Branding: How to write a proposal?

As a third-party company, when we want to BD a new brand, we always have to write a proposal. Before we receive a new BD project, the brand will generally provide a simple brief first. This requires us to use the little information we have to write a proposal that seems sufficient to generate cooperation opportunities in a short period of time.

Just like when we write an insight report, we must first set a general direction for our proposal. Simply put, this general direction is the strategy of our overall proposal. Through the strategy, we can come up with a solution, and this solution is an important factor that prompts customers to ultimately pay for the project and cooperate with the company . In this article I will share how I write a decent proposal.

1. Read the Brief carefully, sort out the content systematically, and find the main thread

If customers are willing to cooperate with us, we must make them realize that we fully understand the problems they face and that we have the ability to solve them.

If possible, try to communicate by phone to learn in detail which department we are working with and what the strategic positioning of this department is in the company. Also, learn in detail the background of the customer in looking for a service provider and what value they hope the service provider will provide.

In addition, carefully read the brief provided by the customer and understand what problems they want to solve behind each requirement. Most of the time, the briefs provided by customers are often large and comprehensive without order or logic, so at this time you have to systematically sort out the requirements yourself, find a main thread, and then string together all the contents of the customer's requirements along this main thread, and develop a solution for the contents in the brief. This way, you can basically complete the proposal easily.

But this alone is not enough. This is just the basis and can only prove that we understand the problem, but it does not have much competitiveness with other companies. To stand out, it is more important to let customers realize that our proposal "precisely locates the problem more than the solution ."

To achieve this, we need to focus on two aspects to elevate our proposals. One is industry experience, and the other is methodology.

In other words, we want to tell customers , "Based on our rich industry experience, we think you may be facing the following problems. Based on these problems, we have mature methodologies to help you locate and solve them more accurately."

2. Understand the industry and conduct industry research

To locate the problem more accurately, one should have a preliminary understanding of the industry, because there is often a pain point behind customer demand, and this pain point is closely related to the development of the industry to a large extent.

I usually quickly learn about the industry through industry reports and research. Regarding industry understanding, I often use the following:

1. By searching keywords on Baidu, you can directly search out a large number of industry data reports;
2. The official accounts of major consulting companies. Generally, consulting companies will have many public industry reports, relatively large market research and market surveys. You can get enough data through these consulting reports.
3. Zhihu is a very good platform where many experts share their industry knowledge and experience, and there are many high-quality articles and answers;
4. Accumulate knowledge daily, save some valuable information when you see it, and slowly build your own knowledge base.

Through such preliminary data collection, we can roughly understand the changes in the market environment, competitive environment, and consumer habits. Finally, we can summarize the following points and put them in our proposal:

• Market environment : Is the overall market currently rising or falling, and what are the reasons? What is the potential for future market development and where are the opportunities? What new technologies, gameplay and resources are there on the market to cope with these changes?
• Competitive environment : What are competing companies doing? What are their responses when faced with the same problems?
• Consumption environment : What are consumers doing and how have their usage habits changed? How to cater to changes in consumer habits?

Based on the previous industry research, the overall solution comes next. What needs to be noted here is that we need to combine the content and data in other people's research reports to package and organize our own plan. Do not simply copy and paste, but filter, and even need to readjust and re-sort the content and data in multiple reports. Only in this way can we take into account the logic and solution ideas of the overall plan .

3. Use methodology appropriately and propose systematic solutions

The value of methodology lies in that through it we can analyze and locate more real problems , so that we will not only have a superficial understanding of the needs, but also systematically and comprehensively sort out our solutions through methodology to solve the identified problems more efficiently and effectively .

Not only is it necessary to be able to use the methodology flexibly, but it is also necessary to clearly explain the logical relationships and thinking processes of the methodology. Regarding methodology, here are a few commonly used ones:

1. Category Matrix – Boston Matrix

When encountering a brand with many categories, a reasonable category matrix is ​​crucial. The Boston Matrix is ​​a good category positioning matrix. This matrix divides categories into four categories based on growth rate and share. First, classify the categories to identify core categories, potential categories, and problem categories; after positioning the categories, specify different strategies for different category statuses.

For example, for star categories, the market is growing fast and has a large share, so resources should be invested in this type of category to consolidate the market share; for problem categories, the market is growing fast but the share is small, this category has great development potential and needs more investment to gain market share.

2. New product launches – 4P marketing mix

When a brand wants to launch new products, Kotler's 4P principle in marketing management comes in handy. The 4Ps refer to Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

• The product is the product itself. What is the performance of the product? What are the features of the product? What is the appearance and packaging of the product? What are the service and guarantee of the product?
• Price means pricing. Are the brand’s reasonable profit and the price acceptable to customers taken into consideration? Does the pricing fit in with the brand’s competitive strategy? What are the pricing of similar competing products in the market?
• Promotional marketing refers to how a brand conveys product information to consumers through advertising, public relations, business promotion and personal sales to facilitate consumer behavior? Corresponding to e-commerce, it means what kind of advertising and promotion we should use to reach consumers and encourage them to convert.
• Channel refers to the channels through which the products are sold? Is it in a specialty store, franchise store, flagship store or supermarket? Is it a single-channel layout or a multi-channel layout? How to deliver products smoothly to consumers?

3. Implementation plan – 5W2H

When we want to make a landing plan, 5W2H is a good tool.

• WHAT——What is it? What is the goal of this event? What needs to be done to achieve the goal?
• WHY——Why do you do this work? Can we not do it? Is there an alternative?
• WHO——Who? Who will do it?
• WHEN——When? When to do it? When is the best time?
• WHERE——Where? Which channel to do it?
• HOW ——How to do it? How to improve efficiency? How to implement? What is the method? Which touch points should be used to reach out?
• HOW MUCH—How much? To what extent? How many times was it reached? What is the quality level? What is the cost output?

In addition, for market and competition analysis, you can also learn about SWOT, PEST, Porter's Five Forces Model, SPACE Matrix, etc.; for process and goal management, there are PDCA, WBS decomposition method, 80/20 principle, SMART principle, etc.; for finding the root problem, there are fishbone diagram/Ishikawa diagram, 5WHY, 6M, etc.; for consumer growth and analysis models, there are AARRR, RFM, consumer journey (CXJ) and consumer moment (MOT), etc.;

Understanding and applying these models can help us better analyze and clarify problems, elevate proposals, and better enable clients to realize the key to the problem and that we have the ability to solve their problems .

4. Final Thoughts

The goal of the proposal is to obtain the next service project. Please do not worry too much about whether the content is correct, because customers are more concerned about ideas, the ability to understand their problems and analysis methods , and we should be able to demonstrate our ability to solve problems during the proposal process.

In addition to the content explained above, a complete proposal should also be comprehensive. It is also important whether the proposal itself is complete and whether there are some practical cases to support the methodology. Finally, a reasonable quotation is required. What we need to do is to convey to customers that we are the best and most suitable choice in the market, and the price issue should be left to business or sales to solve.

Author: Li Tingting Source: Li Tingting