3 methodologies for selling goods through live streaming!

Nowadays, the so-called sales promotion is actually driven by three factors, namely the sales results under the influence of promotion power, product power and brand power. In today’s content, we will sort out some of the methodologies and precautions of these “three horses” for selling goods.

The “first horse carriage” for bringing goods: sales promotion

It's simple, "getting a bargain" is human nature. If merchants offer big enough promotional discounts, it will naturally attract people to buy, even if they do not have this demand at the moment. Just like the ubiquitous e-commerce live streaming nowadays, it is essentially based on the fact that these top anchors have a large enough fan base and throughput, which can shake merchants to give exclusive promotional discounts, thereby forming a virtuous circle between fans and merchants, and naturally the goods will be sold.

However, there is a fatal impact on the power of promotion to bring goods, which is the "Aronson Effect" that I talked about in my early "Live Streaming is a Record of the "Seven Injury Fist": excessive reliance on promotional stimuli leads to fewer and fewer consumers purchasing after prices return to normal. Merchants can provide a lot of promotional discounts to these anchors, and they can also show you amazing sales performance in the short term, but merchants cannot always have such a strong promotion force. Therefore, at this time we need to know when is the best time to exert the power of promotion and how to minimize its damage to ourselves.

Regarding when it is best to use the power of promotion, I listed three situations in the article:

• One is to promote products that do have selling points, but the user has a high threshold to try. The promotion efforts can effectively lower this threshold to try.
• One is when a few products are sacrificed to attract traffic to the entire store;
• Another situation is when the final sales volume has a decisive impact on you.

At the same time, we can also use the following means to give the promotion stimulus a reasonable name or reason to reduce its harm to ourselves.

For example, promotions may be provided only at specific time points (brand anniversary, super brand day/gathering day, Double 11, National Day, etc.), or promotions may be provided only to users with specific behaviors (fans, members, the first 100 users who place an order, etc.), or promotions may be provided only to specific products (off-season models, trial packs, limited-size models, etc.).

Of course, sometimes, even strong promotions may not necessarily lead to sales, just like the current trend of brand merchants entering live broadcast rooms. But the result is that some products sell very well, and a live broadcast may release the sales performance of a normal half month; while a small number of them are losing money because their income is not enough to cover their expenses. The reason behind the difference involves the "second carriage" of bringing goods, which will be discussed next.

The "Second Horse Carriage" of Cargo Sales: Product Power

The reason why some live broadcast rooms sell well and some do not is that if we control the variable of promotional power, the most fundamental influencing factor is the difference in product strength.

A good product should sell well. Even if they are not Li Jiaqi, Liao Jiaqi and Ma Jiaqi can also sell well; but a bad product will not sell well in the future even if some people buy it with the mentality of trying something new or getting a bargain at the beginning.

Therefore, instead of studying which platforms, anchors, and KOLs can sell products, a more advanced level is to study how to create good products that are popular in the market and even have the potential to become a hit. Many emerging brands that are selling well in the market now rely on their strong product power to enter the market, such as Perfect Diary, Huaxizi, Sandunban, Zhong Xuegao, Heytea, Wonderlab, etc.

So, how can we fundamentally build strong product power?

First of all, we need to know that the fundamental way to evaluate a good product today is whether it can create a differentiated consumer experience for users and make users pay for it.

Regarding creating product differentiation, I recently saw an article posted by Sister Dao on her official account, "A 10,000-word summary of the three turning points in new consumer brand entrepreneurship," which provided great inspiration. The author of the article is Huang Hai, executive director of Fengrui Capital. From the perspective of the consumer product venture capital circle, he gave three dimensions for creating product differentiation from 0-1, namely: starting from price range, consumption scenario, and product function.

The first dimension is to cut into the gap in the price range

When thinking about the problem from the product perspective, the first thing to consider is the price range.

For example, a cup of coffee at Starbucks costs 30 yuan, Luckin Coffee costs 10-20 yuan, and a San Meon and a Half costs only six or seven yuan. This tells us that in the initial research stage of a new product, we can first list the price gradients of all competing products in the corresponding industry to see if there are any gaps in the price range.

For example, in the laundry detergent field, the most competitive area is definitely the low- to mid-price range dominated by the daily chemical giants. So the laundress targeted the still vacant high-end price range and launched the "Hermes Laundry Detergent" priced at 210 yuan/bottle/L.

The second dimension is to start from differentiated consumption scenarios

Let’s take coffee as an example. Starbucks is a space-based experience-based coffee service industry. After buying a cup of coffee, you have to sit down and communicate with people. Its space experience is a very important consumption scene.

Luckin Coffee occupies the office scene. If you feel a little sleepy after lunch in the afternoon, you may go to Luckin to buy afternoon tea and share it in the office. Luckin Coffee has opened a store in the lobby of every office building, mostly offering discounts for purchases of three or five cups, all of which are designed to encourage consumers to share with colleagues in the office.

Santonban has once again changed the consumption scenario: it is a coffee lover who wants to drink coffee and drink it regularly, without the need to chat with others or share it with colleagues in the office. The scene may be at home, on a business trip, or traveling. I drink coffee during this process simply because I need to drink coffee every day.

What Sandunban achieves is to allow consumers to drink coffee efficiently and conveniently without sacrificing quality, and have the coffee delivered to their homes. Buying a fast-moving consumer product online and stocking it up at home is a common consumption scenario for many everyday coffee lovers. The consumption scenarios that Sandunban has entered into are situations that other giants, including Luckin Coffee and Starbucks, cannot fully cover.

Another similar case is Zhong Xue Gao. The consumption scenario of the traditional ice cream industry is basically street sales and urgent purchases and consumption. Therefore, there is a classic slogan: "If you love her, give her Haagen-Dazs." However, Zhong Xuegao Enterprise believes that in addition to traditional retail consumption scenarios, family scenario-based consumption is beginning to emerge. To this end, Zhong Xuegao Enterprise’s theme sales is to launch multi-flavor package consumption mainly for household storage consumption on the e-commerce platform. Differentiation of consumption scenarios is a very important dimension in the process of product innovation.

The third dimension is to start from differentiated product functions

It is easy to understand. Through technology, ingredients, appearance, etc., we create some product functional points that consumers can see, touch or feel. This functional point may solve a certain pain point, itch point or pleasure point of the user.

For example: instant coffee used to be dissolved in hot water, but now Santonban is dissolved in cold water; milk tea used to have milk and tea mixed together, but now HEYTEA has them separated; essential oils used to be vague and imperceptible, but now Afu Jojoba Oil has produced a very real blackhead-removing essential oil with clear efficacy. There is also the recently popular meal replacement milkshake brand wonderlab, which has directly cooperated with HEYTEA to launch milk tea flavored meal replacement milkshakes, breaking the pain point of poor taste of previous meal replacement powders.

At this point, we have basically explained the first two underlying logics of selling products. In fact, most of the merchants in the market are still driven by these two underlying logics when it comes to selling goods. However, there are also a small number of brands that rely on the "third horse" to bring products: brand power.

The “third carriage” of goods sales: brand power

Regarding the use of brand power to drive sales, we have a misunderstanding about this. Most of us always believe that using promotional power or product power to persuade people to buy is the most direct help to business. The so-called "brand proposition, values, attitude towards life" in brand power and other spiritual information are illusory. Not only does it have no direct help to sales, but it is also time-consuming.

Actually, it is not. We said before: A good product should sell well. But if it was a real brand, it would sell better . The reason why it is difficult for us to perceive the impact of brand power on sales is because there is such a fog: many companies only have a well-known brand name and some good products, but their sales performance mainly comes from the competitiveness of the products rather than the strength of the brand. Brands that truly possess strong brand power can use two mechanisms to drive sales: “establishing purchasing preference” and “increasing product premium”.

First, brand power can establish purchasing preferences among target users.

In terms of the nature of transactions, people's choice of a product is a rational decision after comparing it with other products. Because the product has good quality, many benefits, characteristics and differences, they develop a preference and thus complete the transaction. People choose brands because they can't help but like them. There is no need to compare or compete. They just buy without hesitation and share them spontaneously.

Secondly, brand power can increase the premium of products.

The specific manifestation is that, regardless of the same type of products, it can sell at a higher price than others. If these brands launch a limited edition gift box or some new product, no matter how expensive the price is, there will be people scrambling to grab it. Think about Starbucks’ cat claw cup, co-branded UT, Nike AJ, etc.

How to build brand power?

After sorting out why brand power can bring sales, the question arises: how to build brand power?

I happened to be reading a book recently written by Ogilvy’s senior strategist Ye Guiming, called “How to Build Products into Vital Brands”, which systematically explains the path to building brand power. The core idea is personification. Because if we want people to not only like your product, but also prefer your product, we must make people subconsciously feel that this product is not just an object or service, but a "person". Only then will there be a chance to make people fall in love with your product. Therefore, the principle of branding is personification.

To personify, we can understand from anthropology: What qualities does a charming person have? Master Ye listed 5 conditions, and I personally think the first two are the most important.

• First of all, this person must be someone with firm values ​​and clear opinions. People identify with his values, appreciate his propositions, and are even moved by his value propositions.
• Second, his personality must be consistent. People cannot trust those whose personalities are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and sometimes hot and cold. A strict and serious boss is easy to get along with as long as he remains consistent.

Therefore, when we want to turn a product into a brand through personification, the two most important things are: putting forward a moving brand proposition and maintaining a consistent brand personality.

1) Without brand proposition, it is difficult to sublimate into a real brand

What is brand proposition? This is the original reason why the product exists in the world. The question "Why do products exist?" is similar to "Why do I live?" and "What is the meaning of life?" This might be seen as a silly question, but it could also be a good and fundamental question.

In the steps of building a brand, it is very necessary to create a brand proposition to guide the direction of brand strategy development and the "parts" needed to guide all brand contact points. A product without a brand proposition can never truly become a charming brand. A product without a brand proposition is like a beautiful woman without temperament. No matter how pretty her face is or how good her figure is, she is just a beautiful body without a soul.

The brand proposition should not only reflect all the brand appeals, but also contribute to the growth of the business , because the brand proposition we ultimately promote must be one that is conducive to business development, rather than a well-intentioned social welfare proposition, nor a general principle that encourages humans to pursue a better life, nor a creative work full of beautiful words. A true brand proposition should be related to the commanding heights of the product category and intelligently use a part of human nature to help us do business.

A brand proposition is a sentence, but not an advertising slogan. An advertising slogan should be: creative writing based on the values ​​​​explained by the brand proposition.

Nike’s advertising slogan is “Just do it”, which is derived from Nike’s brand proposition: Nike believes that “no matter what, fairness and justice will prevail in the end.” Since justice will eventually come, there is no need to worry about anything, just “Just do it”! This is truly beautiful sportsmanship.

Another classic case is the classic brand proposition that Mr. Ye created for Taiwan's PX Mart: PX Mart has nothing. This proposition is based on a consumer insight: the wool comes from the sheep, and there is no free lunch in the world. For this reason, the protagonist of PX Mart's advertising film is an honest and simple ordinary man, who introduces the PX Mart Welfare Center in a very straightforward manner: there is no obvious sign, no wide aisles, no pretty uniforms, no beautiful floors, no parking spaces, no card swiping services, only real cheapness.

2) Brand personality must be distinct and consistent

A product that cannot be identified with its own personality will never be a brand. The formation of brand personality comes from a consistent tone of text and an extraordinary visual style.

As long as the brand owner maintains genuine goodwill while doing business and abides by the law, the brand's personality is actually neither good nor bad.

The process of developing a brand personality is both a science and an art, a logical exercise and a work of magic that works on the subconscious mind. When we design the brand personality for a product, our best basis is the spirit of the brand proposition.

For example, when Nike advocates that "fairness and justice must be served", its brand should have a stubborn and upright personality, the text used in communication should have a firm and self-reflective tone, and the visual style should be bright and distinctive.

Another principle in designing a brand personality is to plan it based on consumer relationships that are beneficial to the business.

For example, PX Supermarket, a very successful brand in Taiwan, has a brand personality of “excessively honest and simple, even often exposing its own shortcomings.” The relationship between this brand and its consumers is that of an honest person and a smart person (the PX brand is the honest person, and the consumers are the smart people). Such a brand personality not only makes customers feel friendly, but also makes people happy to do business with it. Of course, everyone likes to deal with honest people. Who would like to do business with a petty and unscrupulous businessman?

To shape a brand personality, you must also have patience and perseverance to allow the brand personality to truly enter the consciousness of consumers. Nowadays, digital communication is prevalent with real-time hot spots, carrying different sales information, but ignoring the importance of maintaining a consistent brand personality. Most digital communication works change with the changes in hot scenes, and the tone and style of communication change endlessly, causing the brand personality to be split, making it impossible to accumulate the brand personality required for product personification.

The biggest difference between digital communication with brand awareness and digital communication that is absolutely unable to build a brand is that digital communication with brand effect will insist on using the values ​​​​advocated by the brand to respond to real-time hot content, and adhere to the attitude and tone that the brand should have to convey the brand's views on hot topics, rather than directly cutting and pasting hot keywords.

Brand proposition and brand personality are the two most basic and important keywords in our industry. However, they are gradually forgotten or even maliciously deleted in the emerging digital communication revolution. For example, when we are doing a campaign today, we may still use this set of brand propositions and personality, but next time we may completely forget about it because of a hot event or a sudden inspiration of another creative idea.

Human nature will not change, the importance of brands will not change, the principles of branding will not change, the value of brand proposition will not change, and the necessity of brand personality will not change.

Building brand power is bound to be a long and bumpy road, but it is also the underlying logic that can have the longest-lasting and far-reaching impact on sales.

Author: Pulang

Source: Planner (ID: planner2333)