Understand brand communication in 3 sentences!

This article starts with the topic of communication.

After reading this article, your understanding of brand communication and communication will be one level higher than others. Today I will share with you the most advanced, leading and profound ideas in communication. But don’t be afraid, don’t feel like you don’t understand. In fact, my sharing is very simple. I just want to share three sentences with you -

The first sentence is " Marketing is communication, communication is marketing ", which was said by Don Schultz, the marketing master and father of integrated marketing communications. The second sentence is " the medium is the message ", which was said by Marshall McLuhan, the most famous media theorist and thinker in the 20th century.

The third sentence is " Imitation is communication ", which was said by Tarde, a well-known Western psychologist and one of the three founders of French sociology in the 19th century (on par with Comte and Durkheim).

Before I start, let me ask you a question:

Anyone who understands marketing knows that marketing has a basic framework and elements, namely 4P. 4P includes Product, Price, Place and Promotion .

Some people, including some marketing textbooks, translate the word "Promotion" into "sales promotion", which is incorrect. Because our conventional interpretation of "promotion" is sales activities with price discounts, such as buy-one-get-one-free and discounts, and Promotion refers to all means used by companies to drive and promote sales, including advertising, public relations, door-to-door sales, sales promotions, live streaming, e-commerce, etc. So Promotion should be translated into "promotion" or "sales promotion", which includes "sales promotion".

Here we can see that 4P is the basic element of marketing, and advertising communication is one of the 1P "Promotion" among the 4P. Advertising communication is a small branch of marketing.

So here comes my question - why aren't university advertising departments or advertising majors set up under the marketing department? Why not just offer a professional course in advertising under the marketing department, but instead set up an independent major? Friends who studied advertising in college know that the advertising major is generally set up under the School of Journalism and Communication in colleges and universities. According to the regulations of the Ministry of Education, marketing is a subject belonging to management, and its professional category is affiliated to business administration. Graduates are awarded a Bachelor of Management degree; while advertising is a subject belonging to literature, and its professional category is affiliated to journalism and communication. Graduates are awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Advertising belongs to journalism and communication, not marketing. This is how the academic community defines it. Why is this setting different from what we said above that advertising is a branch of marketing?

In fact, I have said this on many occasions, including on my official account: Marketing is management from the perspective of the enterprise, and brand is communication from the perspective of the user (brand can be equally replaced by advertising and communication). The issues that marketing needs to consider are how to maximize the use of corporate resources, produce products that everyone wants to buy, and obtain the most profits; and how to influence the most consumers to buy their own products with the least promotional costs.

Advertising and branding must start from consumers, what they are thinking, what they want to hear and see, what kind of products they want to buy, and then give consumers the information and products they want.

Therefore, if you want to do good advertising, understanding what is news and what is communication is much more important than understanding marketing. If you don't start from the consumer, and only do advertising based on the marketing needs of the company, then you will never be good at advertising in your life.

This is why advertising is set under the journalism and communication major (this is from a professional perspective and from a social impact perspective. Another reason is that advertising and news have shaped our social culture today , and advertising is of great significance to society).

Marketing is the management of enterprise resources, but is it possible to examine marketing from the perspective of the consumer? This is the marketing revolution initiated by Philip Kotler, who single-handedly transformed marketing from product-centered to consumer demand-centered . For a business, it is not important what the business wants to produce. The most important thing is what customers need you to produce and what they want to buy. This is indeed a revolutionary concept, so Philip Kotler is known as the father of modern marketing.

In addition to Kotler, the person who took the consumer stance a step further was Don Schultz.

In Schultz's view, the 4Ps we mentioned earlier, these marketing variables, are not core competitive advantages for enterprises. Your competitors can imitate your product design (today is an era of product homogeneity); your competitors can copy your pricing strategy; your competitors can follow up on your distribution channels, and I will sell where you sell; your competitors can also copy your advertising, promotions and other promotional methods. So Schultz said that the information that exists in the minds of consumers is where the real marketing value lies. Information dissemination will be the main marketing force in the future and the only sustainable competitive advantage of marketing organizations. Consumer communication is what marketing is all about.

1. Marketing is communication, communication is marketing, the two are inseparable

It is necessary for enterprises to integrate all marketing information and deliver it to consumers in an integrated manner.

This is the marketing theory proposed by Professor Schultz - Integrated Marketing Communication, abbreviated as IMC (Integrated Marketing Communication).

Integrated Marketing Communications is a professional course in the advertising department of a university. I took this course for one semester in college. The green-covered book "Integrated Marketing Communications" written by Schultz was also my professional textbook in college. After graduating from university, I joined an advertising company and often used the IMC theory when writing proposals.

The advertising industry actually likes to talk about integration. There are many advertising companies that like to call themselves integrated communications companies or integrated marketing planning companies; and the plans they make are not called advertising creative plans, but integrated communications plans. However, I have long misunderstood the IMC theory, and I did not agree with it, and even looked down on it.

Why?

Because what does integration mean in the advertising industry? In fact, it is the integration of all media. For example, when I was working on an advertising plan, I came up with a slogan for a certain brand and designed a main screen. How to spread the word? I will use various means of communication to promote it, such as TV commercials, print ads, radio ads, Tik Tok short videos, Moments ads, holiday marketing, promotional activities, etc.; the main screen is extended to advertisements, VIs, shop signs, supermarket displays, in-store posters, table cards, and even corporate employee uniforms, and other occasions where visual appearance is required.

The same slogan is being shouted in various media, and the same picture is shown in various materials . This is called integration.

To use a vivid metaphor, integration is a fruit platter . Add a little of this, a little of that, and finally make a whole plate. Integration is nothing more than 360 degrees, it is all-round, so I think integration has no technical content, and therefore I think this theory is insignificant.

But I actually misunderstood it. The key to IMC is not integration. This is the inspiration given to me by Professor Miao Qingxian. In June 2020, Mr. Schultz passed away. Teacher Miao wrote an article titled "Achieving sainthood in the flesh or becoming a god after death? In Memory of Mr. Schulz, the Great but Not Yet a Master. He told me that the essence of integrated marketing communications is not integration, but marketing = communication .

Integrated marketing communications does not mean integrating various communication media or various marketing methods. It uses all possible means, such as advertising, ground promotion, and channel development. What it really means is that everything a business does is communication . Advertising is communication, products are communication, stores are communication, pricing is communication, and corporate marketing is to convey information to consumers through various means, so as to achieve consumer recognition and identification of the corporate brand. It is crucial for consumers to receive and understand corporate marketing information. Therefore, marketing = communication, and companies should use communication thinking to shape marketing. Since marketing = communication, it is necessary to integrate marketing and communication to achieve the integration of marketing and communication.

So from this perspective, Schultz is first and foremost a marketing expert, not an advertising and communications expert.

For example, I want to create a high-end mineral water brand. If consumers recognize the “high-end” nature of my brand, then sales and performance will not be a problem. But how can we make consumers feel the high-end nature of the brand? You can’t just price it high right? First of all, your product packaging design must be high-end. Plastic bottles may not work, and you have to use glass bottles. Otherwise, you have to invite big-name designers to design it, or do cross-border cooperation with top brands.

Secondly, the channels have to be high-end. You have to sell your mineral water in star-rated hotels, Michelin restaurants, and airports. If you sell Evian in a grocery store, it will definitely be difficult to sell, right? This is like ZARA. In order to create the feeling of a big brand, its stores are opened in the best locations in shopping malls, placing themselves next to big-name stores such as LV, Chanel, and GUCCI.

Once again, your advertisement needs to be high-end, and you may even need to invite big-name stars to be spokespeople. It would definitely be inappropriate to ask Fan Wei or Huang Bo to be your spokespeople. It’s not that these two lack money or strength, but that their image is approachable, not high-end, right? Therefore, if a company wants to start a business, it must first think clearly about what its company wants to sell and how to make consumers believe in and identify with it. The key here is not just the product, but the unified message you convey to consumers through the 4Ps.

For example, if you want to make skin care products, the core value is naturalness. Then your product packaging, brand VI and terminal stores should all be green. You should establish production bases in Changbai Mountain, the Inner Mongolia grasslands, Tibet or New Zealand, and initiate more public welfare marketing with the theme of nature conservation. Only in this way can consumers recognize and identify with your naturalness.

When a company does marketing, the core work is to operate the information flow, because all the touch points between the company and consumers are the channels for the dissemination of corporate information. Therefore, whether it is developing products, setting prices, developing channels, or advertising, there must be a communication mindset and the same voice must be conveyed to consumers.

This reveals a whole new direction for corporate marketing and adds a new dimension to the understanding of marketing. As for communication, we should keep in mind that not only various media advertisements are communication, in fact everything a company does in marketing is communication. Advertising information does not necessarily appear in the media; it may be on products, price tags, and channels.

2. McLuhan, the master of communication, said that “the medium is the message”

The understanding of this sentence is usually to say that the media itself is also conveying information. The same advertisement will give consumers different impressions when it is placed at an airport and at a bus stop. It will also reflect different levels of brand quality and consumers’ trust in the brand. But this understanding is actually wrong.

What McLuhan really meant was that whenever a new medium is born, we tend to only care about the content (information) disseminated by the medium, but ignore the changes that the medium itself brings to human beings.

The media and technical tools for disseminating information are sometimes more important and meaningful than the information itself. Because what influences our cognition and thinking habits is often not the information, but the medium that disseminates the information.

Media plays a role in shaping and controlling the scale and form of human collaboration and activities. Its impact is not at the level of information and ideas, but rather that it changes our sensory ratios and patterns of perception, a change that McLuhan called "unwavering and irresistible."

In the primitive tribal era, the tribal humans of that time lived in a harmonious balance of senses, perceiving the world equally through vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell when acquiring information. But ever since humans invented writing and printing, vision has become dominant, the senses have lost balance, and the eyes have gained the upper hand. After humans invented television, our social structure underwent earth-shaking changes.

The way we get information through visual images is different from the way we get information through text. The medium of television itself has changed our cognitive methods, ways of thinking and the development trend of the entire social culture. So in 1985, Neil Postman, an American media culture researcher and McLuhan's disciple, wrote a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death", criticizing the American society's view that television images gradually replaced written language, and that print dominance had shifted to television dominance, which had led to the social public discourse shifting from rationality, order, and logic to being out of context, superficial, and fragmented.

Prior to this, in 1967, French director and thinker Guy Debord published his most important work, The Society of the Spectacle. He believed that contemporary society had entered a society dominated by the production and consumption of image objects. Spectacle had become a materialized worldview, and commodities had completely colonized social life.

Think about these media thinkers' criticism of the image society, and then think about the emergence of TikTok...

Many people criticize the funny clips and singing and dancing videos of young ladies twisting their hips and waists on TikTok as being vulgar, superficial, and polluting. But even if Douyin is full of short videos about learning and scientific knowledge, the result is still the same. It’s not because of the type of videos (information) on TikTok, but because the medium of short videos itself has changed our cognition and way of thinking, causing our thinking to become more fragmented and superficial, and making us lose the ability to think deeply.

This is the “medium is the message”.

So what impact does this sentence have on brand communication and the advertising industry? Let me explain.

The advertising theory in the printing age is called paper salesmanship . This was the definition of advertising given by John Kennedy, the first copywriting master in the history of advertising in 1904. Later, another advertising master, Claude Hopkins, advocated " scientific advertising ".

Including in the 1950s, Rosser Reeves wrote the book "Truth in Advertising" and proposed the " Unique Selling Proposition " (USP) advertising theory.

Their common proposition is to convey detailed product information in advertisements and to describe the product's functional selling points clearly in a popular, sincere and plain tone, so that consumers will pay for it. They all oppose exaggerated and funny advertisements because for consumers, spending money on themselves and planning their lives through shopping arrangements is a serious matter, so don't turn yourself into a clown.

As Hopkins said, "Only people who are interested in our products will read our ads. No matter how long or short the ad is, no one will read it as a pastime. So we should treat the ad reader as a potential customer who is asking you for information and give him enough product information to motivate him to pay for it."

But in the 1960s, a creative revolution took place in the advertising industry. The three flag bearers who carried the banner of creativity, David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and William Bernbach, respectively proposed the brand image theory, product drama and creative ROI theory (originality, relevance and shock).

Starting from them, the advertising industry began to focus on creativity, and advertising information began to shift from physical levels and rational product function propositions to user communication that emphasizes emotions, personality image, and attitudes. Advertising forms increasingly focused on visual effects, drama, and shock in order to capture consumers' attention. So why is the advertising industry changing like this? Why did the 1960s usher in a creative revolution? This is because television began to become popular in the United States in the 1960s, and the advertising industry moved from the print era to the television era. Advertising theory in the television age is naturally different from that in the print age.

Today, we have entered a new era of the Internet, especially an era with short videos, live broadcasts, and social media as the main media forms. So, how should advertising theory change today?

According to the concept of "the medium is the message", the process (the medium) is as important as the content (the message). The media "process" in the Internet age refers to how communication and exchange are carried out. Therefore, what is important for branding today is not just what the brand conveys to consumers (whether it is functional selling points or emotional attitudes), but more importantly, how the brand conveys information to consumers. The attitude with which a brand interacts and develops a relationship with consumers may be more important than what it says to consumers. Consumers are like your girlfriend, and what your girlfriend often says is that what is important is not what you do, but your attitude and process of caring about her.

By the way, McLuhan published his classic work "Understanding Media" in 1964, in which he put forward the important proposition that "the medium is the message". McLuhan died in 1980. He did not see the prosperity and great development of today's Internet era. But today, when the metaverse is very popular, using McLuhan's views to understand the metaverse can help us understand more clearly what the metaverse is. McLuhan believed that all media are extensions of humans, extensions of the human body and the human brain (sensory organs and nervous system). To put it simply, television is our eyes and ears.

The metaverse is not just an extension of our eyes and ears. We are not just using our eyes and ears to "browse" the Internet. The metaverse can be an extension of our hands. We can reach out a hand into the Internet to touch the texture of an object thousands of miles away. We can step into the Internet and use a virtual avatar of our own to "enter" the Internet to experience the Internet in an all-round and full-sensory way. The metaverse is an extension of all senses, this is the metaverse. This is the Master's insight.

3. Tarde’s “Imitation is Communication”

This sentence explains how advertising and brand communication work on consumers and help sales. The result and ultimate goal of communication is to form imitation, including imitation from words to behaviors. Verbal imitation is spreading the brand by word of mouth, and behavioral imitation is consuming and using a certain brand in groups. Tarde believed that society consists of a group of people and that many of the similarities they exhibit are the result of imitation or counter-imitation. Imitation is the soul of social life and the most basic social phenomenon. Our society is made up of the spread and exchange of personal emotions and ideas through imitation.

For example, why is brand awareness so important for brand building and sales? It is because everyone is talking about and using a certain brand, so I will follow suit. Herd consumption is a form of imitation. For example, when the milk tea brand was first emerging, people were saying that milk tea shops hired people to queue up. This was to create a popular trend for milk tea shops and FOMO (fear of missing out), which was essentially imitation.

Generally speaking, there are two strategies for brands: the herd strategy and the standout strategy . The herd mentality strategy is suitable for mass-market daily-use brands. It takes the route of imitation and its social logic is based on consumers’ worship of popularity and authority. The outstanding strategy is suitable for niche individual brands and takes an anti-imitation route. Its social logic is to cater to the social psychology that some consumers do not like to be the same as others. Anti-imitation means that what you do is exactly the opposite of what others do.

Tarde wrote a very important book called The Law of Imitation. In this book, Tarde summarizes several laws on how imitation is formed, which are very useful for us to do communication.

1. Law of Decline

What this means is that imitation is often from top to bottom. Lower classes and individuals always imitate higher classes and individuals. This is imitation that radiates from high to low.

The most representative example is the movie "The Devil Wears Prada", in which Andrea Sanchez, played by Anne Hathaway, enters society for the first time and interns at the famous fashion magazine "RUNWAY", serving as the second assistant to the editor-in-chief Miranda Priestley (played by Meryl Streep).

The first scene in the play is about a group of fashion editors who are trying to match a model's clothes with a belt, and they are struggling and arguing about which color belt to use. Anne Hathaway couldn't help laughing when she saw this scene, because she saw that the colors of the two belts were almost exactly the same.

Anne Hathaway was wearing a sky blue thick sweater at the time, and then editor-in-chief Miranda pointed at the sweater and gave a long speech, lecturing Anne Hathaway. This line is what I think is the essence of this movie. She said: "You think it has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and pick out that blue chunky sweater. You think you have chosen it carefully according to your own will. You want to tell the world that you value your inner self and don't mind what you wear... But in fact you don't know:

The sky blue dress first appeared at Oscar de la Rent's show in 2002, and then I remember that YSL also showed a sky blue military uniform series. Soon, sky blue appeared in the next eight designers' shows, and then it became popular in major high-end stores around the world. Finally it was kicked out of department stores, became popular on the streets, and flowed into the pathetic casual counters. You undoubtedly got it there during a clearance sale.

In fact, this sky blue color generates millions of dollars in profits and countless jobs... and countless efforts have been made to make it... The funny thing is that you think you chose the clothes you wear yourself, thinking that your choice is outside the fashion industry, but in fact, the sweater you are wearing was chosen for you by everyone in this room, from this pile of stuff. ”

This is the law of descent.

2. Internal first, external second

What it means is that imitation comes from the inside out. Any act of imitation is first ideological imitation and then material imitation. The spread of ideas precedes the spread of expression. Therefore, if we want to form imitative social behavior, we must have thoughts and ideas first.

For example, with the rise of domestic fashion in recent years, why are consumers scrambling to consume domestic fashion brands? First of all, it is because of the formation of the social trend of national self-confidence and the rise of a great power. First there is confidence in the country, then there is consumption of domestic brands. This is the rule of looking inside first and outside later.

3. Geometric Rate

This means that without interference, once imitation begins, it will grow exponentially and spread rapidly. This explains what we call fission and exponential growth today. Imitation has enormous social power.

In addition to these three laws, Tarde also summarized many conclusions about imitation, such as imitation of emotions is much more lasting than imitation of thoughts , and imitation is often unconscious, etc. These rules are of great inspiration and help to us in studying communication and doing brand communication well. Everyone can understand the statement "imitation is dissemination".

Finally, how do we achieve large-scale imitation among consumers in brand communication? The key is to make good use of memes in communication. " The mission of social communication is imitation, and the means is memes ." This is my point of view, and it is also my summary in the book "Essential Copywriting" (but what is a meme and how to use memes well in communication is another topic).

• Marketing is communication, communication is marketing
• The medium is the message
• Imitation is spreading

Everyone must remember these three sentences. Today’s article ends here.

Author: Empty-handed

Source: Empty Hands (ID: firesteal13)