How to avoid “naked” marketing? 4 ways to teach you how to borrow endorsements

Naked marketing is a marketing method with no brand , no endorsement, no resources, and only the product.

Unless your product is so excellent that it is the only one of its kind in history, otherwise, due to the fierce market competition, your peers will teach you a lesson in minutes.

So how to avoid streaking? As the saying goes, clothes make the man, and products depend on their bindings. Only by cleverly leveraging endorsements and building the audience’s trust can you quickly capture their minds and open up the market.

1. Use celebrity endorsements

Asking celebrities to endorse products is the most commonly used endorsement method in the marketing industry. Because celebrities are good things. Not only can they convert their fans and utilize their influence, but the right celebrity image can also directly connect and build the image of the product . The question is, how to choose the right star? Are popular young actors with high traffic necessarily suitable?

This can be seen from the used car industry. Almost no used car platform chooses traffic stars as endorsements. Among the TOP platforms, Guazi invited Sun Honglei, Renrenche invited Huang Bo, and Youxin invited Leonardo. None of them chose to use popular traffic stars such as Li Yifeng and Angelababy.

The reason is that the used car industry is an industry with an extreme lack of trust. Inherent industry attributes such as non-standard products, opaque prices, high customer orders, and information asymmetry make users always full of doubts at the beginning and maintain a vigilant wait-and-see attitude. The reason why celebrities are invited is that the platform wants to use the qualities of "reliability" and "trustworthiness" in the celebrity image as a credit guarantee. The essence of the word endorsement is to provide credit guarantee . Celebrities use the film and television images they have accumulated over the years to endorse the products they endorse. Used car platforms also hope that users will transfer their trust in celebrities to the platform.

By the same token, the household products industry rarely uses popular celebrities as its spokespeople. Advertisers prefer to choose celebrities who are portrayed as good wives and mothers in the public eye, such as Ma Yili, Liu Tao, and Sun Li. This is also because brands want to use the celebrity’s image of “virtue” and “hard work” to endorse their newly launched products.

In short, new products or new platforms can use celebrity images to endorse them. First, they can attract a wave of celebrity fans as early users of the product. Second, they can use the celebrity’s influence to quickly increase market awareness. Third, they can use the celebrity’s image to build user trust and establish the product image. It can be said that it kills two birds with one stone. The disadvantage is that celebrity endorsements are a bit expensive, which is not friendly to companies with limited budgets. In this case, asking celebrities to " promote " or "stand for" your products or directly purchasing the rights to use their photos are alternatives, which are much more cost-effective.

2. Endorsement through brand power

When Tmall was officially established in 2012, it concentrated its resources on attracting investment to attract brands to join. After Pinduoduo went public in 2018, it also embarked on the road of quality iteration and competed with Tmall for brand resources.

Whether it was Tmall in the past or Pinduoduo today, they are all seeking the endorsement of brand power. For younger e-commerce platforms, brand means too much. On the one hand, the brand is an endorsement of product quality. The introduction of a large number of genuine, high-quality branded goods can alleviate the consumer trust crisis caused by counterfeit goods and rebuild consumers' trust in the platform. On the other hand, brands with a long history, such as Hengyuanxiang and Shanghai Soap, although their market share is not high and may not bring much GMV growth to the platform, their profound history and years of accumulation in the middle-aged and elderly market are also a kind of endorsement that can help the platform win the trust of consumers.

In addition to e-commerce platforms, major advertising companies and third-party data analysis companies are also typical examples of using brands for endorsement. The following two pictures are from Publicis Advertising and Analysys Data, showing the lists of various partner brands displayed on their official websites. One is a 4A advertising company, and the other is an Internet data analysis company.

This method of a B-party service company using the brand endorsement of Party A is a common marketing method used by B-type institutions . Party B uses the power of Party A's brand to endorse itself and indirectly prove its own capabilities and industry status, thereby gaining the trust of other customers.

In a nutshell, whether it is a to C company or a to B company, it can use the power of the brand for endorsement. To C companies use brand endorsement to win potential consumers, and to B companies use brand endorsement to win potential customers.

3. Use social relationships to endorse

Social relationships have given rise to the acquaintance economy , and marketing is also rapidly opening up the acquaintance market with the help of the endorsement of social relationships.

When micro-businesses sell goods in the circle of friends , they are leveraging the endorsement of their existing social relationships, while social e-commerce platforms represented by Pinduoduo are leveraging the huge social network behind their 300 million users. In fact, WeChat business is not the first to use a marketing method centered on social relationships, and Pinduoduo is even less so. As early as the offline marketing era, "friend recommendations" and "relative recommendations" inadvertently utilized the power of social relationships through word of mouth.

So, why do recommendations from friends have such great magic? First, we have a natural and strong sense of trust in our friends. Second, when we want to reject a friend’s recommendation, we always feel reluctant. In the social psychology book "Influence", the author cited the example of Tupperware Brands in the United States using friend relationships for marketing.

In the 1950s in the United States, a company called Tupperware created the concept of a "family party". The whole party was hosted by a hostess who was a friend of everyone present. During the party, she showed Tupperware products to all her friends, and she was able to get a commission for every piece sold.

Incredibly, the friends fully understood that the hostess would profit from the event, but they still could not refuse the invitation to the party the next time. Tupperware's family gatherings are popular in more than 100 countries, with one held every 2.5 seconds on average. This marketing method that leverages social relationships to endorse products has also made Tupperware a world-renowned brand.

4. Financing /Shareholder Background Endorsement

Bullet Messenger became all the rage at the end of August this year, partly because its investor was Luo Yonghao . The investor is well-known, and the products he invested in have also received wide exposure and a certain degree of credit endorsement.

In addition, if a new startup 's investors are top venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital, then this is a strong endorsement for the company, whether in terms of product marketing to target audiences or in terms of securing the next round of financing. For example, among various Internet financial platforms, those whose shareholder backgrounds include state-owned assets and bank capital will be relatively easier to gain the trust of users. This is also an application of shareholder endorsement.

In short, no matter what type of endorsement is used in marketing, the fundamental purpose is to obtain credit guarantee .

Because it is easy for audiences to be curious about new products, but difficult for them to trust them. By leveraging various endorsements, we can, to a certain extent, dispel the audience's concerns and reduce customer acquisition costs. The disadvantage of naked marketing is that it cannot gain the trust of the audience, so it will get half the result with twice the effort in marketing.

Finally, in short, you can’t run naked as a person, and you can’t run naked in marketing either. Let the product have endorsements before going out to market it!

Source: Chai Ji