There are no marketing masters in the brand wave

Every once in a while, the popular marketing methodology in the industry will undergo a "trend-type" change, which also dazzles many marketers:

• After 2009, Weibo started to rise. The production methods of fancy hot spot posters on Weibo attracted attention, and many brands started to write jokes on Weibo.
• After 2013, WeChat public accounts were all the rage, with brain-opening articles, chicken soup articles, and comic strips all becoming popular for a while.
• Around 2016, H5 became popular, and brands began to compete to engage in H5 communication;
• After 2018, social media fission, private domain traffic, short video, and live streaming sales have all come into being...

Similarly, the popular marketing methodologies in the industry have also transformed from hot poster production and new media copywriting to live streaming methods and private domain traffic building.

Friends often ask me privately what kind of marketing method is the most effective at present. In fact, asking this question falls into a misunderstanding that many marketers commonly make - the important thing is not to ask what marketing method is the most effective, but to ask what kind of marketing is suitable for your brand's users.

We talk about user thinking every day, but it is actually not easy to truly integrate user thinking into team behavior. There is often a long distance between saying and doing, and the inability to integrate knowledge and action is a common problem for most people.

China has a vast territory and a wide range of user levels in the market, so almost every marketing method can find a targeted audience. You think H5 is outdated, but in fact it is still very effective in some sinking markets. Although opening pictures is more convenient and faster, there are still many users who like to display pictures as albums. They think the album format is very cool.

For example, over the past decade, marketers have been saying that positioning theory is dead and that Ye Maozhong’s approach no longer works, but in fact, there have still been many well-known “positioning-type” marketing cases in recent years. Therefore, if you are a marketer, you don’t need to worry about whether the marketing method is cutting-edge, but instead focus on the user’s behavioral preferences and use targeted methods.

New methodologies can open up new marketing ideas, but there is no need to apply them mechanically. At least in the marketing industry, not all new methods will work, and there is no need to blindly believe in a particular brand marketing guru. This is why many marketing professionals “try too hard” but achieve little results.

Many years ago, I discovered that there are time machines in the world. The current status of third- and fourth-tier cities is actually the same as that of first- and second-tier cities several years ago. Later, I found that Masayoshi Son of SoftBank had proposed a "time machine theory" for the investment industry, which means that the development of different countries and industries is uneven. If the industry model of developed countries is applied to the industries of developing countries, it can often lead to successful investments and a glimpse into the future.

About a year or two ago, I had a conversation with a senior in the marketing industry, and one of his views impressed me deeply:

There are often many restrictions in serving top brands, and in fact, advertisers in the industry are not happy to serve them. Instead, the companies with the greatest potential are some companies in second- and third-tier cities. Their product quality is excellent, but they lack branding operations and marketing thinking, which limits their business development. It is a pity. Being able to help such brands grow is something that third-party marketers really want to do.

When I went traveling during the National Day holiday a while ago, I briefly observed the brands of several second-, third- and fourth-tier cities I visited. I would like to share some personal observations here. They may not be rigorous and accurate, but they may be worth referring to.

01 The maturity of the market will go through the stages of "mom-and-pop stores-quality-copycat-branding"

Offline physical stores in rural areas (fourth- and fifth-tier cities) are often run by couples or miscellaneous brands. The merchandise in these stores is mostly unbranded (except for consumer goods such as rice, flour, grain and oil), and there are almost no branded stores on the streets.

Of course, this is easy to understand. The consumption power in rural areas is insufficient, and the cost of brand channel expansion is likely to exceed the benefits, resulting in the brand being unable to expand. In addition, rural areas are almost an acquaintance society, and the supply of goods themselves is not large, so users' purchasing behavior is mostly completed through familiar store owners.

In the offline businesses in small towns (probably third- and fourth-tier cities), a small number of brand stores can be seen, but there are also many dealerships and copycat stores with brand logos. Many brands have indeed achieved great success in channel penetration into lower-tier cities. In addition to lower-tier giants such as OPPO and VIVO and some clothing brands specializing in the lower-tier markets, there are also sporadic high-priced brands such as Fotile and Feihe.

In fact, the products in third- and fourth-tier cities can be said to have a certain sense of quality, and there are basically no major quality issues. What's interesting is that on the streets of third- and fourth-tier cities, you can already see many people wearing "trendy brands", which are probably counterfeit A-grade products. In other words, users in third- and fourth-tier cities have shifted from pursuing product quality to pursuing brand premium.

The state of the city center in mid-tier areas (lower-tier second-tier and third-tier cities) is actually quite close to that of the secondary center in first-tier cities.

If we ignore the brand distribution of offline stores, it can be said that the differences between first-, second- and third-tier cities are not that big. However, most of the brands in the shopping malls are still local brands (although the decoration is nice). There are already some catering brands such as foreign fast food, hot pot chains, and Internet-famous milk tea shops, and the central shopping malls are quite popular.

That is to say, some industries (usually the catering industry) have achieved a certain degree of branding, and branding in other industries is also underway. In our view, these second- and third-tier cities are on the eve of branding, their populations have sufficient purchasing power, and they are already experiencing an explosion of brand market opportunities.

In summary, we intuitively believe that second- and third-tier cities currently have huge branding dividends and their consumption power still needs to be tapped, so it is worth it for many brands to pay attention to this part of the market.

02 The Internet has eliminated the time gap, and second- and third-tier regions will incubate a large number of new brands

In the several second- and third-tier cities I have visited, not only is the purchasing power of users high (because people usually have a certain amount of spare money), but the price level is not low, which is largely the result of branding. For a cup of milk tea of ​​the same brand, the price difference in first-, second- and third-tier cities is not obvious, but there are still many users queuing up to buy it.

In addition, there are no obvious differences in brand aesthetics and brand preferences between second- and third-tier cities and first-tier cities. Internet tools such as short videos have achieved branded user education and to some extent smoothed the time difference of the "time machine".

However, the population and market capacity of second- and third-tier cities are obviously much larger than those of first-tier cities. We can also find that in recent years, many "Internet celebrity brands" have originated in second- and third-tier cities, rather than first-tier cities. For example, Heytea originated in Jiangmen, Three Squirrels originated in Wuhu, Zhou Hei Ya and Bestore originated in Wuhan, and Cha Yan Yue Se is also stationed in Changsha...

We believe that with the current level of development of China’s supply chain, various new consumer brands will emerge in second- and third-tier cities, and second- and third-tier markets are the best places to incubate brands. Just as my predecessor said, many brand products in second- and third-tier regions are of excellent quality but are unknown to the public outside of those regions. Once they are helped by branding, they are likely to experience explosive growth.

03 Existing brands are generally moving down the market, leaving vacancies for high-end brands

We may write a special article to analyze this topic in the future, so let’s just briefly talk about it here. Ten or twenty years ago, Adidas and Nike (and even brands like Anta) could be considered high-end clothing brands in the minds of the public, but now these brands obviously can no longer bear the word "high-end".

At that time, international brands were just entering the Chinese market, and domestic brands as a whole were also in the stage of de-copying, creating a "high-end halo" for international brands such as Adidas and Nike. However, with the improvement of mass consumption power, more and more people started wearing Adidas and Nike (also due to the factors of copycats and piracy), and the brand halo faded, and the brand was demystified.

This process is actually similar to the situation faced by second- and third-tier cities and current high-end brands. With the activation of consumption power in the sinking market and the advancement of commercial branding in the sinking market, many of today's high-end brands will continue to be disenchanted and will no longer have the "high-end halo". This also means that there will be vacancies for high-end brands again, which is also a major commercial opportunity. It’s a fact that when Adidas and Nike were no longer “high-end”, trendy clothing brands took over the brand space left by high-end clothing.

In other words, the process of consumption upgrading is comprehensive and multi-dimensional. Second-, third- and fourth-tier cities have opportunities for local companies to brand, while first- and second-tier cities also have the benefits of high-end brands occupying the market, and even have room to create new user demand. Overall, we believe that the opportunities in today's Chinese market, at least for the consumer goods industry, are still huge.

In a word, the Chinese market is relatively special (the Chinese market and the Muslim world market may be the two most special markets in the world). Different regions and markets are at different stages of development, which has also brought a lot of market dividends and diversified marketing methodologies. As a marketer, you need to adopt marketing methods that suit the characteristics of target users. As a manager, you need to seize major business trend opportunities.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)