2020, a survival guide for marketing departments

Today’s content is about the iteration of the marketing industry, involving multiple brands such as Pinduoduo, Ctrip, and WeChat Advertising.

And I believe that the biggest driving force to offset the sluggish marketing market this year in 2020 will come from Tencent (friends who are short on time can go directly to 05). As I said before, the dividends from the Tencent system have never disappeared. They exist every year, but they are different every year.

Asia’s success 30 years ago popularized the concept of “customer first” in China’s business environment for the first time. Then the era of bidding winners arrived, and the concepts of positioning theory and integrated marketing have been popular for more than ten years. Today, these have become “tears of the times”.

The mobile Internet has created an ecosystem that transcends time and space, causing all settings to be reset. What I believe in as marketing iteration is essentially not just a methodological innovation, but also a generational journey.

1. No Heroes See Wang Suizhou

In the late 1980s, the state-owned economy dominated the world. When you walk into a state-owned shopping mall, you will see goods piled up haphazardly, the sales clerks are indifferent to you, and they exude the aura of “buy if you want, buy if you don’t, get out”.

Except Asia in Zhengzhou.

According to the description in "The Big Failure", his sales clerks " greet customers with a hello, introduce them when they serve them, and say farewell when customers leave ."

At Asia, you can see receptionists, singing and dancing performances, and even run to the entrance of the mall every day to watch their specially trained guard of honor raising the national flag and playing the national anthem.

A tree that stands out in the forest will be destroyed by the wind. This operation left them with about 100 Haidilaos between themselves and the traditional state-owned shopping malls, which made the state-owned giants so anxious that they joined forces to attack them, thus triggering the famous "Battle of Central Plains".

In the first year of its opening, Asia's sales reached 186 million, ranking among the top 40 large shopping malls in China, reaching its peak as soon as it debuted. All this is thanks to its first-generation helmsman Wang Suizhou.

He threw the concept of "customer first" into the dead business world and planned many large-scale marketing events with consumers at the center, such as the advertisement "Where to go in the Central Plains? Zhengzhou Asia" which was repeatedly broadcasted by CCTV.

This was the first time that Chinese consumers felt reliability and respect in a business environment, so much so that many years after the decline of Wild Sun, it and its legend can still be heard in the world.

The commercial war in the Central Plains has never stopped, and the Mid-Autumn Festival is approaching in Zhengzhou. Looking back at the dimming lights, the hero Wang Suizhou is no longer there.

2. Tears of the Times

I believe everyone is tired of hearing the five words "youth marketing", but as far as advertising marketing is concerned, the ones that can make young people shed tears of the times are not the groundbreaking Asia, but the following ones.

The first to be affected is the six-word magic sound - "Hengyuanxiang, Sheep Sheep Sheep". When this advertisement was broadcast that year, many viewers thought that the TV was stuck.

There is also Li Ziming from Class 6, Grade 3.

And an incredible plot.

"Why are you chasing me?" "I want jellyfish syrup."...Why would a cheetah want jellyfish syrup?

There is also a series of magical sounds lingering in the air, where the next line can be sung after the previous line is given:

Wash, wash, take a bath——

I want O bubble I want O bubble——

In the mid-to-late 1990s, color TVs became popular in Chinese households. Yang Weiguang made the final decision on the CCTV advertising tender, and Chinese advertising officially entered the era of winning bids.

At that time, to do marketing, you had to have a deep financial foundation, and then make a repetitive/strange/simple/brainwashing+large-scale advertising film, and you were basically set.

During the same period, companies began to develop brand awareness and seek differentiated ways to present themselves to the public.

Uni-President Group renamed the Japanese anime "Cooking Master Boy" to "The Cooking Master Boy", and all the names of the characters became its products.

Haier Group produced a popular science cartoon called "Haier Brothers", which was broadcast from 1995 to 1998, with a total of 212 episodes.

3. Who is God?

Following the era of winning bids and the rise of brand awareness came the first generation of systematic concepts and methodologies in China's marketing field - positioning theory and integrated marketing.

I agree with these historical wealth creation cases and effective methodologies. They have provided me with different perspectives on marketing and even the world.

These are all parts of the whole, and the mistake we often make is to think that because one part is correct, it is the whole. Then you may make mistakes in the next stage.

Why was positioning theory so effective in the previous stage?

At that time, people were constrained by the economy and had to have a reason to buy things, such as buying a dress for a date. Shopping always had a clear purpose.

Because “consumers actively seek out products”, the positioning is effective.

But today the people and goods yard has been completely reorganized. When the economy gets better, consumers’ purchasing process is real-time, and they can buy something immediately after it’s been bought. If you want to drink a drink at this time, there are so many choices, you can choose from Yidiandian, Heytea, Lelecha, or FamilyMart's smoothies. So “ products have to come to consumers ”.

If a white-collar worker wants to drink something in the office, 99% of the time he or she will open the food delivery app to search for a nearby tea shop. Even if it is a brand he or she has never heard of, if he or she sees that its qualifications and related reviews are good on Meituan, he or she will be willing to try it.

More and more consumption behavior has become unconscious. This means that Li Jiaqi can definitely sell out a new brand by promoting it in front of the public.

The end of the bidding king era is due to the huge changes in the media environment. The failure of positioning theory stems from the reorganization of people, goods and places. If we dig deeper, we will find that consumers 20 years ago and consumers now are all consuming based on trust.

Whether it is the winning bidder, Li Jiaqi, or Pinduoduo's agricultural support activities, their relationships with customers are established over the long term. The former constantly brainwashes through the endorsement of CCTV, while the latter two are strategic and long-term operations. Obviously, the current media environment and consumer behavior habits only support the latter.

So the question is, if you want to operate in the long term, you have to find consumers who can allow you to operate.

The customer-first concept has been practiced by Wang Suizhou for 30 years. Brands attach great importance to advertising and marketing, but still don’t know who their consumers are.

Without data-based targeting, your ads are directed to everyone, such as in subways and elevators. These superficial "ads" cannot achieve customer loyalty (unless the product is truly amazing) and cannot allow you to "operate in the long term" because you do not build a true customer relationship with consumers.

In today's marketing, it is imperative to accurately find consumers, build trust, delve into customer relationships, and retain fleeting traffic.

4. Find TA

In today's China, if you want to find someone accurately, you cannot bypass the super platform of Tencent.

Tencent once compared itself to a river. A river means connection, not just connecting users with users and users with brands, but organically combining all parts of the ecosystem to bring the possibility of incremental business in multiple scenarios.

I have said before that Tencent is a full-link platform based on users' different life scenarios and needs. It can effectively cover the core scenarios of everyone's life, and has its own super account system and social circle system, which can achieve efficient tracking.

There is also the classic case: Pinduoduo.

How did it quickly rise from scratch by leveraging the social e-commerce dividends of the Tencent ecosystem?

Pinduoduo does not have a physical form. One of its marketing logics is to cultivate consumers' usage habits, which cannot be achieved overnight. It also determines that it cannot achieve rapid growth through traditional market logic and can only "play the long game to catch big fish."

"A large part of the traffic distribution and human behavior cannot be simply categorized and predicted, so Pinduoduo will prepare enough creative materials, video materials, plans, and copywriting to match enough data and generate unlimited results to maximize the effectiveness." For example, girls received advertisements for La Mer, and boys received advertisements for AJ.

There is also Ctrip. His WeChat mini program currently has more than 300 million users, and the user overlap with Ctrip APP is only 10%. "Based on different user matching, Ctrip's mini program will focus on service pages such as food, visas, ticketing, foreign exchange, etc." This is equivalent to helping Ctrip achieve scene complementarity.

5. Keep him/her

The above approach is suitable for large companies and is the most efficient for them. If you want to improve retention, you should constantly adjust the strategy based on the data.

But for many smaller brands, e-commerce companies, or companies with high-priced products that require in-depth communication, such as real estate and insurance, finding people is far from enough. They need to maintain customer relationships to achieve long-term operations.

Celebrities and internet celebrities are the best at retaining people.

In the live broadcast room, Li Jiaqi would always emphasize that the price given to him by the brand must be the lowest price on the entire network. If not, he would no longer cooperate with the brand in the future. He would also speak harshly to the staff when replenishment was slow.

In the fan circle, this is called pampering fans. The subtext is "I put you first, and everything I do is for your own good." In essence, it is about building a trusting relationship with fans.

The same goes for building trusting relationships and long-term operations. Let’s see how companies can do it online.

Zhongshan Vanke launched WeChat advertising some time ago and added 79 corporate WeChat customers. Through subsequent communication, many houses were sold, with a very high ROI.

The cost for customers to successfully add WeChat is extremely low, 60% lower than the industry average customer information collection cost.

The TV series "An Jia" showed us how some real estate agents find clients to add WeChat - handing out flyers, one by one on the street in the hot summer, and then leaving it to fate.

Now that WeChat for Business and WeChat are connected, it is entirely possible to direct customers to WeChat for Business through Moments, which is time-saving and efficient. When offline scenarios no longer work, we have to create them online.

After the campaign is completed, potential consumers only need two or three steps from seeing the ad, clicking it, and adding the brand’s corporate WeChat, and the entire process is extremely short.

At the same time, the previous model easily missed those consumers who were "interested but not willing to buy for the time being". After the enterprise WeChat and WeChat were connected, even if the customer did not want to buy now, they might add the brand WeChat because of their interest.

Over time, a group of customer resources will be slowly accumulated, and the brand can be used to build a community or for one-on-one communication. Ultimately, these can be gathered into brand assets, and traffic will no longer flow away directly but will remain.

This should be the data-based gameplay with the highest traffic utilization and conversion rate.

This gameplay is most suitable for traditional e-commerce industries and real estate, insurance and other offline service formats that require one-on-one services. Another advanced level of understanding of marketing is to adapt to local conditions and choose the right strategy based on your own needs.

The "2019 China Internet Advertising Development Report" shows that food and beverages and personal care and maternal and child products continue to rank first and second in Internet advertising, accounting for 54.17% of the advertising market share.

Last year, advertising in nearly half of the categories, including transportation, finance and insurance, online communications, and real estate, generally shrank. For these less active industries, 99% of them are because their businesses rely too much on offline models of deep communication, and most of their online advertising is information flow advertising. They have no direct access to users' daily links, and cannot establish sufficient trust, so the ROI is naturally low.

For those industries that rely on offline communication and conversion, they can leverage the capabilities of WeChat for Business and the WeChat system after they are connected. This will provide new ways of playing while achieving short-chain customer acquisition and business activation goals. For example, using promotional activities in multiple links such as Moments or WeChat public accounts to attract customer consultations, and after directing traffic to corporate WeChat, customer service can then use private chat, community operations, and Moments to direct traffic to the mini program mall, and finally complete the conversion.

This logic is also applicable to food, beverage and personal care products, and even all brands operating e-commerce channels, including maternal and child products, skin care, cosmetics and other categories. Through corporate WeChat shopping guides, they can get closer to customers in terms of service and refined operations, thereby achieving substantial growth in brand assets and business.

Stimulate the potential energy of inactive markets and complement the advantages of active markets.

This is why I said at the beginning that the biggest driving force to offset the sluggish marketing market in 2020 will come from Tencent.

Huang Tieming, vice president of the WeChat Business Group, once said in a media interview, "Customers cannot be viewed as grass that can be mowed or running water. Customers are living things, and what they need is warm service."

The arbitrage space of short-term thinking is gradually disappearing. Future marketing must use long-term thinking and pursue compound growth.

6. Symbiosis

In this year's WeChat Open Class, Chen Chunhua, Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, mentioned a concept that left a deep impression on people. She said that business is the meaning of life, and the essence of business is to "provide life solutions" rather than "sell goods."

From a technical perspective, after interoperability with WeChat for Business, the WeChat advertising ecosystem has undoubtedly greatly broadened the boundaries of corporate marketing, maximizing customer acquisition revenue within a reasonable range. From a marketing logic and customer experience perspective, I believe that not only WeChat and WeChat for Business, but the business environment of the entire market will further move towards integration, towards the possibility of friendly coexistence among consumers, brands, and platforms.

What is symbiosis? We watch over each other in times of difficulty and make money together when the market is good. This is the most realistic thing.

Author: Attack Wave Finance

Source: Jinbubo Finance (ID: jinbubo)