4 fundamental reasons why brands fail to grow well

"Planting grass" has now become an important means for brands to expand their popularity and influence. Many emerging brands have gained the love of many consumers by relying on "planting grass". At the same time, many big brands have been surpassed by competitors because they are not good at "planting grass".

When a group of emerging brands became popular by promoting marketing, "promoting marketing" seemed to become a marketing myth, making many brands worship it, including those traditional big brands. They enthusiastically put out a budget and prepare to make a big splash in the vast social world, but unfortunately the final result is often a failure.

Why can’t these big brands grow good grass? In this article, I combined my own experience of serving some big brands, observed and analyzed some of their practices when they were doing the so-called "grass planting", and summarized the four fundamental reasons.

1. Still using the same thinking as advertising to “plant grass”

People who work in traditional marketing should be very familiar with this set of advertising communication operations: find an advertising company to come up with a big idea, then expand it into videos, posters and other content materials, and then spread these materials through celebrities, KOLs, and hard ads.

Most brands today still implement this set of operations without hesitation when promoting their products. This is the biggest reason why I think they are not good at promoting products, because their thinking is wrong.

People who have been reading my articles for a long time should know that no matter what I wrote before, "When we talk about content planting, what exactly are we planting? ” or “18 Knowledge Points About Content Marketing”, both emphasize the most critical idea, which is: when marketing, the less brand traces are revealed, the better!

Because grass-planting is essentially a word-of-mouth marketing process in which consumers spread the word and recommend each other, the most important thing is "authenticity".

Just imagine that when consumers only see exquisite celebrity posters and TVCs of a brand, how could they possibly recommend it to their friends? Would they say, “Hey, let me tell you, today I saw an essence recommended by so-and-so in an advertisement”?

I remember a brand client once approached us and said that he wanted to create a wave of content seeding. After reading the product introduction, it seemed to have great potential.

But the brief asked us to come up with a creative concept, and then develop a video script for a designated celebrity based on this concept. The references given were all short videos shot by other brands with a viral nature.

I told them at the time that this was not an attempt to plant seeds at all, it was just an advertising campaign! If you really want to promote your product, instead of spending so much money on shooting some brand videos, you might as well think about how to invite more celebrities and KOLs who will actually use this product, and let them share their experiences from the perspective of using the product in real life.

Therefore, brands that want to promote products may as well forget the advertising thinking in their minds first!

2. Lack of or failure to find products worth recommending

This is also the most fatal point, because the starting point of promoting products is the goods! When many brands approach us and ask us to promote their products, we always ask first: "Hey, what kind of product are we promoting this time? Do you have any specific selling points?"

At this time, some customers will confidently say: "All our products are good." After we researched them, we found that these products are very common in the market. They have the same selling points as others, but they lack points that are worth consumers' attention.

What is a point worth planting?

To put it simply, it is a kind of scarce value. Only when it is scarce will consumers be willing to buy it after seeing it and share it with their friends. For example, it can be the ultimate cost-effectiveness, super high appearance, super cool functions, super unexpected usage scenarios, etc. It doesn't have to cover everything, as long as one of the scarce values ​​is present, that's enough.

There is also a situation where the brand itself does not know which product has such potential to be worth promoting. We have encountered such a case before. Because the categories covered were so many, there were nearly a hundred product lines alone, and the SKUs were even more countless. Faced with so many products, it is impossible to have enough budget to promote all of them, and not every one of them is worth doing.

At this time, it is particularly important to be able to choose a product that is worthy of consumers' attention. Many people would automatically choose the one with the highest sales volume on e-commerce platforms, but I don’t think this is necessarily a good idea.

Because first of all, when you decide to invest money to promote content, you must be thinking about increasing the volume. The best-selling product may sell well even without any investment, so why not look for the next potential product to promote?

Secondly, products that sell well may not necessarily have the divergence points that can carry the content that will inspire customers. So, how do you screen among so many products? There are several standards for your reference:

1. First, look at functional innovation: whether the product has superb technical content and can better solve consumers' pain points, itches, or pleasures;
2. The second is to look at the communication tension: Does the product have a selling point that has the potential for dramatic interpretation? For example, a bubble mask produces more bubbles on the face, indicating that the face is cleaner, and consumers are eager to try it. This is a kind of communication tension.
3. The third is to look at emerging trends: whether the product is in a high-growth trend category track. For example, if there is an equally ordinary pair of running shoes and ski suits in winter, it is recommended to choose ski suits as the product to promote, because skiing has been a high-growth trend in recent years.
4. Fourth, look at the price range: whether the product fills the gap in the price range of current competing products. For example, the price range of competing products is either above 1,000 yuan or below 500 yuan, and your new product happens to be between the two.

If you are still unsure about the above standards, it is recommended that you go to Li Jiaqi or Wei Ya’s live broadcast room to do a test. Products that can pass the review of their product selection team should be generally good. If they sell well, then this product will be worth investing the budget to promote.

3. No large-scale focused investment to penetrate a scene/crowd/traffic pool

Big brands may only see the glory of emerging brands such as Perfect Diary, Hanako, and Genki Forest after they have become successful, but they often ignore the continuous large-scale investment and burning of money behind them. Even if there is no direct effect for the time being, after all, there is a large amount of money to burn behind these brands.

If you want to achieve significant results by promoting content, you need to leverage the effect of scale. Only when the investment reaches a certain scale threshold can there be a steady supply of "grass".

This is obviously difficult for big brands to do. There is only so much marketing budget in a year, and most brands are testing the waters. After a wave of money is spent, they will only continue if the KPI results are obviously good, otherwise they will have to retreat. Therefore, it is difficult to make any large-scale investment.

If the horizontal budget is not enough, then you can only make up for it by focusing vertically. This is probably the best way out for big brands when they are promoting products. Before I talk about how to stay focused when promoting something, let me first talk about what it means to be unfocused based on my real experience.

Lack of focus essentially reflects the greed of brand operators, who want to talk about everything and have everything. For example, some customers often give feedback such as: "Hey, why is the target audience so narrow this time? Our product can be used not only at night? Why do we only choose one platform for delivery?"

On the contrary, what is focusing? The purpose of planting grass is to penetrate any one of the three: a scene, a group of people or a traffic pool. Faced with a limited budget, it would be amazing if you could get through one of them.

For example, I went to see the promotion of Xiaoxiandun. They focused on Xiaohongshu, and all the promotions were about women’s anti-aging and beauty consumption scenarios. So they invited a group of female celebrities to promote the product and implant Xiaoxiandun into the daily lives of these female celebrities.

4. Lack of control over influencer delivery strategy and overall rhythm arrangement

Many brands think that promoting products is just a matter of throwing it to KOLs and that’s it. The two most important steps in the actual operation of grass-planting are often overlooked: the influencer's delivery strategy and the arrangement of the overall grass-planting rhythm.

Let’s first talk about influencer marketing. In this regard, many big brands find media agencies or MCN companies to get a large list of KOLs, and then decide who to invest in after comparing prices among the three parties.

This is actually a very imprecise approach. Not to mention how complicated the KOL field is, you need to remove the water one by one when selecting the numbers. The most important thing is that by doing this all the KOLs are scattered and fail to form a synergy. In order to form a synergy, we must have a delivery strategy.

Usually, KOLs have two strategies when promoting content:

1. Concentrated detonation: It takes the target audience's catalyst habits as the starting point, and detonates through a large number of mid-level KOLs on different platforms. The effect presented is that it seems as if everyone is discussing this brand/product overnight.
2. "Water ripple diffusion" type: The innermost layer of the "water ripple" is usually large-sized heads, or even celebrities, who are used to produce materials for subsequent diffusion and to endorse the products; the next layer outward is mid-level influencers, who are used to produce marketing content, such as various outfits, unboxings, reviews, etc.; the next layer outward is a large number of KOCs, which are used to form economies of scale and word of mouth.

Let’s talk about the overall rhythm arrangement of grass planting. Let’s take a new product launch as an example to talk about the rhythm of grass planting, which is usually arranged for about 3 weeks:

• The first week is used to create topics, including leveraging celebrities/popular variety shows, planting “seeds” in multiple circles, and establishing scenario-based content;
• The second week is used to spread the topic and dig out seeds for the memes planted in the early stage through big accounts and top KOLs in the circle;
• The first half of the third week is used for product evaluation. Different KOLs are invited to conduct collective usage evaluations on the products to build word-of-mouth.

At this point, the preheating stage of content planting has basically been completed, and then it enters the explosive stage. At this time, big promotions are usually used to complete the "finishing touch" to attract more consumers to buy products, which is regarded as "mowing the grass" after planting the grass.

This is not the end. Next, we need to encourage consumers to post their orders and create a trend among the whole nation. On the one hand, this can help to generate another wave of follow-up sales, and on the other hand, it can also serve as a content layout that will be deposited on the platform for a long time for user searches.

Author: Pulang

Source: Planner (ID: planner2333)