Brand Marketing: How to make your Internet brand “seen”?

Internet brands frequently do things offline, invade people's space, and begin to be seen in real life. This has become a trend in recent years.

Internet brands frequently place traditional offline advertisements, organize offline activities, physical peripherals, pop-up stores and other offline brand behaviors. I summarize the offline behavior of virtual Internet brands as moving from virtual to reality, hoping to be seen, making people feel that they are real and become part of the real society.

Today, let’s discuss the significance and value of Internet brands being seen offline. This is also a question I have been thinking about in recent years.

When I was working at my last company, I almost set up an electronic music party label. If it had been done and run smoothly, it might have become a source of profit for the marketing department.

Of course, Internet brands such as Meituan and Didi, which use Internet technology to transform traditional industries, are not included in this discussion. In other words, I hope to discuss the Internet's industrial experiments from a brand perspective, with profits existing as added value, at least for now.

So, we discuss Internet brands in a purely digital economy. Logically speaking, all users and services of these brands are online, so why do they frequently test the waters offline during the brand marketing process? Let’s chat, Enjoy:

1. From advertising to scenes

Contemporary people's understanding of contemporaneity is very backward. In all previous eras, ideas have always come first. Philosophy, literature, and art are often the most avant-garde, while business is relatively conservative. But at present, business is at the forefront of the times, while philosophy, literature and art are relatively backward. There is very little contemporary philosophy and contemporary literature, and classical philosophy and serious literature are often respected.

In general, business is moving too fast and ideas are not keeping up, or in other words, the intellectual world is avoiding contemporary issues. This leads to most people still using traditional ideas to think about contemporary issues and contemporary business. I will explore this issue in depth when I have the chance.

The lack of awareness of contemporaneity is also lagging behind in the brand marketing industry. The Internet has profoundly changed the social structure and way of cognition, but the advertising industry is still immersed in the past, so it is normal for advertising to be out of touch with business. Avoidance of contemporary issues is a global problem, and the global advertising industry lacks awareness of contemporaneity.

It is important to recognize this point, so our brand marketing must be based on the Internet environment and on a world transformed by Internet technology. We must think about how to build brands and how to communicate in this new world.

The future trend will definitely be to remove advertising and communicate with consumers through content and scenarios. Whereas consumers previously needed to be told, now users want to perceive the brand.

Advertising is notification

I won’t go into the history of advertising, but for about a hundred years, its form has basically been highly summary-based. Its purpose was to quickly inform, in the simplest way and in a form that most people could accept, as many people as possible, about who I am, what I can do, and why they need me.

In the space of public opinion monopoly, he creates a strong causal relationship, putting the public in a situation where they have to rely on him.

This set of content and communication form was suitable in the traditional industrial era, because all industrial products had just been invented, from handicrafts to assembly lines, and people needed to be informed. In terms of media form, the right to speak was also monopolized, with limited outlets for information, scarce and opaque information, and a huge recipient base. That was the golden age of advertising.

But nowadays, faced with the vastness of the Internet and in an era of information explosion, most brand marketing is still using advertising to build brands, which is like burying one's head in the sand. The brand marketing industry should fully integrate into the contemporary world and move away from the advertising-informed mindset.

Scene is perception

There are two important concepts, one is brand scene and the other is brand role. The brand plays a certain role in a certain scenario, and creates scenarios for users to perceive, rather than the brand selling things. These are two different logics.

So, how to create scenes and how to shape brand roles become issues that should be considered. In recent years, Internet brands have begun to frequently test offline waters, and brands have carried out brand marketing by invading space.

This is the Internet brands’ exploration of contemporary marketing, including Taobao’s Maker Festival, NetEase’s Sangcha, Zhihu’s Unknown Clinic, etc., which are all explorations of scenes and roles.

2. From brand marketing to business innovation

When Internet brands first tried to be seen, it was mostly for marketing purposes and most of them were short-term behaviors. Later, we started to develop some sustainable IPs, repeatedly operating the same theme, such as Zhihu's New Knowledge Youth Conference or Maker Festival, which became short-term gatherings that are held continuously.

From now to a long time in the future, virtual Internet brands may go a step further and do some long-term things offline, evolving from the logic of brand marketing to business logic, achieving brand marketing goals while also gaining profits on the business end.

Next, let’s talk about a case and see how Internet brands can achieve a win-win situation in terms of brand and business offline.

Let me first introduce the background. On May 20, Zhihu joined hands with the cultural life experience space Yanjiyou to open a "Problematic Bookstore" in Sanlitun, Beijing - Yanyan Q&A Space, which was officially opened in Beijing as the first model room of the strategic cooperation between the two parties. The space includes sections such as "Yanyan Q&A", "Yanyan Recommendations", "Yanyan Time" and "Is there a question that has helped you find the answer to love?", and plans to create a new landmark for love in Beijing.

The birth of "Yanyan Q&A Space" is the integration of Zhihu's Q&A attributes and Yanjiyou's brand concept of conveying the possibilities of life. Through a more interactive expression, the "system for displaying books" and the "system for online Q&A" are transformed into a mechanism that users are willing to experience and share. This is a new content interaction scenario.

Zhihu and Yanjiyou jointly define a new user value, and this combination will naturally transcend the existing price sensitivity range of users. Therefore, both parties also have the opportunity to redefine the experience and value points of member-exclusive benefits.

Make your brand visible

At the brand marketing level, this is a three-dimensional offline breakthrough for the Zhihu brand. Serious knowledge should have a sense of ritual and be integrated into the cultural life experience space from the mobile phone screen. This will make Zhihu more ceremonial and more "intellectual". The tone of a brand is its temperament. The Yanjiyou Bookstore space will be of great help in shaping Zhihu's brand temperament.

For Yan Jiyou, the addition of Zhihu has greatly expanded the capacity of the space. For example, if there were originally 10,000 physical books, with the addition of Zhihu, the number might become 1 million.

This is a physical space and also an entrance. When people find an answer to a question and then a book, online and offline are no longer important.

Achieving win-win business

Then from a commercial perspective, we will develop a membership system for Zhihu and Yanjiyou. When you buy a membership for one, you will also get a membership for the other, thus achieving a win-win situation in business.

In this case, win-win business is the basis of cooperation. If it is only used as a brand display for Zhihu, Zhihu will have to pay a large amount of advertising fees.

For Yanjiyou, the first thing is the membership value. Users of both sides exchange memberships, and after buying two memberships with one price, it will definitely bring more membership growth. This is the core membership value.

Secondly, there is the value of selling books. Finding an answer through a question ultimately leads to a book. So who would refuse to bring back a book of answers from a bookstore?

Sustainable Operations

In contemporary brand marketing, sustainability of marketing is very important. If you persist in doing any right thing, its value will become greater and greater, its scale will become larger, and its imagination space will also become greater. Zhihu and Yanjiyou can only operate an offline space and membership system sustainably now, so what will they jointly operate in the future?

Zhihu starts with questions, and Yanjiyou’s books are the answers. Questions and answers, online and offline, can do a lot of things. Jointly develop member benefits, with Zhihu supplementing offline and Yanjiyou supplementing online, to provide members with more comprehensive services. With the advent of 5G technology, the virtual Zhihu may exist in real space in three dimensions. As long as it can operate sustainably, there is huge room for imagination.

To sum up, my personal opinion is that in the future, Internet brands will invest more and more in offline markets, and will shift from the battlefield of time to the battlefield of space.

The core purpose of investing in offline is the scenario, it must be the scenario. Creating physical scenes for Internet brands will demonstrate huge commercial value in the future. In the future, there will most likely be no screens, no Internet, and only scenes. Whoever is more integrated into the scenes will be the winner in the space battlefield. Of course, this is a long-term strategy.

In the short term, to make Internet brands visible and bring them into offline physical life, we are doing brand marketing, allowing users to have a more three-dimensional understanding of what the brand is and what scenarios it should be in. In other words, we are materializing the "brand".

Then there is the commercial value. If it is long-term content that can be operated sustainably, it must be profitable. Only with profitability can it continue for a long time and can it sustainably shape the brand role.

3. Opportunities in the Marketing Department

I've been in this industry for so many years, and to be honest, I'm a bit tired of doing advertising. Write plans, propose strategies, think of slogans, write copy, shoot TVCs, place advertisements, and make closing summaries... A year later, if you ask others, no one will remember what the advertisement was.

In an era where everything is changing so fast, the vitality of advertising is too limited. This makes me feel very unfulfilled. After so many years in the industry, I have done some short-term screen-sweeping works, but I am too lazy to talk about it. No advertising work can make me feel fulfilled.

However, I am still very passionate about brand marketing, and I believe that the marketing department can do many other interesting, meaningful and valuable things besides advertising.

First of all, shooting commercials is not only boring but also ineffective, and it is most likely a waste of budget. I have said before that the marketing department needs to transfer skills to the grassroots and work on productization and operational projects. Recently, many people have come to talk to me and said that this is indeed difficult to push forward. The organization is not integrated, the division of labor is not clear, and cooperation is difficult. Then, offline "entrepreneurship" of the Internet marketing department may be another breakthrough.

For example, Zhihu and Yanjiyou created the Yanyan Q&A space mentioned above; Momo could become an electronic music label; Taobao could create a Taobao museum; Kuaishou could transform a small town’s cultural square…

Compared to shooting a TVC with a production cost of 5 million, doing these things should be more fulfilling, right? They are all long-term operations with the potential to be profitable. Which CEO would refuse this while building a brand and making money?

Let’s go back to the brand and make the Internet brand visible. We can create a more three-dimensional brand role, shape the brand tone, build brand scenes, materialize and content the virtual brand, and communicate the brand with users beyond the framework of advertising.

However, each brand needs to think clearly about its own problem, scenario, and role, and then decide what needs to be done.

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Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai ( yangbuhuai01 )