3 advanced methodologies for brand marketing!

Recently, Sister Mulan has been talking with some brand managers about corporate brand practices as a brand consultant or speaker, and often feels that the distance between theory and practice is: "A slight error can lead to a huge mistake." So today Sister Mulan wants to talk to you about brand marketing.

When most CEOs talk about marketing, they think it means advertising, new media, sales, and branding, but they do not see it as a strategic behavior for the company to manage the market.

As a result, there is a famous Wanamaker's puzzle in the advertising circle: "I know that half of my advertising expenses are wasted, but I don't know which half."

Product is 1, marketing is 0

Management guru Peter Drucker once said, "The two most important functions of a business are innovation and marketing. Everything else is a cost."

Innovation is more about product and value creation, while marketing is about value delivery. So when comparing marketing and products, which one is more important?

Apple represents product culture, and Microsoft represents marketing culture. Today, Apple is king; however, ten years ago Microsoft was king.

Therefore, Sister Mulan believes that the brand strategy is based on the product. Product is 1, marketing is 0, and the core of any marketing is the product.

In the past, the cost of connecting with customers was huge. Consumers were difficult to find, and traditional advertising and TV advertising were everywhere, so the connection cost in the middle was huge. Today, mobile Internet has developed to a mature stage, and the cost of connecting products to users is zero. The most essential and profound understanding of advertising in this era is: the product is the advertisement.

As the saying goes: "This is a big era where small eras prevail." You will find that many companies today can emerge with just one product and become prosperous from the moment they are born. Xiaomi, WeChat and Yu'ebao are examples.

With the prevalence of the Internet today, all the intermediate links have been cut out. Only if the product is compelling enough can you amplify its power 10 times or 100 times. If the "1" of the product is not done well, no matter how many zeros are added later, they will be invalid. Without the "1" of the product, no matter how good the marketing is, it will all be a bunch of "0s".

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he once made a very important reflection: "Product people were killed by marketing people." After Jobs returned to Apple, the most important thing he did was to let product people regain the right to speak.

It can be said that today’s brands have changed a lot compared to the past. Previous brands were more about going from brand to marketing, then to users, then to your products, and then forming a brand.

Today’s brands are reversing the entire methodology. Only after having a product will there be a certain amount of user traffic, and finally there will be more word-of-mouth marketing to form the entire brand.

Therefore, the difference between good marketing and bad marketing lies in whether the advantages of the product can be magnified and recognized by more people.

Therefore, the starting point of brand work must be to start from the user, discover needs, create value and spread value, rather than coming up with all kinds of creative ideas right away.

As Zhang Xiaolong said in his speech about WeChat:

“Everything is based on user value. User value comes first. This sentence may seem old-fashioned or ordinary, but what I want to say is that this sentence actually makes the difference between a good product and a bad product. Everyone understands that users are important, but not many products truly put user value first…”

What is the purpose of demand insight? Help consumers solve problems:

• What do consumers need?
• Why is there such a need?
• How to meet their needs?

How do we solve these 3 problems? The purpose of solving problems is to benefit consumers. You have to think clearly about what I am to consumers and what I can give you?

The essence of any product/service is to meet certain needs of customers, or to solve certain pain points of customers. For marketing, it is just to use more effective channels and more convincing methods to make customers believe that you can meet their needs and solve their pain points.

Teacher Chen Chunhua once conducted an experiment in which she asked a company to make a catalog of all the functions of a product and asked consumers to check the boxes. In the end, it was found that only 5% of the functions were usable, and consumers were not aware of the other 95%. This is actually a huge waste of cost. Why do companies present 100%, but consumers only need 5%?

There are two possible reasons:

1. The company simply didn’t communicate with consumers, so others didn’t know about that 95%;
2. Companies take it for granted that this 95% is what consumers want.

Therefore, some logic is what we think, but it is not necessarily what users think. Although they lead to the same goal, misunderstanding is often the root cause of failure.

However, after we have a clear insight into customer needs, the second question we need to think about is: the positioning must be clear.

Al Ries and Jack Trout said in their book Positioning:

“Positioning is a new way of communicating. It brings about a revolution in communicators, which is to consider the sending of information from the perspective of receiving information.”

Therefore, positioning is not just a sentence, a simple slogan, a pile of gorgeous words or a beautiful empty framework, but the answers to these three questions (What are you? How are you different? How do you know?).

The first is product positioning, what is different about your product? In other words, your product should clearly express "three points": selling point, highlight and differentiation point.

For example, in the shampoo category, Rejoice occupies the "softness" feature, Pantene occupies the "hair nourishment" feature, and Head & Shoulders occupies the "dandruff removal" feature...

Answering your differentiated features in this product category is to help customers make effective choices among many competing brands and reduce decision-making costs.

If a product has no selling point, even the eloquent Wang Po can do nothing about it; if a product has no bright spot, no matter how good the marketing is, it can’t help; if a product has no differentiation point, even competitors will rarely pay attention to it.

For example, as a non-essential product, the successful rise of Elvis is largely due to its ability to meet consumers' consumption preferences for "design" and "cultural core" in the era of consumption upgrading.

Through big data, Mao Wang discovered that 75% of his users were girls, so he thought about what girls would like and what young people like. In principle, small and mini products are definitely cute. This is actually the default view in everyone's mind, so young people will definitely like such products.

So you will find that Elvis's Little Prince OTR series of products has a single factor maximization principle, which is to do the best in the few points that users are concerned about. The first is that it must look good; the second is that it must sound good; the third is that it must have good craftsmanship and exquisite workmanship; and the fourth is that it must be able to be a gift.

The second is market positioning: without choice, there is no strategy.

“The opportunity to build a brand lies not in existing markets but in creating new markets.”

This sentence also comes from Jack Kraut's masterpieces "Positioning" and "The Origin of Brands".

Sister Mulan agrees with this statement very much. Based on certain market segmentation, enterprises determine their target market and finally position their products or services at a specific position in the target market.

Taking Xiaoguan Tea as an example, Xiaoguan Tea has its own differentiation for consumers. The traditional tea industry does not make any distinction between consumer groups in the market, while Xiaoguan Tea targets high-end consumers.

What are the consumption characteristics of high-end consumers: First of all, the price does not need to be cheap. The second thing is to have texture, or to put it bluntly, to have class.

Compared to the "tea" that is used as a gift for exchange but is put on the shelf, Xiaoguan Tea defines tea as a fast-moving consumer product and segmented the target consumer groups, which is worth referring to and learning from. It has truly turned tea into a fast-moving consumer product, even if it is a "luxury" fast-moving consumer product, and it has begun to change the traditional way of thinking about tea business in China.

The third is the communication positioning: the meaning of communication and what emotions does it satisfy?

The highest level of marketing is to achieve "empathy" between brands and users. There are so many brands in today's society that it is impossible for the public to remember every brand. Therefore, what brands need to do is to help their audiences achieve self-realization rather than self-promotion in the era of famous brands.

Take Nike, which we are all familiar with. Nike seldom does product-level publicity, but its brand concept is very clear, which is just do it!

This is a kind of sports competitive spirit and the spirit of perseverance to challenge oneself and never give up. It connects people with similar ideas and those who love sports, and brings marketing back to values.

Therefore, a successful brand should be an organizational system with an image, flesh and blood, a skeleton and a soul. Its communication design uses various methods to create a path and imprint from product to brand, thereby establishing an emotional connection between the product and consumers.

Tell your brand’s true story

Once the top-level product design is straightened out, marketing is the icing on the cake, helping the product find its own users and enter thousands of households.

Even good wine needs no bush; brand marketing is nothing more than telling a true story.

Stories are the most primitive form of entertainment and the most contagious material. They can create an emotional resonance between your corporate brand and your audience.

So how does a product tell a story? Sister Mulan believes that the following points can provide some reference for everyone.

First, the theme

The brand story depends on the brand personality and brand connotation, so you should design a moving theme based on your brand tone.

The theme of the story behind Dove is "confession", the theme of the story behind Apple is "leading", and the story behind Haidilao is "changing destiny with your own hands", so it purposefully creates designs and tells service stories that exceed the audience's expectations and go beyond the bottom line.

At this point, when consumers buy this product, it is not just because of its use value, but more because of the spiritual or psychological satisfaction that the product brings, which are all reflected by the brand personality.

Second, conflict

A good story must have ups and downs, and ups and downs in the plot require conflicts to construct.

Third-rate marketing seeks conflicts, second-rate marketing resolves conflicts, and first-rate marketing creates conflicts.

For example, Chu Orange: an inspirational orange. Chu Orange tells the story of Chu Shijian's life of success and failure, peaks and troughs; for example, Roseonly: love only one person in your life. It tells the story of a man who can only give flowers to his one and only woman, and it resolves the conflict between the exclusivity of love and the fear of cheating.

Third, your product can tell stories to consumers

In the new media era, product quality and function are no longer the driving force for consumers to buy. They care more about the experience and feelings brought by the products.

For example, Southern Black Sesame Paste creates an experiential story that allows consumers to experience the same emotions as conveyed in the commercial, namely nostalgia and recollection of childhood life. The little boy licking the bowl in the film is like the shadow of the consumer who was still reluctant to eat his favorite food as a child.

So, what is it in the product? What you say it is actually not important at all. What matters is what your users think your product is. This is the most core and important thing.

So, a good story is a mini value. The best way to spread values ​​is to do it silently and in a subtle way, through infiltration rather than inculcation.

For example, "Avengers 4" has recently driven countless movie fans crazy. In the past 11 years, Marvel has carefully told the stories of each superhero and successfully shaped their respective images.

Veteran movie fans will find that every time Marvel tries its best to inject something new, for example, "Captain America 3" seems to have more political metaphors, "Ant-Man" creates a character with richer emotions in taking care of his daughter, and "Spider-Man" is more like a campus youth film, establishing a huge Marvel Universe in the hearts of the audience - the world of superheroes.

Such a design is also in line with the concept of integrated marketing, making each movie a part of the entire Marvel Universe, allowing superheroes to attract and cross-communicate with each other. Even if you only like Iron Man, you must not miss other Marvel movies. At the same time, each movie can deepen fans' memory of the Marvel brand.

On the other hand, brand story creation needs to adhere to the "kiss principle".

The KISS principle originated from David Mamet's film theory, and its original meaning is "Keep it Simple and Stupid". This theory is widely used in fields such as product design and is also applicable to storytelling.

• Small pot tea: made by eight masters. It tells the story of how eight tea-making masters pass on their handcraftsmanship so that ordinary people can drink their tea.
• darry Ring: With your ID card, you can only customize one diamond ring in your lifetime.

This is such a story, short but full of imagination. There’s no need to fill your story with complicated information and plots; the most important thing is to let your audience experience it and fill in the context on their own.

Telling a good story instead of letting monologues become the toxic hydrogen that kills consumer interest has become an important task in the era of "information overload".

Whoever has the best storytelling consumers has the strongest brand

The funnel marketing model in the traditional marketing era begins with consumers' attention to products and services and ends with the establishment of purchasing behavior and loyalty. It is a process of decreasing and losing layers.

However, in the era of social marketing, the funnel model is becoming increasingly inefficient. Especially in the last link, brands can transform users into "promoters" of the brand through the connection of social scenarios, inspire users to spread the brand in circles, recommend the brand to more users, and achieve more interesting user interactions and fission-like communication.

Therefore, the real key to brand competition is often to conquer consumers.

In the stage of consumption upgrading in Chinese society, especially among young groups, an obvious trend is the rise of social needs.

Luo Zhenyu has a point of view: the future transaction entry point will not be traffic, but social interaction and personality. Sister Mulan agrees with this.

Today, personalized young groups need a higher quality of social interaction, so the concept of "social currency" was born.

The description of social currency in "Contagious" is: just as people use currency to buy goods or services, using social currency can gain more praise and more positive impressions from family, friends and colleagues.

To put it more simply, "social currency is conversation starter."

It includes several levels:

1. Expressing ideas: I have ideas, but I don’t know how to express them. Alas, there is an article or a scene that can help me express my inner thoughts.
2. Image building: I share this information to help me build a good image in front of others;
3. Find people of the same ilk: What kind of opinions can help me gain recognition from a certain group?
4. Social showing off/comparison: Make me look stronger, more beautiful, richer, more interesting, more thoughtful, more aesthetic, more responsible, etc. than others to gain more influence;
5. Emotional expression: Emotions are contagious, and good content can help people express their emotions;
6. Show love: Love is a manifestation of agreeableness and conscientiousness. People need a platform to show their love.
7. Helping others: "I am useful and needed by others" is itself a manifestation of one's social value;
8. Provide topics for conversation: Avoid awkward social conversations and help people solve the problem of what to talk about.

For products, you need to provide a kind of "social currency" (topic for conversation) so that your potential customers or even strangers will take photos of your products, post them on WeChat Moments, and discuss your products as soon as they see them.

In the Internet age, consumers live on the Internet. If a brand's products are not worth "showing off", then they are definitely not their favorite content. Products like Haidilao's new way of eating, Jiang Xiaobai cocktail blending, Oreo's spicy chicken wings, and mustard-flavored sandwich cookies have created "fresh and interesting" topics of conversation for users.

Therefore, stir the hearts of young people and hit their itch points. Where there is heat, there is marketing.

Enterprises must turn to a new marketing approach that is user-centric and growth-oriented, carry out refined and sustainable operations, and provide customized information and experiences based on users' personalized needs, in order to effectively impress users, activate existing customers, drive incremental growth, and maximize marketing efficiency.

Summarize

The above are the three methodologies that Sister Mulan believes should be understood first in brand marketing work. To summarize in one sentence: good products, good stories, and user reputation . Everyone is welcome to discuss together.

Author: Sister Mulan

Source: Mulanjie (ID: mulanjie-)