The underlying logic of brand growth and SOP implementation steps

In terms of underlying logic and final results, the most important thing about branding is not the process, but the results in the end-user’s mind and the establishment of brand mind.

The underlying logic of brand growth and SOP implementation steps

10 Brand Truths & 5 Practical QA

• Only when users recognize and consider it a brand, it is considered a brand.
• Starting from scratch, you need to have clear and systematic ideas for two brand tasks. It’s just that at different stages, for a single brand, the emphasis is different.
• Mental goal, mind is also the starting point, brand work is the way, and systematically implementing our two basic brand tasks is a strategy and a necessity.
• Don’t set limits on our brand growth. Only by continuously doing “large-scale penetration” can our brand continue to grow.
• Don’t go against user needs, don’t go against users, and don’t say “I think”. Brands are not creating demand.
• Brand competition means that you may have to snatch your competitors' customer base. Brand growth means continuously increasing customer penetration.
• A brand must establish and maintain its prominence in the minds of customers and its convenience in customer purchasing scenarios through persistent and extensive penetration.
• Instead of wasting energy pondering "meaningful" differentiation, it is better to let go of the obsession and focus on "meaningless" uniqueness to make the brand known to customers first.
• The larger the market share of a brand, the more it should pay attention to protecting the brand prominence it has accumulated with great difficulty, otherwise it will lose its competitive advantage in customer awareness.
• An interesting phenomenon often occurs in reality - many entrepreneurs or brand operators, once their brands have grown a little, become obsessed with "brand upgrading", believing that their brands must be upgraded, that their brand image and added value must be enhanced, and that they must be benchmarked against international high-end brands. At this time, you must pay attention. If your brand has grown rapidly in the past and has already occupied the minds of a certain scale of consumers, then you should not easily change your brand's unique assets. Otherwise, it is easy to lose the brand mental prominence and purchasing convenience that you have accumulated with great difficulty. Unless your brand has a strong budget to support itself in rebuilding new brand unique assets, it is necessary to protect its existing brand unique assets.

Question 1: Can raising prices and asking old customers to pay more help grow the brand?

In theory, if you raise the price of an existing product, it may also lead to an increase in sales; but in reality, this situation is very rare, and even if it is successful, it is only temporary. Because price increases will break the customer's "price anchor" for a certain brand, which will discourage customers and cause a decrease in the number of customers.

At the same time, price increases will also affect the confidence of channel dealers. Channels generally attract customers through promotions. Although they also complain about low profit margins, they are more worried about the decline in the number of customers than the profit margins.

Question 2: Can we achieve growth by increasing the purchase frequency of old customers?

In the same category, the differences in customer loyalty and purchase frequency between competing brands are very small. Customers are fickle and there are not many so-called loyal customers. Even if they show loyalty, it is a two-timing loyalty. Therefore, it is very difficult to achieve brand growth by improving customer loyalty.

Moreover, loyalty and purchase frequency are often beyond the control of brands. No matter how well we take care of our old customers, from time to time a competitor will appear and take our customers away.

Question 3: Why can many brands grow rapidly simply by penetrating channels without investing in advertising?

Precisely because channel penetration itself is a kind of "reach", by opening up some channels, sales can immediately increase. Especially nowadays, channels are becoming "marketing-oriented", and the channels themselves are also doing marketing.

And often, in the early stages of brand growth, the efficiency of channel reach is higher than that of marketing reach. Because marketing is invested in the "middle process", while channels directly promote "terminal purchases".

Question 4: Channel first vs. marketing first?

Often at the beginning, a brand will make a single breakthrough and a single large penetration based on its own strengths and resource advantages.

Some brand founding teams come from "channel backgrounds" and have relatively abundant channel resources, so naturally they will choose the tactic of "large-scale channel penetration." Some brand founding teams come from a "marketing background" and have relatively experienced market experience, so they will naturally tend to adopt the tactic of "marketing penetration".

Question 5: Multi-channel distribution vs. single-channel penetration: Which path should you choose?

This depends on the different stages of development of the brand. When a brand is in the initial stage from 0 to 1, it is often limited by cost and energy and can only choose a single channel for penetration. When the brand grows to a certain stage, in order to reach more new customers, a single channel is often unable to meet this demand, so it has to develop more channels and thus enter more diversified channels.

On the other hand, when a brand enters different channels, it will inevitably face conflicts of interest. There are certain conflicts in price and trade terms between channels, and there is often a risk of cross-selling between channels. Therefore, after a brand begins to distribute through diversified channels, it has to pay attention to how to manage diversified channels and how to reduce the conflicts and risks brought about by diversified channels. Brands often choose to develop different new products for different channels to reduce channel conflicts of interest.

10 Brand Truths & 5 Practical QA

• “Walk with Me” rule: simulate customer scenarios, follow customers shopping, and respect their first instincts.
• Once you find the users you should target, digging out user insights is a simple matter of steps. There are also a series of tools and angles on the market for you to refer to for user insights.
• Don’t conduct user insights aimlessly. The speed of iteration is too fast in today’s era, and you need to keep in mind the core purpose of mining insights—everything is for product development. You cannot dig broadly for insights without taking your core purpose into account. In addition to product development, user insights sometimes also serve the following purposes: product concept innovation, product upgrades, new brand launches, and marketing creativity.
• Many brands tend to fall into three misunderstandings when creating content:

  One is to blindly represent the user (consumer/customer/client)

  The other is to blindly believe in personal aesthetics.

  Think that branding = creating a fashionable brand

• A good product must come from "good insight". All traffic/channel techniques cannot save "bad insight and bad product"
• If you blindly start researching users without screening the track in advance, you will fall into the trap of "empty" insights, armchair insights, insights that are full of craftsmanship, illogical, personally subjective, and based on emotional judgment! Wasted time, wrong direction, internal quarrels
• Comparing your professional perspective with the user's perspective is actually a very illogical behavior. People who often think they are consumers actually don’t understand real consumers—because they are biased inside.
• In practice, we often see that many brands fall into the misunderstanding of blind aesthetics and blindly representing consumers, allowing the aesthetics of internal colleagues to represent the aesthetics of users, and the opinions of internal colleagues to represent the opinions of users.

  This is actually very unfair and a lazy behavior that lacks logical thinking, because users are actually diverse, and their needs and aesthetic demands are also diverse. This can easily lead brands into a huge brand growth trap that is very unscientific, emotional, and based on personal experience and personal aesthetics.

• In all brand and product marketing, there is no perfect content or good content, only the right content. What is the right content? Only the content that matches people, goods and places is the right content.
• The content presentation of a brand must not just be so-called "high-end" content, nor do all brands have to conform to the aesthetic requirements of some media masters as "potential brands, small and beautiful brands." Ultimately, branding is about returning to the user's perspective. Don't talk to yourself, and don't talk to yourself in a small circle.

Question 1: How to judge true needs and false needs through user insights?

Return to industry common sense, user behavior common sense, and user brain cognitive common sense - investigate users' real word-of-mouth keywords, search terms, industry competition analysis, etc. Why are false demands often raised? Because:

• Still don't understand the industry and don't respect users
• Trapped in the "obsession with differentiated innovation"
• I don’t know that “penetration rate” is the first important criterion

Question 2: How to extract the most core needs and pain points from user insights and eliminate non-core nonsense?

Hold on to your desire to express yourself, and practice the ability to say just “one sentence”. Do not arbitrarily extend content that is irrelevant to the main needs or even incorrect user perceptions.

Question 3: How to judge true needs and false needs through user insights?

Return to industry common sense, user behavior common sense, and user brain cognitive common sense - investigate users' real word-of-mouth keywords, search terms, industry competition analysis, etc. Why are false demands often raised? Because:

• Still don't understand the industry and don't respect users
• Trapped in the "obsession with differentiated innovation"
• I don’t know that “penetration rate” is the first important criterion

Question 4: Why can’t branding just be about branding?

In terms of underlying logic and final results, the most important thing about branding is not the process, but the results in the end-user’s mind and the establishment of brand mind. All of these are of no help in establishing brand awareness. No matter how grand the process is or how trendy the branding method used is, it actually does not provide any essential help.

From a practical perspective, if you blindly equate "building a brand" with the branding ten-piece set, you may fall into the dilemma of blindly copying your competitors:

• I don't know why I copied it.
• I can't copy it well at all
• A huge waste of energy and money
• To make wedding clothes for others
• It is easy to cause doubts from the sales channel

Often, senior management in the internal team, if they are traditional creatives, marketers, or advertisers, will be more obsessed with branding because these are the areas they are most familiar with. So they will try their best to persuade their bosses to do these ten parts of branding work, but they don’t know why they are doing it or what to choose that is suitable for them, thus wasting a lot of money.

Of course, this is not necessarily a problem for middle and senior management. As founders, we cannot always rely on the team. Don’t expect the team to help you think through the systematic logical ideas of building a brand, especially since brainpower is too difficult. In companies, especially startups, it is basically the founders who do the brainwork. As long as the remaining team members (whether middle, low-level or senior) can do 80% of the execution well, they are already superior to their competitors. If we are lucky enough to meet one or two talented people who are willing to think about problems and use their brains like the founders, we must cherish them, otherwise such rare talents may be lost.

Question 5: What if you can’t find the user’s pain points during user insights?

Most users have pain points, but they are not that differentiated. This situation often occurs in the Red Sea, such as cleansing, then you can:

Solution 1: As a second best option, don’t look for it in user value, but look for it in extended angles such as product RTB and user convenience.

Option 2: Create a new conflict/pain point

The underlying logic of brand asset management and SOP implementation steps

10 Brand Truths & 5 Practical QA

• Enduring brands often have a very good understanding of brand value management/brand asset management.
• Often, enduring brands rely on classic big products to convey their brand value: every enduring brand has a classic big product that transcends time, space, eras, and user stratification, and is known and loved by everyone.
• For old brands, it is necessary to screen for [unique assets]. There are two dimensions for reference: [popularity] and [uniqueness]:

  Awareness refers to how many customers recognize the asset and its association with the brand. It measures the degree to which the asset itself is known and/or has the potential to be known.

  Uniqueness refers to how much customers will perceive the asset as unique to a particular brand. A measure of the uniqueness or potential of an asset. If customers think of competitors when an asset is mentioned, then this asset element, if used improperly, will become a boon to others.

• Products are not mentioned in [Brand Asset Management] because products are the core carriers of brand unique assets, brand value, brand personality, brand mission, vision and values ​​- the brand is not empty, and the brand and product are not separated.
• We don’t determine product categories based on what we want, but rather on what our customers think. Just like a brand, it is not how we want to position it, but it depends on the customer's mental understanding.
• Recently, a new trend has emerged in the industry, advocating that brands should create spiritual value and high-level brand emotional value. It is believed that brands are divided into two categories: low-end brands and high-end brands. Compared with the trend in the past two years that first advocated consumer product entrepreneurship and then criticized it, this new trend has done more hidden harm to the industry. A large number of traditional brand founders and even many new brand founders have fallen into confusion. On the one hand, they worry about the pressure of being labeled, and on the other hand, they do not understand the systematic brand methodology of brand building well. As for how to implement the "high-end brand", they have fallen into an anxious self-reflection on themselves and their team.
• We may have done a lot of branding marketing and materials, but these are not the carriers of our brand value commitment. They are just a way to promise brand value and a way to reach users. The real carrier of products and the one that truly enables users to perceive our brand value commitment is the product.
• Shaping a brand’s unique asset system is the basic work of the brand department, and is the foundation of all departments and tasks, especially one of the core tasks of the brand marketing department.
• In reality, customers do not make rational purchases, and there are not many 100% loyal customers who will only buy from you. On the contrary, customers are all "fickle". Therefore, "uniqueness" does not focus too much on "reasons for purchase" nor does it require "meaningful" differences, but is more focused on how to enable customers to distinguish and remember the brand.
• Customers rely on different nodal associations to remember and recognize brands. Although customers’ memory process is the same, the memory nodes/information reflected by different brands are different, and customers rely on different node associations to remember and recognize brands. In most cases, the purchasing process of most customers is very short and takes little effort. Customers are usually busy and rarely spend a long time thinking rationally about the differences between different brands. Instead, they rely more on some subset of memory to make decisions.

Question 1: Why is brand equity so important?

The most urgent reason, of course, is that simply delivering traffic and building channels is not enough to achieve sufficiently high user penetration and user repurchase. Customers may not be able to recognize or remember our brand and products at all? It is very likely that you will buy it and forget about it after buying it, and there will be no next time.

Secondly, competition among brands is quite fierce and homogeneity is quite serious. Many times, as soon as a brand launches a relatively differentiated idea, it will be immediately copied by its competitors. If everyone has the same ability to deliver traffic, then this homogeneity of products and traffic delivery capabilities will make it impossible for our brand to stand out and win customers from competitors. Therefore, our brand must try its best to have its own brand uniqueness assets and brand value assets.

Third, business and traffic alone cannot support our brand valuation. The capital market's valuation of brands is not entirely based on sales volume or traffic capacity, but must also be based on the brand assets that the brand can accumulate. Therefore, brand assets are actually quite important for the brand’s future capital operations. At present, many emerging brands may still be seeking opportunities for capital such as sales and mergers and acquisitions.

Question 2: How to make good use of brand unique assets?

The basic principle of using unique assets is use it or lose it, because the customer's brain perceives the truth: no time, fickle, can't remember, and fickle. If we keep changing, we can't expect busy and fickle customers to recognize our brand. If there is a lack of continuity and unity in brand assets during the process of brand marketing penetration, the brand awareness that has been hard-earned will be forgotten or ignored by customers.

Question 3: What exactly are brands competing for when it comes to customer perception?

The category memory entry point is how customers connect to the brand. The more entry points into category memory, the more ways a brand can connect, and the more opportunities a brand has to stand out. These category memory entry points are distributed in the minds of customers like outlets. Category memory entry points are cognitive channels for establishing brand mental prominence.

Ultimately, the competition among brands at the customer awareness level is actually a competition for the breadth and depth of connections between these category memory entry points.

Question 4: How is the customer’s category memory entry point formed?

Generally speaking, both internal factors and external environment will have an impact on customers’ memory entry points. Customers may have certain memories of a certain category in many scenarios, such as:

• Because of some reasons
• In certain periods of time
• In some locations
• When with certain people
• Did something special

Customers may associate certain brands with each of the above scenarios. Each category has a series of category recognition entry points, and each category has a series of category memory entry points, which also corresponds to a series of brand choices.

Question 5: What is the root cause of the negative reviews that many new brands are facing nowadays?

The root cause is that there is a disconnect between the product and the brand value promise - the product is just an ordinary product, but the brand is exaggerated. In particular, the brand value promise contains too many vague spiritual values. They are clearly just selling a broom, but they insist on advertising it to make consumers think that using the broom will make women more independent and confident.

The root cause of negative comments about a brand is not that the influencer doesn’t like it, nor that the influencer is targeting you. It’s simply that the influencer has discovered the huge gap between your brand value promise and your product. So when the influencer criticizes the brand, he or she thinks he or she is doing a good thing and speaking for consumers.

If the brand takes the initiative to give influencers an opportunity to expose its own hidden dangers: the products do not match its own brand value promises at all, then this major hidden danger will explode sooner or later, it is just a matter of time.

Some brands are busy promoting their brand value promises and brand spiritual values, thinking that influencers may tolerate and forgive their mediocre products because of their fancy branding promotions - this is basically a fantasy of the brand's self-entertainment.