How to replicate the success of Jiang Xiaobai and Heytea?

Brand marketing is a discipline that combines science and art. It uses quantifiable and systematic operations and formulaic thinking to create brands . As long as efforts are made continuously, the success of the brand is inevitable.

With the emergence of brands such as Jiang Xiaobai and Heytea , they have set an example and provided confidence for a number of start-ups. In the current entrepreneurial environment, competition for similar products and services is unprecedentedly fierce. The earlier a startup company establishes its brand characteristics, the easier it will be to seize the initiative. With the urgent task of survival and development, the brand marketing of start-ups should be more aggressive, fast and steady, and how to make steady progress. How to replicate the success of Jiang Xiaobai and Heytea? Let us analyze from the perspective of the two brand personalities of "Sun God" and "Bacchus".

01 Behind the legends of those brands that became popular overnight

In recent years, thanks to the powerful power of netizens, too many brands that became popular overnight have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. These success stories have led many start-ups into a misunderstanding: they believe that as long as they have the right creativity and the Internet as a low-cost marketing weapon, they can achieve overnight success. This leads to startups taking too big steps and rushing to build their brands.

This idea exists not only in start-ups, but in the minds of almost all brand decision makers, and most of them have even put it into practice. Everyone rushing in makes the entire marketing environment more noisy, it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas, and consumers become increasingly desensitized to creativity. If the early "Ben Ben Tribe" marketing could still attract consumers, then today's marketing "routines" have become an open secret, and even appear in the lines of urban commercial-themed film and television dramas. It is becoming increasingly difficult for new startups to achieve unexpected success and build brands.

How to build a brand under the new situation? How can new brands break through? The brand hasn’t moved yet, but the system has come first. As the saying goes, to practice martial arts, you must first practice the basics. Only when the foundation is solid can you move flexibly. Behind any overnight success there is an unbreakable system. Any efforts made by an enterprise in branding need to be backed by a strong personnel system and product and service system. In practice, we have encountered such a situation. Although the corporate marketing department launched an ambitious creative campaign, there was no warm atmosphere at all in the terminal store, and only sporadic table sign materials could reflect the activity. This is a manifestation of weak system capabilities, resulting in a waste of marketing resources.

Behind brands that became popular overnight, such as Heytea, there is a mature business team, product lineup, and channel system. The formation of brand awareness is the result of long-term accumulation. Before launching a brand, the first thing to do is to develop the brand’s system-building capabilities.

02 Brand Sun God Personality VS Brand Dionysus Personality

For new brands, system construction should revolve around brand personality. If we compare a brand to a person, then the brand should have two personalities: the sun god personality and the wine god personality. The former relies more on emotional thinking, with the help of tools such as user insights , creativity, big data , and media matrix, while the latter relies more on rational thinking, with the help of products, channels, service teams, and resource control capabilities.

In ancient Greek mythology, the sun god and the god of wine are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of logic and rationality, while Dionysus is the god of chaos and emotion. Philosopher Nietzsche believed that they were two driving forces in the ancient Greek art world, and there was a relationship of you in me between them. This relationship also holds true in the brand world.

In real life, people with a Sun God personality are often too rational and lack charm. On the contrary, people with a Dionysus personality are likely to become excellent artists, but not good managers. For a brand, crossing the two personalities will produce an effect of 1+1>2: constructing the Dionysus personality with rational thinking and constructing the Apollo personality with emotional thinking, achieving the most stable brand breakthrough.

From an execution perspective, on the one hand, it allows the more emotional and creative work content to be systematized and digitized, making it measurable. Enterprises should establish a set of management standards and implement them from top to bottom. Without this set of standards, corporate actions will not be integrated, the brain and limbs will not be coordinated, and conflicts between product, sales and brand departments will often arise from this.

On the other hand, let the more rational business departments integrate emotional thinking. From product research and development to the final sales terminal, the entire process is guided by a unified concept, and people in all links have the same awareness: what is provided to consumers is not only the value of the products and services themselves, but also the intangible brand value such as emotion and meaning. Products and services provided based on this kind of thinking can also give brand building more room to play. For specific examples, you can refer to Haidilao .

03 Standardization of Creative Work: From Dionysian Personality to Apollo Personality

Startups have limited budgets, so they are more cautious in introducing brand plans. Brand plans often have to go through three rounds of review by various departments before they are approved. The most convincing ones are based on accurate user insights and market insights. By analyzing the current state of the industry, the competitive environment, and the characteristics of consumers through reliable data, everyone can feel the close connection between the enterprise and the larger environment, and understand the connection between themselves and the enterprise, thus avoiding subjective conjectures of "I think".

Regarding the significance of industry insights, there is a case that is often mentioned recently: it was the delivery guy who defeated the instant noodle company. Nowadays, compared to instant noodles, online food ordering has become a more popular consumer choice. When instant noodle sales began to decline, the scale of online food ordering was expanding rapidly. Therefore, accurate industry insights can enable all employees of the company to grasp the big picture. When all employees understand the current status of the industry in which the company is located, their understanding will be more unified and the significance of brand marketing will be easier to understand.

In addition to industry insights, consumer insights are equally important. If the insights are not accurate enough, the marketing direction will often go in the opposite direction. Let’s take the wine market as an example. The overall market sales data shows that the liquor category accounts for the largest proportion. However, a deeper insight will reveal that young people’s alcohol consumption habits are exactly the opposite of the performance of the entire wine market. The most popular alcoholic beverage among young people is beer, followed by low-alcohol beverages including wine, pre-mixed cocktails, flavored beer, etc. Many domestic catering brands have seen the change in consumption trends and have started selling alcohol in their restaurants. For example, Haidilao once launched customized beer in more than 300 stores across the country.

After the insight is completed, the next step is to implement the strategy, deploy effective resources, and maintain the stability of the strategy during the execution process. As the saying goes, if you keep thinking about it, there will be a response. In the years before Jiang Xiaobai became popular, the copywriting on the wine bottles always revolved around Internet hot spots, until one day it resonated with netizens across the country; before the big gamble of this year's World Cup made Vatti the king of topics, Vatti had already been the sponsor of the French team; recently, Mercedes-Benz's "She is on the Road" series of films has been circulated among the friends of female executives, which is also the result of Mercedes-Benz's long-term deep cultivation of the female group. The company has already created a platform for the female group "She is Mercedes". The three-foot-thick ice does not form overnight.

Finally, it should be noted that the implementation of the strategy must never deviate from the brand positioning. In today's world of e-commerce , persistence in differentiated positioning allows companies to win a place in the competitive environment. Xiaohongshu was initially just a community for overseas shopping guides. It entered the e-commerce market in late 2014. Later, as users' demand for cross-border products in the market continued to increase, it began to exert its strength in the cross-border e-commerce market and stood out among many competitors. It has now become a typical social e-commerce platform that promotes product promotion.

04 Sensualization of products and sales: from the personality of the sun god to the personality of the god of wine

Traditional thinking holds that a company will provide consumers with benefits based on the resources it has. This kind of thinking in the current market environment is like ancient cavalry fighting against the precision strikes of modern military. Users in the Internet age have unprecedentedly emotional thinking, and their lifestyles and consumption concepts have become more emotional and entertaining. When we open video software such as Tik Tok , we will find that it is not only the young people who live an interesting life, but also children and the elderly. The rich have their own way of playing, and the poor can also be happy in poverty.

In a world full of emotions, what startups need to do is to integrate emotions into their business, fully understand their users and stand on the same front with them, so as to help their brands win at the starting line in the "information war". Since each company has a different business model and provides different values ​​to consumers, their strategies cannot be generalized: the emerging e-commerce economic business model is flexible and sensitive to market trends, and traditional manufacturing brands can also operate with ease in a changing market as long as they keep up with the times.

If we talk about start-ups in the e-commerce sector, we cannot fail to mention Pinduoduo, whose Huang Zheng recently topped the Hurun Rich List of Post-80s. According to industry consensus, Xiaohongshu, which we mentioned earlier, is the representative of social + e-commerce, while Pinduoduo will be the representative of e-commerce + social. Since Pinduoduo started in 2015, the group buying model has become a phenomenon. This is a typical case of building a business model with emotional thinking. Because Pinduoduo has successfully grasped the user's psychology, the sense of participation, and made low prices reasonable through social participation. Buy one get one free, flash sales, discounts, discounts on purchases over a certain amount, etc. are all aimed at solving the problem of being cheap and reasonable. However, with the endorsement of relatives and friends, users can become more confident in purchasing.

If a startup is in a traditional industry, Haier is a case that must be mentioned. In the impression of those born in the 1990s, Haier is a very fashionable and internet-based brand. Supporting the rejuvenation of Haier's brand is a whole set of Internet thinking. Today, Haier has already completed the transformation from "electrical appliances" to "network appliances", injecting the genes of Internet thinking into the factory, allowing users to participate in the factory design, manufacturing and marketing processes. From user big data analysis , user demand analysis to product appearance design, Haier platform invites new media micro-owners to take responsibility for product research and development and market promotion . In production, the introduction of new media has flattened the entire manufacturing process, changing it from a series relationship to a parallel relationship, and has shifted the traditional production process to one that is customer-demand oriented.

The cross-construction based on the personalities of the sun god and the god of wine is a development formula for the brand to seek steady progress. It can help the brand shift from quantitative change to qualitative change. This process can only be gradual and cannot be forced. Brand marketing is a discipline that combines science and art. It uses quantifiable and systematic operations and formulaic thinking to create brands. As long as efforts are made continuously, the success of the brand is inevitable.

Source: Brand Observation News (ID: pinpaigcbao)