Brand Marketing Integration Path

With the in-depth development of mobile Internet and the geometric growth of algorithms and big data accuracy, the communication industry has undoubtedly ushered in a new change. I believe that this change has begun since the Internet web1.0 era. Compared with traditional advertising such as outdoor, television, and print media that cannot measure the input-output ratio, .com portals have begun to measure the actual effect of a communication according to CPM, CPC and other standards. Although there are many fake and extensive elements in it, it is at least visible compared to traditional advertising.

The precise advertising model driven by mobile Internet and combining big data + technology + algorithm is a further deepening of Internet advertising. Nowadays, many people browse e-commerce websites instead of buying when they need to. The products and information that each person browses while browsing are specially customized by algorithms based on his interests. If the accuracy is 10% now, you can imagine what it will be like when it reaches 90%. The products you receive are all the ones you like and need. Do you still need advertisements at that time?

From a broad perspective, I think this is the future of advertising. Everyone will no longer receive the same information, products, and advertisements. Instead, they will receive thousands of customized information, products, and advertisements based on their income, interests, etc.

Such a future will certainly take some time, but the trend it represents is marketing integration - precise communication and advertising with measurable actual results. Before such a future arrives, there is still a path to achieve marketing integration. Based on years of experience and learning, I have summarized the path to marketing integration. It can be said that this is currently the most comprehensive method of marketing integration. These methods may not achieve 100% effect, but they are definitely different from traditional advertising communications. They are the most comprehensive methods based on effect measurement. I hope they can help your marketing.

I divide "marketing integration" into six schools. These six schools are not arranged in chronological order and may be able to leverage each other.

Insight School: Marketing based on real user needs

The first is the insight school. The core idea of ​​the insight school is to conduct in-depth market research, understand user needs, and find the most important points of interest for advertising production and dissemination.

The most famous representative is of course Mr. Ogilvy. The advertisement he wrote for Rolls-Royce can be said to represent the highest level of insight: at a speed of sixty miles per hour, the loudest noise on this new Rolls-Royce car comes from its electronic clock. Ogilvy said, "The purpose of advertising is to sell products, otherwise it is not advertising." This view represents the concept of marketing integration in the traditional advertising era.

In addition to Ogilvy, Hopkins is also a representative of this school. His masterpiece, "Scientific Advertising", has an advertising effect-oriented concept as the title suggests. The statement "scientific advertising is about monitoring effects and testing" can be said to have advanced the practice of the AB testing concept commonly used by Internet companies today.

In the early domestic advertising market, Ye Maozhong adhered to this concept to produce advertisements and achieved remarkable results. In the case of Zhen Gongfu, he combined the "steaming" that represents the Lingnan food culture with the popular martial arts style at the time to create Zhen Gongfu, which once achieved a very large brand reputation. In recent years, Ye Maozhong published "Conflict", which, combined with his early "Advertiser's Notes", is more inclined to the hybrid theory of insight + positioning.

Shi Yuzhu believes that it is very important to study consumers' psychology and motivations and help them make decisions. His insightful views were best demonstrated in the case of Nongfu Spring, where he linked people's gift-giving habits with his own products, meeting a major demand in the gift market.

Positioning School: Positioning + Repetition + Occupy Mind

The second school is the positioning school. The reason why this theory from the traditional advertising era is placed here is that most of the relatively effective traditional advertisements in the country currently use this theory. For example, "Drink Wanglaoji if you don't want to get a sore throat", "Guazi used cars, no middlemen making a profit from the price difference", Shenzhou Private Car, a safe online car-hailing service, etc.

Positioning was proposed by Trout and Ries. The core idea is to differentiate brand promotion positioning and occupy the user's mind through continuous repetition. The slogan "Drink Wanglaoji if you are afraid of getting a sore throat" was once popular all over the country. It was created under the guidance of this theory. As an elevator media operator, Jiang Nanchun is also a supporter of this theory, which is tied to his own interests. He uses elevator media to constantly repeat product positioning advertisements, making the advertisements achieve a brainwashing effect. Guazi used car, Luckin Coffee and others have all used this medium to continuously practice the "repetition" of positioning theory.

The blue ocean strategy has been talked about a lot nowadays, but for this fully competitive market, almost every field is a red ocean, and the blue ocean almost no longer exists. Douglas Holt, author of "Cultural Strategy", believes that a unique cultural brand should be built with innovative ideology in order to construct a blue ocean strategy in brand culture. This unique cultural brand can be seen as a cultural brand positioning. For example, Nike has solidified its brand cultural strategy of civilian struggle and Just Do It by using a large number of African-American athletes from slums in its advertisements to showcase their daily struggles, and then dramatizing Michael Jordan's personal will to fight.

Many people should have read Hua & Hua's book "Super Symbols Are Super Creativity". Hua & Hua's philosophy is to create easy-to-remember brand symbols to form good communication. For example, Hua & Hua believes that there should be three clear-at-a-glance design concepts: "The first clear-at-a-glance concept is to see the name at a glance; the second clear-at-a-glance concept is to see the industry at a glance. The third clear-at-a-glance concept is to try to use concrete graphics when using graphic design." I think this is a branch concept of positioning. Some marketing experts, such as Xiaoma Song and Luo Zhenyu, basically derived their marketing concepts from this.

Creative School: Big Ideas

The third school is the creative school. It is certain that good ideas can promote sales, but the problem is that good ideas are unstable and difficult to measure. As George Lewis, one of the greatest advertisers of this school, said, advertising is an art that is entirely based on intuition, instinct, and especially talent. According to this theory, there are not many people who can really come up with good ideas, and even fewer who can produce them at a consistent level. I personally think that this school of thought has limited application in the area of ​​marketing integration, so I will not elaborate on it here. I recommend everyone to read "The Blue Trick" carefully.

Psychology School: Psychology guides sales

The fourth school is the psychology school. Starting from this school, the concept will be different from the traditional marketing concept, making marketing more integrated and effective. The representatives of the psychology school are not necessarily advertising and marketing practitioners, but more likely scientific psychologists and behaviorists. Their research has relatively scientific analysis and judgment on the universal psychology and behavior of human beings, and these analyses and judgments are of great inspiration for marketers to formulate marketing strategies and content.

Underhill's "Why Customers Buy" was written in the pre-Internet era. He carefully observed people's shopping behaviors outdoors and in shopping malls and came to some conclusions. If operators improve the layout and placement of goods, the setting of cash registers, the setting of corridors, etc. based on these conclusions, they can optimize the shopping process of consumers and make them consume more. In fact, the same is true in the e-commerce era. Research on this in the e-commerce era is more convenient than in the traditional era. Using this concept well will have a huge impact on your e-commerce marketing strategy.

Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler are both Nobel Prize winners in economics. Their research is behavioral economics. Anyone who has studied economics knows the famous "rational economic man" hypothesis in economics, which states that any human behavior is based on rationality - maximizing one's own interests. Classical economics is based on this foundation. The two authors mentioned above believe that people are irrational (emotional) most of the time, and this characteristic makes people's behavior often more casual. "Nudge" argues that designers can set options to guide the audience, causing them to behave irrationally but in a way that benefits the designer.

Wilcox's book "The Principles of Best Selling" applied this theory to marketing, and he also set up an advertising company in the United States that used this theory as a guide. The book concludes that successful marketing drives consumers to make choices based on intuition or instinct, without the need for consumers to think about these choices. The most worthwhile thing for a brand is to guide consumers to choose themselves based on their intuition. For example, if you use the psychological exposure effect, the bandwagon effect, the default effect, etc. to carry out marketing, you will achieve better results.

Just to give an example, why do the selling prices of many products end with 9? The book tells the story of a department store, JCP, which experienced brilliant sales after changing its prices ending in 9 to round numbers. If a mobile phone costs 2999, usually when asked about the price, they will answer that it is less than 3000. An item that costs 9999 yuan gives people the impression that it is less than 10,000 yuan, but 10001 is completely different. The price of a product ending in 9 satisfies people's intuition. The price of a product is not decided on a whim; it needs to be based on scientific research and statistics.

Robert Cialdini, Chip Heath, and Lindstrom also belong to this school. Their representative works "Influence", "Making Creativity Stickier", and "Brand Brainwashing" are all good works. These concepts will help you make better brand marketing decisions.

The scientific school: scientific and measurable marketing

I call the fifth school the scientific school. You can also call it the technical school or the algorithmic school. The overall idea is to use technology, algorithms, data and other tools to make marketing actions relatively scientifically and achieve measurable marketing results.

I think the representatives of this school are the following. First of all, Zuckerberg of Facebook, who should be regarded as the prototype of growth hacker. He customizes content and advertisements for users through algorithms, allowing users to obtain the information they need most, and they are also willing to actively spread it. Currently, most Internet companies are practicing this concept, such as the algorithm-based content recommendations of Toutiao and Baidu, and the algorithm-based product recommendations of Taobao and JD.

Algorithms + big data will have a devastating impact on traditional marketing and may usher in a new era of marketing. Regarding the role of data, you can read Schoenberg’s “Big Data”.

Sean Ellis is the originator and originator of the concept of "growth hacker" in Silicon Valley. "Growth hacker" is a very popular concept in Internet operations and marketing in the past two years. Its core is to use products, data, technology, marketing and other means to promote product or sales growth in a relatively scientific and visibly manner. Internet companies such as AirBnb, LinkedIn, and Facebook all used growth hacking in their early days to achieve explosive growth in their users in a short period of time.

Among them, the social fission model represented by Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao can be regarded as a branch of growth hacking, and this model has also become popular in recent years. For example, Luckin Coffee relies on this method to develop new users.

Today, I think understanding growth hacking is an essential quality for a marketer. The path for practitioners who can only write a few sentences and think of a few creative ideas may become increasingly narrow.

Channel School: Distributing Brands

The sixth and final school of thought is the one that I personally think is more important. I call it the personal business school, or the channel school. Channel is one of the four major elements of marketing (4P). Traditional channels are stores developed by the brand itself. The development of mobile Internet and sharing economy has brought about a new class, the individual businessmen, who are characterized by small individual shops run by couples or even individuals, and most of them earn income by promoting and selling brands on a part-time basis. For brands, they authorize their brands to these individual businessmen, allowing them to spread and sell them, thereby expanding their own channels and sales.

This method is not new. The case of advocating direct sales was the beginning, and the emergence of mobile Internet has accelerated this process. For example, Xiaomi stores, which are mainly run by couples, a large number of micro-business practitioners, and practitioners of the sharing economy. Practitioners who work as part-time drivers for Uber are of course also disseminators of the Uber brand and salesmen who increase Uber's revenue.

The above is the most complete method I have compiled to promote marketing integration. These six schools of thought are not isolated, but have mutually reinforcing and mutually influential connections. The following is the “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” of marketing integration.

Marketing integration path

So how should marketing practitioners formulate their own marketing strategies after reading this complete method?

My views are as follows:

If you are a brand new brand, it is recommended that you first position yourself and use it as your long-term promotional point. Finding the right positioning is the prerequisite for marketing.

In the early stages of growth, you should use growth hacking more to promote your first step of growth.

On the sales side, various small marketing strategies are designed based on psychology to help consumers promote purchases.

On the brand side, we combine the positioning school with the insight school to occupy the minds of consumers, silently implant them into their brains, and create marketing that promotes results.

If you have more budget, come up with big ideas that can help accumulate brand assets.

If the brand reaches a certain scale, it can leverage social forces to attract individual business practitioners to enter and expand the brand and sales force.