Brand promotion and marketing, how to create another Jiang Xiaobai? !

In this article, the author explains in detail what brand personalized marketing is, the value points of personalized marketing, and how to implement it in order to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

In this article, I will talk to you about brand personalized marketing.

This term is actually not new. In recent years, a number of anthropomorphic brands with their own traffic have emerged in the market, such as Heytea, Jiang Xiaobai, and Three Squirrels. "Personification", "Internet celebrity brand", "brand personification", "brand IP" and other ideas have become new ideas that companies are pursuing when building their brands.

Many marketers still think that they can achieve the same viral effect as Three Squirrels by changing the brand logo to an anthropomorphic pattern, but they find that it is useless and they are still unable to grasp the method behind the viral effect. How to systematically understand brand personification, also known as "personalization", and recreate a Jiang Xiaobai?

Before talking about specific methods, we need to understand what brand personification is? If our company already has a long-term and stable brand, is it necessary to personalize the brand?

01 What is brand personification?

There is no definite conclusion in the marketing world about the concept of "brand personification". It is a term born in the era of mobile Internet and new media. Here is an explanation that I find relatively easy to understand: through personalization, consumers’ understanding and views of the various characteristics of a product or service are transformed into human traits.

“People have personality, brands have individuality; people have thoughts, brands have connotation; people have faces, brands have images; people have diseases, brands have crises, and they also need physical examinations.”

To initially identify the relationship between existing brands and personalities, it is recommended to refer to "Brand Archetypes" by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson. The book proposes that vital and long-lived brands have personality archetypes .

According to the four major human motivations of "stability VS conquest; belonging VS independence", brand archetypes are divided into 12 types (stability: creator, caregiver, ruler; belonging: ordinary people, lovers, jesters; conquest: heroes, rebels, wizards; independence: naive, explorers, wise men). For example, Chanel's brand archetype is a lover, Red Bull is an explorer, and Apple is a magician.

The purpose of a brand archetype is to provide a reference point during the personification process when it comes to brand values ​​and beliefs. But simply setting values ​​and beliefs for the brand is far from enough in the actual process of brand personification. Personification has many other connotations.

02 Why is it necessary to personalize the brand?

Let me first use a simple diagram to illustrate the relationship between brands, merchants, and consumers in the entire marketing chain:

The ultimate purpose of a single enterprise/merchant is to provide products or services to consumers in order to make continuous profits (process C). In an exclusive monopoly market, this process is unimpeded and does not require the intervention of brands. But in reality, you will encounter merchants 2, 3, 4... that can also meet the same needs of consumers. Especially in the new media era, the intensified flow of information (introducing more competitors) greatly reduces the efficiency of process C.

To quote the view mentioned by He Caitou in "2017 New Media Development Forecast": There is no media without sociality ; content without social attributes is almost impossible to be spread and exchanged. Establishing social links with consumers is the most efficient way for companies to persuade consumers to buy their products and services in the new media era (of course, some companies will choose the simplest and crudest method of lowering prices or making better and lower-priced products and services), thereby improving the efficiency of process C.

How can we establish social links between companies and consumers and continuously generate social momentum?

Companies are naturally insensitive to consumers, and consumers will not have strong social interactions with your company because of a corporate symbol or logo. People live in society, and the objects of social interaction are “people” rather than “things”. You wouldn’t talk to your pillow product and expect a reply.

By designing a marketing process (A+B+D) to create a brand with charisma, the brand can become the "him" that consumers are willing to communicate with. Brand "personalization" is the most in line with human social interaction. Brands continuously interact with consumers in the form of "people", making consumers willing to pay a higher premium to buy your products and services (brand premium).

This also explains why it is easier for some industry bigwigs to break through in corporate branding than ordinary people. In addition to resource endowments, it is their personal brands that empower corporate brands (such as Luoji Siwei, Wu Xiaobo Channel, and Internet celebrity Taobao brands). The corporate brands they create are all based on personal brands, naturally have social attributes, and are extremely easy to be liked by consumers.

03 How to shape brand personality?

Through the above analysis of the communication mechanism, we understand the definition of brand personification and the mechanism behind why brands need to be personified. The following diagram will systematically help you build a personalized brand of your own (this tool is also called the brand personality anchoring compass ).

Brand Personification Anchoring Compass

The essence of brand personality shaping is "people", so it is very important to study "personality" first. The creation of the "personality" on the left side of the picture can be achieved through six dimensions, which correspond one to one with the six dimensions of the brand personalization process on the right, collectively referred to here as the " six anchors of personalization (vision, language, value, personality, credit, and communication power)".

Visual Anchoring

Clothes make the man, and the same goes for brands. We naturally have a primitive urge for beautiful things. The saying "Beauty is justice" can never be wrong when used anywhere. Anthropomorphic brand logos are a quick way to achieve personalized visual anchoring. Specific examples include Tmall (Doraemon), JD.com (dog), Get (owl), QQ (penguin); and HEYTEA (children drinking HEYTEA). The overall design should be minimalist, bright in color and highly relevant.

Language Anchoring

Language here refers to words, sounds and pictures. Language anchoring can most accurately carry the information that a brand wants to convey to consumers, especially in this era when we need to focus on personalized brand expression. For a brand, it is important to design a language system with a fixed style for use in external communications.

The slightly rebellious style of "Vancl" made Vancl an object of pursuit for young grassroots and made the brand popular overnight; Jiang Xiaobai used the joys and sorrows of love in life and work to touch the hearts of those born in the 80s and 90s with Jiang Xiaobai's quotations. Durex uses obscure pornographic jokes to make itself popular every time a hot topic comes. Golden sentences represent the height of the brand language system. Without summarizing a few golden sentences, you cannot say that your brand is a qualified communicator.

Fanketi

Jiang Xiaobai's Quotes

Durex jokes

Value Anchor

Value can be commercial value or social value. The value of a brand in the market is like the value of a person in society. Commercial value focuses on what services or products the brand provides to consumers, while social value is more often achieved through public welfare means.

Alipay launched the Ant Forest application, emphasizing doing business while doing charity. People who use Alipay to make purchases will gain a certain amount of energy, which can be used to water trees. After watering for a period of time, when the tree grows up, you can apply on the APP to donate the tree to the Alxa Foundation, and then the foundation will plant a real tree in the Alxa region of Inner Mongolia. Alipay calls on everyone to protect the environment and live a low-carbon life, adding social welfare value to the brand.

Personality Anchoring

Brand personality refers to the brand’s values ​​and beliefs, which are usually reflected in the company’s brand slogan. Brand values ​​and beliefs must keep up with the ideology of mainstream consumers. The usual practice is to hire or design spokespersons who can represent the brand's personality, and then create a series of events around them that can highlight the distinctive personality proposition, so as to inject personal charm into the brand.

For example, the Forbidden City Taobao designed a series of cute pictures of palace figures (Emperor Yongzheng making a scissors hand gesture is one of them), and it also occasionally releases cute emoticon packages through its official account. Who would have thought that the majestic "imperial palace" would suddenly turn around and laugh, breaking the character setting with its own halo, and become an "Internet celebrity" with "soft, cute, and mean" characteristics. This unexpected turn gave the Forbidden City's Taobao brand personal charm, and netizens exclaimed, "So this is the Forbidden City you are."

New Balance invited music godfather Li Zongsheng to endorse and shoot commercials, injecting craftsmanship and high-quality personality into the brand. Li Zongsheng has been in the industry for 30 years. He is stubborn, slow, and concise in his approach to music, and only focuses on the voice in his heart. This is in perfect agreement with Newbalance's brand spirit of "a century of shoemaking practice just for the pursuit of extremely comfortable wearing experience".

Jiang Xiaobai, on the other hand, created the image of an ordinary young man in the workplace and developed a set of online animation dramas around him on a quarterly basis: I am Jiang Xiaobai. The total number of online views exceeds 100 million, injecting Jiang Xiaobai with the core of "life hurts the heart".

Credit Anchor

Honesty is the foundation of a person's life. The same is true for the brand's credit value. Unconditional refunds if you are not satisfied with a product trial are a common way to build a credit anchor.

Every customer who buys a pair of shoes from Zappos will receive three identical pairs of shoes. After trying them on, the customer can keep the most suitable pair and return the other two pairs with free shipping. Moreover, within 365 days, if you are not satisfied with the shoes, you can return them unconditionally, and the shipping is also free.

The "Free Returns within 365 Days" logo on the Zappos website

"Buy one pair and get three pairs free to try on, 365 days of free returns and exchanges" has enhanced the credit of the Zappos brand, with sales increasing several times every year.

Communication Anchoring

The higher a person's social status is, the greater their influence tends to be. Brands use social networking to continuously improve their communication capabilities and enhance consumer awareness of the brand. The community here can be an alliance between brands, or it can be the establishment of a brand community around consumers.

Haier, the head coach of the 800,000 Blue Vs, has formed a communication matrix by gathering numerous corporate brand accounts. Its self-media accounts are exposed up to 1 billion times a year, saving a lot of marketing and promotion costs.

Building a brand community around consumers can increase the opportunities for contact between the brand and target consumers. At the same time, it can strengthen brand awareness through interaction between consumers, thereby improving brand loyalty. Chaos University and Fan Deng Reading Club have both established knowledge payment brands in cities across the country through brand communities.

04 Conclusion

Personalization of corporate brands is an imperative marketing project in the new media era and cannot be delayed. Focusing on the brand personality anchoring compass to empower brand personality and strengthen social connections with consumers, we look forward to you creating a "Jiang Xiaobai" of your own .

illustrate:

1. The pictures in this article are from the Internet and are not for commercial use;

2. The copyright of the brand personality anchoring compass proposed in this article belongs to 007 in the marketing industry and is for reference only.

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Author: Uncle Seven

Source: 007 in the marketing world (ID: beastmkt)