Brand Advertising Development Trends in 2022

"In the real market environment, 70% of sales occur in the medium to long term and are contributed by brand assets, while sales achieved through short-term direct conversions only account for 30%." - Kantar Research 2021

Brand management is moving from "sales-oriented" to "relationship-oriented".

Let’s assume a magical scenario: you go to the market to buy green onions, and there are three vegetable vendors selling green onions in the market.

Vegetable vendor Zhang San: "Zhang San Scallion, the best seller of Shandong high-end scallions, give me two pounds!"

Vegetable vendor Li Si: "If you want to eat 'not spicy' scallions, buy my scallions!"

Vegetable vendor Zhao Wu: "Oh, you're here? Just take a look. If you don't buy much, take two to try. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. We're all neighbors..."

Every time you go to the vegetable market, Zhang San and Li Si shout the same words and express the same distinctive selling points. Only Zhao Wu always chats with you about daily life, and you two become familiar with each other as you chat. Later, every time you bought green onions, if you didn't buy them from Zhao Wu, you felt a little embarrassed...

The advertising of Zhang San and Li Si is "sales-oriented". What they care about is occupying your mind; the advertising of Zhao Wu is "relationship-oriented". What he cares about is building a relationship with you.

In our era, all Zhang San and Li Si type brand advertisements may be transformed into Zhao Wu type brand advertisements.

Relationships start from the shallow to the deep

——How will the content of brand advertising change?

The vast majority of brands do not have a so-called “relationship” with their customers. Because the advertisements of most brands are full of "deep feelings even though they are just a brief acquaintance".

Just imagine, in real life, would you say to a girl, "Let's get married" when you meet her for the first time? Therefore, when your brand meets consumers for the first time, you cannot directly ask them to pay for it.

In real life, the establishment of true relationships must start from the shallow and gradually grow into the deep. Any behavior of "talking too deeply about someone you just met" will scare the other person away. There is a "social penetration theory" in communication studies. This theory tells us a truth: the process of establishing relationships between people is the process of revealing their true selves.

People have many selves, like a nesting doll, with the real self wrapped in layers. The outermost you might be an analyst at Jintai Securities, the next layer is a snowboarding enthusiast, the next layer is a middle-aged man who wants to divorce, and the innermost layer is an ambitious person who wants to become the next Li Ka-shing...

A person's privacy, hobbies, life desires, etc. are his or her true self. What we usually come into contact with is just a person’s social identity. The process of building a relationship is the process of gradually revealing your true self.

The reason why brand advertising in the past failed to establish relationships with users is that it violated the "social penetration theory."

If we regard brand advertising as a signal from one person to another about making friends. Well, in the past, brand advertisements, in order to occupy the minds of consumers in a quick and profitable manner, generally adopted the approach of releasing a strong signal and then repeating this strong signal indefinitely until consumers were “brainwashed”.

If we want to establish a certain relationship with users, our signal should change from a weak signal to a strong signal, with the signal strength continuously increasing.

In other words, brand advertising should release content layer by layer, allowing users to smoothly absorb brand information like watching a TV series. The reason we weren’t able to do this in the past was because the technology was not mature at the time. We were unable to track or lock onto a user and continuously push ads of the same brand to him.

But in today's media environment, all of this has become very simple. When we cooperate with ByteDance, we can leverage its capabilities to push different brand advertisements to the same user like a serial.

For example, SK-II previously launched a series of brand advertisements on ByteDance. They did not start selling right away, but combined the platform’s crowd-reaching strategy to lock in a wave of target users, and then sent progressive content to these customers:

• At the beginning, the advertisement tells an emotional story, which first makes users feel good about the brand and understand the brand's values;

• Then, a celebrity bare-faced evaluation video was released, using objective and rational analysis to build user trust;

• Finally, the celebrity gift box advertisement is pushed to naturally open the user's wallet.

Progressive advertising aims to restore the process of building relationships between people and release advertising signals from shallow to deep. This method may seem slow, but it is a shortcut to building stable relationships.

Relationships are a two-way street

——The production and broadcasting logic of brand advertising is to exchange value with users

Many brands think they have some "relationship" with users, but in my opinion, that is just their wishful thinking. Because what they call "relationship" is just being able to find users and communicate with them.

From the perspective of social psychology, the essence of a relationship is "exchange." In other words, relationships should be “give and take.” However, most brands only have their own “comings” but no user “goings”.

Brands chase their users just like boys chase girls. A boy squats downstairs of the girls’ dormitory every day to get water and bring meals to the girl he likes, but the girl never does anything for the boy. Are they in a relationship? They can only be considered as "attempted relationships".

Friends greet each other, lovers care about each other, and brands and users should also give and support each other.

Most brand advertising can only help companies establish a "one-way relationship". For example, a beverage advertisement shot a TVC with the message "To quench your thirst, drink white pears" and then ran it on a video media for three months.

The content you produce yourself may be of high quality, but “me-centric” content can easily lose the user’s perspective. Moreover, content can only be spread by purchasing traffic, and the dissemination effect is almost equal to the size of the budget. Small businesses will never be able to beat the big players.

Brand advertising that can achieve a "two-way relationship" must allow users to participate and there must be an exchange of value between the brand and users.

When Heinz was making advertisements, it did not come up with an idea on its own, but instead launched a "drawing ketchup" experiment to collect users' ideas.

They invited users to draw their own ideal ketchup. At first, users only knew that this was an anonymous social experiment and didn't know who the brand was, but everyone drew the Heinz bottle. Heinz then turned the users' drawings into outdoor advertisements.

In order to get more people to join in, Heinz also encourages everyone to post their ketchup drawings on social platforms, and promises to select 250 bottles drawn by users and make them into exclusive customized bottles for them.

By turning one-way creative output into two-way creative exchange, Heinz's advertising has moved beyond billboards and into users' social circles.

Don’t simply understand this kind of brand advertising as “co-creation with users.” The correct understanding is that companies need to adjust their content production and dissemination models.

From the perspective of content production model, the brand is not about producing good content, but about leading your users to produce good content.

For example, if you want to demonstrate the camera function of a mobile phone, you can shoot a set of visual blockbusters or a TVC with top-notch visual effects. You can also set up a topic and let users discover for themselves how powerful your camera function is.

When a new mobile phone product was launched, a spokesperson Vlog was produced and a brand Vlog challenge was launched. They worked with ByteDance to create a photo album template, and users can generate their own Vlog in one stop by simply uploading 5 clips of material.

By stimulating users to take the same photos as celebrities, brands not only gain exposure, but also gain nationwide documentary-style carpet-style interaction.

From the perspective of content dissemination model, brands do not create content and then distribute it to the media. Instead, let your users become content distributors. In an era of social media, people are the smallest granularity of media, and media is a collection of many communicators.

The advantage of distributing content by people is that everyone has a natural trust endorsement, which will make the advertising content more credible and spreadable.

In other words, a one-way relationship is that the brand outputs content to users in order to seek profits. A two-way relationship is one in which brands and users exchange content and create benefits.

Relationship is telling the truth

——The voice of brand advertising has changed from speaking official language, speaking human language, to speaking the truth.

The relationship between brands and consumers is changing from speaking official language and human language to speaking the truth. Let’s look at the differences between these three voices.

Speaking official language: I was shocked at first sight

When consumers see brand advertisements that use official language, they will feel that you are very powerful, but they will not be able to empathize with you, let alone trust you.

Come and experience it:

• For mid- to high-end decoration, more people choose Dianjin;

• Kaidi brand: Breakthrough in technology, enlightening the future;

• Create specialty food and build the Delonghi brand.

These official-speaking advertisements convey correct information that consumers are unaware of. Because they are all "empty words", using a condescending tone to show off their muscles to consumers, but they do not collide with consumers' lives.

When a brand speaks in official language, it only creates a sense of alienation and it is difficult to inspire consumers to establish a relationship with you.

Speaking human language: You can understand it at a glance

Compared with the obscurity and alienation of official language, advertisements spoken in plain language are much more approachable.

For example: "Use your brain frequently and drink Six Walnuts more often."

Speaking in human language means that the brand puts itself into the consumer’s living environment and communicates with the consumer. The communication between the two parties is based on the context of equal communication between people, just like the conversation between you and your friends. Everyone communicates on the same frequency, so consumers can understand it at a glance and know what to do after reading it.

Advertising that speaks in human language is currently the most mainstream way of communication between brands and consumers. However, when a brand speaks in human language, it can only establish a preliminary understanding and cannot immediately form a bond of trust.

For example, a certain recruitment platform says that it can help you find a job through chatting; a certain homestay platform allows you to sleep between mountains and seas and live among human feelings. Consumers will not believe it immediately after seeing it, but will believe it after actually using it.

Establishing relationships with consumers by speaking human language is a relatively long process. The faster way is to tell the truth.

Tell the truth: Believe it at first sight

Some time ago, I saw an advertisement for Social Sciences Science in an elevator.

The expression of this advertisement is very realistic, and some people even followed suit and came up with the "real body". Fortunately, it did not flatter itself, but chose to tell the truth. Telling the truth is to use reality to erase the "pink feeling" of advertising.

Taishan Original Juice also did a wave of "truth advertising" a few days ago.

Community notices are content carriers that are closely related to residents’ daily lives. People may not necessarily watch advertisements, but they will definitely pay close attention to community notices. Make advertisements real content, and users will not only watch them, but also pay attention to them.

remember! Refined falsehood is not as good as rough truth. To tell the truth, the brand is appearing without makeup. When you dare to give up the beauty filter and appear in front of consumers without makeup, you will naturally have credibility.

Relationships can be quantified

——Measurement of brand advertising, from information list to information feedback system

Relationships can be divided into nodding acquaintances, liking each other's words, Guan and Bao friendship, and sworn brotherhood... If you search for idioms related to "friendship" in Baidu, you will find more than 30. It can be seen that we know clearly to what extent a relationship has developed.

The same is true between brands and users. We cannot just establish relationships with users. We must also clearly know the extent of the relationship between ourselves and users so that we can strike a balance when interacting with them.

Brands of the future must be able to quantify the relationship between themselves and their users. If you want to make brand advertising useful and effective, you must turn the metaphysical concept of "mind" into a scientific concept.

Since we want to quantify, we must first establish quantitative indicators. If we want to quantify a table, we can use length, width, and height to quantify its volume, or we can use table tops, legs, and screws to quantify its structure.

And "relationship", something that seems to be unquantifiable, can actually be broken down into different elements. The relationship between people, from being strangers to being close friends, can actually be divided into six stages:

• Chance. For example, Xiao Wang, an employee of P&G, is in the operations department, and Xiao Li is in the sales department. They may have some interactions with each other, or they may not have spoken a word to each other until they leave. Although they are all employees of a company, they only have certain opportunities to build relationships.

• Familiar face. Xiao Li's sales department moved to the floor where Xiao Wang's operations department was located. The two often met in the tea room and elevator. They were just acquaintances and looked familiar.

• Shallow acquaintance. Xiao Wang and Xiao Li joined a work group because of a project, became comrades-in-arms, and began to get to know each other.

• Deep friendship. Once, Xiao Li had something to do at home and couldn't work overtime, so Xiao Wang took the initiative to stay and help him with the work. From then on, the two became friends who could talk about anything.

• close. Xiao Wang and Xiao Li often go to the cafeteria to eat together, smoke together in the corridor, and team up to play King of Glory together on weekends. The two have become inseparable good friends.

• Iron porcelain. Xiao Wang was dissatisfied with the company's job arrangement and decided to resign and start his own business. Xiao Li was persuaded by Xiao Wang and also resigned and became Xiao Wang's partner. From then on, the two people's careers, lives and wealth were intertwined.

Brands can also manage users in layers according to these six relationships. Carry out targeted marketing for users at different relationship stages. If the company does not have such a sophisticated CRM system, it can make use of the platform's crowd management tools.

ByteDance also divides its target customer groups according to these six relationship stages, namely opportunity, understanding, attraction, inquiry, action, and advocacy. This is also the O-5A brand relationship asset model that we often use.

In this system, brands can attract more users, screen more suitable users, and quantify the relationship between themselves and users. When we can measure brand advertising effectiveness through relationships, we can clearly diagnose brand problems and quickly find solutions.

For example, if you find that the conversion rate of your brand advertising has decreased, it is likely that the proportion of the A3 population, that is, the inquiring population, is too small. At this time, it is necessary to reduce the placement of pure exposure advertising, do more content planting, let users have shopping intentions for the products, and accumulate enough "inquiry groups" to improve the conversion rate.

Following the idea of ​​​​Broadcasting Engine to build a brand advertising system, brands must first find more right users, and then strategically deepen the relationship links between each other, so that brand advertising can be truly useful and effective.

Conclusion

Saturation attack, mind-grabbing, and miracle-making brand advertising are not our only paths to success. Trying to infiltrate users' lives and build deep relationships with them may become the theme song of future brand advertising.