What’s the secret to “brand placement” that goes viral?

There is a saying in the branding industry that “nearly 80% of advertising dollars spent are ineffective.”

The beginning of the year is often the time when companies focus on brand planning. Regarding the topic of brand marketing expenditure allocation, we surveyed more than 300 CEOs and brand managers of the Jingwei system and asked them about the issues that they were most concerned about. We found that the issue that bothered everyone the most was the brand investment strategy.

Some people believe that formulating a marketing strategy is difficult, as the difficulty lies in how to estimate the input-output ratio of the budget, how to quantify the effect of the marketing, and how to formulate a cost-effective channel combination. However, how to place a brand is never a problem that can be solved at the tactical level. Companies that think about brands from a tactical level often find it difficult to achieve satisfactory short-term results. It requires the CEO to pay more attention to it from a strategic level, and it also requires the person in charge of actually managing the brand to have a more systematic understanding and strong insight and execution capabilities.

At the recent CHUANG Sharing Conference, Jingwei's marketing brand, the Jingwei PR team systematically broke down the five dimensions of strategy, budget, effect, evaluation and capability from strategy to tactics, and explained to Jingwei companies how to spend money strategically instead of burning money. Below, Enjoy:

1. Brand strategy: How to make enterprises gain an advantageous position in competition

1. Brand strategy after careful planning

The ultimate meaning and value of a brand is to reduce the decision-making costs of the audience. The audience here may be ToC consumers or ToB people. From a deeper perspective, the establishment and exploration of brand strategy is to put the company in a more comfortable and advantageous position in the competitive environment.

In general, all businesses go through four stages:

Phase 1: Low budget and low brand awareness

By analogy, most Pre-A round companies are at this stage, when the brand needs to be deeply involved in the company's initial business positioning and brand positioning. Determining the brand’s positioning and target is the 1 of branding, and subsequent promotion is the 0.

Phase 2: Positioning

During this stage, as the company grows in scale, increases in users, and cash flow, the brand’s mission is to “help the company gain a foothold.” This is because there are at least ten companies racing on the same track, and the brand must help the company to be among the top three and occupy the leading position in order to gain an advantage in the competition.

Stage 3: Look up and see the road, guard the core

Subsequently, many companies will enter the third stage, where their popularity increases and their revenue and profits also increase. However, it is important to remember that competition in all sectors will never end, and even leading companies must guard against arrogance and impatience. At this stage, they must maintain their position in core categories and at the same time be cautious in the development of business diversification to prevent competitors from raiding their backyards.

Phase 4: Seeking a breakthrough

At this stage, some companies may face high visibility but reduced budget. Maybe this is not a good sign, it may mean that the company's growth has stagnated. At this point, the brand needs to help the company think about whether to deploy breakthroughs in brand demand in new markets or tracks.

2. Three key points of brand positioning

No matter what stage they are facing, the starting point of all brands is positioning, which is the core part of all brand strategies. In fact, positioning is about positioning the user’s mental cognition.

Figuratively speaking, in traditional shopping malls, we can see physical shelves; after the increase in the number of commodities and the upgrading of consumption, there is also a shelf in the hearts of users. When people choose a brand, they don’t get to know you through the shelves of corporate promotions, but rather through the shelves that they recognize in their consciousness. This is the cognitive shelf of the mind.

There are two issues that Trout's cognitive theory has not resolved clearly: first, which users are worth studying; second, how to find the mental positioning.

First, we believe that we need to find users who are truly insensitive to price but have great room for growth. Many people will conduct in-depth analysis and research on seed-stage users, but generally, seed-stage users are friends and relatives around them, and the number is too small and may not be representative. At this time, we must deeply explore user data, and then do market projection to see the room for growth in the overall user base.

The second point is that after determining the users, you need to know how to analyze the mental ladder to find a differentiated positioning. The mental ladder is based on users' demands for companies/products in terms of functionality, security, emotion, identity, and values. We will conduct analysis and research on each of these levels. Generally speaking, for products in the early stages with higher decision-making costs, we need to find more opportunities at the functional level. For products with relatively low decision-making costs and a longer brand cycle, we may look for differentiated positioning in terms of emotional identity and other aspects.

Of course, there are different ways of playing in differentiated competition. Some people adopt a follow-up strategy, some directly become track leaders, and some companies are opponents of leading brands. In fact, there is no specific formula. It must be based on the company's own comprehensive analysis of the competitive situation.

2. How brands invest their budgets

1. Know yourself and know your enemy

Brand money is very important, it is the food and ammunition for fighting, and it must come first. The operating conditions and quantities of this ammunition vary for each company. Generally speaking, to make a budget, you must first know yourself and your opponent.

If you don't know this, and the company does a little calculation internally and thinks it's perfect, but when you put it in the context of the entire brand launch, you'll find that it's just a small pebble. Then, at this time, the competitor took out a cannon and bombed, and the entire momentum was covered up by the competitor.

2. Enterprises need to know how much money they can use at most

The company's brand budget should be calculated by CLV ( customer lifetime value) * number of users, which is the cost of the financial value that the entire user contributes to the company during the entire life cycle of purchasing the company's products, multiplied by the expected number of users. Basically, this value is the extreme value of spending money. After calculating it, you should have an idea of ​​how much value the company can generate by spending so much effort to attract so many users. With this number, you can roughly know how much money my brand will cost.

The money a brand has to spend ultimately comes down to this formula: CPM*effective exposure . CPM is fixed, which actually shows that the idea of ​​brand placement and the idea of ​​performance placement are completely different. The effectiveness of advertising is CPA multiplied by the number of users, but the brands are different. The CPM of each brand is fixed, and the CPM sold through each channel is basically the same. However, how to control the effective exposure is not something that can be achieved through refined operations. It depends on investment vision and your control over channels and content.

3. Sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood

How to control channels and content? Before we get into it, we need to emphasize one thing. When allocating energy and budget, I suggest that you focus 50% - 60% of your energy on researching users. In particular, brand managers with higher positions need to understand the users and the entire business development track in terms of strategy, and then think carefully about which company to find to help you with the placement. Secondly, at least 10% of the budget should be put at the beginning and end. This money will definitely not be wasted.

3. How do brands compete for attention?

Is brand investment about channels? Yes and no. Simply put, what we are investing in is a war to seize users' attention and time. Why do I say that? Earlier, we have mentioned that brand positioning is about positioning mental cognition. What is the first step in mental cognition? It is to seize the entrance to his cognition.

There are two lines of deployment for the entrance to cognition. One line intercepts the entrance of traffic , which is very easy to understand. The other line is an exit that I think will be more refreshing and capture people's hearts. These two points must be coordinated to make our brand hit the mark.

1. Traffic entrance

Online and offline traffic should be organically integrated at the traffic entrance. At present, the value of offline traffic has been re-evaluated, and what needs to be deployed are key points on the paths that audiences must pass, such as communities, offices, and entertainment. Of course, this is mainly for people in first- and second-tier cities.

What do these three types of paths resemble? The path and layout of new retail are now moving offline. Why? The logic is the same. Now everyone finds that the noise of online traffic is too loud, and everyone hopes to be able to intercept it at the physical level. The traffic that can be seen is the real traffic.

The second online traffic is delivered through a cross-screen approach that attracts the urgent need for attention. First of all, we must pay attention to the visibility of the head traffic channel: the company must know where the head traffic is, and where the waist and tail traffic is. But shouldn’t we invest in information flow or so-called precise delivery in top channels from the very beginning? This kind of investment method will often make your visibility very low; secondly, you must pay attention to the closed loop of traffic delivery. If you want to invest, you must create a closed loop, especially now that data from giants have opened up a lot of behavioral data tracks from video to e-commerce to information. You can use a cross-screen and closed-loop data concept to do this kind of investment, and you may get some surprising results.

2. The outlet of people’s hearts

The way to capture people's hearts is content marketing . Simply put, only things that touch people's hearts will go viral and generate conversions , making users come to you. First, we must tell the story of our products well; second, the higher demand is to become good friends with users. You have to become an authoritative expert, or even an opinion leader in the lifestyle and spiritual fields.

How to achieve this level of advancement and climbing? Generally speaking, you can only be effective if you deploy your content in three dimensions. First, the company’s own IP image, what is your personality image? This is very important. You must have your own self-media handle, leader IP, and user UGC content to shape your own IP position.

Secondly, it is not enough to just say good things about yourself, you have to convince others and make them believe it. This is the IP that enhances credibility. You need to unite credible KOLs , organize the media matrix, and link knowledge marketing . They will also enhance the credibility of our IP to a great extent.

Finally, with their own core and credit enhancement, companies with more needs and more budgets can use traffic IP to exchange cost for time, and time for space, to quickly increase brand visibility and popularity. Of course, there are many methods to do this, such as pleasure marketing, sports marketing, internet celebrity marketing, etc., which can all play a very important role in helping you shape the content. But one thing I want to emphasize is that, screen-sweeping is very good, but people who are doing branding cannot do content marketing with the mentality of screen-sweeping. You must be focused and continuous, and deploy your marketing at every key node. Of course, leveraging the power of others is also very important in content marketing.

3. Three possibilities for future screen swiping

We have summarized several trends that may go viral based on past experiences and future trends.

First, leverage IP. IP is a large cultural symbol that is emotionally appealing, and opinion leaders have a leading influence. Where are the top IPs concentrated? Everyone’s first reaction is celebrities, entertainment, what else? Variety shows in the entertainment industry include variety shows, web dramas, TV dramas, sports-related, and highly exposed IPs related to the celebrity cultural industry chain. This is indeed very important traffic, but if you are a "big money player" you must learn to identify the quality of high-quality top IPs.

There is also what we call dark horse IP. If you don’t have tens of millions of dollars, I suggest that you must have a discerning eye to find dark horse IP. You will find that in some vertical segments, places where young people gather can often breed many high-quality IPs. Because of the cultural identity involved, its stickiness and explosive power are very strong. In addition, in the knowledge payment stage, there are also very good dark horse IP opportunities.

Having said so much, the core of IP is how you choose the IP. The first thing is the matching degree, which is really very difficult. Some people understand matching very well, but everyone will inevitably fall into a misunderstanding. If I want to improve my brand, should I just find one that is more influential, better, and more powerful than my brand? Is that enough? This is not the case, because 1+1 is not necessarily greater than 2. Before your brand awareness reaches a certain level, you are likely to be overshadowed by other brands. It is very important to build your own brand awareness first.

Secondly, what is advocated may be related to red themes. For example, everyone has seen last year’s Wolf Warrior, which is linked to the main theme. Some family ethics dramas related to realistic themes are also quite good. There are also some more vertical ones, such as suspenseful crime solving, which will not deviate from the main theme, so you have to be very careful not to cross the red line.

And then there’s the sense of quality. The sense of quality is very important. Many people will ask: Isn’t IP just about finding celebrities and top-level names? No, now the overall IP has been developing to another level, and people pay more attention to the quality of producers and the abilities of screenwriters. The ability of the producer is very, very important. We have seen many dramas last year that may not have such big stars or such a gorgeous lineup but they still became popular. Don’t blindly believe in stars, as stars can also have negative effects.

Another issue is visibility. Big IPs are often the target of a rush of top brands from all walks of life to grab resources. How much money you have and what level of visibility you can achieve is something that everyone needs to be very vigilant about. So sometimes I suggest that if you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, but only tens of millions, you might as well find a second-tier IP to do it, so that you can increase your own visibility. This is very important.

The last practical question is, all IPs are not suitable for the kind of delivery that requires a strong promotion rhythm. Why? Because there are various uncertainties in time, everyone should also pay attention to controlling the timing.

If you don’t have that much money but still want to dominate the screen by leveraging content, there are two opportunities. One of the opportunities is more inclined towards the ToB population, or corporate brands with higher decision-making thresholds. You can make good use of practical information , that is, knowledge marketing is a very good opportunity to build your own image as a professional authority.

But there are several key nodes. The first is that knowledge points are very important, because when you make dry goods, the larger the granularity of the dry goods, the harder it is to resonate with people. You must tap into the rigid needs of users. In addition, it is very important who does the work. The people who can really promote the explosion of practical information are those who are very authoritative in the professional field. Therefore, PGC is more suitable for utilizing information nodes with explosive dry goods. In addition, you can use your imagination in terms of form. You can try live broadcast or text and pictures.

Second, if the decision-making threshold for your product or service is relatively low, you can take the people-friendly approach. Emotional marketing will also trigger screen-sweeping. Last year, the most screen-sweeping topics were large topics such as People's Daily's military uniform photos and Wolf Warrior. Why? In fact, they are all playing emotional cards. Why are emotional cards so popular nowadays? Because China has probably developed to this stage now. With every economic improvement, this demand will be brought about. At this time, the awakening of self-awareness will be very important, so identity recognition is a very important starting point for triggering emotional resonance.

You will find that the things that resonate with everyone are not the type that say "you are not a Chinese if you don't repost", but there is also a sense of collective consciousness. For example, hair loss among those born after 1990 and greasy middle-aged people all have labels, so everyone should be very sensitive to the label of identity. Then, you have to be a master who is very good at creating conflicts. Dramatic conflict can easily trigger people's emotions. You have to learn to create the negative and positive sides of emotions so that your emotions can be fermented in a real sense.

Also, when people post this kind of emotional content, there is a technique that always works, which is reversal. This reversal of first suppressing and then praising is also very important. Finally, emotions must find a fermentation point. You must find the group of people with the identity label mentioned above, and let these people form a focus and explosion point in their minds first. This way, the speed of rotation will be very fast.

4. How to systematically evaluate brand-effect performance

How to prepare and collect samples for research? I can only sincerely tell you that brand data can only be viewed systematically. A company cannot evaluate the effectiveness of your brand based on a single exposure. It must have three-dimensional data established.

First of all, exposure data is certain. If you can’t get very cost-effective exposure, nothing else matters. The second is qualitative data, such as whether the user's first mention rate to you has increased, and whether their subjective perception of you has changed. These are the underlying data; what is more important is how to connect it with the second-level sales data. People who build brands must know the rules and situations of sales, otherwise all communication will end up being zero. The third level is that after connecting all these data, you can predict the behavior of your future brand target users by utilizing external data, and you can use some reverse tracking data for reference and incubation. But this requires a strong data team to support it. I can see that in the future more and more Internet companies will connect all the underlying data, mid-level data and reverse data. Only in this way can they build the entire brand in a targeted manner and examine the results dynamically and prospectively.

5. How to improve the capabilities of the brand team

The last point is about the issue of capabilities. Here I have connected high-level capabilities and grassroots capabilities and discussed them together. Some capability survey reports will show the factors that CEOs are most dissatisfied with about the spending department: first, strategic ability; second, user thinking; and third, data.

In addition, why do many managers of spending departments encounter career bottlenecks? To a large extent, it is not due to his external abilities, experience or qualifications, but rather to his weak internal motivation to learn. Secondly, aesthetics is very important if you sincerely want to build a brand, not just focus on performance. You must find someone with aesthetic judgment, whether it is selecting IP or deploying channels. Without this judgment it will be disastrous. Then there is communication, which includes upward communication, downward communication, and parallel communication. Especially if you want to get so much data in the future, whether it is for the CEO or to cooperate with various departments, you must be able to clearly explain where the value points are and what you can provide for the company.

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

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