The new brand is the track that attracts the most attention in the venture capital circle this year.
But when all kinds of forces are involved in it, you will find that in the face of comprehensive changes in products, channels, and media, many “proud” experiences are no longer valid, and new styles and concepts are endlessly changing. Nowadays, it is more and more difficult for a brand to cover more people. Because of the influence of cultural, social and other factors, people’s information acquisition is becoming more and more fragmented. It is difficult for brand companies to cover multiple categories with a single recognition.
Traditional brand marketing emphasizes cognitive bombing and memory-enhancing routines. Nowadays, the new brand era driven by social marketing pursues the new concept of “relationship innovation, user-oriented”. It looks like 9 simple words, but it is too difficult to make it up.
From social platforms and private domain traffic to emerging content platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin, and Station B, every depression is being quickly seized and filled.
However, the disappearance of the big dividend does not mean the end of the new brand. On the contrary, the gradual maturity of new channels and new content allows brands to have more touch points to reach consumers, and also cultivates an unprecedented soil for the birth of new brands.
Based on years of research and the latest precipitation in the consumer industry, I bring a staged and systematic thinking summary for brand entrepreneurs in the new consumer era.
What are the characteristics of the leaders of the past few decades?
The first-generation front-runners often come from resource-based fields, and the typical representatives are the wealthy people who rely on real estate and mining.
In general, the first generation of successful people achieved wealth accumulation from the acquisition of tangible resources. However, the success of these benchmarking companies also has a prerequisite, that is, they have reached the bottom and top of each long cycle. There are also a considerable number of resource-based small and medium-sized players who died in the short cycle and were out. .
The second-generation front-runners are the winners in the competition of commercial resources, and they mainly appear in the field of large commercial consumption.
The second-generation winners are often those entities that have built the most physical transaction connections, such as retail and chain industries, and brand manufacturing companies. The reason why the retail industry can form a super market capitalization company is because this industry has built a huge network effect of consumer transactions and connections. The docking of traffic and goods occurs quickly, making the goods flow very efficiently, thus forming today’s very multi-level The business world.
During this period, large market capitalization listed companies like Wal-Mart, Unilever, Uniqlo, and Moutai emerged.
Such front-runners are value creators, and their value lies in meeting the rigid needs of mankind, such as commodity needs, catering needs, and needs for daily necessities.
The third-generation leader is a networked super-connected platform constructed in a combination of virtual and real or completely virtual.
Super platform providers such as Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Facebook, and Google have broken traditional traffic methods, changed the behavior patterns of modern consumers, and redefined the connection between people, thus forming a more monopolistic one. Super traffic driven platform.
The law of social competition has been completely changed. From the past accumulation, decentralization, bottom-up game competition pattern, the rapid shift to the oligopoly, Matthew effect, centralized, top-down, ultra-short cycle traffic competition pattern.
The super traffic platform further amplifies the greed and desire in human nature, forms a super connection, and uses various unique methods to carry out larger-scale fission and realization. They have become the biggest beneficiaries of capitalization, forming a new species of capital enterprises, which carry out commercial transactions on the one hand and capitalized investments on the other.
Constructing an ecological form of the entire value chain is a brand-new form that has never appeared before.
What are the opportunities for the rise of new brands?
From the perspective of long-term trends, brands will gradually move from product manufacturing to service-oriented, and brands will also become a series of products, services and experiences to meet the more comprehensive needs of consumers. Therefore, the new brand era will give consumers an impulse to buy. Interactive communication is the key.
Brand spirit should help consumers build “personal design”
In recent years, with the extreme abundance of commodities and the rise of the “post-90s” generation as the main consumer, the era of consumers simply consuming commodities is gone. Functional attributes are the most basic demand. The new generation of consumer groups has begun to adopt Consumer tastes to show their personality, propositions and attitudes towards life.
The thermos cup and wolfberry are the “veteran cadres” personality, MUJI is the “Buddhist” personality, and “Supreme” and “AJ” are the cool ones. “Every time you spend money, you are pretending to be who you want to be, or who you want others to think of.” This sentence cannot describe the new consumer demand more clearly.
For example, “tide” is undoubtedly the most popular keyword for the younger generation of consumers. The looting effect caused by the joint model of Uniqlo and KAWS, the outbreak of drug apps and the CHAO community are essentially because “tide” has become a kind of “social “Currency”, the younger generation establishes themselves through consumption, and at the same time declares to their circles who they are in order to gain recognition.
The “goods find people” model, to realize the co-creation of value with users
From the traditional brand to the new brand era, the important change is from operating products to operating users. In the past, the model of product management was mostly to manufacture products and then sell them, and users often needed to follow the search model of “people looking for goods” when consuming.
The user management model in the new brand era is to find products around users. Enterprises are the agents of users and provide various products of the entire system around one type of user group.
Users follow the search model of “goods looking for people” while consuming, while pursuing product value, emotional value, and symbolic value. Brand owners need to win the resonance of users and realize their co-creation with users.
For brand value to resonate with users, it is necessary to achieve the integration of products and consumers and the integration of content and personalized output. Whether it is text, packaging design, graphic stickers, or vibrato, live broadcast, etc., you must fully consider that it can be shared when designing creativity.
Of course, the traditional brand method is still effective in some scenarios, especially in the relatively large and medium-sized cities, which are more sinking county-level markets, but the effect is declining. This trend also provides opportunities for new brands.
Construction and extension of brand private domain traffic pool
Brands are trying another way to acquire long-term users, by using various effective Internet tools to build private domain traffic, or quickly acquire customers, fission, and growth from public domain traffic, and rapidly increase consumers’ purchasing decisions and experience perception. Thereby forming consumers’ rapid recognition of the new brand.
Three barriers to new consumer brands will be built here: innovative and iterative product capabilities, multi-channel and multi-platform capabilities, and brand awareness and communication capabilities.
In this process, the concentration of traditional advertising media is rapidly being broken. The new digital marketing dominated by short videos is changing the path of brand communication, allowing new brands to invest more accurately and increase the input-output rate.
Whether it is a product manufacturer, a retail store, or an e-commerce company, all kinds of business entities are beginning to re-examine the importance of the scene. Because the scene has enough consumer touchpoints, companies have the opportunity to acquire customers at low cost and form a user traffic pool, and then use tools to operate, pull new, fission, and transform these long-term users, explore the full life cycle of users, and finally Consumers’ trust in retailers is transformed into trust in certain categories, forming a private brand model.
Use media thinking to build a brand with social personality
In the future, enterprises will gradually become media. Interesting and sticky content is an important core for increasing user traffic. Of course, it is not that the corporate marketing department has built WeChat, Weibo and other self-media platforms, even if it has completed the transformation of media operations.
More importantly, we must learn to use media-based thinking to operate the market and build brands, open up the company’s products, resources and communication value chain, and build an open platform to maximize brand communication and corporate influence. The company must strive to become a communication Organization.
On the one hand, companies must learn from the media to detonate the topic in order to achieve a multiplier marketing effect; on the other hand, companies must change the original media communication channels.
The essence of media thinking is to build a brand with social personality. Companies need to have media attributes to attract a group of users with similar interests.
New brand marketing enters the era of consumer sovereignty
The FMCG market has passed through the era of product sovereignty and channel sovereignty, and now it has entered the era of consumer sovereignty.
The core of the new brand operation is to reconstruct a marketing system centered on the value of operating users. It is mainly through new marketing methods and new social methods such as WeChat community to reconstruct the relationship between the brand and customers and consumers, from no relationship, weak relationship to relationship, or even strong relationship.
Judging from the current problems faced by brand companies, if they want to effectively solve the problems of the decrease in the number of users and the decline in market share, product marketing alone cannot be effective. Establishing a membership management system centered on the value of operating users can solve the problem of value exchange between enterprises and users. The biggest impact of the Internet on marketing is that the many tools and platforms it creates are profoundly changing marketing efficiency.
For example, companies can use technological means such as small programs to establish a wider range of in-depth interactions between companies and users to influence more consumers.
In addition, we have discovered through research that, in fact, consumers’ single material needs are declining, and their overall needs are rising. Therefore, it has never been seen that service providers will replace commodity producers and circulators to form “final service providers and solution providers.”
Selling products is not only the functional value of the products, but also the establishment of a series of product scenarios, the establishment of “iron powder” consumer centers, more rigid-need consumers into heavy consumers, to provide them with a package service model .
We infer that in the end, brand owners need to transform into a full set of solution providers, and they will provide consumers with a certain type of solution instead of just selling a series of products. After all, single products have obvious “ceilings”.
