Brand marketing strategy in 2021: Planting grass is not a panacea!

We can get a glimpse of the situation from a set of data: According to media reports, ByteDance's advertising revenue in the Chinese market is expected to reach US$27 billion in 2020; in the first half of 2020, Kuaishou's total revenue was 25.321 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 48.26%, of which advertising revenue accounted for 28.3% and live streaming e-commerce accounted for 3.2%. The strong rise of short video platforms such as Tik Tok and Kuaishou has overshadowed search engines, which were once the mainstream Internet marketing platforms. This reflects the trend of brand marketing budgets shifting from traffic marketing to seed marketing.

Information flow advertising has grown explosively, live streaming has become a phenomenon, content communities such as Xiaohongshu are all the rage, Bilibili Up masters have become a must-have for brands to capture young people, and KOL/KOC have become guests of honor for brands, all of which reflect the popularity of “grass planting” marketing. Many new consumer brands, such as Yuanqi Forest, Perfect Diary, and Huaxizi, all stood out by relying on "grass planting" marketing. Even some traditional brands, such as funds and real estate, have now embarked on the path of "grass planting" marketing. A mother I know was successfully introduced to fund buying for the first time by a Xiaohongshu influencer.

In the era of information explosion, users have the right to make active choices. They can spend money to buy video memberships to refuse advertisements, and naturally they will no longer accept cramming advertisements. In the era of "advertising is content", the "silent" marketing effect of using content to plant grass and using influencers to bring goods is better. This is the essential reason for the rise of grass-planting marketing.

In the post-epidemic era, for brands that are desperate to break through and grow, grass-roots marketing seems to have become a panacea overnight. However, is grass-planting really a panacea for today’s brand marketing?

“Planting grass” is not a panacea

In previous years, brand growth often had to go through a development path from "recognition and awareness" to "recognition and subscription." Today, more and more new brands are taking the opposite approach, first planting seeds on Internet platforms to gain the "subscription and recognition" of a certain number of users, and then building their brand to achieve "recognition and recognition." Xiaoxiandun, Yuanqi Forest, Huaxizi and other new consumer brands are representatives. They are all very successful in community marketing, relying on Internet marketing to achieve from 0 to 1, and finally expanding the brand across the board and banning corresponding categories.

Their experiences are similar as they grow up. In the early stage, rapid growth was achieved through seemingly low-cost, “one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent for one cent” grass-roots marketing. However, after a certain stage, all of them encountered common bottlenecks:

1. Highly dependent on traffic, profit margins are compressed. Traffic is the foundation of grass-roots marketing. The sales volume of grass-roots marketing is highly dependent on traffic delivery. Buying traffic may not necessarily have an effect, but not buying traffic will definitely have no effect. In the end, brands can only work for traffic, with no premium, low profits, and are overwhelmed.

2. Facing followers, it is difficult for grass-roots marketing to form a barrier. In the era of information transparency, any innovation can be easily copied quickly. The essence of grass-roots promotion is that experts promote products from the perspective of product usage scenarios. As long as latecomers make products with equal or even slightly inferior product strength, they can still spend money to buy traffic to promote grass-roots products. If the pioneer fails to form a brand impression in the minds of consumers, it is equivalent to having no barriers.

3. Grass-roots marketing itself is becoming increasingly difficult. In the early days, grass-roots marketing was a gold mine with good results, but today it is a red ocean. Both new and old brands are trying to establish themselves on the Internet. Under the bidding model, traffic costs will naturally rise, and it will become increasingly difficult for brands to stand out. In the end, they will only become a small grass in a vast sea of ​​grass. In addition, no one likes advertisements. Users are becoming smarter, and as more grass-planting content becomes available, users’ ability to recognize and become immune to grass-planting content is developing.

4. It is difficult to accumulate brand assets through grass-roots marketing. Fireworks are beautiful, but it is the lights that illuminate the night sky. Traffic has an effect, but it is only an immediate effect. A brand can create long-term value that accumulates over time, bring premiums, turn into assets and be passed down for centuries. “Drink Wanglaoji if you’re afraid of getting a sore throat”, “Moutai, the national liquor”, “Nongfu Spring is a little sweet”, many classic brand slogans have become insurmountable barriers for latecomers, become inestimable brand assets, and become consumers’ unhesitating choices. Although grass-roots marketing may have some effect every time, it is destined to be temporary, short-lived, immediate and difficult to sustain.

Grass-roots marketing can help a brand achieve the goal from 0 to 10, but if you want to continue to add 0s, you can’t rely solely on grass-roots marketing. In 2021, brands must learn to "plant trees".

Brands need to “plant trees” in 2021

"I have no fragrance of flowers, and I am not as tall as trees. I am just a small grass that no one knows about." In 2021, brands should establish a "tree planting" mindset based on the grass planting mindset. Many people have seen similar scenery: on the vast grassland, a tree suddenly comes into view. No matter how tall the tree is, it will be impressive.

The tree-planting mindset is to attach importance to the long-term project of brand building. Don't just focus on selling products, but also engage in long-term brand building, and have in-depth discussions with users on brand spirit such as culture, emotions, and values ​​to seek consensus, achieve resonance, and achieve resonance.

The benefits of brand "planting trees" are obvious:

1. Amplify the brand. The towering trees standing on the grassland can be seen from afar and will be remembered by everyone first.

2. Occupy the mind. Occupy a clear and simple word in the minds of consumers. When customers have such needs, your brand will become the first choice and even a conditioned reflex. Only in this way can the brand become immune to price wars, promotion wars and traffic wars.

3. Bring your own traffic. Good brands have their own traffic, and any form of third-party traffic is just a supplement, not a dependency. We rarely hear news about super brands being restricted by any e-commerce platform or content platform. On the contrary, the traffic party will become the "Party B" of these brands because they bring their own traffic.

4. Stand out from the crowd. The essence of a brand is a differentiated label. Building a brand means strengthening differentiated attributes and getting out of the quagmire of homogeneous competition.

5. Lush branches and leaves. Any marketing without a brand is like “drink today and worry about tomorrow when it comes.” The same is true for grass-planting marketing. Bai Juyi has a poem that says, “The grass on the plain is withered and flourishing every year.” The grass falls with the wind, and the trees stand tall like pines. Once a big tree takes root and sprouts, it will grow luxuriantly and even produce a forest, creating its own base. After all, only brands have accumulation, inheritance and a future. Those who plant trees will enjoy the shade.

What’s so difficult about “planting trees”?

In the age of television media, brands were easy to build industrially, but today the environment brands face is complex and ever-changing. The media environment is changing with each passing day, users are overwhelmed by information, and market competition is extremely fierce. It is much more difficult for brands to plant trees on the grassland.

First, the channels through which brands communicate with consumers have changed.

The era of mobile Internet is an era of fragmented media, and the media environment has become further "fragmented" and ubiquitous. No brand has achieved success through a spread-out channel strategy. Only by targeting the most effective channels and using the right language to convey emotions, culture, and values ​​can these "roots" quickly take root in the hearts of consumers.

Good steel is used on the blade, what is the “blade”? Today, there are very few media that can gather energy in a short period of time and ignite a brand like the TV stations did in the past. Elevator media is an exception. Elevator media in apartment buildings and office buildings, which consumers must pass by every day, represented by Focus Media, as well as shopping malls, cinemas and other media are core contact points for consumers. Elevators are closed, have weak signals, and are boring, so advertisements in elevators have become the only entertainment. Therefore, elevator media has the characteristics of high frequency, compulsion, impact, and exclusivity. Through years of infrastructure construction, elevator media has been able to reach a large number of people, force exposure, and detonate in a concentrated manner. In fact, it has the ability to detonate brands in a centralized manner.

For example, Focus Media's elevator media covers a total population of 310 million and 700 million people per day, making it the media with the strongest explosive power for mainstream urban people. Because of this, 87% of China's TOP100 brands choose Focus Media. Familiar slogans such as Guazi's "No middlemen to make a profit from the price difference", Feihe's "More suitable for the physique of Chinese babies", and Ele.me's "Don't call mom when you're hungry, call Ele.me", all come from Focus Media's elevator media. The "2020 China Popular Slogan Inventory Report" released by Ipsos shows that 83% of the top ten slogans most remembered by respondents came from elevator media.

Secondly, the efficiency of communication between brands and consumers is low.

The Internet allows brands and consumers to communicate directly, interact in both directions, and gain data insights. It seems that communication efficiency has increased, but in fact it is not. In today's world where everyone can speak up, consumers have long been overwhelmed by the massive amount of information they receive, their memories are getting shorter, their attention is becoming more and more distracted, and their immunity to advertising is becoming stronger and stronger. It is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to take root in the hearts of consumers.

To combat the fragmentation of the media environment and user amnesia, brands have only two options: one is repetition, and the second is to repeat loudly, that is, to promote it in a high-profile manner. Hua Shan, founder of H&H Consulting, believes that the essence of publicity lies in repetition, and the essence of the audience lies in forgetting, and brands must fight against forgetting through repetition. Nobel Prize winner in Economics Kahneman believes that the way to make people believe in a concept or thing is to repeat it over and over again.

Because of this, we see many brands choosing to adopt saturation delivery on platforms such as elevator media to achieve repeated impact. Long-term continuous release, repeated brainwashing songs, etc., are all "repetition".

Yuanqi Forest is an example. Its founder Tang Binsen has always attached great importance to marketing and has tasted the sweetness of oversaturation attack. When the game was launched overseas, it "dared to spend 1.8 billion on advertising when it generated 2 billion in revenue, and exposed its brand in central cities such as New York, London, and Moscow." Yuanqi Forest also adopted a saturation attack strategy. After successfully capturing young people online, it invested heavily in Focus Media, playing brand advertisements 4-6 times repeatedly at a high frequency in elevator scenes that 300 million core middle-class people must pass through, in order to refresh the minds of target users.

When Yuanqi Forest's actual sales volume was only a dozen times that of Coca-Cola in China, its offline media marketing budget had already exceeded the latter. Through high-profile promotion, Yuanqi Forest quickly became a star brand known to young consumers in first- and second-tier cities. Its popularity is not inferior to Coca-Cola, and it has its own brand label, successfully banishing the category of sugar-free beverages.

Finally, when everyone is planting trees, it is better to make your brand famous as early as possible.

When a number of brands are overwhelmed by planting grass, a brand that takes the lead in "planting trees" will be able to take root and sprout. Once they grow into towering trees, they will squeeze the living space of the grass. Conversely, when a competitor successfully plants trees, it becomes difficult for a brand to plant the same trees.

As long as a market is not a false demand, it will eventually form a leading brand or a first-tier brand camp. Consumers can only remember the first and second, but not the third. Therefore, the time window left for a brand in any market is very short.

After a brand has clearly defined its differentiated positioning, it must seize the time window and launch a saturation attack before competitors have the chance to block a category, a feature or a label. It must exchange resources for time and space, gain first-mover advantage, and seize the minds of customers, so as to win the intellectual property rights and become the preferred choice. This process is like fertilizing and watering a sapling. If you want the sapling to grow quickly, you cannot hesitate and be stingy with your investment.

Once upon a time, Bel was leading the Chinese cheese stick market. When Yili Group entered the market, the time window for category awareness still existed because Bel did not occupy consumers' minds through brand advertising. Although Bel’s annual sales have reached 1 billion yuan, in the minds of consumers, cheese sticks do not equal Bel. Miko's seized the opportunity and launched a saturation attack on the target audience, occupying the consumers' mind that "Mioko's equals cheese sticks". Six quarters later, it became the number one cheese brand in China, and its market value increased from 2 billion to 24 billion.

For brands, it is relatively simple to promote products. If you have decent product quality, you can spend money to buy traffic, find influencers, and do promotions to achieve immediate sales. Planting trees is much more difficult, but has greater long-term value. Only by doing the right thing rather than the easy thing can we go forward steadily and have a bright future. Everyone understands this truth.

Author: Luo Chao Channel

Source: Luo Chao Channel