Brand marketing promotion: How to create a hit brand?

Introduction: Good brands try their best to meet needs, while successful brands try their best to create demand.

Good brands try their best to meet demand, while successful brands try their best to create demand.

Therefore, good brands are remembered by consumers and leave a good reputation because they solve the pain points and difficulties of the general public, but that’s all. Successful brands enter another realm. Because they create consumer demand, they lead the trend of the times, bring about a double harvest of word-of-mouth and sales, and are rapidly on the road to becoming a hit brand. Brands that meet demand have an upper limit to their development, but brands that create demand have no upper limit.

As the times change, when people no longer worry about basic needs such as food, clothing, housing and transportation, a psychological need will gradually emerge (as mentioned in Maslow's need theory). This kind of need is deeply hidden in people's hearts and is difficult to detect. Even the person involved does not know what his next need will be.

That is to say, this demand will be immediate, sudden and uncertain. I define this kind of demand as a non-rigid implicit demand. This demand does not necessarily have to be met, but it can be created! And demand creation will be the main theme of successful brand or product planning.

Before KINDLE was invented, people had no need to hold an electronic screen to read, which sounds very different from the habit of paper reading. However, after KINDLE was launched, people were refreshed by its excellent reading experience and no longer had any reason to reject this product, so you can often encounter users who are addicted to KINDLE on the subway and in cafes.

Before Meituan Takeout was launched on the market, people had no need to browse nearby businesses online to order takeout. Even if they did, consumers themselves were not aware of it. But Meituan did it, and after extensive promotion, the habit of ordering takeout was gradually cultivated, and the ecosystem of merchants + takeout platforms + users was formed. Consumers formed a new demand for ordering food, and created a huge consumption chain in the process.

Before the first shared travel app, OFO Bike, came out, people had no need to ride a shared bike for short distance travel. But after OFO came out, consumers sincerely exclaimed: This is too convenient! A large number of users also flocked in.

As Apple founder Steve Jobs said, consumers don't know what they need until we come up with our products, and then they realize that this is what they want.

Baudrillard said in "The Consumer Society": Consumerism means that the purpose of consumption is not to meet "actual needs", but to constantly pursue manufactured and stimulated desires.

Therefore, we can understand demand creation in this way: we try our best to meet the users' known needs, and try to create needs that users are not aware of. The former is to find the optimal solution within the known range, while the latter is to explore other possibilities that can satisfy desires in the unknown.

丨Creating demand = stimulating potential demand + satisfying potential demand

The market is ever-changing and new consumer demands emerge one after another. The first level of innovation is for companies to break the rules and produce new products or services to meet consumers' new demands. "Those who are good at planning can go far." The highest level of innovation is to enable companies to grasp trends, foresee problems, and create and stimulate consumer demand among an increasingly personalized and diversified consumer base.

As Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong said, "We can see the potential needs of consumers through our understanding of consumers, insights into consumers, and behind the consumer behavior data. Then we can meet consumer needs through our product creation, marketing, sales, and services, and at the same time create more new consumer needs."

A good brand should first meet the necessities of life and have a full presence in people's lives. These brands all emphasize the need to find the users’ “pain points” and meet their “urgent needs”. That is, your brand must face users’ problems directly. Or tell users what problems your brand can help them solve. Or remind users what problems they will face in life if they don’t buy from me.

If the brand cannot face the problems and the product benefits are insignificant, then users will feel that your product is optional and no different from current products. Meet user needs efficiently, lastingly, exceeding expectations and at low cost. Only by meeting their needs in this way can users feel that the product is useful, easy to use and enjoy using it.

The brands above this are based on the perspective of demand creation. Can it be said that the invention of the Walkman discovered and satisfied consumer demand? Obviously not. The "Walkman" was actually created and led by SONY based on consumers' potential desire to listen to music better.

For example, Oreo has created a new consumer demand through the usage habit education of "twist, lick and soak" and the strong combination with milk, and has firmly occupied the throne of the world's number one sales in the industry.

Brands created based on demand will also be associated with social status, psychological superiority, ideal self-image, wonderful emotional experiences, and upper-class lifestyles. In addition to the basic needs, a beautiful consumption scenario is built for users, creating virtual desires for users.

In a sense, the marketing path of demand creation is the path of dream creation. It is selling a promise to consumers that after owning my product, you will become more beautiful, wiser, more aesthetic, more stylish, more charming, and so on.

丨Creating demand is also selling emotional resonance

In Demand: The Fundamental Force That Creates Great Business Legends, Slywoski proposed six keys to successfully creating demand:

1. Magic: Creating an irreplaceable emotional resonance;

2. Trouble: Solve the problems that customers don’t tell you about;

3. Background factors: seemingly irrelevant factors that influence the success or failure of a product;

4. Motivation: Turn "potential" needs into "real" needs;

5. 45-degree improvement curve: slow improvement equals mediocrity;

6. De-averaging: adding one type of customer at a time.

There are so many coffee brands in the world, including higher-end and more affordable brands, but why does Starbucks always take the lead? The real reason is that in its nearly 40 years of publicity, Starbucks has been selling a beautiful need - to inspire human inspiration.

The design concept of Starbucks is that when you are enjoying a cup of coffee, the music you listen to, the sofa you sit on, the furniture placed throughout the store, the paintings hanging on the wall, and the greetings between the store clerks and you are actually all to create a comfortable coffee experience, allowing you to communicate and think better with others. This is what distinguishes Starbucks from other coffee brands and creates a third space outside of home and work.

Do you need to walk 800 meters for a cup of Starbucks? You don’t need it, but you want it.

As far as the drinking water market is concerned, the two-yuan Nongfu Spring has fully met users' demand for drinking water, but high-end water brands (Evian, Evergrande Ice Spring) advocate drinking better water, using gimmicks such as moderate alkalinity, rich mineral components, rich electrolytes, and more benefits to human body functions.

In fact, no matter which brand of drinking water they drink, consumers themselves cannot perceive the difference, but high-end water brands have completed the process of demand creation through "consumer education" and have created the high-end water market through a large amount of publicity.

Before the iPhone appeared, people were not aware of the potential demand for industrial aesthetics and convenient design. However, after a new iPhone was released, it always caused a global rush to buy it, as if people had been looking forward to the release of such a product. But in fact, even without Apple and Android, people can still happily play with other smartphones instead of protesting for fewer physical keys, larger touch screens, etc.

A successful brand should not only become a necessity for users, but also make users feel the beauty of the brand. Mentioning the brand can generate richer associations and experiences, and stimulate users' potential consumption needs by creating emotional resonance. Only in this way can users be firmly grasped.

丨Three steps to create demand:

1) User Insights

Since user needs are often superficial solutions and do not represent the user's real needs, in-depth insights can be used to tap into the other party's potential desires. Or analyze the users' complex needs, such as the need to drink water after a lot of exercise, but in fact the users also consume energy. This is the entry point for functional beverages.

2) Product positioning

Sort out all the levels of desire behind user needs, and propose creative solutions based on product positioning. For example, in the traditional music industry, users want to listen to music, and manufacturers compete with each other by improving sound quality. But in fact, sacrificing some sound quality can create more music listening scenarios (such as commuting on the subway), and users are willing to buy it, so portable players have become a new demand. By the same token, later on, MP3s with poor sound quality but small size and light weight became a new demand.

3) Marketing guidance

Creation alone is not enough. At this time, marketing methods must be used to guide user needs and solve trust issues. Market education is a necessary process. Many new demands may be created without consumers themselves being aware of them. It is necessary to build a reasonable consumption scenario for consumers to guide them to form usage habits.

For example, people originally had no need for chewing gum, but it is human nature to have needs for social interaction, recognition, and respect. So Wrigley achieved great success by guiding users with the slogan "Fresh breath, you and I are closer."

When almost all chewing gum brands on the market were focusing on the same demand of "fresh breath", Extraliga played the "sugar-free chewing gum" card, shifting the focus to "caring for teeth" and cultivating consumers' trust in xylitol. After gaining users' trust and establishing a demand for chewing gum, Extraliga began to guide consumers' habits: "Chew Extraliga after eating and drinking." Demand is constantly being created, consumer habits are constantly being cultivated, and the vitality of the brand is constantly being reshaped.

Any new function or product that has never existed before can create new demand by following the "insight-positioning-guidance" methodology.

In an era of constant overturning and innovation between user needs and satisfaction, it is easy for us to fall into anxiety. What is more scarce than the attention economy is understanding "consumer intentions". Deeply exploring consumers' potential intentions and proposing creative solutions are the only way to build a successful brand. We cannot just be the porters of demand, but also the creators of "invisible demand".

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Author: 404 Tenant

Source: PR Home