What is the focus of brand marketing in 2021?

With the disappearance of traffic dividends, the grand ambitions of countless brands have also dissipated, or even completely withdrawn from the stage of history.

However, the gears of the times will never stop turning. The fall of one person will only lead more people to stand up and join this brutal competition battlefield to continue fighting.

So we can also see that many brands are not living as comfortably as we imagined. They are like frogs stuck in the mud, struggling desperately.

Since 2019, "how to find incremental growth from existing assets" has become a common topic of discussion in the industry. At the same time, it seems that everyone has placed their bets on this "last straw."

Play whatever is new.

From social e-commerce, new retail, live streaming, community group buying, to all kinds of cross-border marketing that are overwhelming…

Source: iResearch "2021 China Enterprise Live Broadcasting Service Industry Development Research Report"

Of course, the emergence of every new business and new marketing does create and bring new dividends to the brand. This is something that everyone has witnessed and there is no doubt about it.

But there is only one topic we are discussing today: what is the winning formula for brands to "find growth from existing stock" in the future, or in the next period of time?

I personally think it should be: relationship.

Take social e-commerce, new retail, live streaming, community group buying, and cross-border marketing as examples. Their ultimate core goal is to establish good relationships with consumers.

Next, let’s talk about why.

01. Only by building good relationships can we regain brand dominance

The current communication environment has two characteristics: one is information cocoon and involution, and the other is the narrowing of social circles.

This is also the reason why many brand bosses personally create their own personalities, but compared to Lao Luo, he is more straightforward. No matter what he does, it is all for the purpose of making friends.

What is the purpose of making friends?

It is about building good relationships, getting the brand noticed, making your own speeches more convincing, and making your services or products difficult to replace after being mixed with some personal relationships.

Although many brands are beginning to value relationships, more than 80% of them are actually useless.

Shopping characteristics of Generation Z Source: Baidu Marketing Center

For example, frequently giving gifts to consumers may increase brand awareness and drive certain sales. On the contrary, it may also lead to lower user quality and weaken brand value, which is not a long-term path.

Another example is public welfare event marketing, which has not been unsuccessful in many cases. It is a double-edged sword in itself and mostly just enhances the positive image.

Even many commercials are truly heartfelt and resonate with people, but it is a bit far-fetched to expect to build good relationships with consumers by relying on stories and emotions.

If a brand wants to build a good relationship with consumers, it must first understand one thing:

What charm do I have that can truly attract consumers?

Then do one thing: How can I make them feel their own charm personally?

Ultimately accomplish one thing: use your own charm to create a higher threshold of happiness for them.

Just like the recent cooperation between Nordic Oumu and Xinchao Media, they seized the opportunity that summer is coming and skewers will become a popular food for urban youth. With the help of Xinchao Media’s community smart screen, they quickly penetrated the target audience, fully demonstrated the product value of Nordic Oumu’s smokeless barbecue grill, and conveyed the comfortable lifestyle represented by the product.

It not only raised the happiness threshold of the consumer group, strongly attracted the main consumer groups, and instilled the brand concept of "focusing on creating quality life and fun enjoyment for users" into everyone's hearts, but also accelerated the improvement of Nordic Oumu's quality awareness and market share.

From this case, it is not difficult to find that the community is the fastest way to enter the lives of consumers and the only choice to establish good relationships with consumers.

02. “Community+” strategy: building relationships with consumers by looking at their daily lives

There is an old Chinese saying, "If you are in a different circle, there is no need to force yourself to fit in."

The same applies here.

The first is geographical attributes. Whether offline or online, the differences and spans in geographical attributes between brands and consumers are obstacles to communication.

The second is cultural attributes. A brand cannot just talk to itself. It must look at the actual situation of the target audience and truly enter their life circle.

As an integral part of people’s main life scenes, the community is also an important scene where one can get in touch with them and observe their actual living conditions at the closest distance. If a brand wants to build a good relationship with consumers, “contact” and “observation” are the first issues to be solved.

Without contact, there will be no order; without observation, it is impossible to look consumers in the eye.

Why do native Internet brands such as Bestore, Three Squirrels, and Miniso choose to go offline?

The spatial misalignment between online and offline prevents consumers from having direct contact with brands. Through offline layout, the contact surface between consumers and brands is lowered and brought closer, allowing the charm of the brand to be discovered and experienced by consumers more quickly and intuitively.

At the same time, it can also promptly discover consumer demands, collect experience feedback, and respond quickly, thus forming a business model that feeds back and co-cultivates brand growth online and offline.

New marketing expert Fang Gang said something that I agree with: where people are, there is marketing. But now people are constantly switching between dislocated spatial states, so, to put it another way: from a geographical perspective, people are in communities, and from a virtual perspective, people are in social groups.

Here, a new question arises: do we really need to connect the two space scenes?

My answer is yes.

It's like two good friends, if they want to see each other, they can only go to your house, but there is no way to contact each other, which always feels weird.

Spatial gap, brands only occupy half of consumers' lives.

The so-called "Community +" is a community community, which activates the community's public domain traffic, directs the community's private domain traffic, adds value-added services, and uses more humane means to obtain more opportunities for interaction with consumers and meet their more personalized and segmented needs.

Conquer and attract with charm, and achieve a close connection between the brand and consumers' lives.

To build good relationships with consumers through the "community +" strategy, to put it bluntly, is to make the brand a neighborhood friend that they "don't want to lose."

03. Community scenarios: the last piece of land to connect with users

Community marketing in the traditional sense may be the door-to-door promotion and social events that we are familiar with...

But in fact, after the emergence of Xinchao Media Smart Screen, community marketing has more fresh ways of playing, opening up a new marketing channel for major brands.

After all, in the current environment, the community has become a scene that major Internet brands are competing for. It can even be said that it is the last piece of the puzzle to connect brands with users.

Even when platform e-commerce has developed to its limit, it only accounts for 25% of total consumption, while offline consumption remains high at 75%; even though private domain traffic has become a hot topic on the entire Internet, the actual growth it brings to brands is unprecedentedly weak.

For those large fast-moving consumer goods brands with a scale of hundreds of billions, tens of billions, or even billions, none of the single brand's private domain traffic exceeds 1 billion (a company cannot use sales of hundreds of millions to save a huge number of sales). Although I am not against private domain traffic, it is destined to be marginalized in the future and become one of the commercial supporting services.

The community scene also returns to the essence of marketing.

Why were there so many century-old stores that continued to thrive in ancient times, but now people are left wishing for nothing and feeling disappointed?

Only by doing business between people can the brand reputation continue to stand and be passed on from person to person.

Author: Community Marketing Research Institute

Source: Community Marketing Research Institute