20 trends and heartfelt suggestions for brands in 2022

I have compiled 20 brand trends and suggestions for 2022, ten of which are about corporate brands, and ten are about individual brands and personal development. These are my own observations and predictions over the past year, as well as some growth insights. I hope they will be helpful to you.

Internet celebrities are crossing the river by feeling the stones, and consumer giants are crossing the river by feeling the internet celebrities.

The Fortune 500 giants are no pushovers either. The truth is: those large consumer product companies are not incapable of crazy marketing, nor are they fools when it comes to innovation. It’s just that years of experience have enabled them to develop the business wisdom of “daring to be the last in the world.” They silently watched the new consumer companies burning money and struggling behind the scenes, while at the same time they were busy making plans for their own products.

After experiencing the madness and bubble of 2020-2021, starting in 2022, consumer brands will officially return to a normal and rational growth rhythm.

Going back to the essence, what has the Internet changed? In fact, only the efficiency of marketing and sales has been rapidly improved, but the rhythm and cycle of forming a real brand is not as fast as investors and entrepreneurs imagine.

In other words: marketing a consumer product has become easier, but building a consumer brand has not become easier. On the contrary, as channels fragment and competition intensifies, this process has become more difficult.

This realization is an important lesson I gained from my own practice in consumer product entrepreneurship.

For consumer goods, achieving some sales volume (especially at a loss) is not a big deal. The key is to be able to produce stable, differentiated products that truly imprint the brand in people's minds. In 2022, this will become increasingly clear to everyone.

Although content operation has been talked about for a long time, in the face of the tempting short-term driving force of traffic, truly good content is still a minority.

In the past, good content was only produced by self-media companies or content companies. In the future, "good content" will be everywhere in enterprises. There will even be enterprise-level content products that everyone can pay for.

In the final analysis, the eyeballs that are deceived will be returned sooner or later.

The importance of ToB brands is recognized by more entrepreneurs, and the way of ToB brand marketing will no longer be conventional. Some imaginative ToC gameplay will gradually become the choice of ToB brands.

People’s past perception of ToB will change, and some boring ToB concepts and corporate knowledge will become popular and a consensus.

In 2022, at least five new concepts in the B2B field will be popularized under the background of "knowledge marketing".

The most important thing is that everyone began to realize that branding and marketing are indeed two different things, and the person responsible for the branding is the CEO himself.

Just like the internal friction within a person. The company's brand is consumed in four places:

No one is really responsible for the brand , the marketing department is only responsible for market activities and marketing events. A CEO has too many things to be responsible for; brand is important but not urgent.

The lack of "internal review" of the brand has resulted in the brand being almost indistinguishable from its peers, so it remains difficult to convince customers.

Almost no one can clearly explain what the "brand soul" of a company is , and everyone turns a blind eye to the slogans on the wall.

The brand is too abstract , so the strategies and behaviors related to the brand cannot be implemented.

6 Offline space brand innovation: the result of distributed commerce

We will see more and more commodity collection stores appearing, not only different brands of the same category (such as glasses, shoes and clothing buyer stores), but even different categories and different brands (Tomato Pockets, Daizihang, etc.). Everyone relies on the "same brand style" to share commercial space. This is the result of distributed commerce reaching a certain level.

Next, more interesting phenomena will emerge, such as: content and products appear in the same scene, social and brands appear in the same scene, and activities and brands appear in the same scene. In short, the spring of innovation in offline space has arrived!

These influences have, to some extent, affected the construction process of new brands.

The massive entry and strong influence of capital have certainly played a great role in promoting brand exposure and investment in brand activities. But sometimes, the capital's "quick success" can cause invisible damage to the brand.

As hot money fades and brand investment becomes more rational, the influence of capital on brands is gradually weakening. This is both bad news and good news.

From the couplet of Tong Ren Tang, which reads "No matter how complicated the preparation is, we will never save on labor; no matter how expensive the dish is, we will never reduce the material resources", we have seen examples of the influence of values ​​and culture on brands. Unfortunately, as business developed so rapidly, this point was overlooked by many people.

When the impact of the epidemic forces us to slow down, the topics of values ​​and culture will be brought up again.

Bringing back a topic is the beginning of true maturity and rationality.

Efficiency plays an almost exclusive role on the Internet, and it is understandable that pragmatism promotes efficiency. But as efficiency crushes us time and time again, should we consider the value of “feelings”? This is the key to retaining a brand.

Marketing is about selling things through operations.

A brand means that no matter whether the transaction is completed or not, the people on the other side believe in you and wish you the best.

The relationship between brand and marketing is not a binary opposition of black and white, but starting this year, there will be more entanglements and games.

In this way, the cost-effectiveness is obviously higher.

After all, a company spent $1 million on advertising and reached 2,000 people. If you convince 2,000 internal employees and spend $1 million on advertising, it may affect 10,000 people at once. This account still makes sense.

Individual refers to an organization based on individual labor. There are more and more such organizations, and their number will increase sharply in 2022 . Why this year?

The arrival of the epidemic has led to a rapid development of various online collaboration and office software. At the same time, the demand for virtual products such as content and education on social media and platforms has surged. The possibility of individuals producing products, especially content products, in exchange for income and IP has greatly increased.

Short videos, content dissemination with the help of short videos, self-media, individual education, tax planning consultants, coaches, medical consultants…Individuals are gradually becoming a business and organization, and the era of individual brands has truly arrived.

Everyone is his own CEO, which is becoming a reality.

The most harmful compliment is praising someone for being smart. If someone praises you for being smart, you should be wary.

Compared to focus and hard work, intelligence is not a scarce resource. This will be even less true after 2022. Intelligence can protect you for a while, hard work can protect you for a lifetime.

On the one hand, it is the systematic absorption of "knowledge", and another very important aspect is "insight". Knowledge + insight = cognition.

In the era of knowledge payment, everyone is busy and the absorption and input of knowledge is in full swing. What I want to emphasize next is insight, the insight that “people are like rainbows; you only know their existence when you meet them.”

You must have encountered, seen, and experienced it firsthand before you will have a sudden change in your cognition. This is especially true for brand people.

When you chat with a brand person, you must pay more attention to how much of the other person's bragging is hearsay or what he read in books, and how much is something he has seen with his own eyes, visited personally, and experienced personally.

These are where the gap is widened.

But does this guarantee a good outcome?

No.

The key point of personal branding is actually "whether others want you to succeed." Every day we see more and more "elite personalities" trying to make their presence felt. Do we really "want them to succeed" in our hearts? If not, then the opponent's screen swiping can be said to be ineffective and even harmful.

If you want to give others the impression that they "want you to succeed", it's useless to just scroll through the screen. The key is to think about the question "why do you think so?" Only marketing that is "sharpening the knife to target pigs and sheep" will backfire.

What rare, good, and real qualities do you present?

All the brands that we think have become popular overnight must have gone through unknown accumulation before.

If you have such a person around you, whose accumulation and knowledge far exceed the popularity he deserves, then he will be more efficient if he runs an individual brand. On the contrary, for those brands that are blindly researching techniques and methods but whose accumulation is not up to standard, it is better to keep a low profile and make up for it.

In this era, the strong cannot be covered up. Likewise, a reputation that is not worthy of its substance cannot last long.

It’s just that in the overall social value ranking, the wealth ranking will change.

The screen was once filled with “get rich” and “make money”, and people would call rich people “dad” when they met them. The value system of “judging a hero by his wealth” will undergo some changes. There are many factors behind this, including social development, epidemic situation, and culture.

Next, more beautiful virtues, such as "social contribution", "knowledge", "taste", "sentiment" and other diverse keywords will gradually replace wealth in the evaluation of individuals.

At the same time, in terms of personal branding, a person with a high wealth index but low other indexes and the impression of a "capitalist" will also hinder the construction of personal branding.

From the 18 Arhats to the Five Tiger Generals, companies are good at turning individual brands into alliance systems to strengthen the company's shared brand. In the future, when individual brands face a series of challenges such as promotion and resource exchange, they will also start the "alliance" model to acquire customers. This is also a game where separation will eventually lead to reunion and reunion will eventually lead to separation (although there will still be many problems to be solved in the process).

How to express, how to express more accurately, and how to express content more accurately to influence others are the keys to content work.

For a large number of people working in B2B, knowledge is almost all of their work, and the level of expressing and delivering this knowledge is the key factor that distinguishes a person's level. For people working in 2C, accurately expressing content that can resonate with others is the focus of their work. The standardization of commodities is becoming increasingly higher. What distinguishes commodities is not only their performance but also their profound content.

Therefore, under the sky of content, there is a common stage given by God to all mankind.

When it first came out, it was used to describe the embarrassing behavior of everyone spending time in fierce competition but getting nothing when there was no way to expand the pie.

But now, it seems that the slightest effort has turned into what others call "involution".

Involution has almost become a cynical excuse for those who want to lie down.

As long as the result of your hard work can get you better results than in the past or if you didn’t work hard, it is not called involution.

People with discerning eyes should never be carried away by this kind of "sarcastic sentiment".

Where you can see, everyone is satirizing "involution", and where you can't see, excellent people are working frantically.

What I want to express is: no matter whether you are facing your own efforts, other people's doubts, or the confusion and chaos of the world, don't be impatient, let the bullets fly for a while and see.

It’s better to keep silent and see what time says.

The above 20 points are my predictions and ideas about corporate brands and personal development in 2022. Share it with you - my friend. You are welcome to criticize and resonate with us!