In 2021, all brands need to start over from 0 to 1

Last year was a very special year for all of us. Although this year has been hard, it has also been a more rewarding year for Chinese brand people.

When I was doing the year-end review last year, I said that 2019 was the year of "naked swimming" for marketers - if 2019 was the year of brand and effect integration, everyone began to tighten their belts to sell goods and pay attention to traffic-generating products. In 2020, the emergence of new consumer brands and the further transformation of traditional consumer brands have become a new highlight in the marketing circle. We see that the development of the brand market has become more positive. It is no longer confused by various marketing tactics, but is returning to the essence of marketing: focusing on users and creating user value.

In the transformation of brands, we see a new trend and keyword: the marketing circle is increasingly beginning to discover the meaning and importance of "brand assets". The accumulation of brand assets, in addition to the management and cultivation of the brand’s own system, more importantly, is the operation of brand fan assets.

From "focusing on sales + traffic explosion" to "managing fan assets" is one of the underlying logic and keywords for brands to achieve growth in 2020. Brands manage their users just like celebrities manage their fans. Brands should return to their needs and concepts, deepen their strong connections with users, and do a good job in brand fan operations.

The insight into this trend comes not only from conversations with brands, but also from communication with platforms. If a brand wants to manage its assets well, it not only needs to carry out its own refined operations, but also needs to leverage the platform. Starting this year, various platforms have begun to further expand and demonstrate no longer just the ability to create hit products and the strength of subsidies, but more through their own data-based tools, empowering brands to expand new customer base, connect with other brand IPs, and deeply expand and operate their own fans.

For example, Juhuasuan, a platform that I have been following for the past two years, released the "2020+1" annual review advertising film during the New Year's Eve these two days, discussing how it witnessed how brands and consumers accompany and support each other - the energy of brands helps people overcome difficulties, and the support of consumers allows brands to gain the motivation to innovate and grow.

1. The core of marketing returns to the ability to gather people

2. All brands need to start over from 0 to 1

3. To transfer brand value from 0 to 1, digital tools are needed to build scenarios

1. The core of marketing returns to the ability to gather people

In my brand marketing course, I once returned to Kotler's definition of marketing in management consulting: the essence of marketing is actually to find the user's needs and the brand's interests, and to make efficient communication links.

The key factors of brand operation are actually two parts:

1. Fan operation: While communicating the brand's functional and emotional benefits, continuously reach the brand's potential core users and operate the brand's core and high-potential users.

2. Brand asset accumulation: Repeatedly shape brand perception through the creation and delivery of 360-degree brand experience.

To sum up, the core of marketing is actually the ability to use brands to gather people. The accumulation of brand assets is the fan operation process of continuously turning users into fans.

However, in the past marketing environment under the Internet traffic dividend, we have been discussing how to reach people, but have forgotten how to turn users into loyal fans of the brand, refine operations and accumulate brand assets.

Starting from 2020, as the traffic dividend disappeared, consumer brands began to show new opportunities, and the essence of marketing began to gradually return to people's hearts.

Especially today's consumers, especially those born in the 1990s, 1995s, and Generation Z, not only value the practicality of the brand, but also the emotional value that the brand conveys.

For example, he/she may save up for three and a half small cups for half a year because of a "return plan" that advocates environmental protection. However, the previous brand marketing templates that only use "one trick" to sell products can easily form the perception of an emotionless money-making machine in his/her mind, which has the opposite effect.

This means that compared to the satisfaction of rational needs, the connection of emotional needs is a more complex marketing chain. For brands, they need to be able to "win people's hearts"——

Compared with the traditional one-way brand marketing approach, more and more brands have learned to understand the needs of their fans and make changes to themselves over the past year. Just like how celebrities gain popularity through their works and personalities, creating attention and a sense of closeness; last year, brands gained popularity through the introduction of new products and the companionship attributes of marketing tools such as live streaming and private domains, which narrowed the distance between them and consumers, gathered old fans, attracted new people, and accumulated popularity.

2. All brands need to start over from 0 to 1

In the past, we compared 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 100 to different stages of brand growth, such as new brands, mature brands, super brands, etc. This is essentially a process of linear brand growth.

But in today's new population and new marketing environment, media characteristics and product tools have accelerated the explosive growth of brands, and are also changing the definition of brands from 0 to 1 to some extent - now the brand's 0 to 1 has gradually shifted to non-linear growth. This means that for brands at any stage of their life cycle, there are new opportunities to go from 0 to 1.

Today, brands at any stage of their life cycle need to redo their brand operations from 0 to 1 and reorganize their fan assets.

Whether it is the first brand-defining marketing launch of an emerging brand, a new track for the younger generation of a traditional conservative brand, or how industry leaders lead industry model innovation, it requires a breakthrough change from 0 to 1 for the brand.

This change from 0 to 1 must follow the trajectory of the market, that is, only by using the characteristics of its own fan base as insight can a brand develop healthily and realize its commercial innovation value.

However, the innovation of fan marketing cannot rely solely on the brand’s own brute force, but needs to be leveraged——

For example, we have seen five new and old brands using the Juhuasuan platform to re-operate brand fans from 0 to 1:

First, use platform tools to break the boundaries between public and private domains.

The fundamental goal that a brand wants to achieve through fan asset operation is to break the circle.

If a brand wants to break out of its circle, it must first enter the circle.

But many times, brands are busy entering different circles and forget that there is a large circle under their feet, namely the brand’s own private domain. Connecting the public domain by activating the private domain is also the first point at which the platform can empower brands.

For example, in April last year, Juhuasuan’s joint case with Starbucks on Joyful Gathering Day amplified Starbucks’ image IP – Bearista, while leveraging its own identity as “Starbucks’ Environmental Ambassador” to launch a campaign #GatherThisCup,LoveTheEarth#. Through the online H5 format, fans are called upon to bring their own coffee cups, take away coffee grounds and engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors, thus converting the original rights and interests of offline stores into online interactive activities.

The platform Juhuasuan Joy Day also integrated Weitao, short video and other entrances into the site to stimulate the interest of public domain traffic, further amplify the volume of this event, and increase the number of new customers. It is equivalent to occupying the atrium of the plaza in a super shopping district, occupying centralized brand exposure and content display.

In the end, Starbucks’ offer of 10,000 cups of coffee to its fans once again brought online traffic offline. Introduce public domain topics into private domain experiences to increase the brand’s fan base. The live broadcast was watched by a total of 750,000 people, and the popular cat paw and cat tail cup was sold out in one second, helping the brand to rank No. 1 in two major categories.

When a brand wants to penetrate a new demographic, it essentially wants to expand its customer base and bring in more sales.

But what’s important is how to make new customers see you and make them buy.

We can imagine that the brand has moved its offline shelves online and how to capture the consumer’s first moment of truth online so that they will have the urge to buy when they see the product. We will find that in addition to the attractiveness of the content itself, the carrier of the content is also very important.

For example, the cooperation case between Joyoung and Juhuasuan Joyful Gathering Day focused the content insight on the user portrait, targeting the appearance economy of new middle-class women. Since 2019, they have worked together to expand the anime IP co-branded product line and achieved a brand fan growth of over 200,000. In 2020, Joyoung and Juhuasuan joined hands again to further broaden the track of two-dimensional youth products. At the same time, they cooperated with three major IPs including Pokémon, LineFriends, and HELLO KITTY to create the marketing theme of the "Cute Kitchen Group" debuting together, which impressed consumers visually and achieved a second breakthrough in new customers for the brand, with new customer transactions accounting for as high as 88%.

In this case, the product itself is a good carrier of content, helping the brand convey a new image.

In the case of cooperation with Budweiser Group, I found that another key point of Juhuasuan’s empowerment of brand fan asset operations is to bring surprises to users.

What is a surprise? That is what they wanted but did not expect.

For example, guiding an offline consumption scenario online.

When the epidemic situation just began to stabilize in May, Juhuasuan teamed up with the Budweiser Group to launch the #Everything Can Beer# Group Gathering Day event online, and launched a special online wine culture buyer store for shopping. It also used the Z generation culture of "the world is so big, happy to stay at home, beauty is righteous, and party animals" as a starting point to guide users with different interests in wine consumption. I believe that the source of these cultural labels must come from the database behind the Juhuasuan platform, which uses the topicality of the products to guide consumers' curiosity and ordering.

What’s even more interesting is that in this group’s happy gathering day collaboration, Alibaba Zoo’s IP also participated and started collaborating with the brand. While empowering brands, the platform also further expands its own effects.

While brands are gaining empowerment from the platform, they are also turning the tools on the platform into new venues for communication between themselves and consumers.

For example, in April this year, when the epidemic was severe, the global launch of LineFriends' new IP image MINI BROWM&FRIENDS was also affected and it was impossible to meet with fans offline. In this case, it joined hands with Juhuasuan to move the press conference to online live broadcast. A new global image launch conference titled "Let's Go Back to Our Childhood Together" was presented, creating a cloud gathering for fans around the world.

This live broadcast ultimately helped the brand gain a 255% year-on-year increase in fans and a 400% year-on-year increase in new members.

Today's new consumer groups are easily attracted by a new concept. Let’s look back at last year’s hot words: “working people”, “unethical”, “involution”, “balancing”, etc.

These words are not so self-explanatory that people can understand what they mean just by looking at them. But in this feeling of not quite understanding, people will be driven by curiosity to learn more information.

This method of creating new concepts has been very popular in this year's marketing circle, helping brands attract attention and sales.

Taking the case of Lin's Wood Industry and Juhuasuan's Gathering Day this year, Lin's Wood Industry launched the concept of "social furniture" for Generation Z, which fits the "stay-at-home culture" in special times. After the resumption of work after the epidemic, it launched the "mahjong sofa" to encourage young people to play at home with family and a few friends without having to gather in groups.

The strong social attributes of this product also attracted 510,000 young people to search and enter the store naturally. The sales explosion target was achieved within 5 minutes of the sale, and the transaction volume of 165 million was achieved in 3 days.

3. To transfer brand value from 0 to 1, digital tools are needed to build scenarios

One of the most powerful partners is the platform. The collusion between brands and platforms is creating a new market for incremental commercial value. Brands and platforms have a common goal, which is to achieve growth.

Instead of building their own middle platform, data platform and investing to gain volume, brands need to be empowered by platforms with the same values ​​to radiate more voice and sales: that is, use the platform's "digital tools" to reach people, and use the innovative power of content to build dialogue scenarios: leverage the platform's data-based operation capabilities, platform traffic circulation mechanism, refined user stratification capabilities, and the ability to transfer new experience scenarios from offline to online.

For example, Juhuasuan, a large Taobao marketing platform, has been operating large-scale brand activities for more than ten years, and has its own centralized traffic base with high activity and UV value. At the same time, the platform's product capabilities can provide targeted communication for users at different levels, including new customer privileges, algorithm matching of high-potential groups, etc., thereby helping brands achieve stratified fan communication and improve marketing efficiency.

At the tactical level, brands can obtain through the platform: marketing tools for group stratification to help improve the efficiency of rights distribution; public domain groups to increase the exposure and display of content; platform marketing tools to improve the links to reach new customers; and at the strategic level, the platform's data content library is also an important growth assistant for brands.

At the same time, the platform is also iterating. Through cooperation with brands, it further deepens its understanding of users in the ecosystem and continuously iterates, rolls, and optimizes the value-added of centralized fan assets.

As analyzed above, the Juhuasuan Joyful Day marketing IP is a platform that collaborates with brands to build dialogue scenarios with new customer groups through co-construction of solutions. By cooperating with brands in different industries and different life cycles, we study their brand-effect integration strategies in consumer communication, product innovation, and global communication links, and accumulate our own rich practical database.

Not only are brands eager to realize new concepts from 0 to 1, but platforms also have new goals from 0 to 1:

This year, Juhuasuan will strengthen its systematic data operation capabilities and launch the "Jufeilun" crowd data engine to enable the brand's daily user operations and platform promotions to gain synergy, and allow public domain crowd assets to intersect with the brand's private domain crowd.

As for brands, how to seize the platform dividend, turn it into an efficient tool, and achieve rapid breakthrough, I think this is also a key thing we need to think about in early 2021.

After all, after experiencing a difficult year, efficient mutual empowerment and support will definitely be the main theme in the future.

4. Keywords for brand marketing in 2021: Focus on fan assets

Starting from 2021, every brand will usher in a new journey from 0 to 1, whether it is the first voice of a new brand or the rejuvenation of a traditional brand.

A key word in brand marketing will be the management of fan assets, returning to how to win people's hearts: operating old customers and developing new customers.

It is not enough to rely solely on the brand's own CRM and private domain operations to operate fan assets. Instead, you can leverage the power of other platforms that have the same idea of ​​empowering brands to combine the public and private domains: use the public domain to create cases to expand the population, use the platform's capabilities to improve operational efficiency, use data-based tools to bring offline experiences online, and more accurately enter the culture of new groups.

Future brand assets are built by core fans. Core fans require brands to operate more intelligently through data-based platforms.

After all, marketing is a combination of art and science.