some key background information.

Pay attention to a few key questions that need to be guided when asking: Why are you looking for a service provider? What problem do you want the service provider to help solve? What department is our liaison and what are the areas of focus? What modules do you hope to cooperate on? Do we have the ability to undertake them?

Through communication and understanding, I have collected the brand's current pain points and difficulties. The brand has strong supply chain and product development capabilities and can quickly develop new products, but precisely because of this, it also puts greater demands on the brand's product operation capabilities. Therefore, the brand has just established a consumer operation department, hoping to find excellent service providers to help them operate better.

2. Requirements simplification

With the background information, I re-read the brand's needs and simplified them into three categories:

1. In terms of demographics, the brand believes that youth is its growth potential;
2. Goods-oriented, reasonable categories and goods operation matrix;
3. Evaluation indicators should establish a reasonable evaluation system and operational indicators to evaluate operational efficiency.

Demand simplification can help us better sort out needs, simplify complex things, and first understand what the brand wants before starting to do it. Why are marketing activities not included? This is because people and goods will eventually be used in various activities and daily operations. Being able to classify needs can also help you find a better entry point.

3. Solution

When a brand has no direction, we need to find the direction first. After the brand has a clear direction, what we need to do is to evaluate whether the direction is correct (this proposal brand has already preset the direction, youth and category matrix); secondly, writing a proposal needs to have a focus, so we need to find the entry point of our proposal, whether it is people looking for goods or goods looking for people.

The difference between the two is that if the brand's products are very special, such as medical devices, medicines, or if there are very few products, we generally adopt the approach of finding people, finding precise people; and if the brand has a lot of products and there are no restrictions on special groups of people to consume, we generally adopt the approach of finding people through goods, finding the goods first and then finding people.

3. Start writing proposals based on understanding of needs

In fact, it is only at this step that we truly begin to enter the solution stage.

Many people rush to execute after receiving the requirements, and finally find that what they have produced does not meet the requirements and keeps making changes. This is because they lack understanding of the requirements and collection of background information. Next time when you receive a requirement, you can think about it first, sort it out and then see how you should do it.

1. Market analysis

Before I started writing, I first looked at the overall market situation of small kitchen appliances. Then we will find the consumption trend of small kitchen appliances from 2017 to 2019. Online small kitchen appliances are developing rapidly, and the rapid growth trend is brought about by the dual growth in the number of people and frequency.

So then we will look at why these two are growing. The first is the frequency. We looked at the number of categories purchased by consumers (broken down into 1, 2, 3 and above categories). The growth rate of consumers who purchased 3 or more categories was the fastest. Consumers have a demand for purchasing multiple categories. While the number of people is growing, the consumption of small kitchen appliances is gradually becoming younger, and the growth rate is the fastest among those born in the 1990s and 1995s, which accounted for about 40% in 2019.

So next we looked at what brands these young people prefer. We divided them into traditional brands and emerging brands. The leading brands are represented by brands like Midea, Joyoung, and Supor, and the emerging brands are brands like Little Pumpkin, Donlim, and Morphy. Through comparison, we found that the growth rate of emerging brands among young groups born in the 1990s and 1995s is higher than that of traditional brands.

Therefore, for leading traditional brands (the brands we serve), how to capture young groups during the operation process has become the focus of operations. And we mentioned earlier that consumers have the demand to purchase multiple categories, so a reasonable category layout is crucial for us.

Therefore, we combined the brand brief and category development, and used the category as the entry point to match people, goods and places.

We will mainly talk about three aspects: how should we operate an existing category, secondly, what are our solutions for some special categories (such as IP co-branded products), and finally, whether it is an existing category or a special product, we can incubate hot products.

2. Category Operation

This time I will only share ideas. Next, I will output various propositional articles, down to detailed solutions.

1) Existing category operations

We mentioned earlier that the entry point of our proposal is goods. So when there are many brand categories, the first thing we should do is to find the core categories and formulate category operation strategies, followed by formulating corresponding population operation strategies. Therefore, this section will also be elaborated in detail around these two key points.

The Boston Matrix is ​​a good matrix for screening categories (in addition to the conventional sales volume and growth rate, you can add a few more indicators according to the actual situation of the brand to avoid being challenged by the brand). After finding the category, you can take a certain category/product as an example to see what the current operational focus of this category is (is it to attract new or old customers, what is the composition, what are the core and potential groups?), so as to determine who the offensive and defensive groups of our category/product are.

Finally, it’s about how we attack and how we defend. For example, if we determine that the target group is young people, then we can analyze consumers’ purchasing mentality and reasons for loss, young people’s cross-category preferences and content operations through research; if the target group is old customers, then we can look at the old customers’ category-related purchases and purchasing preferences, and guide old customers of other categories to purchase the categories we want to focus on.

2) Featured products (IP product operation)

The operation of IP products can be divided into three parts: the first is how to choose IP, the second is how to choose products, and the last is how to operate IP products.

• Selecting IP: First, we can use market analysis to see what the joint trends of online IPs are. Secondly, we can analyze which people will buy IP products. Thirdly, we can further analyze which products these people will be interested in. Finally, we can build an IP selection model and set evaluation indicators to evaluate whether the IP is suitable for the brand (such as: how influential the IP itself is, whether the IP matches the brand portrait, and whether the brand tone matches).
• Product selection: In addition to IP cooperation, it is also important to know what kind of products are more popular with consumers. Therefore, you can build a search tree to see the proportion and growth rate of search terms. You can also use consumers' search terms to see what functions and appearances they like. Choosing the right products can also make new products more competitive.
• IP product operation: What is our IP operation methodology, how to combine it with existing data products (data bank & strategy center, etc.), what is the full-link operation idea of ​​IP co-branded products (how to operate OAIPL), and what are our specific solutions for these different groups of people?

3) Incubation of hot products

Whether this category is an opportunity category, whether the right products, the right people, the right channels and good content have been found, are crucial for a hit product. So our overall discussion will focus on how to select categories and how to formulate our explosive product strategies, target audience strategies, channel strategies and content strategies.

• Category screening and hot-selling product strategy: lock in categories through core and opportunity category analysis; lock in hot-selling product strategy through market competition analysis (see whether the market and competitors have a single hot-selling product strategy or a multi-hot-selling product strategy);
• Crowd strategy: Target the core group through crowd insights; analyze the core group’s preferences and cross-category preferences to guide crowd strategy;
• Channel strategy: refer to the hot-selling ideas of competitors to guide brand operations (brand-driven, promotional, and channel-linked); select a channel operation strategy suitable for the brand based on the actual situation of the brand;
• Content operation: It mainly involves the operation of content channels such as asking everyone, comments, live broadcasts, and short videos. Here, you can analyze consumers’ purchasing concerns through asking everyone and analyzing comments, and further guide the brand content operation strategy.

3. Conclusion

I have set evaluation indicators for these three parts. The specific way to formulate them depends on your content. For example, if the target group I mentioned earlier is young people, then the indicators can be the increase in the AI ​​population among young people, the category penetration and purchasing situation among young people, etc.

After writing the plan, the next thing to do is to decide on the service content, namely the service quotation, and then to assign team members. This is relatively simple, so I won’t go into details.

As I said in the previous article, what we need to ensure is the quality of the proposal and the rationality of the solution. What we need to convey to our customers is that we are the best and most suitable choice in the market, and the issue of price should be left to business or sales to resolve.

4. Write to the end

Let me end with a sentence I like very much: we have plenty of time to make ourselves better and better, so don't rush for success. Those who win in the end are those with strategic patience. As long as we calm down, think about what is the right thing to do, persist in doing the right thing, and make improvements, we will become better and better (quoted from others, please delete if infringed).

Author: Li Tingting

Source: Li Tingting