Brand marketing skills from 0 to 1!

What are the most common mistakes for new brands when going from 0 to 1?

My product is great, why don’t users choose me?

For a while, I was particularly afraid of people coming to me with products to discuss their business plans, because they would talk for a long time and talk about all sorts of things.

These entrepreneurs have extraordinary ways of thinking and indescribable strong self-confidence. They will describe to you a market worth tens of billions of dollars endlessly, as if a huge business empire is about to be born!

Where does this confidence come from?

product!

They always tell me that my products are great!

Then he turned around and asked me a question: "My product is so good, why don't users choose me?"

Why?

You must have heard: What users want is never a drill with a diameter of 5 mm, but a hole with a diameter of 5 mm. ——This is a very interesting sentence. The metaphor behind it is the user’s superficial pseudo-needs and invisible real needs.

Let’s take a simple example: you design a weight loss product, and you think the target users are fat people.

No! In fact, it is the people who "feel fat"...

Many founders are passionate people. They easily feel involved. If they particularly like a product or something, they will dive into it. Unfortunately, most of the time they don’t think about market research, product design, model demonstration, etc., but just live in their own little world of emotions.

I have seen too many founders’ self-imagination fail, so what I want to say is that any founder should think over and over again before starting a business:

Your value is the value you create for users and the solutions you provide to them, not just your own revelry.

How do you understand this sentence?

The so-called value means meeting the real needs of users, and it must be an urgent need.

How to explore demand?

Here I would like to ask a few soul-searching questions to all entrepreneurs, which I shared at the Everyone is a Product Manager Conference some time ago:

• Who is your target user?
• Are the things you do and the products you make meaningful? More directly, are they able to meet user needs and help users solve some practical problems?
• There are actually people with this demand. How big is the existing and incremental market? Where is the ceiling?
• What is the potential difference of your product? Are there any differentiated advantages?
• If users don’t choose your product, what other solutions do they have for similar needs?
• Does your product satisfy user experience? Convenient, fast, efficient and unobstructed?
• Does your product bring a sense of surprise to users? Altruism?

Following this logic, let’s talk about brands, which have three stages!

• First, find positioning
• The second is to establish your own positioning to seize the user's mind
• Third, enrich your self-image

Generally speaking, this is called mind share.

The most mature product brand positioning model is: following the trend of consumer minds, productization, youthfulness, and popular symbolization.

Remember, an entrepreneurial project must be a timely help, not icing on the cake.

Your product is good, but being good doesn’t mean users will buy it. On the other hand, there are actually many good products on the market, but why there are not many products that can satisfy users is because there are too many homogeneous products.

So why you? How to make consumers choose you from among many competitors. You need to highlight the sense of value of "super good". If you make something that you feel great about but users think is dispensable, it will definitely fail.

I would also like to emphasize that it doesn’t matter what the product itself is, what matters is what consumers think your product is.

Why?

Because the products and services that consumers look for must not only meet their basic needs, they also hope to discover an experience and business model that can touch their hearts deeply. In other words, providing consumers with a sense of meaning will become a value proposition that companies must pay attention to when developing products.

Today's consumers are too savvy. For many companies, the approach of traffic, channels, and marketing being king is no longer feasible.

The environment is a place where only the fittest survive in the process of natural selection. Entrepreneurs should develop products from the perspective of the market and users in order to better achieve emotional communication after user experience.
You have to go from knowing - recognizing - identifying - trusting - accompanying each other, or knowing each other - becoming friends - falling in love - getting married, only in this way can you go on for a long time.

Born from traffic, die from trust

In recent years, new media has become very popular, and the traffic dividend has made most founders greedy. As a result, many people have fallen into the dream that as long as they can make products that catch the user's attention, they can quickly get high traffic, strong exposure, and high conversion.

Therefore, "becoming an Internet celebrity brand" or "a brand must have Internet celebrity genes from birth" has become the goal that many entrepreneurs are desperate for.

Undoubtedly, with the help of new media, many Internet celebrity brands have enjoyed the pleasure of becoming famous overnight, such as Answer Tea, Australian Snow Double Yolk Ice Cream, Zhong Xue Gao... and so on.

But haven’t you seen that many Internet celebrity brands are only popular for a period of time and then there is no follow-up. The dead stores and unpopular sales make you wonder where those crazy leeks who were crying out to be harvested have gone?

Take Answer Tea as an example. When the tide was rising, it became a popular element and attracted consumers' enthusiasm with the help of novelty and the bonus of Douyin short videos. It was normal. But a year has passed, how many people still post about it in their circle of friends?

It can be said that "when the tide goes out, you discover who is swimming naked." This famous quote from Buffett confirms the situation of the once-bustling Internet celebrity brands: they were so floating during high tide, but were stripped naked during low tide, ending in a miserable way.

What's more, today when the Internet breaks down the barriers to information dissemination, the rise of an Internet celebrity brand will lead to the rise of thousands of homogeneous brands, which will copy your strategy at almost zero cost.

If you don’t believe me, let me ask you now which brand of dirty buns you like best? Can you answer it directly?

I believe many people can’t do it.

There is also a music bar that I once liked very much, Hutaoli. However, this simple catering ecological model was soon imitated by other restaurants and bars. Coupled with the subsequent poor service experience and the dishes that were hard to describe, I gradually put it on my blacklist.

This is the curse of internet celebrity brands. Internet celebrity brands become famous overnight, but what they bring is traffic, not brand.

What is the brand?

Brand is the cost consumers pay you for. The most important value of a brand is not to generate traffic attention, but to enhance the vitality of traffic. Its essence is trust - you can buy the product with your eyes closed and you won’t go wrong.

But how many brands claiming to be internet celebrity brands actually focus on developing quality products?

What we see are all kinds of marketing, competing on imagination, curiosity, and presence, but in the end, consumers vote with their feet and they die clearly.

As a brand also born as an internet celebrity, let’s take a look at how brands like Heytea have survived, from being a big marketing company to cultivating their internal strength, and from being a firework-like “idol” to an evergreen “real power”.

The answer is as follows:

1. Product core building

Product is 1, marketing is 0, and the core of any marketing is the product. It is not enough to grasp the innovation in a certain segment. The key is to lay a solid foundation for the basic product skills (good appearance, high quality, and high cost performance).

2. Continuous innovation

Innovation is not about changing packaging or concepts, these are not very meaningful. Real innovation is about creating new value, new environments, scenarios and habits.

My advice is that any company’s traffic strategy should not be made on a whim, but should be based on its own survival model and the direction of its circle of competence.

Don't think about achieving success overnight. It's important for founders to stay sober. Traffic will become increasingly scarce, brands will become increasingly fragile, and methods will be rapidly iterated, but the underlying principles will not change . It will be easier to remain invincible if you maintain your original intention and awe.

I will talk about branding when I become big.

Of course, if the above example is a brand that is too self-indulgent, then the excessive conservatism of some entrepreneurs makes me laugh and cry.

As we all know, the process of defining a brand is actually the process of forming brand culture, which is an early part of brand building. However, many founders often skip this important step and start to focus only on sales issues, and then determine their competitive advantages and describe ideal customers.

As for brand marketing, it's just something "they can afford". So I have seen many companies, some of which are even old companies with a vitality of more than 10 years, and they have no brand accumulation. This is very shocking to me.

Of course, a startup has only one goal in its early days – to survive. Only by surviving can it have the right to talk about feelings, be cool, and please consumers at all costs. There is nothing wrong with that.

But one thing to note is that while the most important thing for a brand is sales and growth, this does not mean that you should wait until you can afford brand marketing before you start thinking about how to build a "lean marketing" toolbox.

The question isn’t “when will you be ready for marketing” but “what do you need to do now” so that you’ll be ready for marketing when your business scales.

Of course, some people will say, new consumption, new brands, and new marketing, aren’t they just social media? We have people running it.

Listening carefully to how he did it, I couldn't help laughing:

A better editor has to manage several social media accounts of the company, write articles, do operations, BD, organize events, do design, and also work part-time on Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, etc. A new media editor is responsible for the KPI of the entire company's new media.

What's more, in order to save operating costs, some people even leave new media communications to interns. From a human resources perspective, interns are indeed cheap, but they cannot truly convey the true value of the company.

Of course, compared with these small-scale brands, what is even more speechless are some other brand managers who do not take social media into consideration and think that new media is useless.

They ignore the following reality: the total number of fans of Chinese internet celebrities is nearly 600 million, more than half of whom are under 25 years old - young people will dominate social media.

It is such a sad thing that when 190 million Generation Z become the mainstay of consumption, you fail to understand them and approach them.

Of course, there are many other experiences that are the result of countless entrepreneurs’ hard work:

1. Not everyone has the courage and ability to create a pioneering brand
2. Brand rejuvenation ≠ brand rejuvenation
3. How to find the balance between effect-driven and experience-driven?
4. Marketing is not a panacea. Good products bring their own traffic.
5. Should we do marketing with too low a return on investment?

You can also look back at my previous articles to learn more and deeper perspectives.

Author: Sister Mulan

Source: Mulanjie (ID: mulanjie-)