5 marketing discoveries in today’s communications environment

01 Brands are losing marketing initiative

In the past, many of the well-known brand events we saw originated from the brands themselves. In other words, communication is planned. Most of the marketing events and advertising activities that impress us originate from and are led by the brand.

But the situation this year is very different. In my impression, only "Hou Lang" can be regarded as a phenomenal communication initiated by the brand, but the results are mixed.

So how did this year’s phenomenal brand communications come about? Through happenstance.

The usual pattern is that a discussion happens by chance online and continues to ferment, involving the brand, and the brand is able to gain cross-circle publicity by responding to this incident.

DingTalk's Bilibili video broke through the circle by responding to the one-star rating; Tencent's Hanhan Enterprise broke through the circle by responding to the Lao Gan Ma incident... Although there are not many eye-catching marketing events this year, there are actually quite a few social media communication cases of all sizes. The recent Yang Guofu Malatang incident also attracted heated discussion because of its response to the comments of Zhang Liang and netizens.

Have you noticed that brands seem to have lost the initiative in large-scale communications, and are more likely to rely on public relations methods to leverage other people’s power to achieve mass exposure and break out of the topic circle?

Who holds the initiative in marketing? In the hands of users and the public. The public and users have the right to choose information. If a brand merely does hard advertising promotion, the general public can choose not to read it.

Brand marketing content is actually competing for user attention with current social topics. If the marketing content you plan is not attractive, it will naturally not attract enough user attention.

But in fact, the appeal of brand marketing events can never be compared with the appeal of social topics. This is why I say that "phenomenal marketing is difficult to plan."

Of course, this shift in event communication mode can also inspire brands. For example, how to wrap brand marketing information in social topics; how to stimulate brand users to achieve more interactions and UGC to incubate communication topics; and how to respond to sudden public relations events are all areas that need to be focused on in the future.

02 Today’s users are not averse to advertising

It may be that users nowadays have become more rational and know that brand companies are not doing charity work. They are more accepting of brand advertising in many scenarios, but the prerequisite is that the content is good enough. Of course, this is just my overall observation and is not supported by any research data.

In fact, this transformation is multifaceted and has taken many years to cultivate.

Many years ago, variety shows tried the "fancy talk show" method of advertising, such as Ma Dong's series of programs. This actually turned advertisements into content and jokes and inserted them into the program, making it a content-based attraction. A change in thinking for this kind of "fancy oral broadcast" is that the program team is on the same side of the users, and advertising becomes a necessary joke for the survival of the program.

Earlier, public accounts also had various creative advertising series tweets, and users would even follow the ads. The reason is that content and advertising can be seamlessly combined, as long as the brand is not too greedy.

Today's short video content is also repeating this point. We can even find on Douyin that many popular videos with hundreds of thousands or millions of likes are actually advertising content, but their content is good enough to be loved and recognized by users.

On the other hand, the brands themselves have become more mature in their thinking. They have found that directly asking KOLs to issue press releases will not produce any good results. Therefore, they have given KOLs more creative space overall. Now they are more focused on the "co-creation" content cooperation method.

In addition, in today's era of video communication, brands are simply unable to provide video versions of "embedded press releases", and a large number of brands do not even have video capabilities, which actually provides more space for content communication.

In short, the same old saying still applies: “High-quality content means traffic”, which is even more true in today’s video-driven world, except that the content is beginning to focus more on the creative ideas of the creators themselves.

03 New platform dividends may not necessarily be brand opportunities

There seem to be many new marketing opportunities at the moment, such as WeChat Video Account, WeChat Mini Program Live Streaming, and of course Bilibili and long video content that have been receiving attention today. Especially for Bilibili, many brands may want to make some marketing attempts to seize the dividends of the platform.

Take Bilibili for example. Although Bilibili is rapidly breaking out of its circle, this platform dividend is not a marketing dividend for most brands. The platform’s demands may not be consistent with the brand’s marketing demands, especially for small and medium-sized brands. Coupled with some problems with Bilibili’s distribution system (we will write a special article about this later), it is actually very difficult for ordinary brands to gain a lot of attention on Bilibili.

At present, there are actually no iconic cases in Bilibili’s brand marketing, and the public relations crisis marketing of DingTalk and Tencent Lao Gan Ma are not replicable for ordinary brands. Of course, the platform itself is also trying its best to create benchmark marketing cases to run a closed commercial loop, but this also means that if a brand enters the market at this time, it may invest a lot of energy in useless work.

Therefore, I generally recommend that ordinary brands that are not wealthy should keep a close eye on Bilibili and wait and see. They can try to create videos with a small cost, but it is actually unnecessary to invest heavily. In addition, Bilibili itself is still far away from the field of selling products and monetizing them, so it is not necessary to try it.

In fact, if we think back now, Kuaishou and Douyin also had similar problems. You may not be able to remember any serious brands that became popular from Kuaishou and Douyin. However, some white-label products became popular. Two years ago, there were terms like "Dou merchants" on Douyin, but now no one mentions it.

In short, the growth opportunities and growth dividends of many platforms are not suitable for every brand, and brands do not need to rush out. Moreover, there are already enough platforms. In addition to the "two Weibo and one Douyin", there are also Kuaishou, Bilibili, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and even Douban and Jike. Each platform needs to be cultivated carefully. Brands must make some choices in platform selection and figure out whether the platform dividends can bring them marketing dividends.

04 The market concentration of brands will gradually decrease

The epidemic will increase the market concentration of brands, because the economic situation filters out the tail brands and concentrates resources on the top brands. But in the long run, we believe that as user needs become more diversified, the market concentration of most consumer goods will decline, which is also a trend of new consumption.

The differentiated features of each brand may hit the segmented needs of a specific group of people. This was not obvious in the past because users' spending power to pay for personalization was not increased. But now, each segment of the population may be able to support the survival and profitability of a brand.

If Internet media has fragmented user scenarios, then diversified and personalized aesthetic needs will make brands fragmented as well.

It is for this reason that we have observed that some leading brands have begun to incubate various sub-brands and expand various product lines in the past two years. This is very common in the fast-moving consumer goods sector. We agree with the incubation of this brand matrix and product matrix, but the success rate of brand incubation is actually closely related to many factors such as organizational management capabilities. This is a complex proposition.

In fact, this is no longer the era where success depends on a single hit product. When you talk about Heytea, Zhong Xue Gao, and Perfect Diary, you may only know that these brands are very famous and popular, but you may not remember what hit products they have. It can be found that in addition to various products, Heytea’s product matrix has been growing larger and larger recently, including coffee, soda, NFC, etc.

In short, new brands can only be popular for a while relying on a single product, and old leading brands are unlikely to continue to rely on classic products. Even the cola products of Coca-Cola and Pepsi have faced great challenges. When user demands are diversified, more segmented products are needed to meet their needs.

Therefore, although sub-brands have always been a classic marketing topic, the construction of multi-brand strategies, brand matrices, and product matrices will be more important in the current and future layout. We recommend that brands (especially consumer brands) pay attention to them, and perhaps they will be able to find the so-called "second curve" as a result.

05 Brands should not incubate KOLs, but IPs

With the benefits of many platforms, some brands like to incubate their own KOLs. This can be considered a strategy for private domain traffic, but we generally do not recommend it. Of course, the specific situation needs to be analyzed specifically and cannot be generalized.

There are two main reasons. First, the life cycle of KOLs today is very short. Companies often do not have the ability to incubate KOLs at the beginning, and need a period of trial and error. Even if a KOL is successfully incubated, in addition to the issue of interest distribution between the company and the KOL, there is a greater challenge. Users are only interested in a single KOL for a short time, and are likely to experience aesthetic fatigue after understanding the content routines. Therefore, the cost for KOLs to maintain continuous creation will become higher and higher.

Second, the KOL business model determines that it can only be maintained by accepting advertising from multiple brands or selling multiple products. Otherwise, it will continue to be a cost center, which is not cost-effective for the company and exceeds the brand operation's circle of competence. The ultimate goal of brand companies is not to become MCNs, so there is actually no need to deliberately incubate KOLs.

The fact that incubating KOLs is not recommended does not mean that personalization or IPization is not important. In fact, the "advanced" stage of a brand is to become an IP. Brand IPization is a very obvious trend. To put it bluntly, a brand needs to have its own "super symbol."

Brands may wish to think about what symbolic elements, besides logos, slogans and the like, can make users associate the brand without any enhancement. This symbolic element may be the entry point for brand IPization. Of course, personalized IP will be more impressive and is the mainstream way of IPization, but it is not the only one.

IP-based brands have greater scalability at the content level, which is very important in today's "content is traffic" communication environment. Many traditional brands may find that there is no distinctive content to produce on social media today. This is probably because the brand has no awareness of IP.

The boundary between brand and IP is actually quite vague, and no one in the industry can really explain it clearly at present. But it doesn’t matter. The direction and strategy of the company is to enable the brand itself to have the ability to extend more systematic and recognizable content. In the future, we are likely to be in the era of "content-centric" marketing and communication for a long time.

My friends in the industry and I can feel that the marketing industry is undergoing tremendous changes. Not only are there changes in marketing methodology, but also changes in the entire marketing industry chain and consumer industry chain. It seems that every unit today has become in a competitive relationship with each other, and it is still difficult to say what the future will be like. The above five points are some simple industry observations in recent times. I hope they will be inspiring to everyone.

Author: Lisa Deng

Source: Lisa D's Product Notes