Top 10 Brand Trend Keywords in 2022

2021 is the best of times and the worst of times for consumer industries and brands.

The new population dividend, platform dividend, heavy capital investment, strong supply chain logistics and other infrastructure have allowed Chinese consumer brands to rise rapidly. Dao Fa's initial hunch has gradually been confirmed: China's Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal may be born among this batch of new consumer brands. But as dividends decline and capital recedes, the public begins to realize that behind the wild growth of new consumer brands is the jungle law of survival of the fittest.

Dao Fa never comes because of the fame of new consumer brands when they are at their peak, nor will he leave when the industry is at its lowest point. What we need to do is to accompany, empower and provide solutions for brands.

Daofa hopes to provide brands and industries with referenceable cases, learnable methodologies, and implementable strategic policies - it has disassembled the boutique instant coffee brand "Santonban", upgraded the "Kinetic Energy Brand Theory" to the "Kinetic Energy Brand Four Quadrants", and launched the "Chengjiu Brand Founder Club" to explore brand solutions with China's future "super brands".

Over the past year, DaoFa has come into contact with more than 100 brand founders and operators, exchanged experiences with the heads of multiple platforms such as Douyin, Weibo, Tencent, and Tmall, as well as experts from third-party institutions, and finally summarized the five key words for the new consumer industry in 2021:

01 Sub-categories

The brand's focus on and in-depth development of niche areas comes from the fact that the demands of today's consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Take personal care as an example. In the 1980s, it was normal for a family to share a bottle of shampoo, and the demand was for "clean hair"; in the 1990s, people gradually discovered that shampoos had different functions such as "anti-dandruff" and "hair treatment", and products began to diversify; and now, in addition to shampoo, hair cleaning products also include cleansing gels and scalp scrubs specifically for washing the scalp; repair and moisturizing products have spawned multiple types such as conditioners, hair masks, hair oils, and scalp essences.

In each major sub-category, we are delighted to see the rise of a large number of new consumer brands: Zhuben, which entered the makeup removal market with plant-based cleansing oil, BOP, which proposed "oral care cosmetics", Spes, which positioned functional head care, ffit8, which focused on protein bars, and Darentang, which is committed to the sunshine of sex toys...

E-commerce platforms are also constantly promoting the "segmentation" of consumer brands. During Double 11 in 2021, Tmall claimed that more than 700 new brands ranked first in their sub-categories, compared to 360 last year.

Whether it is the choice of industry media to report on brands, or the choice of capital to invest in "potential stocks", it seems that as long as the words "TOP1 in the sub-category" are included, it is the right choice. This also gave rise to some weird things:

Brands rack their brains to find niche markets. As long as the product categories are niche enough, they will always be able to find a field to be number one.

Daofa believes that it is worth encouraging for brands to constantly look for small unmet consumer demands or new demands, and to develop and provide products for these demands. Just like Japan is very good at making "small things", by thoroughly and meticulously satisfying a demand, it can also gain a place in the market. But segmentation for the sake of segmentation is not a wise move.

02 Wild consumption

"Wild consumption" was selected as one of the top ten hot words for brands in 2021. ,

It originated from the severe floods in Henan Province in July 2021. Erke's donation of 50 million yuan in supplies for disaster relief was jokingly called a "bankruptcy donation" by netizens. While they were deeply moved, they flocked to the brand's live broadcast room to place orders to express their support for the caring enterprise. The brand founder and anchor advised everyone to consume rationally, while netizens responded in the comment section, "I want to consume wildly."

The rise of "wild consumption" has boosted a large number of old domestic brands represented by Hongxing Erke. They were once the childhood memories of those born in the 80s and 90s and were very popular at one time. However, they have been gradually ignored by the market due to many reasons, such as slow product iteration, backward marketing methods, and design aesthetics that do not conform to the preferences of modern young people.

The underlying logic of wild consumption actually has two layers:

First, the national confidence and patriotism generated by the strengthening of national strength have made consumers more tolerant of domestic brands;

Second, when a company takes the initiative to assume social responsibility and conforms to consumers' values, they will also choose to vote with their money.

Admittedly, any growth brought about by wild consumption is only temporary. For China's mature and time-honored brands, how to retain this wave of users who "dropped from the sky" and iterate and innovate the brand are their top priorities.

03 Rational consumption

Rational consumption is the antonym of wild consumption.

This generation of consumers is becoming less and less easily fooled. The topic of “young people are beginning to oppose product planting”, which was hotly discussed for nearly a month last year, is the best proof of this.

The prevalence of rational consumption is also the result of the joint effect of multiple factors. For example, brand market education has enabled consumers to master more "professional knowledge", convenient information query has continuously narrowed the information gap between brands and consumers, consumers' own needs are also constantly evolving, and they know better what they want. In addition, under the control of the batch marketing of emerging new consumer brands, consumers have gradually developed the ability to discern information and are no longer blindly following.

Brands that were previously good at buying traffic to quickly attract users have found that this approach is no longer applicable. Not only has the ROI been greatly reduced, but the direction of comments on social media is also constantly testing the edge of danger. This has actually forced many brands to start operating their user assets in a more refined manner and polish their products more rigorously.

04 From planting grass to planting trees

At major summits, forums, closed-door meetings, or industry articles this year, we can hear the call of "from planting grass to planting trees", and it actually has a deep connection with knife skills.

At the beginning of 2021, Daofa invited the president of Kotler Consulting Group China to share the logic of brand marketing growth with members. During the sharing, Cao Hu proposed that "in 2021, brands should plant trees instead of planting grass."

Behind the change in marketing trend from "planting grass to planting trees" is the change in the language of communication between brands and consumers, and the changes in the values, attitudes and culture that brands carry. The role of brands is to maintain their core "unchanged" in the ever-changing process.

Therefore, short-term, impromptu brand marketing actions and methods may achieve certain results at the moment, but they can easily be imitated and become ineffective; brand values ​​and the emotional connection between the brand and users that require long-term watering and maintenance are the roots of the brand tree. Allowing consumers to choose based on the brand is the real and lasting traffic for the brand.

05 Metaverse

Anyone working in marketing in 2021 who has not heard of the "Metaverse" will 100% be "expelled from school".

Everyone is discussing the Metaverse, but few know how to build it. Everyone thinks that others are building the Metaverse, and a large number of Internet companies and consumer product companies have flocked to it, claiming that they are building the Metaverse...

As the hottest concept in the market today, the Metaverse has received polarized evaluations ranging from "niche" and "pioneer" to "commonplace" and "cheating" in just a few months.

Nowadays, there are countless articles about metaverse marketing. In the Daofa content matrix alone, we discussed the possibility of brands opening up marketing boundaries through the metaverse in the future in October 21, and recently sorted out the metaverse marketing trends at home and abroad and the historical and cultural origins behind them.

Daofa believes that the Metaverse provides a grand and inclusive theme for contemporary and future marketers, brand people, and content creators, allowing brands to build their own worlds while inviting users to co-create experience scenarios, extending the intimate relationships between people and between people and brands from the real world to the virtual world, and then feeding back to real life from the virtual world.

But brands also need to be aware that their marketing actions should not be just for the sake of riding on the popularity. Consumers may not be able to discern your intentions, but they can feel your sincerity.

For the future, DaoFa also gave 5 key words on how to build a brand in 2022:

01 Content as a carrier

Content must be an eternal theme. The essence of content commercialization is to find opportunities to gain dividends in content carriers.

For self-media practitioners, text is the carrier of the account creation logic led by WeChat public accounts in 2015; pictures are the graphic notes of Xiaohongshu and Weibo from 2013 to now; medium and long videos are the carrier of the vlog trend and Bilibili videos that broke out around 2018; short videos are the carrier of Douyin around 20 years...

For brands, in addition to constantly updating and iterating the optimal presentation methods of brand content (text, pictures, videos, products) , the core of content creation lies in the production and accumulation of high-quality content.

Daofa is a company that grew out of content. It is also a platform organization that uses "content as the main driving force" and continuously delivers brand solutions to the industry. But how to create content? How to create content? What kind of content do you create? The three great questions behind the heavenly world test one’s insight into human nature.

If you only look at user/market data to decide on products or content, you will find that products or content that hit the weaknesses of human nature always perform better: desire to voyeurism, love of gossip, liking of emotions, pornography, gambling and drugs. It is indeed easy to make content/products popular by doing this, but after a long time you will find that the content is full of incitement, violence, falsehood, and impetuousness, and it will not accumulate any assets.

Therefore, content creators should not "completely follow consumers", but need to have their own values ​​​​and bottom line, and "lead consumers one step faster."

To create content in today's society, you need to have the mindset of a "product manager": when creating content, you also need to create SKUs, start with simple basic models, then gradually expand horizontally and vertically, summarize the methodology for hit products, and think about how to mass produce them. However, the best content can never be copied or templated, and the talents who can produce such content must be monopolized or strongly bound.

If you want to produce high-quality content continuously, you need to have the ability (temperament, attitude, values ​​and professional ability) to gather fans with similar values ​​from all over the world to produce content together.

In this way, the brand’s content is established, its values ​​are established, and its soul is also established.

02 Product-effect synergy

In 2019, Doris found that it had become wishful thinking for marketers to run a campaign that only focused on the brand and not the results, and “brand-effect integration” became popular across the country. Sister Dao released the "Brand-Effect Integration Guide" and won over 100,000 views.

The popularity of brand-effect integration comes from changes in the marketing environment: since the digitization of advertising channels, advertising effects have changed from being untraceable to being trackable; with the rise of Internet grass-planting strategies, consumers' shopping links have changed from delayed gratification to impulse consumption; while the competition for traffic has become increasingly fierce, the false bubble has also grown.

As brands return to "long-termism", the public will realize that brands and growth are not contradictory, but can work together to move forward. Brand-effect integration is only a temporary stage; brand-effect synergy is the long-term solution.

This year, we have seen that live streaming e-commerce, which is mainly based on CPS, has become a key channel for brands to ship goods. In addition to selling goods, top anchors represented by Li Jiaqi have gradually assumed the responsibility of product promotion. The strong rise of Douyin e-commerce and the release of models such as "FACT" show that the platform also hopes that brands will change their thinking of "buying effects and washing traffic" and focus on accumulating brand potential.

In fact, the core of "brand-effect synergy" lies in combining brand advertising centered on creativity and performance advertising aimed at sales, taking into account both the improvement of the brand's long-term influence and the conversion of short-term marketing effects.

Only by learning to walk on two legs can Chinese brands advance steadily and in a big way.

03 People-oriented

In the second half of 2021, Daofa proposed: "The brand of the future must be a "crowd brand" and a "people-oriented" brand. ”

So what kind of brand is "people-oriented"?

First of all, starting from the literal meaning, "people-oriented" means that everything starts from user needs. This part has been discussed a lot and will not be repeated here.

Secondly, people-oriented means finding the group of “people” that the brand cares about.

Humans are social animals who gather into communities around their unique culture. Therefore, whether it is for new consumer brands or mature brands, if they want to capture the hearts of users in the future, they must find the cultural codes and core influencers of their circles and communicate in their language.

Today's consumers are digital natives who are materially wealthy, knowledgeable, and have a strong desire for self-realization and self-identity. They hate copy-paste and appreciate individuality and self-expression. For them, they need brands to highlight their personality. The reason they choose a brand is no longer "what the company can sell", but "whether you represent me".

Therefore, for consumers today and even in the future, the sense of meaning and belonging behind the brand is even more important. I buy products from this brand not only because they can meet basic survival needs, but also because the values ​​it conveys and the people it attracts are similar to me.

If a brand can capture these core circle users, it is very likely to capture its own "super users", that is, a group of loyal users who are willing to buy any product the brand produces and spread the word no matter how much the premium is.

So how can we operate these “super users” well? It can be roughly divided into two ideas: online and offline:

By building "private domain + CRM" online, we create an online "temperature zone" for users, provide a space for free communication and a clear and direct feedback path, allowing brands and users to maintain close interaction.

Offline, through physical stores, Pop-up experience stores, exhibitions, markets, etc., we provide "consumer-centric, merchandise-as-props, and service-as-stage, creating a consumer experience that enables consumers to participate, is worth remembering, and even moves consumers."

04 Spiritual consumption

When we talk about "potential brand", "spiritual consumption" is an unavoidable keyword.

In the past, people’s primary task was “survival”, so they cared about “good quality” and “practicality”, which were material functional needs. What the public is pursuing now is "life", so people now not only have material needs, but also need spiritual values.

Whether it is Apple, lululemon, and Patagonia from abroad, or Guanxia, ​​NEIWAI, and MAIA ACTIVE from China, we will find that these brands have created new value that is beyond the current products and categories: new scenes, new values, new emotional stories, new lifestyles, etc.

The spiritual consumption generated by spiritual needs transcends physical boundaries. It not only provides consumers with practicality in real-life scenarios, but also provides emotional sustenance in the spiritual world, allowing consumers to find like-minded people with whom they can resonate spiritually in the cultural community constructed by the brand. This point actually echoes the "people-oriented" mentioned above.

As mentioned in "Cultural Strategy", in the past when we used positioning theory to analyze the success of certain brands, we always ignored the "ideological opportunities created by social and historical changes."

If China wants to develop a "super brand" like Apple, it must have found new cultural opportunities, perfectly integrated them with the brand mission, and then further implemented them based on the combination of mission and ideology: What kind of social problem are you solving? What is your original intention?

There will definitely be many potential opportunities in 2022. For example, many products are now actually made by foreigners for overseas demand. So can Chinese brands use these clues to create products that are more suitable for Chinese people? Can we find spiritual needs that are more in line with the current Chinese people’s sentiments?

05 Equal consumer rights

In recent years, there has been a very interesting phenomenon: consumption in the sinking market has upgraded rapidly, while consumers in the first- and second-tier markets have begun to seek alternatives.

Whether it is the "small town youth" proposed by Tmall or the "small town sister-in-law" that appears on Xiaohongshu, the "rich and free" consumer groups in the sinking market have exploded with strong consumption power after the Internet opened up information transmission and e-commerce logistics solved the problem of the last mile.

When chatting with the founder of a high-priced brand, she mentioned that the brand once received a courier address that was written on a telephone pole in a place she had never heard of. This also shocked her: it turns out that my products are sold in these places.

When first- and second-tier cities become destinations for young talents to flock to, high rents and prices have also caused some working-class people to start looking for affordable goods that can also satisfy their "little certainties in life." Pinduoduo and 1688 quickly became popular among young people. Whether it is Bilibili, Douyin, or Xiaohongshu, we can see tens of thousands of videos and notes about them. There is even a large number of "1688/Pinduoduo store bloggers".

Most people may think that there is not much value in cost-effectiveness and that brands should have a premium. But in fact, there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor in China. In fact, there are still many places and many people who do not use the products we are accustomed to, such as cotton wipes, sanitary napkins, etc. Cost-effective products still have a broad market in China.

If we can enable most people in China or the world to use good and inexpensive products, this will have great social and commercial value. It is also an opportunity and value point for a "kinetic brand" to become a "national brand."

Conclusion

Brand building is a long journey, and Daofa hopes to accompany brand founders, operators and practitioners to cross mountains and rivers and provide solutions.

Author: Knife Research Institute

Source: Knife Skills Research Institute