From IP to CP: New Brand Operation Methodology

With the rise of Taobao platforms, a large number of new brands have been born, such as Han Du Yishe , Three Squirrels , Lin’s Wood Industry, Mofashijia, Inman, and Liebo.

They are called: Taobao brands.

With the rise of the WeChat platform, a large number of new brands have been born, such as Luoji Siwei , DaV Store, Heytea , Luckin Coffee , and Zhiguan.

I call them: micro-brands.

Of course, this also includes a large number of micro-business brands.

When I talk about micro-brands, I don’t mean brands that sell entirely on WeChat. Instead, I am referring to those brands that achieve user fission and growth through official accounts , Moments , and WeChat groups .

The emergence of new platforms is the soil and infrastructure for the birth of new brands; the success of the Internet and mobile Internet lies in the fact that they create new ways of connection and new ways of resource allocation. New platforms create business opportunities for the emergence of new brands.

We know that brand is a product of the industrial age. It is an efficiency tool that emerged to adapt to large-scale social communication and commercial monetization. It condenses product information to form scalable and replicable connection symbols. The value of a brand lies in improving the efficiency of connections between people and products.

In the era of mobile Internet , due to the change in connection methods, the connection between people and products, the connection between people and information, and the connection between people have undergone tremendous changes.

This means that the way new brands play will also undergo earth-shaking changes. Even the word "brand" itself requires us to re-examine and rethink.

Marshall McLuhan, an important media theorist and thinker in the 20th century, has a classic saying: The medium is the message. Media is nothing more than a carrier of information connection. A change in connection means a change in information.

The development of the Internet has shown us that people have become more equal and have more equal rights online, information has become decentralized and flat on the Internet, users have mastered the discourse and dominance of this era, different people have formed communities based on different concepts and interests, and subcultures have become increasingly rich and mainstream. The Internet has built a completely new discourse system.

This new way of connecting and discourse requires a business response. Brands need to build new ways of connecting with consumers and new modes of dialogue with consumers.

In the era of mobile Internet, this new way of brand connection and dialogue is IP.

IP, intellectual property , this is the most basic definition of IP.

Don’t forget brand guru David Aaker’s definition of brand: brand represents the knowledge that consumers have about products and companies, and brand is an important asset of a company.

Brand is a kind of intellectual property of an enterprise. It is the most important intangible property right of an enterprise besides its property rights such as factories and equipment.

Brand is a kind of IP

Many people talk about IP, but as for what IP is and how to create IP, there are many different opinions, and it is confusing and complicated.

In fact, returning to the basics, for an enterprise, the two most essential and important tasks are to create products and to polish content.

IP comes from these two.

1. IP means content productization and product contentization.

IP is a type of content, but not all content is IP.

For example, movies are a typical form of content. Its content is quite expensive to produce, and while the rewards are great, the risks are also high. A movie with an investment of over 100 million yuan may have a box office of over 1 billion yuan or less than 20 million yuan.

Moreover, for a film company, the success of a film cannot be replicated. If one film is successful, the next one may fail miserably at the box office. Each film is an independent event, and each film has to start all over again.

In order to reduce risks and increase success rates, major film companies are competing to enter the universe mode.

Marvel Studios has the MCU Universe, which produces a series of films based on superhero characters from Marvel comic publications. These superhero films are composed of common elements, settings, performances, and characters, forming a complete system through cross-border works.

In this way, connections are established between different movies. If "Iron Man" is a box office hit, then "The Avengers" and "Captain America" ​​are also more likely to be successful, because their plots are related to each other. Iron Man also appears in "The Avengers" and is also performed by Iron Man.

This goes beyond the flaws of a single movie, and superhero characters have also become a vehicle for attracting fans.

Seeing Marvel's success, major film companies followed suit.

Warner Bros. and DC Comics have the DC Extended Universe, in which Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash form the Justice League.

Legendary Pictures has the Monster Movie Universe, which consists of King Kong, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra.

Universal Pictures has the Dark Universe, which brings together famous monsters in film history such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, and The Half-Blooded Man. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, played by Russell Crowe, and the Department of Vision he manages become the key points connecting the entire Dark Universe.

From this we can see, what is IP?

It is content that comes with its own topics, fans, and traffic . IP combines and encapsulates scattered content, turning the content into an organic whole.

IP designs content like a product, which is replicable, iterative, derivative, and sustainably recreatable. It continuously accumulates fan assets and communication momentum, maintains content popularity, creates new topics and focus points, and turns content into high-quality traffic.

Those who are used to event planning know that planning and executing an event is enough to make people exhausted.

From the early basic strategy, researching what kind of activities consumers like and finalizing the core ideas of the activities; to the mid-term activity planning, coming up with the activity theme, determining the activity process, and designing a lot of activity materials; to the later venue, personnel, prizes, budget...

The duration of a marketing campaign can be as short as two weeks or as long as two months, but consumers' attention is fleeting. Don’t fantasize that consumers will pay attention to you from the beginning of the event. It’s already quite impressive if they can pay attention to you for two days.

So in addition to executing the event, you have to promote the event as much as possible and attract consumers' attention until the end of the event. When the next event starts, you have to start all over again.

With the rise of the fitness trend in China, more and more brands have begun to participate in sports marketing and sponsor various marathon events. Suppose the brand you are responsible for sponsors a marathon this month, and you go to great lengths to promote the event and attract users. Three months later, the brand you are responsible for sponsors another marathon, and you have to do it all over again because a one-time marketing campaign cannot accumulate and retain fans.

So imagine again, what if the color run was created by your brand?

You can use the color run as a platform to convey the spirit of sports and shape your brand's enterprising and dynamic image without having to worry about fans and promotion.

This means elevating simple event planning to the level of building an event brand, thereby superimposing the event effects, continuously performing them, and accumulating fan assets.

Sponsoring a marathon is a traditional brand marketing content, while color run is an IP.

Victoria's Secret doesn't have many advertisements, but the annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show has captured the world's attention. In 2017, the live broadcast of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show on Tencent Video attracted more than 12 million viewers that night.

The well-known fashion magazine "VOGUE" commented that the Victoria's Secret Show is the most dazzling, most pleasing to the eye and most pleasant to the ear in the world, and it is also the most successful brand marketing event in the world.

This is how to build an event brand, this is IP.

Line is not available in China, but even without the main app, Line Friends is still very popular, and has captured the hearts of a large number of young people with just four cute characters.

As of mid-2017, LINE has 18 officially authorized offline stores of various types in mainland China. In 2016, LINE made a net profit of 6.5 billion worldwide from derivative products alone.

So, tell me, which brand doesn’t have a mascot? It’s so common. Mascots are just a very routine brand communication content. However, it will only become an IP if you continuously create, interpret, shape, and iterate around this content, and give it stories and emotions,

The same is true for Kumamon.

Marketing is actually about helping brands create and disseminate content. Whether it is a sentence , a graphic, a video, an event, or a mascot design, it is all content.

However, only when content is designed and iterated like a product can it have lasting vitality.

This is the first key point in building IP: content productization.

2. The content should be designed like the product, and the product should be interpreted like the content.

Products are just objects mass-produced on an assembly line. Only when products are contented can they be truly given life and soul.

Products are the basis for user shopping, and product content is the entry point for creating user shopping.

Since the mid-20th century, marketing experts around the world have been shouting about the arrival of the era of homogeneity.

The differences between products are getting smaller and smaller, and creating differentiation has become a basic competitive strategy for enterprises.

In fact, with the increasingly fierce competition and the deepening of business exchanges, product convergence is an inevitable trend. Good innovations will be imitated by everyone, bad designs and functions will be collectively eliminated, products in the same category will become better and better, but the differences between different manufacturers will become smaller and smaller.

Haven’t you seen that in the era of smart phones, how big the difference is between different mobile phone manufacturers in terms of appearance design and main functions?

If a company only regards its products as physical tools that carry functions, then the products it creates will have no personality or differences. Only by treating products as content can we create new business imagination.

Today's product design needs to add storytelling, expression, personality, values, sense of ritual, topicality, internet celebrity power, design aesthetics, and cross-border interpretation. In a word, any product that you don’t want to take photos of and post on Moments after buying is not a good product.

The reason why Jiang Xiaobai became so popular is that it treats the product as a carrier of content. The product is the content that connects users.

In recent years, more and more brands have been making a fuss about bottles, including Coca-Cola 's Nickname Bottle, Red Star Erguotou's World Cup , McCafé's Dialogue Cup, and Weiquan Daily C's Reason Bottle.

Having tasted the sweetness of the Reason Bottle, Weiquan started to make the Hi Bottle. The Hi Bottle, which was inspired by the TV series Love O2O, helped increase Weiquan Daily C’s sales by 90% year-on-year.

Immediately afterwards, before the Spring Festival, Weiquan started playing with the spelling bottle again, opening it up to users to participate and generate UGC content. Of course, if you let users play, they will ruin it, so this created another wave of huge topics.

In 2005, Shingo Ito took over his father's struggling Sanhe Douyou Food Factory and focused on making tofu.

How is traditional tofu sold? We will immediately think of the vegetable market, where aunties and grandmas are picking and choosing, three pieces of tofu for 100 yen.

Of course, tofu is white and soft, which also conforms to the inherent perception of femininity.

What about Ito Shingo? But they came up with a "nanqian tofu shop", which means "manly tofu shop". The soft tofu has been turned into a symbol of masculinity, and product development has been implemented in three aspects: raw materials, craftsmanship, and taste, focusing on "masculine charm". It became popular in just a few years, and a piece of tofu became a big business worth 5 billion yen.

This means interpreting the product as content and giving it personalized characteristics.

Check-in culture is very popular today, and more and more Internet celebrity stores are emerging. A cafe or restaurant is a product, but if you view it as just a functional place to eat and drink, then it is just an ordinary store, no different from the ones you see on thousands of streets.

If you treat your restaurant as a piece of content for consumers to read and experience, then you can create continuous personalized traffic without advertising.

At this time, your store becomes an IP.

This is true for AJ, Supreme, adidas originals, Heytea, and Nayuki Tea .

In today's era, IP creates three extremely important values ​​for companies to build their brands:

A unique identification language

A personalized role setting

A content platform that continues to shine

Content, content.

product, product .

This is the most fundamental and essential thing that an enterprise must build. Although traditional marketing develops products and outputs content, it relies on traffic to promote products and content. Its business logic is to purchase traffic from the media to acquire users.

Today's marketing must integrate products and content, bring its own traffic and fans. Its business logic is to achieve user fission through topics and word of mouth, and purchase users from users.

Content productization, product contentization

Content+ Product, C+P.

A true brand should become the user’s CP through C+P and achieve rapid matching of consumers.

So since 2016, I have named the team I lead in the company CP Team, hoping to focus on helping clients with product and content development, and to be the CP of clients and consumers.

From building corporate IP to becoming a user CP, this is the brand operation methodology in the mobile Internet era.

Source: Empty Hands (ID:firesteal13)