2019 brand promotion direction and channels!

2019 was a pretty boring year for branding .

We can see some cases with highlights, but there are few surprises and it is even more difficult to break the circle.

Most clients are struggling in the sea of ​​brand effectiveness, and are troubled by how to calculate the ROI of brand projects and how to measure and ensure the effectiveness. It is an irony that even a hit like "Peppa Pig" had a dismal box office. What's the point of pure branding - just to make directors and advertising companies famous?

Some companies have turned directly to effects - community, fission, private domain, etc.

But obviously, it does not apply to all types of businesses; even if it does, can it achieve sustainable growth? It has not been strongly verified.

In fact, many companies I have come into contact with still attach importance to brand - they believe that brand is the source of traffic, the moat of business and supports the premium space. But at the same time, people are paying more and more attention to the specific effects brought by the brand. However, how to prove the effectiveness of brand promotion in the short term remains an eternal problem.

Indeed, purchase intention index, number of brand fans, and natural search volume can all be used as measurement indexes. but:

Without a significant increase in direct key indicators (downloads, daily active users, sales), the above data will seem insignificant and powerless.

Not to mention the so-called volume (which really shouldn’t be mentioned)

Especially this year, the demographic dividend has decreased, the economic situation is grim, competition in the existing market is fierce, the media environment is complex, and new and old marketing tools are emerging in an endless stream.

Brand people are often in pain:

What is the right thing to do?

How to be sure it is correct?

How to prove it is right?

…

Should I believe in the classic theory or try Douyin live streaming and Xiaohongshu first?

Even more serious than budget cuts is the decreasing time left for brands.

If it doesn't prove useful, it needs to be changed immediately. But how can we establish a unified brand impression if we keep changing it?

Well, then stick to the medium to long term strategy and play. However, once the time is extended, how can the effect be verified? It is indeed difficult for most companies to pay for so-called long-term impressions.

Therefore, the theme we want to discuss this time is: long-term brand building, establishing impressions and goodwill, and at the same time allowing brand projects to prove their effectiveness (conversion effects) in a short period of time. Simply put, construct a brand curve that rises in a wavy line - the wave means the pull on the effect, and the upward trend means the improvement of the overall brand power.

The significance of this goal is not only to serve business growth, but also to ensure that brand work itself has a foothold in the overall business.

Below is my recent practice and thinking on this goal:

1. Where does the brand start?

At each stage, do those things

2. Bigger and Smaller Things

How to ensure short-term and long-term results

3. Find a combination of brand and effect

A channel that takes both brand and performance into consideration

1. Where does the brand start?

The reason for exploring this question is that there are so many options for branding. For example, in the top ten marketing cases selected by socialbeta in September, we saw completely different brand promotion ideas:

There are commercials of different styles, marketing combining hot topics, public welfare and intangible heritage protection, as well as micro variety shows, etc. It seems difficult to directly measure the effects of any one program, but it also seems like the right thing to do.

So, how to choose?

What to do?

In terms of time, there is such an idea: according to the user perception of the brand at different stages, the key tasks of each stage can be determined:

In the early stages of brand development, the focus of promotion is on "getting to know me", and the most direct way is to promote products and positioning. Previously, it mainly relied on various forms of hard advertising (newspapers, television, outdoor advertising, etc.), but now there are also live broadcasts by internet celebrities, grass-roots promotion and other methods (such as HFP, which has fully utilized the dividends of public accounts, and Perfect Diary, which was made popular by Xiaohongshu). In the final analysis, it is also to promote the product itself.

The subtext here, of course, is that the product itself has an attractive or differentiated selling point.

Spokesperson marketing is also a frequently used method in this stage, which forms a memory symbol by strengthening the connection between people and products.

Based on the foundation of acquaintance (usually 1-2 years), further improving stickiness and favorability requires strengthening the role of the brand in the lives of users. Therefore, the focus of the second stage is to establish a close connection between the brand and users. In the early stage, the main focus is on building functional associations, which are achieved through pain point reinforcement, scenario marketing, etc. In the middle and late stages, the emphasis is on building spiritual associations - paying attention to users' lifestyles, spiritual realms, and emotional appeals, so that the brand and target users have a higher degree of intrinsic fit. For example, SKII’s women’s series marketing and Fotile’s beautiful family series.

Most brands (especially those serving a specific group of people) will stay at this level. Because the goal of brand building is ultimately to serve business goals and growth needs. It is enough to achieve this goal by continuously building close connections with target users.

But for national brands, in addition to establishing and maintaining user relationships, they also need to shape brand values ​​and influence at a broader social level. Among them, brand behavior driven by social responsibility is an important part.

It is worth mentioning that these three parts are not mutually exclusive, but rather expand layer by layer - continuously expanding the scope and content of brand promotion. In the early stage, focus on the product; in the middle and late stages, start to establish close user connections; then shape the brand's social influence and establish a wider range of people's recognition. At this stage, products and users are still an indispensable part of brand work: for example, update product awareness through new product launches, product innovations, etc.; strengthen connections with core users, and form a brand promotion idea that combines the three.

You may have a question here: how to understand Internet celebrity brands? It seems that the approach is to first establish shared values ​​and lifestyles with target users, and then drive product sales. In fact, for internet celebrity brands, the definition of [product] is fundamentally different from other models. The product here is not the physical object or service being sold, but the internet celebrity itself - users pay for the internet celebrity. Therefore, brand promotion is to turn internet celebrities into [star products] to attract fans and achieve conversions and sales. This also determines the power of individual voice in the internet celebrity economy (Zhang Dayi to Ruhan). The same is true for the fan economy. Celebrities make themselves popular products through their works (or appearance) and constantly strengthen their stickiness with fans to consolidate their personal brand.

2. Bigger and Smaller Things

Exploring this topic is more based on practical thinking and summary.

In the process of forming influence, there are two ways of thinking, one is earth-shaking, and the other is like water dripping through a stone.

The same goes for brands.

The first point is to concentrate all efforts on major issues. The major issues here refer to: concentrating advertising delivery to form an information cocoon surrounding the target users, which can be as large as sponsoring the most popular variety shows or as small as focusing on a certain media for a short period of time and high frequency bombardment. A wave-interval delivery strategy can be adopted to provide a strong boost to enhance brand power.

The reason why we need to do big things is that we can form a stronger radiation surface in both space and time dimensions. Especially in the current environment, good content is everywhere. Douyin and Kuaishou almost give every creative idea a chance to attract attention, which also makes marketers extremely anxious: with so much content to watch every day, who would still be willing to watch advertisements? (This is also the reason why it is difficult for works to go viral this year.) In such an environment, spending big money, focusing resources, and doing big things seem to be more practical. First, there is sufficient influence to guarantee it; second, sufficiently strong brand investment will have a more direct impact on the results and give greater internal confidence.

To supplement, doing big things at the practical level requires: first, ensuring multiple launches rather than just one; second, cutting medium-sized projects to concentrate resources and team energy; third, finding partners to work together, share costs and increase influence.

Bigger things are easy to understand, smaller things are actually relative to medium-sized (the medium-sized and small projects here take into account the different budget pools of each enterprise, and only consider the proportion rather than the absolute value: a single medium-sized project accounts for 6%-10% of the quarterly marketing, and small projects account for less than 5%, such as content marketing on social platforms, low-cost cross-border cooperation, short-term and fast node marketing, etc.)

Here are three key points:

First, why do small rather than medium-sized projects?

To reserve resources to support big things.

Small projects take up less budget and energy, and in the long run, this allocation is more feasible.

To be more practical, with the current increasingly stringent requirements for brand effectiveness, smaller things will encounter less resistance when promoted internally - bosses and budget departments are often willing to invest in long-term brand building, but how much to invest is often not much, just a little, because of the lack of visible short-term conversion effects.

Second, there are already large projects, so why do something smaller?

Practice has shown that large projects can often lead to rapid improvements in conversion effects, while small and medium-sized projects generally do not have direct conversion effects, or the conversion effects take longer to manifest. However, for most companies, considering the budget, the time intervals between projects are longer, and the output content is often direct brand positioning and interest points. However, starting from the second stage, brand building cannot be separated from continuous communication with users. Therefore, more frequent and in-depth communication is needed to strengthen the connection between the brand and users, build the brand image, and shape the brand personality through the penetration of water through stone.

In addition, frequent small-scale projects are also training the team, especially in terms of understanding users and polishing creativity. From this perspective, it can be said that it increases the chances of achieving big results with small efforts (a hit product).

Third, what smaller things can we do?

Personally, I think the smaller thing is to find the direction of brand building and carry out continuous and internally consistent marketing around the direction and theme. For example, the cross-border cooperation of the Heytea series targets young people who are curious and eager to try new things. The impact of a single project may not be large, but continuous output will create a young and interesting brand impression. It is worth noting that smaller things do not mean dispersion, but rather have highly consistent themes, directions, and even communication media to achieve the goal of establishing a unified brand impression.

Going a step further, if brand work focuses on bigger things and smaller things, it will inevitably be different from the division of traditional marketing departments (divided into brands, media, new media, etc.). In other words, it will be more similar to the structure of an e-commerce operation department - divided into major projects and daily operations. The former is responsible for big things, and the latter is responsible for long-term brand accumulation and construction. There will be mobility and rotation of talents between the two departments. Of course, compared with a single function, the requirements for talent are more comprehensive.

3. Find a combination of brand and effect

In brand promotion, we must take into account the conversion effect. In addition to major events and large investments (which may have insufficient budget), there is another way of thinking, which is to find channels that can achieve both brand and effect. These channels have the following characteristics:

1. Fully carry the transmission of brand information

2. There is a direct conversion pathway;

3. During the promotion process, the real-time effect can be directly monitored;

4. It does not necessarily require a large budget investment (for example, sponsorship of TV, outdoor activities or variety shows, etc., often leads to qualitative changes through quantitative changes, and only large investments can produce visible results)

After practice and measurement, I have personally tested the following channels and found them to have better results in terms of brand effectiveness:

Of course, different business types, products and services require specific analysis and testing to determine which channel to choose. However, given a limited budget, focusing on a particular channel is undoubtedly a more worthwhile option than casting a wide net. As a key customer of the channel, you can not only get better prices and more cost-effective resource combinations, but also have the opportunity to tap more new resources and innovative ways of playing. If it happens to coincide with the bonus period of the channel itself, then you can really take off.

The above are some recent practices and thoughts on brand promotion.

To summarize:

Longer-term planning rather than pursuing a single victory

Do harder things, not afraid of risks and challenges

Do more solid things. Without accumulating small steps, you will never reach a thousand miles.

Adapt to more stringent product performance assessments and find new ways to work on brands

In difficult times, brand people with firm will and flexible thinking are needed

mutual encouragement

Author: Lan Lan

Source: Taro and Cat Talk