How can brands achieve growth in 2020?

Let’s first think about the following questions:

• Why can old domestic brands like White Rabbit, Pechoin, and Lao Gan Ma frequently appear in the vision of young people through various cross-border operations?
• Why are jokes like #kindle盖面更香# and #VANS王安石#, which were originally just online jokes, actually made into reality by official brands, and the results are quite good?
• Why are more and more daily chemical products, such as toothpaste and laundry detergent, now beginning to adopt a beauty and skin care tone, both in terms of product appearance and marketing methods?
• Why can Ele.me now allow you to order takeout and buy more things like an online supermarket?
• Why is Xiaomi, which was originally positioned as a "direct-selling mobile phone company", now developing its IOT?
• Why did Haidilao, which relies on service differentiation to position itself, launch the self-heating hotpot called Zihaiguo, and did not use another brand name?
• Why is it that P&G, once an oligopoly in personal care and fast-moving consumer goods, is now seeing its market share in most of its product lines decline year after year? Fortunately, they are beginning to change this situation.
• Why is it that Wanglaoji and Jiaduobao, who had gone to court many times over the red can dispute, now no longer care about the red can and even launched bottle designs with various appearances?

To sum up all the above problems, they are:

Why are those seemingly "heretical" things accepted by more and more brands and even shine?

Why are those companies that stick to their original positioning gradually forgotten in consumer choices and eventually become mediocre?

There are actually two forces at work behind this, one is called "positioning" and the other is called "misalignment."

Regarding "positioning", I believe many people know more or less. Proposed by Ries and Trout in the late 1970s, it is considered one of the greatest marketing theories of that era. The core is that the company must first determine the category positioning, and then occupy the consumer's mental memory through continuous communication and reinforcement, so that they will reflexively purchase the brand's products.

Positioning theory has successfully helped many brands expand their territory, and even helped them return to the top from being on the verge of death, such as IBM, General Electric, Jiaduobao, and Xiangpiaopiao Milk Tea.

As for the word "dislocation", it was not my original creation or deliberate coining. In fact, as early as 2016, Liu Yuetan, a postdoctoral fellow in marketing at the University of Missouri, proposed the "dislocation" theory. The core of the theory is to use a method that exceeds consumers' psychological expectations to dislocate consumers' original psychological labels of the brand, thereby achieving consumer satisfaction with unexpected surprises.

Seeing this, you may think that I am also going to say something like "positioning is dead". In fact, some colleagues in the industry have made similar remarks, and they are not without reason. But the "misalignment" I mentioned in this article is actually relative to "positioning". Without the brand's previous positioning, there would be no misalignment of consumers' original psychological benchmarks for the brand. So, in a sense, I believe positioning is still playing its role.

However, in this era of wild growth and stock, just like the cases mentioned at the beginning, the balance of these two forces is slowly tilting towards the "misalignment" end. So as 2020 is approaching, I dare to write this article. The core point is: instead of sticking to "positioning", it is better for brands to grow in a "misaligned" way.

This article mainly wants to make two things clear:

• Why do brands go from “positioning” to “mispositioning”?
• How can brands achieve “misaligned” growth?

Below, enjoy!

1. Why does it go from “positioning” to “mispositioning”?

Let us first review the growth logic of enterprises under the guidance of traditional positioning theory. It is mainly driven by two factors: consumer mental resources and channel distribution capabilities. The former determines consumer choices, and the latter provides consumption channels for these choices.

Let’s take the example of Jiaduobao. Why can the slogan “If you’re afraid of getting a sore throat, drink Jiaduobao” help a herbal tea brand achieve annual sales of tens of billions? It is because at that time it firmly occupied the minds of consumers who were “afraid of getting a sore throat” through overwhelming advertising, variety show sponsorship and other communication methods. Coupled with its powerful offline distribution channels, when consumers are eating hot pot, staying up late, or in dry weather, etc., they will naturally think of buying a can of Jiaduobao to prevent getting a sore throat.

In that era, consumers’ shopping patterns can be summarized as “mental memory purchases”, which means that consumers make purchases based on their memories of brands. However, consumers’ minds are limited, so limited that they can only remember 1-2 brands in each category. Therefore, companies must first have a clear category positioning, and then continuously strengthen communication based on this positioning to allow consumers to remember you and form cognition, so that they will continue to buy, and the company will achieve sustained growth.

This theory was an absolutely unchallengeable authority before 2012. But later, we gradually discovered its flaws, and more and more brands surpassed this theory and have developed well so far. As a result, the saying that "positioning is dead" became popular.

The failure of the "positioning" theory is largely due to the fundamental changes in consumer shopping patterns.

The previous "mental memory purchase" model was based on two premises: one is information asymmetry, consumers need to remember which brand is good in their minds and then make a choice; the other is the separation of brand information transmission and stores. Consumers may see the advertisement and wait three or four days or even longer before actually going to the offline store to buy. This time difference also makes mental memory a guiding factor for purchases.

But now these two premises have basically been broken, resulting in the "mental memory" model playing an increasingly weaker role in truly guiding consumers' shopping choices (of course it has only become weaker, not disappeared).

First of all, the emergence of various search platforms has saved consumers from having to spend time remembering brands.

The search platforms mentioned here include both traditional search engines like Baidu and content shopping guide platforms like Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Taobao, etc. Think about what it would be like if we want to buy something now. Boys may go to Baidu or Zhihu to search for similar answers, while girls may go to Xiaohongshu or Taobao's must-buy list to see relevant recommendations, and then buy it.

Then, under the wave of "product and effect integration", the seamless connection between brand information transmission and various e-commerce platforms (Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo, mini programs, Weidian, etc.) allows consumers to achieve "what you see is what you get". After reading an article recommended by an expert, they can immediately place an order to purchase it through the mini program. This also breaks the previous model in which the communication field and the sales field were separated and consumers had to rely on mental memory to guide their purchasing choices.

When the "mental memory purchase" under positioning theory gradually becomes ineffective, what is the force that can truly influence consumers' purchasing choices today?

The answer is "misalignment".

This power can bring consumers a sense of freshness or surprise regardless of whether they are actively searching or passively receiving brand information. For example, when we see that the nearly 60-year-old White Rabbit Milk Candy "has preserved the classic and become an Internet celebrity", when we see that the Kindle in our hands can use Internet memes to attack itself, when we see that the same old toothpaste is suddenly given a fresh look, when we see that we can buy emergency lipstick on Ele.me within 30 minutes, when we see that various Xiaomi products at home can be controlled through IOT... we will all be surprised to varying degrees.

For those brands that only stick to their own positioning, the consequence is: will consumers remember you?

Remember, but will they choose you often? It seems to be getting less and less.

Dislocation will play a more important role as the younger generation, mainly those born in the 1990s and Generation Z, gradually become mainstream consumers. In front of this generation, it is unrealistic to talk about brand loyalty. They might have been queuing up to buy an iPhone yesterday, but today they might buy a Huawei. They might be saying they only drink Starbucks for coffee today, but tomorrow they might all be holding a cup of internet celebrity coffee and posting it on their Moments.

If the above is more like talking about the brand's "misalignment" in marketing from the consumer's perspective, it can bring a sense of surprise to consumers and thus affect their shopping decisions.

Next, let’s talk about why there is a shift from “positioning” to “misalignment” from the perspective of corporate growth.

I noticed that Boston Consulting Group and Tmall proposed a "Grow" growth model this year. Grow is composed of four English words, namely: Gain (referring to the opportunity to penetrate the existing category), Retain (the opportunity to increase category repurchase), bOOst (the growth space of category bills of lading) and Widen (the opportunity to extend to related categories).

Obviously, the first three are about growth opportunities for existing categories, and the last one is about expansion opportunities into new categories. This shows that even the fast-moving consumer goods sector, where positioning theory was once most successfully practiced, is breaking the constraints of its original category positioning and starting to expand into new categories in order to achieve greater growth. This can be understood as a "misalignment" in product categories.

The case that impressed me most recently was the "self-heating hot pot" made by Haidilao. In the past, none of us would have imagined that a hotpot brand that differentiated itself by putting service first would one day launch a product like instant hotpot that completely violated its original positioning, and still use the brand name Haidilao. I wonder what the positioning master would think after seeing this.

In fact, before the "misalignment" of product categories began in the fast-moving consumer goods sector, Internet companies had already begun to expand their operations through "reverse positioning."

For example, JD.com was originally a 3C e-commerce platform, and its positioning slogan at the time was "To buy 3C products online, go to JD.com", which established a strong mental memory among consumers. In theory, JD.com should have grown bigger and stronger based on this positioning. But later everyone knew that JD.com did not just stay in the 3C field that it was good at, but later got involved in fast-moving consumer goods and even the clothing field where its rival Taobao was the strongest. Now it has become a comprehensive B2C retail platform.

A similar example is the Ele.me example mentioned at the beginning. The change in slogan from "If you are hungry, go to Ele.me" to "Whether you are hungry or not, go to Ele.me" is also a staggered growth of the category.

So, why did the brand go from "positioning" to "mispositioning"?

The reasons can be summarized into two aspects: one is reflected in marketing, where the misalignment of product or information dissemination has gradually replaced the "mental memory purchase" model under positioning and has become a core factor influencing the shopping decisions of the younger generation of consumers; the other is reflected in the growth of the company. The misalignment has become another opportunity to help companies develop new categories and achieve growth under their existing operations.

2. How can brands achieve “misaligned” growth?

Based on the foundation of the first part, we can divide brand "misalignment" into several levels of strategies.

At the most basic level, there should be a dislocation of categories. For example, cases of reverse positioning growth such as Haidilao, JD.com, and Ele.me have expanded into new categories based on the existing category positioning.

The next level is product dislocation. For example, many daily chemical products now begin to deviate from the original characteristics of the category. For example, toothpaste was originally marketed for its core functional properties such as whitening and tooth health, but now you will find that unique ingredients and appearance have become the core characteristics of this category.

The top layer can be the dislocation in the marketing communication level, such as the cross-border development of White Rabbit milk candy, the cover of Kindle, the fashionable paralysis of Chivas, the transformation of the vegetable market by BMW, etc. These are marketing communication activities that can break the fatigue of consumers' information acceptance at the time.

Different brands may be in different fields and have different resources, so the levels of dislocation they can achieve may be different, but that’s okay. Next, I will talk about how brands can achieve "misaligned" growth from these three levels.

1. Category-level dislocation: looking for opportunities to expand into new categories

First of all, I am not advocating that all companies must develop new product categories in order to achieve growth. Because as in the "Grow" model, the first three talk about how to achieve growth through in-depth operations in existing categories, and only the last one talks about considering opportunities to expand into new categories.

Therefore, when you are still not sure whether to do this, you can reflect on this: Are the existing product categories no longer able to meet the company's growth? For example, have the scenarios and populations that need to be penetrated been almost fully developed? Is there no room for growth in repurchase rate and pricing power?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then maybe you can start considering a category dislocation strategy.

The question arises again: How do I find opportunities to expand into new product categories?

Here are three factors for your reference. The intersection of these three is the type of opportunity you can try.

The first factor is whether the current consumption trend is sufficient to support the market for this new product category, and the fundamental factor that determines the market is consumer demand.

The reason why Haidilao launched the self-heating pot is that there is actually a large number of people born after 1995 who want to eat hot pot but don’t want to go out. The biggest characteristics of this group of people are that they “save trouble” and “are lazy”, which is the so-called “lazy economy”. Self-heating hot pot can well meet the consumption needs of this group of people, and this demand is on an upward trend. In fact, thanks to the popularity of the post-95s generation, self-heating hot pot has not only remained popular for a whole year, but also has seen the emergence of many new varieties. Self-heating spicy strips hotpot, self-heating snail noodles, self-heating crayfish pot, self-heating sukiyaki pot... various kinds of "self-heating xx pot" have appeared one after another, making people admire the creativity of foodies.

If you have insight into such a consumer market and there are currently no corresponding unicorn brands, you can consider whether to enter the market.

The second factor is the relevance of the new product category to be expanded to the company’s original product categories.

This is easy to understand. Although Haidilao has launched self-heating hot pot, it has not yet left the big category of hot pot. If one day it starts making tea, coffee or 3C products, I may not understand this world anymore.

In the consumer goods sector, it is actually very easy to judge whether new categories are related to existing categories. But we cannot look at Internet platforms in such a narrow sense. For example, JD.com and Ele.me mentioned above, they look more at the correlation between user demands on these platforms. For example, we all know that JD.com users tend to be more male, and they will buy 3C electronic products. So is there a demand for Durex? Do you need other daily necessities? Of course there is, that’s why we have JD.com today.

However, the strength of demand correlation will affect the subsequent development of new categories. For example, why JD.com’s clothing business has never been as big as Taobao is because the platform tends to have male users.

The third factor to consider when looking for new product category opportunities is whether the company has sufficient backup resources to manage them.

We can use the example of Vancl’s crazy expansion that eventually dragged itself down as an example.

2011 was the heyday of Vancl. It was reported that at that time Vancl had more than 30 product lines, selling not only clothing, but also home appliances, digital products, department stores, and even mops and kitchen knives. In this year, Chen Nian set Vancl's annual sales target at 10 billion yuan. However, the company suffered huge losses that year, with sales reaching only about one-third of the target sales.

Many people attributed this failure to Vancl’s mistake in its category expansion strategy, and felt that if it had only focused on the footwear and apparel field in which it excelled, it would not have suffered a series of subsequent failures. This statement is actually untenable. If JD.com can expand its product categories, why can't Vancl?

The fundamental reason is that after its blind expansion, Vancl did not have sufficient resources to manage its product inventory, production lines, capital chain, etc., which led to inventory backlogs, tight production lines, and funds. Later, it triggered internal strife and layoffs within the company. This series of vicious events eventually caused Vancl to fall into decline.

2. Product-level misalignment: misalignment of the original characteristics of the category

This is an era where marketing is returning to products. More and more brands are beginning to focus their marketing on the products themselves, creating topical products to build momentum and boost sales, rather than doing all kinds of unrealistic communications and then launching products as before. This is also the reason why content seeding, a marketing model, is becoming more and more common.

What is content seeding?

To put it simply, first make a product popular, and then quickly build awareness for the entire brand. This is exactly the opposite of the logic of the traditional marketing model. Traditionally, we build the brand first and then promote the product.

Content marketing provides many opportunities for small and medium-sized brands, because they don’t have to spend so much marketing budget to build a strong brand influence. As long as your product has a popular point, it can be quickly recognized in the market.

I personally think that what this reflects is actually the change in consumption motivations of the rising younger generation of consumers (those born in the 1990s and Generation Z), from consumption of brand value to consumption of the unique experience of the product itself.

So, how do you build a product like this?

The answer is to learn to deviate from the original characteristics of the category.

In this regard, it is actually worthwhile for us to learn from some of the popular Internet celebrity products that are now emerging. When it comes to internet celebrity products, many people may sneer at them, but in fact, there is a reason why most brands can rise quickly and become grass-planting harvesters.

For example, in early 2018, within less than a month after the toothpaste brand NYSCPS was launched on the market, it attracted more than 70 agents to join, and achieved sales of 70,000 tubes and nearly 6 million in sales. So far, Canban has obtained five rounds of financing. After completing a financing of 50 million yuan in May this year, Canban established the strategy of "creating a new trendy brand of daily chemical products", which is based on the powerful product dislocation operation logic.

Compared with the ever-changing cosmetics, the toothpaste category, which belongs to the daily chemical sector, has not seen any large-scale innovative products for a long time. The same old paste-like texture, plastic tubes and paper box packaging have never been able to get rid of the claims of anti-caries, whitening, hemostasis and anti-allergy properties. As a result, a series of toothpastes with added ingredients such as bamboo salt, mint, enzymes, or traditional Chinese medicine formulas have emerged.

However, Canban has pioneered an unusual toothpaste brand development path. It advocates "nourishing the oral cavity like caring for the skin", which is a category characteristic that has never been seen in toothpaste before.

Based on the characteristics of this core category, Canban first made a bold breakthrough in packaging, adopting a bottle shape similar to that of sunscreen. The solid-color bottle body differentiated by the ingredients is matched with a white bottle cap. The contrasting color design is both fresh and more visually impactful.

In addition to pursuing the freshness of the containers, the design inspiration for the packaging boxes of the first series of Canban toothpaste all comes from stamps. It is retro yet smart and has a strong cultural identity. The appearance is good, and the ingredients and the feeling of use will never disappoint you. The reason why Sanban toothpaste adopts bottled squeeze packaging is mainly because most of its toothpastes are gel-like in texture and have stronger fluidity.

Plant fibers are used instead of chemical glue, and hydrated silica is used instead of traditional abrasives, which makes the toothpaste become fluid. The foam produced during use is also finer and can quickly spread around the teeth after entering the mouth, achieving an efficient cleaning effect.

Why did Canban create such category characteristics for toothpaste?

This is because oral care is divided into two parts: hard tissue and soft tissue, and traditional toothpaste basically focuses on the former. While ensuring the essential functions of traditional toothpaste, Canban has added ingredients commonly found in skin care products such as caviar, San Diego bird's nest, and Australian sweet orange. These formulas will mainly act on the soft tissues in the mouth, playing a protective and nourishing role.

Similar Internet celebrity brands that have become Internet celebrities through the misalignment of product characteristics include Sandunban Coffee, HFP, Half Acre Flower Field, San Gu, etc. But of course there are also many short-lived Internet celebrity products, such as Answer Tea, Bubble Mask, Aoxue, etc. Why can't they last?

There may be many reasons. For example, some are to collect IQ tax, some are to over-raise consumers' expectations, and some are to deviate from the core consumption motivation. It is enough for users to just try something new. Therefore, this also tells us that when doing product dislocation, the new characteristics of the category should still avoid the above.

3. Dislocation of communication level: Breaking consumers’ information fatigue

In fact, dislocation is a dynamic process, whether it is category dislocation, product dislocation, or even more so for dislocation at the communication level. Because information is the easiest thing for consumers to obtain in the world. After all, we live in an information explosion every day. This in turn requires us to consider consumers' information fatigue threshold as much as possible when making dislocations at the communication level.

What does it mean?

That is, today you let two unrelated brands do a cross-border collaboration, consumers find it fresh and the communication is misaligned, but when countless brands start to engage in cross-border collaborations, it is no longer effective. Similar things include various offline pop-up stores, selling personalized personalities, talking about women's equality, etc., which cannot be considered as communication dislocations.

There is a practice that may barely be considered as such, which is the brand's official meme-playing, such as the cover of Kindle, VANS Wang Anshi, Chinua's fashionable paralysis, etc. After all, most brands are usually very serious, but what consumers like to see most is actually the brand's official meme-playing, self-deprecating, or even failure. It depends on whether the brand can control these communication factors that bring their own topics well.

But these are actually short-term communication gimmicks, which may only be suitable for a single campaign or social topic. After that, consumers will become "immune" to them, and they will have to spend a lot of effort to think of new gimmicks next time. This is not a long-term solution.

The real long-term solution is to create a sense of "dislocation" for consumers in the overall brand image communication, which will make them feel that the entire brand is cool.

So, how can we make a brand cool in the minds of consumers?

Some people may say: Ah, isn’t this just making the brand younger? Give it a new logo, claiming that it has upgraded its image, and then hire a younger spokesperson, who can say something that reflects his or her personality. At worst, he or she can develop a series of products with a youthful style, such as the second dimension, blind boxes, and jargon. This is a typical brand's self-entertainment and youth-oriented marketing routine. Anyway, I am immune to this practice and don't feel anything about it.

To use Li Jiaoshou’s conclusion, the key to whether a brand is “cool” or not lies in whether it is the first to break the current widespread but unreasonable conventions. If a brand conveys such information at the communication level, then it will be cool in the minds of consumers, which is what we call communication dislocation.

For example, in Apple’s “1984” commercial, the female model in a white Apple T-shirt rushed into the set and smashed the big screen with a hammer. The action of “Big Brother”, which symbolized the mind controller, was actually conveying to the users at the time Apple’s brand concept of daring to challenge unreasonable authority.

The later emergence of iPod broke the unreasonable phenomenon that "consumers have to buy an entire CD for a song they like."

Summarize

Finally, let’s review the context of the article again. It mainly talks about two things.

The first thing is why the brand goes from "positioning" to "mispositioning".

On the one hand, the "mental memory purchasing" model gradually positioned by marketing dislocation has become a core factor influencing consumers' purchasing decisions; on the other hand, in terms of corporate growth, dislocation has become another opportunity to help companies develop new product categories and achieve growth under their existing operations.

The second thing is how brands can achieve "misaligned" growth. It introduces the corresponding misaligned methods that different brands can consider from the perspectives of category misalignment, product misalignment and communication misalignment.

Today is the last day of 2019, I wish you all a happy new year 2020! Let’s make progress together next year!

Author: JS Planner

Author's public account: JS Planner (ID: powerpluspoint)