How to leverage marketing?

The balance between the brand recognition through leveraged communication and whether consumers have a positive perception of the brand after the communication is the criterion for measuring whether leverage is effective and whether the leverage is good or bad.

01

I have seen many articles talking about how to leverage momentum and discussing how to leverage momentum to spread the brand more widely, but there is no fundamental discussion on whether leveraging momentum is really beneficial to the brand. Most people judge a brand's leverage based on their feelings. If the brand is highly relevant, it seems to be a good leverage.

I had doubts about leveraging marketing a few years ago, but I never thought about it seriously. Recently I’ve seen brands all playing with hip-hop, vying to ride on the popularity and rushing to invite contestants from The Rap of China to shoot commercials, which has made me think again.

Brands are flocking to hot spots, but have the pros and cons been weighed clearly?

Let’s put this question aside for now and solve this problem first: What are most brands currently leveraging for marketing?

It is undeniable that most of the big brands on the market are frantically chasing hot spots, but in fact they are just trying to ride on the popularity.

Pay attention, riding on the popularity is indeed very beneficial in terms of communication. Like the recently popular "In the Name of People" and the recent "Wolf Warrior 2", these are hot topics that seem to be known to everyone in recent times. When a hot topic is at its hottest, creating content around it can indeed spread more widely than usual, which is why many public accounts persist in following hot topics.

It is a fact that hot topics exist, and it is also a fact that following hot topics does help spread the word. Now that the data is right in front of us, it seems completely reasonable for brands to take advantage of the trend.

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But why is it that a considerable number of people, both inside and outside the industry, are disgusted with riding on the popularity of other topics? If a considerable number of people are skeptical about something, then there must be doubts about it and it needs to be investigated.

Let’s talk about the hot spots first:

(1) The two most fundamental attributes of a hot topic are: high awareness and high attention.

For example: The recent Rap of China is first known by many people and also followed by many people, so it is a hot topic. Anything that meets these two conditions will have great spreadability. But for hot spots, there is also the issue of timeliness. The effectiveness of hot spots is very short and needs to be dealt with quickly.

The same is true for celebrities. First of all, celebrities are known by many people and are followed by many people, so celebrities have communication value, and content created around celebrities is also easy to spread. If a star hasn't released any works for a long time, then he or she is out of date, which means that the star's popularity period has passed.

(2) Having discussed the two fundamental attributes of hot spots, we should also discuss the most important feature of hot spots: timeliness.

Undoubtedly, all hot spots are temporary and short-lived. In fact, it is almost impossible for a long-term hot spot to exist. Because if something wants to become a long-term hot topic, it must be paid attention to by many people at the same time for a considerable period of time. And it is almost impossible for such a thing to happen with the public's attention unless it is forced.

Precisely because each individual's attention is fragmented and people want to show different things in their hearts, long-term hot spots cannot exist. You cannot ask many people to pay attention to one thing at the same time for a considerable period of time.

Precisely because hot topics can only attract the public's attention for a short period of time, brands that pursue hot topics must be fast. But precisely because of this, the brand's hastily produced advertisements and put on the market were criticized by many people.

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So why are these ads criticized?

Currently, most people understand the "momentum" of a hot spot as its spreading power. That is to say, hot spots have great communication power, so hot spots have "momentum", but we do not call the behavior of taking advantage of this communication power "leveraging momentum".

This is also the reason why most of the public and industry insiders are disgusted with brands riding on hot topics. For a brand, if it rushes to chase hot topics and launches a set of communication activities, but it is obvious that the brand does not match the hot content, the public will have a negative perception of the brand. The wider the dissemination, the greater the negative impact, because the public can fully perceive the crude content. It may not be a problem in the short term, but the results are accumulated bit by bit.

Take this collective hip-hop of brands as an example: New Balance, Mercedes-Benz, Alipay, NetEase Kaola, Meizu, etc. Among the many brand freestyles, only Alipay’s promotional video received good reviews, and the advertisements of other brands are really unacceptable.

When brands flock to take advantage of a hot topic, they are competing to consume the hot topic's influence, causing the hot topic to be overexposed. For any object, overexposure will make people more familiar, and things that are too familiar will have a filtering effect and will not attract people's attention at all. For example: The streets you pass by every day become so familiar that they will not attract your attention at all.

From this perspective, the sooner you start chasing hot topics, the better. This is also the reason why we see brands looking for different players to endorse their products. If the same contestant endorses many brands, the effect will be worse for the later brands. Because they are too familiar and no longer fresh, the public will become more and more disgusted with later brands.

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This actually leads to a key issue, which is the trade-off between the brand recognition that is leveraged for communication and whether consumers have a positive perception of the brand after the communication. In other words, it is the trade-off between brand or product awareness and brand image. This is the criterion for measuring whether a brand should take advantage of the trend and whether it is a good use of the trend.

The most important reason why companies want to take advantage of hot topics is that they can spread their products or brands more widely and make their own brands popular, so as to gain popularity.

On the other hand, what are the results after the spread? Whether consumers have a positive perception of the brand and whether it is beneficial to the brand image. It cannot be said that as long as a brand is known by consumers, it is beneficial to the brand. Instead, it must be positive and beneficial to the brand's awareness to be truly useful.

If brands consider the relationship between the two, they will be much more cautious.

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So, what is the real "potential energy" of a hot spot?

The reason why a hot topic attracts widespread public attention is that there is an internal demand behind it that is commonly recognized by the public. This thing that attracts public attention and resonance is the real "momentum", and the spreading power of heat is the "energy".

• For The Rap of China, the "true personality, handsomeness and fashion" of hip-hop people is the "momentum", and the popularity of hip-hop is the "energy".
• For the "illustration complaining about Party A" some time ago, the actual relationship between Party A and Party B and Party B's complaints about Party A are the "momentum"; for the "Baoqiang incident", people's collective expression of moral values ​​is the "momentum".

What is behind these should be the real "momentum" of a hot spot, while merely focusing on the heat of the event is just trying to take advantage of the popularity. If a brand leverages the “real personality” of hip-hop to highlight its own brand personality, it is better than simply rapping a hip-hop song. Therefore, taking advantage of the situation does not mean riding on the popularity or simply borrowing "power".

When a brand uses a hot event to gain wide dissemination, but the content is crude and leaves a negative perception in the minds of the public, it will destroy the brand in the long run. When a brand becomes popular by taking advantage of a hot topic, it is important to check whether the content it disseminates is related to the brand positioning. If not, it is destroying the brand positioning.

The brand was originally positioned as high-end, but the content that was hastily released was very crude, which destroyed its own positioning. Therefore, the pros and cons of real leverage should be weighed by the impact of the content being disseminated on consumers. Rather than just looking at the spread and awareness.

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The general public and industry insiders have never been against leveraging momentum, because they all know that leveraging momentum is conducive to communication. However, it is worse to not take advantage of the trend and rush to release content because crude content will do negative work for the brand. Therefore, what brands should consider is whether they can produce a hot topic content that is positive for the brand in a short period of time. If not, they should not rush to take advantage of the hot topic. Of course, if a brand leverages momentum to spread widely and gains positive recognition from consumers, then it is a very good leverage.

If you take advantage of the wide spread brought by hot topics, you can increase your popularity among consumers. So, how should we weigh the benefits brought by this hot topic and the negative perception of the brand caused by the dissemination of content? If you think that the benefits of brand recognition outweigh the negative perception of consumers towards the brand, then I have no comment.

Source: Jiatao Jiatao (ID: jiataojiatao)