100 pitfalls that product planners should avoid!

Products need planning, not brands. For most companies, their strength is only enough to operate a single product category. So, his brand planning is product planning . Remember the following points, and you will at least die with a clear mind.

What is a product?

Any goods that can be used and bring value experience are products. The product has a wide range of extensions and is not limited to functional use. The "overall product concept" includes: product entity, service and perception.

1. Functions only account for 1/5 of the product. But if it comes to the level of brand strategy, functions may only account for 1/10. The function of the product is the foundation, and the brand is far superior to the function. Building a brand is actually building a product.

2. Service is also a product. The biggest feature of the Internet era is that you can experience the service before buying it. Therefore, service pre-positioning is the focus of the Internet era.

3. Packaging: It is a factor that helps sell the product and is worth spending a lot of money on. Think about Apple products.

4. Product selling point: The selling point is not to list the functions, but to do subtraction, focus on one point, and win the game with one blow.

5. Product name: A good name is very important, provided that you can register it.

6. Product culture: Products also have culture. For example, if you ask yourself, "Why did I choose Volvo instead of BMW?", the reasons why these two brands impress you are different, and the reason behind them is the difference in product culture.

Viewpoint: What you can see is often not the reason for buying. The reason for consumption lies behind the product.

Example: Tesla’s quality control is poor, the complaint rate remains high, and there are many social topics, but why does it sell well? You thought you were just buying an electric car (visible reason), wrong! Behind this is the desire to gain recognition from the elite circle and a sense of fashion (the sense of value behind it)

1. Product Function

1. Avoid getting stuck in functional dead ends. "My competitor's products are worse than mine, but they sell better than me. "Seems very indignant.

2. In fact, it is enough for the functions to meet basic needs. We must shift from product thinking to cultural perception thinking. Craftsmanship cannot beat innovation, and craftsmanship is the ultimate involution.

3. Times are changing. Customer demands are changing. Values ​​are changing. For example: our parents pay attention to the durability of products, but those born in the 1990s and 2000s do not consider this at all. Appearance is justice!

for example:

Buying watches: When young people buy watches, they don’t care about value preservation, but about matching.

When buying a mobile phone: don’t consider the functional features (homogenization is already very high), consider the brand and personality. Why is the national trend rising? Because young people give domestic brands more opportunities.

When buying clothes: not durability and warmth, but fashion and matching

2. Packaging

1. To be honest with small and medium-sized enterprises: in the early stages of enterprise development, there is nothing wrong with copying other companies in terms of functions and quality. There is nothing shameful in doing less R&D and more copying!

Put more money into product packaging and marketing. Brand image assets are your own.

Who doesn’t have an ignominious time of poverty? Wait until the company is on a higher level before setting up a formal R&D department.

Forget about craftsmanship, just survive first. Instead of relying on craftsmanship, it is better to innovate. If innovation is not possible, then attract new customers. Expand first, then evolve.

Apple's R&D department is more focused on design, and all of its technical problems are mostly solved by the supply system. As for ZARA in the clothing industry, there is no high-tech research and development. It is all about buyers and references, and there is no design to speak of.

Packaging is not a disguise, packaging is a pre-installed icebreaker for value

2. If you don’t have money to build a brand, start with packaging.

Good looks inspire a sense of ownership and stimulate the desire to buy. “The packaging value of a product always exceeds its functional value.”

The most important thing is that compared with time-consuming research and development, spending money on packaging image is the easiest way to produce results. The packaging here includes: corporate packaging and product packaging, that is, CIS+PIS.

3. Product packaging has a lethal effect before product functions, quality and services.

It’s like watching a movie. You won’t know whether the movie is good or not until you finish watching it, but you have to buy a ticket first. Why buy tickets? The publicity and reviews are enough to make you interested, but these are just the packaging of the movie.

Good movies also need packaging, and good products need packaging even more! The same goes for people.

4. The more people who like you there are, the greater your chances of success. Good packaging will first make more people like you. Another chance to get to know you. Pleasing to the eyes should actually mean "pleasing to the eyes and pleasing to the heart".

If a person wants to be liked by others, he needs to package himself. Personal success depends on packaging, and product success also depends on packaging. Packaging is the most important core of the product value chain besides brand. It is the focus of the focus.

Good packaging doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money, but spending little money will definitely result in bad products. Exclusive design can make packaging unique. A design that is made up of a collection of online materials is not called packaging design. Original! Exclusive! Only good packaging!

3. It is very important to choose a good name

1. A good name is half the success. A good name can capture customers' mental resources at the first moment and reduce communication costs.

2. Names with fewer characters are easier to remember, but the disadvantage is that they are difficult to register. what to do? Purchase + Transfer

3. Times have changed. Don’t seek to be fashionable anymore. Cultural confidence starts with naming. Easy to remember and understand (forget about the common “x小x” naming convention), cultural (mass consumer products can ignore this)

The best foreign brands are not foreign: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, BMW…

Names that are classy and easy to remember: Suxie, Jiangnan Buyi, Uniqlo, MUJI…

4. Service is a plus

1. Service is the biggest differentiation in the era of homogeneity.

People say that it is difficult to run a physical store. In fact, the biggest advantage of a physical store over a website is that it directly reflects the service: on-site service, feeling the product, and feeling the people. On-site talent is the greatest product strength.

If your product is difficult to build strategy, difficult to build culture, difficult to command a premium, and difficult to create spiritual enjoyment, then just do your service well! Enjoy premium by relying on the spirit of service and generate continuous purchasing power from customers.

2. Do not provide excessive service, but make the other party feel relaxed and stress-free. A good product can only make users praise you, while good service can make users become your fans.

3. If you are not destined to have luxury goods, don’t get the disease caused by luxury goods. Too cool and unsuitable for 99.9% of product brands.

4. The best service is no service. Product strength is the key.

5. Product selling points

1. There must not be too many selling points, otherwise they will have to be thrown away. You just pick one.

Finding a good selling point can instantly turn an ordinary product into an excellent product. If there is no reason for a product to be priced at a premium, customers will look for reasons for a low price. You can only join in the price war. The reason for the premium is the clever setting of the product selling points and the user empathy of the product culture.

"Safety" is the selling point of Volvo cars, while Porsche's selling point is "satisfying vanity." Reality or fakeness is not important; the core of a successful selling point is “market recognition”, and the premise is “positive experience”.

2. Product selling points can be made into advertising slogans. But advertising slogans are not limited to finding selling points.

Corporate values ​​cannot be used as product slogans, they can only be used as corporate slogans. The problem is that there are many companies that confuse the promotion of corporate values ​​with the promotion of product selling points! “We are just nature’s porters”, is this a promotion of corporate values ​​or a promotion of product selling points? Enough to think about for a while!

3. Find the selling point well, but more importantly, stick to it well

The slogan is repeated, repeated, repeated. Selling point: upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. But it just doesn’t change!

Author: Xing Ruo Chen Liang

Source: Xing Ruo Chen Liang