It is difficult to promote new products. How to open up the market by leveraging well-known brands?

For enterprises, innovation is not an easy thing, especially when they want to create a new product and bring it to market, which is more difficult than ordinary products. The biggest reason is that in the user's default choice, the new product is not recognized, or the recognition, recognition and trust are the lowest. Since new products are so difficult to promote in the early stages, is there any way to leverage their power? To reduce the difficulty of promotion?

It is said that you can see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants. Let’s take a look at how those successful new products are made.

Case 1: Real Kung Fu

Identify your competitors and create conflict

The catering brand Zhen Gongfu planned by Ye Maozhong should be well known to many marketers . I believe everyone is familiar with it. We all know that Zhen Gongfu focuses on nutritious Chinese fast food, and its competitors are foreign fast food brands such as KFC and McDonald's . It compares the nutrition of steamed dishes with the default choice of fried foods, and all its promotions and marketing , even the choice of store locations, are targeted in order to make this conflict more prominent. When the target users of KFC and McDonald's see the default brand store selection, they will also see Zhen Gongfu and the corresponding slogan: "Steamed is better for nutrition." Today, I will use Mr. Ye’s classic case and 5w2h to analyze the psychology of several customers in such a scenario:

From the table above, we can see that the target customers of fast food should be mainly white-collar workers, other business people, parents, etc. Before they have real skills, they choose fast food more because of the good environment, fast service, good taste, standardized and relatively clean ingredients, etc. When they see "steamed food is more nutritious", they will naturally have a comparative impression of high-calorie fried foods such as French fries and hamburgers, which will make them want to eat healthier. In addition, white-collar workers are generally concerned about sub-health, and parents are also very concerned about their children's health. In comparison between the two, the replacement cost is low, and the advantages are more obvious, which can easily prompt users to take action and change their past default choices.

In the old default experience for couples and students, the reasons for their choices were more focused on the environment and atmosphere. When faced with the new product of healthy Chinese fast food, Zhen Gongfu does not have an advantage in these two aspects, and the replacement cost is also high, making it difficult for users to change their past default choices.

Next, let’s analyze why we didn’t target other Chinese fast food restaurants as competitors at the time, also using the 5w2h analysis :

In comparison, even though Zhen Gongfu has a better environment and is more nutritious and healthier, among white-collar workers, Zhen Gongfu has relatively fewer dishes and the steaming method causes some loss of taste in the dishes. The replacement cost is not high, but the advantages and disadvantages are equal.

Parents are more concerned about their children's health and are not so picky about taste. The replacement cost is not high, so they are more willing to choose Zhen Gongfu.

When couples choose between environment and taste, those who are not too picky about taste will tend to choose the one with better environment, but young people like to try new things, so it is not normal for them to choose Zhen Gongfu.

Although students attach importance to the atmosphere of a dining party, they don’t care much about the price.

Overall, among the four groups of people, parents have greater purchasing power and are more likely to choose Zhen Gongfu, and the replacement cost is not high. In the comparison between other groups of people, the contrast between the old experience and the new experience selected by default is obvious, but the advantages and disadvantages are also equal. Among the factors that influence consumers' choices, the advantages are not obvious.

Case 2: Sailing Expansion

Find the right category and create differentiation

This is a new cross-border integrated product. The core business of this company is sailing experience and training. At that time, the expansion of offline business faced bottlenecks, and it was necessary to launch new products to expand the market. During the positioning process, it took half a year of repeated sorting.

At that time, sailing was a sport for only a few people, and there were three types of target users, such as sports enthusiasts, some wealthy people with free time and money, and tourists traveling to the seaside. The default choice for sports enthusiasts is some sailing associations, which gather many professional enthusiasts; the default choice for the rich is to hire a private coach; tourists are scattered and random and lack scale, and cannot form large and stable sales. Let's look at the table below. Compared with the default selection, it does not have any advantages.

Finally, the founder, Mr. Zhou, chose corporate development training for senior executives, integrating development and team management with sailing experience training to form a new product. During the marketing planning process, this product was classified into the expansion category because the search data at the time showed that there was very little data searching for sailboats, while there was more data searching for expansion and the market was also larger.

To this day, there is still no index for sailing training, which shows that this kind of demand is very rare on the search engine side. I remember that the website was optimized to the homepage within a few days of its launch.

However, expansion training has been included since 2011, and has been increasing year by year, with a relatively high demand.

Also use 5W2H for analysis:

By comparing the new and old experiences, it was found that in the past land development training and sailing development training, sailing development has more advantages and lower replacement costs.

Finally, the keywords related to the website are mainly expansion keywords, which are used to divert traffic to the website. When target customers see the novel training method of sailing + expansion, they will stand out from many expansion websites and gain attention and business opportunities. After all, people like novel activities, and the difference is obvious enough compared with the default choices in the past, such as human wall and falling backwards. On the website, the content also focuses on other expansion sports, as shown below:

Case 3, 85°C

Find the right customers and supplement their needs

85°C is a Taiwanese brand that has adopted the strategy of opening a store on the same street as Starbucks in order to grab the attention of target customers. The coffee is imported from the same raw materials as Starbucks. On the one hand, it conveys the impression that 85°C and Starbucks are of consistent quality and taste. On the other hand, it continues to develop new products. The diverse combination of its cakes, bread and coffee meets the needs of users in the commercial area for leisure and quick energy replenishment. Let's compare the two:

Compared with the default choice of drinking coffee at Starbucks, 85°C gives users more choices, while the price is one-third of Starbucks, satisfying the needs of most people to enjoy high-quality products at a low price. Although Starbucks has a better environment, for most people, only a few can enjoy leisure time quietly and for a long time. Instead, snacks with more affordable prices and more varieties are more popular.

Case 4: Lancome Little Black Bottle

Find the right benchmark and reduce the price

After Lancome's Little Black Bottle was launched, many brands have launched their own Little Black Bottle series. Are they really selling the Little Black Bottle? No, they are buying from an already educated market. As you can imagine, most brands say: Our products are no worse than Lancome's, but the price is only half of theirs. The target customers of these follow-up products are those who often pay attention to big brands but do not have such high purchasing power. These target customers have been educated by big brands and recognize the quality represented by these products.

When new products are sold with the help of Lancome's Little Black Bottle, the cost is the lowest and the risk of failure is also low. This is why many small brands imitate big brands, especially in fast-moving consumer goods industries such as clothing and cosmetics.

From the search results of Tmall Beauty, we can see that there are many recommended brands that have the little black bottle.

Looking at the price and sales volume of the products on the first screen, the results are good.

These four cases all use different marketing methods. Although there are multiple reasons for their success, they all did one thing right: the new products leveraged mature brands or products, allowing users to approach the product from a familiar perspective, quickly understand the product and build trust, thereby saving effort in promotion and sales.

To sum up

1. The prerequisite for promoting new products is to assume that customers don’t know you. Otherwise, it is easy to be unable to move forward. Being good at using the default choice of mature brands or products can quickly open up the market;

2. The default selection of competitors, target customers, categories, and benchmarks must be beneficial to your own products or brands, and the advantages must be obvious enough to reduce the difficulty for users to change the default selection;

3. It is consistent with user perception and supported by sufficient information.

The author of this article is @Marketing Flight and it is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games