2020-2021, why do you think marketing is so difficult?

According to our observation, brands mostly face three challenges in marketing, which we call the “three dares”:

The first is not daring to spend money.

We have encountered several brands that have "money but don't spend it". They have millions of budgets in hand, but dare not act rashly to make any investments from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, resulting in the strange phenomenon of having cash budget but not doing marketing promotion .

The reason behind the phenomenon of “not daring to spend money” is naturally confusion about current marketing and people don’t know what kind of promotion method will have the highest ROI. In fact, hundreds of millions or tens of millions may sound like a lot, but if you blindly follow the trend and invest in it, it may not make any splash. If this is the case, the person in charge of marketing for this brand will probably leave. Therefore, brands have become more conservative in marketing.

This is also a rather paradoxical thing. The faster the external communication environment changes, it actually means more bonus opportunities, but for most companies, the uncertainty is also greater, and corporate marketing becomes more conservative.

The second is the fear of investing.

The investment here does not only refer to spending money, but also the refined operation of specific channels. There are so many emerging platforms, channels, and marketing methods now, such as whether to operate Bilibili, whether to do live streaming, whether to do video accounts, whether to engage in private domain traffic... Companies face too many choices and are therefore very hesitant.

What is important is that if you want to do well on every platform and in every marketing method, you need to carry out in-depth operations. It is not something that can be done by simply throwing money at it. Instead, it requires a considerable amount of manpower and budget resources to succeed, and it will involve the overall actions of brand marketing.

Let’s take Bilibili as an example. Video content marketing is obviously a major trend in the future, but there are not many brands that have truly achieved results in marketing on Bilibili. The commercialization of Bilibili itself has just started. Faced with competition from other video platforms such as WeChat Video Account, whether it is cost-effective for brands to invest heavily in marketing on Bilibili is actually a question that needs careful consideration.

The third is not daring to stop loss.

It is normal for a brand to continue investing in a certain platform for a period of time but see no improvement. However, at this time, the company is faced with a dilemma - should it continue investing or stop losses in time?

Sometimes continuous investment can lead to a breakthrough from "quantitative change to qualitative change", and such examples are not uncommon; but sometimes the brand may have chosen the wrong direction and is going further and further down the wrong path; and sometimes it is just a problem of the marketing manager's operational thinking, and the brand can get back on track by adjusting the strategy and replacing the person in charge.

The reasons are very complicated, but based on our observations and experience, most of them are caused by inappropriate operational ideas of marketing managers, and a small number are caused by the wrong selection of marketing platforms. But no matter what, whether to persist or cut losses is a big problem in the corporate marketing process.

I believe that every person in charge of a budget has experienced the challenges of the above three major problems. These are also the confusions we often hear in our daily communications with companies.

In fact, these confusions have not always existed, but have erupted in a concentrated manner due to changes in the media environment in recent years. So here we will talk about some of the trend changes taking place in the marketing industry.

1. What happened to the marketing industry?

1. Platforms Invade Brand Marketing

We have said in other articles before that the role of leading platforms is becoming increasingly important, and many merchants have complained to us that they are "working for the platforms."

In terms of the marketing sector alone, the platform not only has traffic but also data, which means that when the brand does not have sufficient bargaining power, it needs to actively match the brand's overall marketing strategy. In other words, the platform becomes the brand's Party A and determines the brand's marketing effectiveness. In addition, the platform is also developing marketing tools to achieve precision marketing. At the marketing tool level, brand marketing also needs to rely on platform tools.

In the past two years, the negative externalities of the platform economy have gradually emerged and have repeatedly become a hot topic in society. With the advancement of "anti-monopoly", the situation may improve in the future, but the relationship between platforms and brand marketing should not change.

2. The reshuffle of marketing hotspots is accelerating

At the macro level, the disappearance of the demographic dividend has accelerated the integration of major industries, which has also exacerbated the speed at which marketing hotspots are quickly overdrawn by hot money, resulting in a shorter marketing window. The entire industry has presented a process of "marketing dividends - capital entry - rapid overdraft - slow return", which was very obvious in last year's live streaming sales, and may be repeated in the future marketing of Bilibili.

In addition, the platform's content policies will also change rapidly, which will result in the brand's communication effect being unable to be maintained for a long time. For example, the internet celebrities who are popular on Douyin today are almost a completely different group of people compared to two years ago; today's benchmark marketing cases on Douyin may have been eliminated in two years... This requires brands to constantly change their content strategies and communication strategies in order to maintain a relatively good marketing effect, but the reality is that no brand can always stay on the hot spot.

The increased rotation speed of hot spots will also invisibly send a bad signal to the brand, that is, it becomes unimportant to delve deeply into a certain field. A brand continues to invest deeply in a platform in the early stages, but ultimately the platform's marketing dividends may not be obtained by the brand itself, but are more likely to be obtained by external brands that are good at grabbing dividends. This leads to brands not daring to easily invest in operations.

3. Consumers have more initiative

Not only the platforms, but consumers themselves are also beginning to take more initiative, and brands have become weaker in comparison. In fact, the disappearance of the demographic dividend means that consumer categories as a whole are shifting from a seller's market to a buyer's market, and brand marketing is changing from "push" to "pull".

The advantage is that brands no longer compete on marketing promotion, but more on the product itself. This is why product innovation has been so intensive among new consumer brands in the past two years. In the past, we could only see such high-density and large-scale product innovation in the Internet industry.

But the problem that is difficult to solve is that brands are still using consumer data analysis to find insights into product differences, and then design, test, and produce new products. There is still a certain time lag in this process, while the current shift in mass consumer preferences is already very rapid.

The trend of population segmentation and industry verticalization is already obvious. We believe that leading brands in the industry need to continue to become "platforms" to export industry capabilities and industry solutions internally (or externally). Otherwise, they will gradually become screws focusing on niche markets, leading to gradual decline and marginalization.

2. Four Marketing Strategies

Next, let’s talk about the response strategies that brands can consider:

1. Avoid being greedy and be precise

There are too many platforms nowadays. It is unrealistic for any enterprise to cover all platforms for operation (unless your budget is really too large). We have come into contact with some companies that adopt a "wide-net" approach to platform operation. They send one person to try to operate almost every platform and every marketing hotspot. Of course, the result is that nothing is done well. This is actually just a matter of luck.

Marketing is not only about seizing opportunities, but also about resisting temptation. Trying everything can easily lead to distorted actions. What we suggest is that brands need to choose the platform that best matches their own audience and scenarios for operation. “Small and accurate” is more meaningful than “big and comprehensive” today. For example, "Jike" is a very small platform, but many Internet brands operate well on it because the audience is precise enough and the community atmosphere is also good; and although "Bilibili" is already very large, we believe that it is not suitable for all brand operations, at least not at this stage.

Many corporate marketing managers may be too anxious and often in a state of "believing everything they hear". They constantly give their teams various reference cases to imitate, without thinking about whether these cases are suitable for their own brands. They do not take the time to think through their own marketing strategies and methods. This is often tactical diligence and strategic laziness. I believe many readers can relate to this.

2. Avoid the pursuit of breaking the circle, it is better to do a good job in daily life

Our view may be different from that of most marketing observers. We believe that the soil for breaking out of the circle of communication no longer exists, and most brands do not need to pursue the so-called "breaking out of the circle of communication."

Of course, marketing promotions like "The Next Wave" will still break the circle, but when we observe marketing events in the past two years, we can find that breaking the circle is almost only a thing for large companies, or companies with a certain amount of accumulation or capital. For example, the breakthrough of "Houlang" can actually be said to be a concentrated outbreak that B station has been brewing for more than ten years. Paying too much attention to breaking the circle of communication is actually not very meaningful. It is better to do every standard daily action well.

However, it should be noted that there was a fertile ground for "breaking the circle" dissemination in the past few years. For example, WeChat's restrictions on induced forwarding were not very strict in the past few years. Through a series of fission dissemination, unknown small brands could indeed quickly gain screen-sweeping influence and increase their popularity.

Breaking the circle can be the icing on the cake for large companies and companies with a certain degree of fame, but ordinary small and medium-sized companies should not pursue it too much. In fact, breaking the circle to spread is only a "by-product". Moreover, the population is constantly verticalizing, and the significance of breaking the circle to business growth is actually declining.

Let me say a little more here. In the past two years, Lao Xiang Ji has broken through the circle through some communication activities, but I have always been curious about how much impact the communication and breaking through the circle can have on the catering business of Lao Xiang Ji, a catering model with strong offline scenarios? Especially Lao Xiang Ji is still in a state of slow store opening. (If you have any ideas about this, please leave a comment. I will write a separate article on this topic when I have the chance.)

3. Avoid exaggerated concepts and deeply connect products

We have found that the effects of pure marketing concepts and marketing promotions are no longer as good as before. Marketing actions with better results are often those that closely combine products and marketing, which we call "productized marketing." We believe that co-branded products, IP derivative product development, unique peripheral products, and product recommendations are all marketing actions that are closely integrated with the product.

Because now the trigger point of user consumption decision is no longer how good the marketing is, but on the differentiation and personalization of the product, that is why grass-roots marketing has become so popular in recent years.

In the past, we often saw advertisements that were purely conceptual, such as those that talked about lifestyles and life philosophies. That was because products were at a homogenized stage at the time and needed to be differentiated and recognized through brand tone. But today, products are becoming diversified, and it is more practical to highlight the differences in the products themselves. After all, users ultimately buy products, not stories (even if they buy stories, they cannot be separated from the product itself, after all, the economic base determines the superstructure).

In addition, the creation of brand IP is very important, and IP is one of the few things that can resist the uncertainty of communication. We have found that in the past two years, leading brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's have been vigorously promoting the development of their own IP derivatives, and even created e-commerce platforms for IP products. This trend deserves everyone's attention.

4. Avoid fighting alone and seek warmth in groups

As mentioned earlier, the power of brand companies has weakened compared to platforms and consumers. For most brands, banding together for support is an important idea for marketing breakthroughs. Only by establishing cross-industry alliances to empower each other, building a set of gameplay for other brands to participate, linking other brands in marketing actions, and setting up mutual interest mechanisms can the effect of "1+1>2" be achieved.

In fact, banding together for warmth means that brands need to build their own "circle of friends". The construction of most brands' "circles of friends" initially relies on capital connections. For example, the major brands under Shanghai Jahwa often cooperate with each other. We have emphasized many times before that future business competition is not competition between individuals, but competition between ecosystems. Coming back to brand marketing, although it cannot be called an "ecosystem", individual combat undoubtedly has limited energy and low efficiency.

Let’s stop here for today. In fact, there should be a major change in the marketing environment this year, especially with video accounts, live broadcasts, and some actions of Bilibili, which should release a lot of marketing dividends, and we will continue to pay attention to it.

Author: Spread Gymnastics

Source: Spread Gymnastics