How can emerging brands break through with these four tricks?

In the red ocean race, many people are confused: their own products feel similar to those of competitors, making it difficult to compete.

Everyone likes differentiation, but the reality is so cruel that the more competitive the category is, the more similar it becomes.

How to deal with homogeneity?

Many people are obsessed with finding traffic and calculating ROI, looking at cases, learning from big brands, tracking competitor bloggers, and looking at others' sales of billions, they have an illusion: as long as they have the right traffic, breaking the billion mark can be easy; however, these ultimately return to the level of "technique". For a brand operator, especially a founder, it is necessary to plan from the level of "Tao". The founder needs to understand investment, but he should not turn himself into a pitcher who only looks at traffic ROI.

Don't use your diligence in placement and finding traffic to make up for laziness in product and marketing strategy formulation.

I started paying attention to the fruit wine industry on Tmall last year and found that the homogeneity of this industry is becoming more and more serious. Today, taking this as an example, let’s talk about my personal thoughts on how to break through the homogeneous industry.

Background: Liquor, beer, and wine account for nearly 90% of the wine market share, and fruit wine has always been a "category without brand"; but the consumption needs of the new generation of consumers have changed significantly. The growth rate of fruit wine consumption has been 50% in the past two years. Tmall currently has 5,000 fruit wine brands alone. There are so many fruit wine brands that there are almost not enough tipsy girls.

New and emerging brands are well versed in the starting strategy: high appearance + product positioning + live streaming/grass-planting promotion.

So, fruit wine brands look like this:

I can’t help but sigh, each one is beautiful!

In many categories, new brands’ high-looking packaging can quickly establish differentiation. In the fruit wine category, new brands are well prepared and have put a lot of effort into their appearance, making it difficult to tell who is better. The same is true for many industries such as flower tea.

Looking at their Xiaohongshu ads, many of them emphasize "wine suitable for girls":

The homogeneity of a large number of brands also means the homogeneity of product positioning and selling points.

So how do we break through from the perspective of “Tao”?

01 Category Opportunities

When consumers see a brand and place an order, their psychological activities mainly go through the following three steps:

• First: What does this brand sell?
• Second: Why should I buy it?
• Finally: What value can it provide to me?

Consumers’ first impression of a brand is “what it sells”, which is the brand’s category.

Category opportunities, including creating new categories and focusing on categories.

In the fruit wine category, many brands tell consumers: I sell fruit wine; but this is too general. With so many brands, it is easy for consumers to forget about you, and overtaking others is even more of a dream.

The ultimate battlefield in business is the mind. Category is the key marketing force hidden behind the brand. Whether it is a brand or a product, the first thing to do is to address consumers’ perception of you.

1. Category Focus

Many bosses have a misunderstanding that only if there are more SKUs can they have a chance to increase GMV. The opportunity for emerging brands does not lie in becoming big and comprehensive, but in having a clear understanding of their human, financial and material resources, starting from a niche category and looking for a breakthrough.

At present, the fruit wine industry has subcategories such as green plum wine/lychee wine/pomelo wine/yogurt wine/tea fruit wine/peach blossom wine/osmanthus wine, etc. There are many subcategories, and the subcategories lack representative brands, which means there is enough room for emerging brands.

In 2011, Great Wall Motor's sedan business accounted for more than one-third of its total sales, 40,000 more than the overall SUV sales; although the momentum was good, it did not have enough advantages compared with other competitors. In addition, with the increase in independent brands/joint venture brands, competition in the sedan field became increasingly fierce.

Great Wall Motors had relatively limited financial strength and resources; therefore, this year, Great Wall Motors adjusted its strategy, decisively gave up the "sweetness" in front of it, "narrowed" its products, and poured resources into the SUV field, which had less than 5% of the Chinese auto market at the time.

Thanks to the focus back then, Great Wall Motors' development over the past 10 years has grown from sales of less than 10 billion yuan to over 100 billion yuan now.

There are many examples like this on Tmall, such as Ulike's hair removal device, SKG's cervical massager, and "Meijian" which ranked No. 1 in the fruit wine category on Tmall last year, and it only had plum wine. Waiting for the company to have money and a team, and then expanding, that's another story.

2. Create new categories

Creating new product categories is actually about finding fundamental differentiation, establishing unique value and reducing competition.

Fruit wine is a large category, which can be increasingly subdivided based on raw materials, craftsmanship, user groups and concepts.

"Luoyin" tea and fruit wine is positioned as "tea + fruit + wine", forming a unique product advantage. Its products include "Yunnan Red Rose", "Yunnan Red Green Plum", "Dahongpao Grapefruit" and so on. It was launched on Tmall in October last year, and achieved millions of yuan in revenue in the first month of its launch. Sales have increased rapidly in recent months. The bottle label is printed with portraits of ancient Chinese women, full of oriental charm.

Falling Drink

Banu Hotpot has just started to compete with Haidilao in service, but Haidilao = good service has been deeply rooted in people’s minds. As a latecomer, it is impossible to win by using the opponent’s advantages to compete with the opponent.

Later, Banu Hotpot focused on tripe and changed its name to "Banu Tripe Hotpot", making a breakthrough with the single product of tripe and creating the "tripe hotpot" category.

In the field of fruit wine, new raw materials and new technical processes may bring new category opportunities; in fact, technological innovation is a barrier and the most direct way to establish new categories.

Notes on category selection:

The categories that are created must be in line with consumers’ perceptions and cannot be self-satisfactory.

Previously, an entrepreneur excitedly told me that he had discovered a blue ocean in the fruit wine category, "Collagen Wine". Girls can drink it to get a little tipsy and supplement collagen to become more beautiful, and the taste will not be too bad, but the price will be a bit more expensive.

At first glance, this really opens up a new category, and logically it sounds like "collagen" also meets the beauty needs of girls; but who among the girls who drink alcohol wants to whiten their skin? If I have to spend more money on this ingredient, I might as well buy nutritional supplements or cosmetics for whitening separately.

Recently I saw a health-preserving fruit wine brand, which focuses on 18 kinds of amino acids + longan/ginger/red dates and other health-preserving flavors, which can make you healthy and look good after drinking it.

The positioning of this category is a bit as self-congratulatory as "collagen fruit wine".

Changes in product categories are basically accompanied by product modifications, and product modifications are closely related to the supply chain, the team's R&D, and the time cycle, which is not that easy.

If we cannot change the product category, how can we break the deadlock?

02 Brand selling point

Selling points are the reasons why consumers buy. Regardless of whether it is a red ocean or blue ocean product, there must be selling points for the target users.

The embarrassing thing about red ocean brands is that it seems that the selling points they can think of are not unique or special, and the content they release is similar to that of competitors, which makes the delivery efficiency low, and then the brand falls into anxiety.

Now that everything that can be said has been said, what should I do?

1. Be one step ahead

Marketers refine selling points and like to find differentiated and unique selling points, but the reality is, there are not so many unique points. Yuanqi Forest’s main selling point is: 0 sugar, 0 fat, 0 calories. However, most beverages, except coffee and milk, are fat-free. It’s just that Yuanqi Forest pointed out this point.

Which herbal tea doesn’t relieve heat? Wang Laoji spoke out first.

2. Focus

Categories can be focused, and selling points can also be focused. Many new personal care brands like to start with silicone-free fluffy shampoos. After all, young people are anxious about their hair, and lush hair can easily make them impulse buy.

Are these silicone-free volumizing shampoos very different? Just because others have done it, should I not do it?

Of course not. The market size is large enough. I focus on user pain points and work hard to strengthen this selling point. When people see my brand and products, they can strongly associate them with silicone-free and fluffy. Then I will be successful.

Many brands actually have no focus. I have all the selling points that everyone else has, and I will talk about them all in a vain way, just like the current fruit wine industry.

3. Uncover overlooked facts

Brands often overlook many details, and what professionals take for granted is a world beyond the consumer's cognition.

I was chatting with a fruit wine brand before. Their appearance and selling points were all the same, and I was confused about how to extract the selling points. After the communication, they began to explore the selling points based on facts that were ignored.

There is a classic example in marketing:

The teacher of Ogilvy's founder, Mark Ogilvy, came up with a selling point for a beer brand called "Schlitz": every bottle of Schlitz beer must be blown with high-temperature pure oxygen before being canned to ensure a clear taste. But at that time, the brewery owner was very disdainful: this is the standard process of beer production, and all beers have to be blown like this. It's broken if it doesn't blow!

However, this selling point helped Schlitz beer become a huge hit. When consumers saw such an advertisement, wouldn’t it be easy for them to want to try it and see how refreshing it was?

This is how consumers are guided, so Nongfu Spring tastes a little sweet.

03 Differentiation

Positioning differentiation:

Hua Zhixiao cosmetics, although some people complain that their products are average, but in the fiercely competitive cosmetics market, their annual sales exceed 100 million yuan. It has to be said that their positioning of "girly cosmetics" is correct. The product style is two-dimensional and the packaging is dreamy.

The product packaging has almost all the girlish elements: a thinking little angel on a Roman column, a three-dimensional teddy bear on a chocolate eyeshadow palette, and colorful clouds on a rice powder box. It is highly recognizable and leaves a deep impression on people after seeing it.

Differentiation of scenarios:

All green plum wine brands emphasize raw materials and craftsmanship. "Meijian Green Plum Wine" is promoting itself outside the site by entering into differentiated dining scenarios such as "hot pot" and "barbecue", which is different from the "girls drinking alone" approach of other fruit wine brands. It allows consumers to associate with the brand in specific scenarios, and dining scenarios also make it easier for the brand to spread among the group.

The personal care brand PWU, like its scented shampoo and silicone-free fluffy products, is facing extremely fierce competition; however, it has combined the usage scenarios of scented shampoo with the daily scenes of couples in its off-site promotion, creating a sense of resonance.

Packaging differentiation:

Zheyijia, as a traditional enterprise in Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, developed a series of fruit wines in the past two years as shown below; the whole bottle design is quite standard, which is very consistent with their previous offline channel style.

Let’s take a look at the style of Zhejiang Yijia’s current Tmall store. It also follows the ancient style, but unlike Luoyin, Zhejiang Yijia embodies the traditional Chinese style through the shape of the bottle. It has a high degree of recognition and is greatly differentiated from other brands.

When choosing packaging, we must also consider the acceptance of the target users.

Jianghu Guaiguai entered the market with the innovative packaging of "bagged wine". Although the overall packaging is innovative, the style is a bit childish, especially like jelly for children; and many people in the Tmall store comment section think it is too expensive. Currently monthly sales are dismal.

04 Values ​​and emotional identification

A brand must establish connections with users, whether it is user mind, brand association, or user experience, all must be established simultaneously.

Fruit wine is a repurchased product, and its main users are women. Therefore, in addition to marketing around the product itself, it is important to do a good job in membership operations and user emotional operations.

Historical articles will involve ideas, so I won’t write about the specific solutions here.

05 Conclusion

Entrepreneurs look at trends, and trends look at national plans; they paid attention to the government work plan at this year's National People's Congress: insist on expanding domestic demand and stimulating consumption with government spending.

Therefore, there will definitely be more consumer brands in the future, and a large amount of homogeneity is inevitable. If brands want to survive or subvert the previous wave, they have to rely on increasingly expensive traffic, and in the end they can only complain that "e-commerce is becoming more and more difficult."

Diligence in "technique" can only impress oneself, while in-depth research and diligence in "Tao" are what traders and helmsmen should pay attention to.

There are so many brands with high GMV. Don’t always envy others. Experience is for learning and practice. What is important is to find a path suitable for the development of your own brand. There are thousands of beauties in the world, but only one is right for you.

Author: Marketing Lao Wang

Source: Marketing Lao Wang (ID: wltx-2015)