Brand solutions, sustainable creativity

As the end of the year approaches, how should we write the brand annual plan for 2021 and how should we plan the budget? Many friends have been feeling sad about this recently.

I recently encountered two cases. The problems they encountered were different, but the essence was the same.

One is a traditional brand that has been around for decades, but it has been developing steadily and there are no obvious problems at the brand level. The problem we encountered was that the organization was rigid and the responsibilities were very segmented. You were responsible for shooting TVC, he was responsible for operating TikTok, and that one was responsible for Bilibili. When making annual plans, we make plans based on the organizational structure, with little innovation.

One is an Internet upstart who is very rich. We also need to make brand planning for next year. I haven’t seen the brand strategy, but the media plan is very clear. If one gets one point from traditional platforms like CCTV, Focus Media, Baima, iQiyi, and TikTok, 1 billion will be gone, and it still won’t be enough. This division is indeed not enough.

There is a problem behind these two things. Both of them make strategies based on existing organizations or resources, which is putting the cart before the horse.

My point is: reorganize resources based on solutions.

The organizational structure can be disrupted and reorganized. I have previously written "Reshaping the Marketing Department" and talked about my thoughts on the organizational structure of the marketing department. Friends who are interested can read it. Media resources are simpler and can be mobilized if you have money. The pace and priorities can be arranged based on the solutions. There is no need to treat everyone equally.

So, there must be a solution first.

Let’s talk today about what market solutions are and how to develop brand-specific market solutions. Below, enjoy:

Customized Solutions

First of all, we need to figure out what is the solution?

Among the many brands I have come into contact with in the past two or three years, the advice I often give to others is: when customizing brand strategies, think from the perspective of market solutions. Creating long-term solutions that lead to sustainable brand growth.

To think about this issue, we need to step out of the marketing framework and ignore existing resources, including the existing organizational structure. We should first find a solution and then reorganize the resources.

A reliable solution must meet three conditions: customization, sustainability, and iterativeness.

Let’s talk about customization first. For a long time, the brand market has been operating within the 4A system, including preliminary market research, brand positioning, slogans, declarations, media placements, etc.

However, in the Internet environment, infinitely diverse marketing forms are released. In this environment of infinite choices, there is no longer a universal methodology. What matters is finding a way that suits you.

It could be holding a press conference, like Apple or Tesla; it could be having 100,000 employees doing door-to-door sales, like Meituan and other O2O platforms. It may be to continuously create marketing IPs, like Tmall and Taobao.

Then there is sustainability, which means it must be applicable to the brand for at least three to five years. For already mature brands, it may even be necessary to form its own methodology that can be applicable to the brand in the long term. In addition, we should polish the organization based on sustainable solutions and form an organizational structure that suits ourselves.

Finally, it is iterative, or growable. Customized and sustainable, but not repetitive. We need to continuously innovate and iterate within a strategic framework.

Of course, this solution cannot reduce the intensity of your thinking, but it will allow you to accumulate in the right direction and continue to innovate in the right direction.

Every brand should have its own marketing solution.

Create a marketing platform and continue to operate

From my experience working and collaborating at Alibaba, I have learned only one thing: create ideas that can be done in the long term and then keep iterating.

I have written a lot of Tmall Double 11 cases recently. Behind almost every case, there is a marketing IP, but they are just cases focusing on Double 11. Alibaba's e-commerce system already has a very mature solution, which is to continuously create marketing IPs and then continue to iterate.

Tmall’s marketing IP is a solution for Tmall’s marketing, and also a solution to help commercial brands with marketing. Therefore, for Tmall, there is basically no annual plan, because the workload is already very full, and at most there are annual goals.

Today we will talk about something that is easier to understand so that we can explain the “solution” clearly.

Tmall Sports Creates Platform

Let me first talk about the basic background. Sports, like games and animation, have a huge population base, sports events, and sports brands. How can we integrate these resources for mutual benefit and win-win results to promote consumption and growth?

The first step was to create a gamified product: Tmall Vitality Center. The Vitality Center incorporates top events such as the Olympics and NBA in a gamified way, while connecting the sponsoring brands of these top events with consumer brands with sports marketing needs.

At the same time, the Vitality Center has turned traditional sports into fun gamification, using a younger approach to do sports marketing, attracting more young people to participate and making these sports IPs more youthful. This is equivalent to a traffic pool that carries various online activities, combines sports event IP and brands, and establishes a traffic position.

In terms of strategic logic, the first is to maximize the influence of Tmall Sports; the second is to help the event IP achieve longer-tail commercialization; and the third is to meet the sports marketing needs of commercial brands.

In general, Tmall provides a platform and uses the Vitality Center as a carrier to allow sports event IP and merchant brands to conduct cross-border cooperation. In the past, sponsoring an event required huge costs, but now short-term or one-time authorization cooperation has very low costs, and even resources can be exchanged.

Ultimately a sports marketing solution.

Double 11 To C Breaking the Circle

The vitality center itself is also a brand that needs to be promoted and its popularity and user base needs to be expanded.

During Double 11, we have teamed up with the top ten sports IPs. The Olympic Games, Winter Olympics, Asian Games, NBA, Chinese Super League and other super IPs have all come to support the Double 11 Championship. The joint posters are a gathering of energetic minds, and together we will support you to run towards becoming a vibrant winner. Deeply integrate sports outdoor brands with top sports IPs to jointly deliver the "Vibrant Winner" online sports meeting to consumers.

Sports communications are usually more traditional, but this time "Vibrant Winner" did a very youthful communication. Tengger was invited to be the initiator of the challenge tasks on the site and also the creator of the core content. Attract young people to the Vitality Center in a younger way and enter the Vitality Winner Challenge.

On the site, five themed running tracks are launched, and Tengger is invited as the track NPC to initiate challenge tasks, linking top sports IPs and brands, and adding celebrity autographed equipment and other benefits to attract users. Eventually, it became an online sports event with millions of people online.

Outside the site, Tengger adapted the hit song "My Skateboard Shoes" into "My Vitality Shoes". The contrasting cute style of the hot dance triggered a wave of worship from B station up masters, and #Tengger Hot Dance# became a hot search topic on Weibo, using young people's nonsensical content to convey the Double Eleven vitality sports proposition.

Offline, we will work with Ideal City and Beijing Winter Olympics to create the Beijing Winter Olympics Vitality City, and put into operation a cat-shaped running track installation in the Vitality Center as an offline memory symbol of the Vitality Center, using phenomenal interactions to create an offline event that lights up the vitality of Beijing city with running.

Whether it is outside the site or offline venues, they are all directed to the site, leveraging more traffic and greater influence on the C-end, while also establishing awareness at the B-end brand level: for sports marketing, come to the Vitality Center.

Be the solution

As far as I know, Vitality Center is also a new IP. In order to cope with the large-scale explosion of sports marketing needs, especially during the Olympics or the World Cup, hundreds of brands are involved in sports marketing, and a platform that can carry it on a large scale is needed.

As the influence of the vitality center expands and more events and celebrity resources are introduced, it will become a sports marketing solution in the consumer field.

In essence, this is a marketing platform that can operate sustainably and continue to grow and iterate.

The core resource is top sports events. This Double 11 event has gathered the top ten IPs. Tmall is probably the only one in China that can do this. It continuously adds domestic and international event IPs and an increasingly open authorization and cooperation system to connect more brands.

This marketing platform can do many things, including event nodes, cross-border joint products, event title brand blockbusters, daily event operations, etc.

It basically solves Tmall’s sports marketing needs and is scalable, sustainable and iterative.

Summary: There is only one important thing

For most brands, is there an opportunity to be a marketing platform? Opportunity for a custom solution?

Let’s talk about it from the perspective of solutions. First of all, we need to break through the advertising mindset and don’t consider whether or not to advertise. Advertising is a form, and it is very likely that this form will not be used.

For example, Tesla does not advertise, and Apple never hires spokespersons. It could be in any form, the key is to break through and grow. This solution may be to use an activity center to carry out large-scale demand, it may be a 100,000-strong team to do door-to-door promotion, it may be to hold 100 offline events a year, it may be to hold a fashion show in New York, and so on.

Then there are marketing platforms. Some of them are not platform brands like Tmall. For product brands, it is impossible to produce products like Vitality Center.

We need to think about solutions with a platform-based mindset. For example, Uber’s “Call XX with one click” did not have a physical platform product, but it was indeed a product of platform thinking that could be continued and iterated continuously.

The core logic is to create sustainable ideas. This idea can continue to grow, scale, and innovate over time. It will gradually become a platform or product solution.

Of course, the solution is not to make a five-year plan in a PowerPoint presentation and then execute it. It should be that there is basic thinking first, followed by small-scale experiments, then gradual expansion, and finally fixed into a methodology.

Back to the 2021 annual plan, there is still more than a month until the end of this year, and many brands have started competing. My personal opinion is that Party A should figure out the strategy, and Party B should think about the issues of creativity and execution.

When brands think about this question, they should apply the classic approach: If you could only do one thing, what would you do?

How to define this matter? Shooting a TVC is a form, making the brand younger is the direction, and 3 million followers on Douyin is the goal.

Things should be thought of from the perspective of brand strategy, and specific things should be done in the right direction, with forms and resources matched according to the goals.

Maybe starting from now, we can spend two or three years to customize brand-specific solutions.

When you leave the company, the marketing IP you created continues to grow, which should be a great honor for a marketer.

above.

Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai