"Traffic is a drug, traffic is a poison to quench thirst, traffic is just a heart-saving pill, traffic is a painful lesson..." These are all descriptions of traffic from brand people.

In the eyes of most brand people, traffic is just a one-time consumable, while brand is a durable product. But the strange thing is that whether it is a successful company or a mediocre company, people buy more consumables rather than durable goods.

Rather than believing that "most people are fools", I would rather believe that "existence is reasonable". There is a reason why traffic is so popular.

As a typical brand person, I really want to be a debater for "traffic" and talk to you about how I view "traffic".

Today, the concept we are going to digest together is - traffic.

1. Traffic business is the profitable business

When several entrepreneurs talked to me about business, they all expressed the same view: we are not in the traffic business, we will provide greater value to users.

Every time I hear this, my heart tightens. Because people who say this kind of thing are often out of touch with reality and don't fully understand the value of traffic.

What I want to tell you is that profitable businesses are often traffic businesses, not value businesses.

A few days ago, I watched the show "13 Invitations" where Xu Zhiyuan interviewed Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan. He recalled an incident that had a particularly great impact on his values.

He joined Sohu in his early years and wanted to see through which channels users came. Then after some statistics, we found that one-third of the users came from a website called "Hao123". When I went in, I saw that it was full of URLs and the page was ugly.

But upon further inquiry, I found out that many employees’ families were using this website, and the monthly revenue was 3 million at the time. However, Sohu, as the number one portal, was still not making money!

In Wang Xiaochuan’s own words, “I felt like my graduate studies were in vain.”

Hao123 is a typical traffic business, a business that is looked down upon by elite entrepreneurs, but it is indeed the most profitable business.

There are many similar cases.

For example, let’s take news information as an example. NetEase News is considered to be a map of youth attitudes, while Toutiao was once considered a traffic poison. In its early days, Toutiao did not produce any news content and did not emphasize the media's news attitude. It was a typical traffic distribution business.

However, Toutiao’s revenue is several times that of NetEase News, and their commercial value is vastly different.

Why do I say that traffic business is a good business model? Because in the end, all competition among enterprises comes down to business efficiency.

If a business can obtain the maximum profit with the lowest cost. So from a business perspective alone, without any moral judgment, it is the best model.

The biggest feature of the traffic business is that it is simple enough. If you play with traffic well, you can achieve "the least effort and the most profit".

The biggest characteristic of all valuable businesses is that they are very complicated, and you need to put in a lot of effort to get considerable benefits.

For example, General Liang provides brand consulting services, helping brands to position their brands and develop macro-strategies and tactics. Serving a brand requires me to spend a lot of time and effort, but the profit may only be equivalent to a few soft articles on Mimi Meng’s official account. Which would you choose: making money the simple way or making money the complicated way?

What’s interesting is that many businesses that were originally traffic-related are now thought to be value-based businesses.

Let me ask you, the logical thinking back then (I’m talking about the logical thinking before “Get” was created), was it more inclined to focus on traffic or value?

At that time, Logical Thinking would send you a 60-second voice message every day, and you would reply with keywords and then read someone else's article. Note, this is someone else’s article!

In other words, although Logical Thinking seemed to be a knowledge service public account at that time, it actually did not create any content. It was just a knowledge distribution platform, another form of Toutiao!

I am not criticizing Logical Thinking by saying this, but rather affirming its business model.

As a knowledge service account, it is very difficult to sustain the process of producing original articles and creating new value in each article. Many knowledge experts only produce one book in their lifetime. If you want to use the dividends of WeChat to become a leader, the best strategy with logical thinking is to screen good content rather than produce it.

I give this example to tell everyone that you should learn to look at brand issues from a business perspective. Once you add a business perspective, you will have a different understanding of users, brands, and traffic.

The expensive and unpalatable fast food restaurants next to airports and train stations are traffic businesses; the Putian Hospital that performs plastic surgery and treats sexually transmitted diseases is also a traffic business; those accounts on Xigua Video that claim to "watch a movie in 5 minutes" are also traffic businesses. These businesses may not be valuable, but they are profitable.

It feels like those who play with traffic are all bad guys, but it is precisely because we good people don’t understand traffic that give bad guys an opportunity to take advantage.

Just now, we first understood "traffic" from a macro business perspective. Next, let's see whether those who claim to be building brands are actually building traffic or branding?

2. 80% of people who build brands have turned their brands into traffic

What is flow? What is a brand?

Brand is stable traffic, and traffic is instant brand.

To put it simply, traffic refers to mobile users who come and go without staying for too long or having too many expectations. Purchasing keywords from Baidu and bidding for information flow on Toutiao are all ways to generate traffic.

What about the brand? If a company has a brand, it means that users will want to come again and have more fantasies and expectations about the product. Therefore, we call any way of communicating with the user’s mind branding.

Let’s explain it in a science and engineering way:

• Traffic = see – buy
• Brand = See – Remember – Buy

In fact, the way of promoting traffic is just missing one link - memory, commonly known as "not putting it in heart".

Since your promotion method is not sincere, you naturally cannot expect users to think of you again when they have needs. But precisely because of this lack of sincerity, users’ purchasing behavior is faster and the final impact on sales is more direct.

If you always "take it seriously" when promoting your brand, then you will naturally be a step behind in everything and the market results will be slow.

Will users be loyal to hao123? Do you have any feelings for the website hao123? No, everyone just uses it for convenience. If the telecom operator's pre-installed website is hao256, but the functions are the same, users will not have any objections. But if you are used to watching Hunan Satellite TV, and suddenly you are asked to watch Zhejiang Satellite TV, you will find it difficult to accept.

After explaining the definition and relationship between brand and traffic, let’s take a look at what those who claim to be branding are doing.

We have said that compared with brand and traffic, there is an additional link of "memory". For Chinese people who have gone through "3 years of college entrance examination and 5 years of simulation", the technique of memory is not unfamiliar, and the core principle lies in "repetition".

But many brands suffer from "ADHD". They are fickle instead of sticking to "repetition".

Let’s take brand endorsement as an example. Like fans today, many brands divide idols into annual, quarterly and monthly types. For those brands that constantly replace young and handsome stars, are you using your spokesperson marketing to build the brand or to generate traffic?

Isn’t finding a seasonal spokesperson just a way to divert fans’ traffic and consume the short-term influence of young idols? This is a typical case of using the guise of a brand to gain traffic.

Another example is those frequent cross-border activities. For brands, cross-border cooperation should be a collision of different brand values, so that each brand proposition is sharper, more intuitive and easier to shake users' consumption concepts.

But many cross-border activities are just mutual fan-washing between two brands and mutual promotion of traffic. There is no exchange of ideas between the two brands, they are just two passers-by who are promiscuous to each other.

So I say that 80% of the people who build brands are actually focusing on traffic, but they are just not aware of it.

In fact, there was no such thing as brand and traffic in the early years. Everyone built their brand just to get traffic.

For example, Shi Yuzhu mentioned something in "My Marketing Experience". He said that in the early years, the Melatonin advertisement was often reported because of its high frequency of broadcast and the fact that the old man in the advertisement was very effeminate.

So, one year they upgraded the commercial and invited famous crosstalk artists Jiang Kun and Dashan and his apprentice to perform. What's the result? As sales continued to decline, Shi Yuzhu switched back to the original vulgar commercials.

From today's perspective, Melatonin's advertisements insist on the concept of "gift giving", which is a typical brand advertisement. However, the dimension that Melatonin uses to measure advertising is based on traffic thinking: any advertisement that does not sell products at the moment is not a good advertisement!

Contemporary brand people should not be confused by concepts. Brand and traffic are two sides of the same coin, the palm and back of the hand of an enterprise, and the yin and yang of things.

3. Traffic can evolve, but brands can degenerate

The biggest criticism of traffic in the industry is that: “the cost of traffic is getting higher and higher.” How high is it? If we wanted to get a customer lead in 2011, the cost would be about a few dollars. But if it is in 2020, the cost may be between 200-300 yuan.

On the other hand, the industry’s promotion of the brand is mainly based on the belief that “the cost of the brand will become lower and lower.” How low is it? There is a thermal underwear brand in China called Nanjiren. Many young people may not know that this brand was established in 1997 and has been the number one brand of thermal underwear in the early years.

In 2019, Antarctic's e-commerce net profit reached 1.206 billion yuan, but what many people don’t know is that this company has long ceased production! Nowadays all income comes from "brand licensing"! As long as dealers pay an authorization deposit of 100,000 yuan, they can open an Antarctic "certified" store.

Let’s not discuss whether Antarctic’s approach is advisable or not, but it at least proves one thing: when your brand foundation is strong enough, you can indeed sit at home and count your money.

"The cost of traffic is getting higher and higher, and the cost of brand is getting lower and lower." Therefore, many people would say that traffic is speculation and brand is investment.

But we can also say this another way: "Traffic has bonuses in the early stages, and branding has bonuses in the late stages."

Many times, an issue is not a question of “is it right or not”, but a question of “is it right or not within a certain period of time”.

It is definitely wrong for you to run a marathon at the age of 12, but it is definitely okay to run a marathon at the age of 32. Many business problems actually contain a certain degree of cyclicality, and we need to make decisions from a dynamic perspective.

Like many companies, they were traffic businesses in the early days, but once they grew bigger, they naturally transitioned from traffic thinking to brand thinking. It’s just that some people plan early and some start late. However, keyboard warriors often only focus on the present moment to criticize others for being "short-sighted".

For example, cosmetics brands such as Vanmilin, TST, and Magiray all started as micro-businesses, and they succeeded through a series of traffic methods such as attracting people, distribution, and communities. When they want to continue to grow, they will encounter growth bottlenecks, so this industry naturally begins to pay attention to brand building and accumulate social reputation.

Toutiao is a more typical example. Toutiao did not create content at the beginning, it only distributed traffic. However, after Toutiao became a national application, it iterated its corporate strategy.

Toutiao has transitioned from simple traffic distribution to "intelligent social networking", using algorithms + social networking to distribute content and subsidizing a large amount of capital to attract content creators, hoping to make "information create value."

If Toutiao and beauty micro-businesses do not start with traffic, but instead focus on building their brands, they will never get ahead.

On the other hand, brand power is not something that will grow indefinitely as long as there is investment. Competition will lead to a "zero-sum game" between brands. Simply put, if the brand power of homogeneous products grows faster, your brand power will also shrink.

For example, Pechoin rose to prominence by promoting the brand name of “domestic beauty products” and it defined its brand culture as “Oriental aesthetics”. However, the rise of brands like Huaxizi has dealt a heavy blow to Pechoin.

The impact does not lie in how much market share Huaxizi has plundered, but in the fact that Huaxizi's oriental aesthetics are more extreme than Pechoin's, which invisibly lowers Pechoin's brand aesthetics.

Traffic can evolve, but brands can degenerate.

Traffic does not necessarily get worse, and branding does not necessarily get stronger. The key is how we can balance the relationship between traffic and brand in different cycles.

4. The change of traffic is a super opportunity for brands

Branding is the art of the mind, and traffic is the science of behavior.

Observing changes in traffic is essentially gaining insight into changes in consumer behavior. Therefore, the rise of all new traffic is an opportunity for brand iteration.

Come, let’s take a look at the history of traffic changes and brand development over the years.

First, there are changes in traffic positions:

• Offline to online: Sina, Sohu, NetEase
• PC to mobile: WeChat, Weibo
• From the center to the local: Dianping.com, Ele.me
• From big media to self-media: Ten points of reading, one

Then, the traffic pattern changes:

• From pictures and texts to videos: iQiyi, Youku,
• From long videos to short videos: Tik Tok, Kuaishou, and Bilibili
• From short videos to live streaming: YY and Huya

Again, there are changes in traffic distribution:

• From manual recommendation to active search: Baidu, Sogou
• Active search for social distribution: WeChat, Yunji
• Social distribution to intelligent recommendation: Toutiao, Douyin

The last and most practical point is: the rise of new traffic is a great opportunity for brand marketing.

All marketing, no matter how sharp your brand positioning is, how powerful your product is, or how sufficient your budget is, will ultimately end up on a specific medium.

We have said that "there are bonuses for traffic in the early stages and bonuses for brands in the late stages", so brand marketing must have enough sense of smell to discover the traffic bonuses of the media in the early stages.

For example, in the era of big searches on PC, Putian-based hospitals became successful; in the years when Weibo was on the rise, brand accounts such as Durex, Haier, and Xiaomi grabbed a lot of attention; the growth of Douyin and Kuaishou provided opportunities for many factory stores and individual merchants.

If there is no opportunity for traffic change, how can there be opportunities for new brands? If there is no cycle of traffic replacement, how can old brands be revitalized?

Sometimes, this traffic change is extremely obvious, such as the traffic of short videos. But sometimes, this kind of traffic change is very secretive, and we need to pay attention to the media traffic trends just as we pay attention to the policies of the two sessions.

For example, why can’t you do content marketing well? I have written about a past traffic trend, which is that content is becoming the traffic entrance for the entire Internet.

Whether it is Taobao, Ctrip, Dianping, NetEase Cloud Music... many non-social apps are building content social relationships. Because everyone has discovered that traditional traffic has reached a bottleneck, and only content can be produced infinitely and break the traffic ceiling.

If brand people sense this traffic change, they should understand: your advertising needs to migrate from media platforms to individual content.

Because the platform's traffic is saturated, it will only become less and less and more and more expensive; and individual content is seen by the platform as a growth point for traffic, so it will only be increasingly supported by the platform, and its traffic will overflow.

Yuanqi Forest, Wang Baobao, Zhong Xuegao, Hua Xizi, Adopt a Cow... The rise of this wave of new domestic products actually depends on the traffic of individual content. At first glance, their marketing model seems to be just to find KOLs to promote their products, but the logic behind it is that they have hit the right incremental point for traffic within a specific business cycle.

When we identify a trend or an opportunity, if we only understand the psychological changes of users, we are turning a science into metaphysics.

No matter how turbulent the user's psychology is, "the body is always honest", and it is important to keep a close eye on changes in user behavior. The fluctuation of traffic is the fluctuation of user behavior, which is the strongest market signal.

V. Conclusion

People who play with traffic are not so stupid as to not know the power of brand; but people who play with brand often do not understand the value of traffic.

A high-level traffic player can build a company with a market value of hundreds of billions. Low-level traffic players will only shout "Don't lose your brand" every day.

What’s wrong is not the traffic, but the people who don’t understand traffic.

Author: General Liang

Source: Liang Jiangjun (ID-liangjiangjunisme)

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