The life of a wizard in the marketing maniac Ye Mao

In 1968, on a small fishing boat in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, a poor family added a new mouthful of people.

The newborn was a boy with a tiger's head, the boy's surname was Ye, and his mother named him Ye Shijin.

Perhaps he felt a wind chill during childbirth, since Ye Shijin was born, his mother's health has been not good, and his father has to often take his mother to the shore to see a doctor, sometimes unable to return home for several months.

One year after the parents left, the food on the ship was eaten until only one pumpkin remained.

Ye Shijin, who was only 7 years old at the time, and his sister cut the pumpkin into slices, and the two of them ate it separately. Coupled with the few fish that could occasionally be caught, I lived for ten days and finally waited until my parents returned.

From birth until school, Ye Shijin had hardly left the river where he was born, and most of the time, he jumped around on the decks of different ships.

That's his whole world.

After going to school, the school teacher said that Ye Shijin was not a name, so he named himself Ye Maozhong.

After becoming an adult, he changed to Ye Maozhong himself.

Many years later, his good friend Chen Gang, vice president of Peking University's New Transmission College, wrote an article for Ye Shijin, who was already called Ye Maozhong at this time, which mentioned:

Ye Maozhong was dizzy, so when he went on stage to give a speech, he always ran on stage. As he runs onto stage, he may often think of the feeling he had when he was a child and gracefully jumped from boat to boat.

Ye Maozhong stood firmly on the rickety boat, looking like he was about to fall on the flat ground. Because he always subconsciously shakes his body, trying to adapt to the fluctuations of the river.

The land doesn't fluctuate at all times, but he's always lived in the fluctuations of the times.

Tide after tide, ups and downs, people gushing.

01

There is a rumor in the jianghu that the price of asking Ye Maozhong to lie is 5 million.

This number is a mystery, but Ye Maozhong is very expensive and very expensive, which is a fact.

In 2009, Sany Group, which had undergone share reform and operation reform, was eager to occupy the market and sent people to pay a lot of money to invite Ye Maozhong, who was already a well-known marketer at that time, to come out of the mountain.

At the time, it seemed like an ordinary product marketing plan.

But through the rearview mirror of the times, it will be found that Ye Maozhong's plan has dropped a bombshell on the river of destiny.

The financial crisis a year ago reduced the net profit of Sany Heavy Industry by more than 20%, and under the crisis of the industry, the take-off period that lasted for five years was interrupted by hard work, but the big changes in the industry are also the best time to overtake in curves.

Crisis Crisis Crisis.

Dangerous, but also organic.

At the end of 2008, four trillion yuan came, and the big infrastructure began.

The plate of the market suddenly became much larger overnight, and the vast rural market became a new blue ocean for construction machinery.

Under the planning of Ye Maozhong, Sany Group held an event on the construction machinery network.

After netizens participate in the activity, the first question that needs to be answered is "Is the national sales of Sany excavators the first or the second?" ”

If the answer is the first, the answer is correct, and the activity moves to the next level;

If the answer is second, it says:

Thank you for participating, you have been disqualified.

In that era, there was no publicly available information channel, no authoritative rankings, and all user perceptions of rankings depended on advertising on television and print media.

However, compared with those advertisements that look at the company's own caliber, this so-called "correct answer" in the form of questions and answers is more acceptable without arousing suspicion.

The more people who have read the book, the more they will subconsciously believe that the answer is correct.

Many years later, the brands that took the lead in placing advertorials in a Q&A community also wanted to understand this.

Whether it is the person who answered correctly or incorrectly, they subconsciously remembered that "the national sales of the original Sany excavator were the first".

But the wonderful thing about this Q&A design is that whether you choose first or second, you fall into the trap of Ye Mao.

Because only look at the sales of excavators that year, the sales of Sany excavators are probably the sixth in the country.

Even if you think it's second, it's not a loss.

Undoubtedly, in this planning, Ye Maozhong's strategy was misleading, and it was a misleading one that was not easy to be debunked or even not noticed at all.

Even if you pay attention, there is nothing to lose to you.

This is a state of marketing.

Moisturizing is silent, better than big fanfare.

The second thing Ye Maozhong did was to take a portrait of every farmer who came to buy Sany excavators, and together with sany's product promotion, he made a year painting and gave it to that customer.

Of course, the product promotion is also written on the Sany excavator, the first in the country.

The New Year paintings, which had their photographs, were brought back to different villages across the country and hung on the most conspicuous walls of their homes.

It was also an era when neighbors loved to visit the door, and each New Year painting became the most accurate advertising space for the rural market.

They believed in propaganda on paper.

First, the information is not smooth, and there is no channel for verification.

Second, I can't imagine how something printed on paper that can't be changed can be wrong.

The so-called black and white words are conclusive. The connection between print and authority established over the past thousand years has become Ye Maozhong's best weapon.

At that moment, he was not an advertiser, but a master tactician, and all the favorable factors on the battlefield could become his weapons.

This may be the earliest precision marketing, decentralized marketing, and sinking market push.

Is he lying?

yes.

But he achieved his goal, overshooting and overtaking.

He only considers the success rate and the input-output ratio, and has no moral considerations.

Whether it is doing activities online or sending New Year paintings, the cost is very low, the effect is very good, then you can do it.

In the purest form of business, there is no morality.

As for the prohibited words of the Advertising Law, that is many years later.

Ye Maozhong also has a classic logic that not only to create favorable factors for oneself at low cost, but also to find ways to create unfavorable factors for competitors by any means.

To defend, but also to attack.

At that time, Sany Heavy Industry's biggest competitor was Japan's Komatsu, which ranked first in the industry.

Ye Noticed a historical stain on Komatsu, who had been a supplier of coal mining equipment for the Japanese army.

So around the 9/18 anniversary, there was a third thing:

Sany Group held an excavator recommendation meeting, but the corridor of memories was plastered with historical photos.

Now look at the three-plate axe again.

There are misleading, there are loopholes, there are stumbling blocks, and everything is used to the extreme.

What is missing is not lacking in effect.

Ye Maozhong likes to compare business to a battlefield, and all commercial competition is essentially a war.

The market is the front, the competitors are the enemy.

There is no morality or immorality on the battlefield, only win or loss, life and death.

"Soldiers are not tired of deception", you can win.

This is Ye Maozhong's evaluation of himself, and it is also the first of his marketing guidelines.

In a sense, this is also his life principle.

02

No one takes deception as their standard from birth.

The source of all the guidelines is that the strategy is constantly highly rewarded after repeated verification of reality, thus solidifying into a person's style of doing things.

In those records about Ye Maozhong, we can find that he first used the phrase "soldiers are not tired of deception" in 1989.

It was also his first foray into advertising.

At that time, 22-year-old Ye Maozhong was working as an artist at Jiangsu Taizhou Television Station, saying that he was an artist, but in fact, there were not so many people in the station, and he had to pick up artists, journalists, and cameras.

There were many things he hadn't learned before, and he didn't know them at all, so he could only wait for his master to teach them while groping for themselves.

Originally, he thought that his best way out was to get a TV station house, and if he could mix an iron rice bowl and leave a suite for his children in this life, it would not be a vain walk in the world.

But the night attack of fate is always unexpected.

One day he was out for an interview, and his master at the TV station suddenly called him and asked him, "Ye Maozhong, will you shoot film commercials?"

At that time, the headquarters of Chunlan Air Conditioning, the largest air conditioning brand in China, was in Taizhou, and during that time, Chunlan Group felt that the traditional TV advertising was not high-grade enough, so it wanted the advertising department of Taizhou Television Station to help shoot a film film advertisement.

Taizhou TV has only taken some simple advertising films with TV cameras before, and has never tried any film advertising, and it is natural to look at each other when it receives demand.

However, Chunlan Group is a big distributor of TV stations, and it can't afford to offend, so it can only try to find ways to meet it.

While moving rescue soldiers outside the stage, the people in the advertising department cast a wide net inside the station and asked everyone in the station if they understood film film.

Originally, Ye Maozhong's master just remembered to casually ask questions, and did not expect too much.

But when Ye Maozhong heard this on the phone, he only hesitated for a second and said his first lie in the advertising industry:

I'll shoot, film, nothing.

Actually he wouldn't, but that didn't stop him from saying he would.

This advertisement was named and will be on CCTV after it is filmed, and Ye Maozhong thought that for the most ordinary staff of a local television station like him who are not even official reporters, this is a rare opportunity that must not be missed.

Especially not to give to others.

Ye Maozhong's choice may not be beneficial to the TV station, but it is his personal optimal solution.

Even if he messed up, he would be fired at best, and what else could he lose?

But when he did it, he became.

So it's imperative.

In that era, every rising entrepreneur had such selfishness and madness in his bones.

Not a good thing, no morality.

But it worked.

After taking over the task, Ye Maozhong temporarily went to the Taizhou Library to find a book on film studies.

He was originally going to learn and sell it now, but he was dumbfounded after reading it, and found that this matter was too professional, and he could not learn it at once.

He studied it and found that the only thing he could do, which didn't require too much professional skills, was to be a director, and the rest of the work had to be done professionally.

So Ye Maozhong quickly ran to Shanghai, found a friend who worked as an artist in the Shanghai Science Film Studio, and asked him to help find a professional photographer, costumer, makeup artist and prop designer.

He, the director, only provided one idea throughout the process:

At that time, billiards was popular in society, and he conceived an idea to score six billiards in one shot, let people shoot it with stunts, and linked the audience's impression of "superb ball skills" with Chunlan air conditioning, coupled with an advertising slogan:

Chunlan air conditioning, high-level pursuit.

Chunlan air conditioner people were greatly satisfied after seeing the film, and it was continuously released on CCTV for five years.

After this commercial was broadcast on CCTV, many people wrote to Chunlan's advertising department and asked them:

How did the man in the commercial score six goals in one shot?

Some people also ran to ask Ye Maozhong, who pretended to be unpredictable:

People have been playing billiards since they were four years old, which is a child's skill.

Many years later, Ye Maozhong will use the "conflict" theory he created to explain the success of Chunlan advertising - this advertisement cuts to the conflict between people's pursuit of a higher quality of life after the reform and the commodity market that lacked differences at that time, with the picture of "one shot and six goals" and the slogan of "high level", distinguishing it from similar products.

In other words, this was a rare advertisement at that time from attacking the consumer's rational brain to attacking the emotional brain.

But at that time, Ye Maozhong had not yet established this set of advertising theories.

He was just a nobody at the time, ignorant of the advertising industry.

He didn't have many cards in his hand, only the seemingly endless ideas in his mind, and the energetic energy that seemed to never tire of young people.

After the advertising film became popular, Chunlan paid Ye Maozhong's creative 1300 yuan planning fee, equivalent to his salary for more than a year.

In an era when creativity was still popular to call "ideas", Ye Maozhong felt the connection between "ideas" and money for the first time.

He left Taizhou TELEVISION and, with no one to lead the way, groped into the advertising industry little by little.

Ye Maozhong spent some time in Shanghai's Nobe advertising, still doing the old business as an artist, but in fashionable Shanghai, this job is called "art design".

After doing art design for a while, Ye Maozhong found that he had no business resources in the advertising circle, could not receive advertisements at all, and did not do anything, and he might really have to draw a lifetime.

Moreover, he ran from the TV station to draw a private plan, and also lost the iron rice bowl and welfare house in his hand, and lost it to his grandmother's family.

So Ye Maozhong planned to make a name in the circle by publishing a book.

After reading through more than a hundred foreign classic books on advertising and marketing in the library, in 1996, Ye Maozhong finally washed more than a hundred books into one, that is, his debut work "Advertising Man's Handbook".

This was the first practical book in China's advertising industry at that time, and there were countless advertisers who were more senior than Ye Maozhong and more qualified to write books, but they felt that writing a biography was a very serious matter, no one was willing to write, no one dared to write.

In "Advertising Man's Handbook", he called himself an advertising duck, and at that time the duck did not have such a rich meaning as later, and Ye Maozhong just wanted to make a literal metaphor:

Ducks are something that can run on land, swim in the water, and flutter twice when they are in a hurry.

Ye Maozhong was forced to be anxious, so he pounced on a book.

In fact, Ye Maozhong had not made a few advertisements at that time, and just a few years ago he was just an artist for Taizhou TELEVISION. But at least in this book, he can package himself as a master.

This was Ye Maozhong's second use of "soldiers who are not tired of deception."

And this application once again changed his destiny.

He didn't ask the publisher for a penny of royalties, he only made one request, leaving his phone number on the back cover of the book.

The books sold well, and the advertising demand found through this number was endless.

Since that day, he has never worried about the resources of his clients.

But from that day on, he could no longer do without "soldiers are not tired of cheating".

In economics there is a theory called path dependence, which means:

Technological evolution or institutional change in human society has inertia similar to that in physics, and once it enters a certain path, whether it is good or bad, it may become dependent on this path.

This theory can sometimes be used to explain the life path of many people.

When we first entered a certain industry, the choice we made, which at the time seemed to be just an inadvertent move, had already chosen a path for the future.

We'll keep going in that direction, constantly reinforcing our original choices, and the farther we go, the harder it will be to turn around.

Until the moment when there is no way out, and then look back at the winding road that has been all the way, you may find that we have never really seen ahead.

We just keep driving in the rearview mirror, imitating the road we have taken, but we always mistakenly think that what is reflected in the rearview mirror is the front.

03

After the publication of "Advertising Man's Handbook", Ye Maozhong moved to Beijing and opened a marketing planning company named after himself.

Through the contact information left in the book, he has received some customer needs one after another. Especially after the advertisements for companies such as Xiaoyudian and Zhenao Nucleic Acid have become popular, they have gradually laid their own industry status.

Xiaoyudian is a Food Company in Heilongjiang, and in order to bring its children's drinks into the Beijing market, the company's advertising department is looking for planning companies in Beijing.

In 1997, after reading "Advertising People's Handbook", which had just been published for a year, the people of Xiaoyudian Company found Ye Maozhong with the mentality of trying it out.

But unlike the wealthy Chunlan air conditioner, Xiaoyudian did not invest in the budget of TV advertising on CCTV for five consecutive years - in fact, their budget was only a pitiful four hundred thousand.

In an article analyzing the advertisement of small raindrops in an issue of EntrepreneurIal Research at that time, the author mentioned:

To make a beverage brand a certain reputation in Beijing, the normal advertising expenditure is about 6 million to 15 million.

Four hundred thousand, not even enough to hear a ring.

Xiaoyudian needs a marketing company that can spend a small amount of money to do big things and create miracles, and Ye Maozhong also needs an opportunity to prove his actual combat ability.

Both sides hit it off and take what they need.

After receiving this order, Ye Maozhong divided the plan into three steps.

The first step is to buy the cheapest "tofu block" page in local newspapers such as Beijing Youth Daily and Beijing Evening News, and publish a simple "looking notice":

Xiaoyudian, 19 cm tall, born in Heilongjiang, wearing red clothes, wearing a little red hat.....Xiaoyudi's parents came to Beijing from the northeast, please Beijing's fathers and fellow villagers, who found the whereabouts of Xiaoyudi, please contact the parents of Xiaoyudian immediately.

After the search notice was published, many Beijingers mistakenly thought that a child named Xiaoyudian had gone missing, and almost a thousand people called the newspaper office almost every day to inquire about the whereabouts of Xiaoyudi. Subsequently, the major media in Beijing also reported the small raindrop as a news event.

When the heat was almost hyped, Ye Maozhong began the second step of planning.

He also published a notice in the major newspapers:

A little raindrop was found.

In the notice, he revealed that the light raindrop was originally a drink, and all the citizens who called to inquire about the whereabouts of the small raindrop could get a gift from the small raindrop company.

The light raindrop drink only cost 400,000 yuan to achieve an effect of far more than 15 million, and Ye Maozhong became famous in a war.

In March 1998, with the defeat of the three oral liquid Changde case in the first instance of the court, monthly sales fell from hundreds of millions of yuan per month to millions, consumers' trust in the health care industry fell to the minimum, and health care products were basically equivalent to scammers in the media context.

Also in this year, Dalian's Zhenao Nucleic Acid Group found Ye Maozhong and hoped that he would help Zhenao nucleic acid gene nutrients to make a plan to reverse consumers' impression of health care products.

At that time, that product, hellish difficulty.

But Ye Maozhong needed money, although he did not believe a word of the statement put forward by the chairman of Zhenao Nucleic Acid that the nucleic acid "cures all diseases and is immortal".

Therefore, Ye Maozhong still took over this job, and continued his best "soldiers are not tired of cheating" in the planning.

In the book "Ye Maozhong on Planning", he said that when he was flipping through the materials, he noticed that a total of 38 scientists had won Nobel Prizes for their research on nucleic acids.

Using the "conflict" theory of Ye Maozhong later to analyze, the biggest conflict faced by Zhen'ao's nucleic acid products is the conflict between the positioning of health care products of nucleic acid products and the general distrust of consumers' attitudes towards health care products at that time.

Logically, whether scientists study nucleic acids or not is two different things than whether Zhenao's nucleic acid products have nutritional value.

But Ye Maozhong told the story of these scientists and nucleic acids in advertisements, and associated the heads of scientists with the products of Zhenao nucleic acid, making 38 scientists become the "spokespersons" of Zhenao nucleic acid in disguise.

If in the case of Xiao Yudian, Ye Maozhong is using the sympathy of the public to create conflict;

Then in the battle of Zhenao nucleic acid, he is using the public's trust in science to resolve the conflict.

It is difficult to say whether Ye Maozhong's moral bottom line has slipped again, but his conflict theory is one step closer to maturity.

Three years after that planning, Zhenao nucleic acid was denounced as a scam by Southern Weekend.

Because of Ye Maozhong's idea of linking 38 Nobel laureates with Zhen'ao nucleic acid, the reporter also interviewed three Nobel laureates who appeared in his propaganda plan, quoting them to criticize the absurdity of nucleic acid nutrition.

But the sales of Zhenao nucleic acid have risen all the way up against the scolding, which was 400 million yuan in 2002 and reached 1 billion yuan in 2003.

Ye Maozhong won again.

You're party A, and you'll love this wizard who can bring sales miracles.

As for morality, it's magical to talk to business people about morality.

At this time, Ye Maozhong was doing brand consultant and marketing general planning for the Neptune Group, which was in short supply of funds, and successively launched explosive advertisements for products such as Neptune Golden Bottle, Neptune Defili and Neptune Ginkgo Biloba.

The start was a game against the wind, and he had a long time to play.

If we only look at Ye Mao's planning cases in the early stages, we may think that he likes to flip against the wind and create miracles.

But in fact, this is not because I like it, but because I don't have a choice.

When he first took over the planning of Xiao Yudian and Zhen'ao nucleic acid, he was just a self-proclaimed senior advertiser and a de facto newcomer, and it was already a kind of luck to have the opportunity to fight, and he was not qualified to pick and choose.

The so-called upright way of playing is essentially to use money to smash channels, and only enterprises that are rich enough to smash them can afford it.

Just like the Chunlan air conditioner of that year, people can directly put CCTV, a shot is five years, can a small raindrop afford it?

Those with few side effects and gradual steps can only afford to wait for companies that do not have their own survival problems.

Otherwise, the planning has just been half done, the company will go out of business, and it will be a fart.

Decent, costly.

In the case of extreme lack of resources and an extremely unfavorable situation, if you want to turn the tables, you can only take the side of the sword and use military strategy.

Even in these ways, there will be side effects and will make his personal morality very suspicious.

From this point of view, Ye Maozhong is certainly not a good person, and you say that he has no problem with poor morality.

But he must be a purest advertiser.

Just as a purest lawyer wouldn't refuse to defend the bad guys, a purest advertiser wouldn't refuse to market an IQ tax product.

It's unethical, but very work ethic.

Even in a sense, the more his personal morality withered, the stronger his work ethic became.

4

After becoming famous, in order to fight less or even not fight against the wind, Ye Maozhong quickly put forward his own "three noes principle":

Do not bargain, do not compare the manuscript, do not take the initiative to find customers.

The latter two principles are just a head start, after all, the principles generally require three.

The first principle is at its core:

The customers who could not give the five million planning fee could not even see Ye Maozhong's face.

Do you think this is Ye Maozhong's arrogance?

No, it's a screening threshold.

At this price, the vast majority of small enterprises that lack anti-risk ability and execution can be screened out, so as not to have a good plan, but because of the lack of funds and the implementation is not in place, or the implementation is in place but the enterprise's capital chain is dragged down.

The reason is very simple, the engine of the F1 car, installed on the shared bicycle, you guess what is the posture of the driver when the traffic police find the driver?

One year, Ye Maozhong went to a beijing university to give a speech and said a big truth to the students in the audience:

Our company is more willing to do the icing on the cake, the key is to see whether the company has money.

And another big truth, it seems a bit vulgar:

The planner is like a famous prostitute in Beijing, who looks bright and beautiful on the surface, but in fact, he takes off his pants when he gives money, and the more he gives, the faster he can take off.

The importance of money is not only to mobilize the enthusiasm of the planner, but also to say that if the enterprise is not so rich, then a perfect and attractive-sounding plan may become the catalyst of the enterprise.

In the book "Turn Around and Look at the Plan", Ye Maozhong once talked about a whole case plan he had done for the Red Bean Food Company in Huaihua, Hunan Province (not the more famous Red Bean).

At that time, his planning fee was not so expensive, unlike the millions later, when he did a planning at about three or four hundred thousand, some small companies could afford to bite their teeth.

And Hongdou is such a small food company — not so much a company as a food factory.

When the Hongdou Company came to him, it was originally intended to ask him to plan a goji juice drink to be launched soon, but Ye Maozhong thought that the wolfberry juice was not a complete market, and he considered that the young people at that time were generally military fans, so he redesigned a series of camouflage packaged drinks for the young people's market and military themes for the Hongdou Company, named "Field War".

In the book, Ye Mao describes the Hongdou Company after using his plan:

Dealers take cash to pick up goods, and the factory can't keep up with overtime every day.

At that time, this was another beautiful plan by Ye Maozhong.

But the other side that is not said in the book is that After Ye Maozhong asked the Red Bean Company to abandon the goji juice products, it indirectly led to the 10,000 mu of wolfberries and three production lines that the Red Bean Company had already planted and failed to come in handy, and had to re-invest the cost and start another stove;

At the same time, because the local area is the origin of goji berries, the red bean company could have relied on the development of goji juice drinks in exchange for the government's investment project support.

But now that the field drinks are being sold, the investment projects have naturally been stranded, and there is no news of the special loans that the bank is about to approve.

Hongdou company was originally a small company, the capital reserves are not very generous, under the chain reaction, within a few years the company broke the capital chain, and eventually the company stopped production, the company leader disappeared.

This is a very realistic and cruel thing, and it is possible to create miracles for small businesses, but it is also possible to accidentally light up people's small broken wooden houses.

The reason why Ye Maozhong wants to raise prices, and resolutely does not bargain, maintaining the "door-to-door pair" of planners and enterprises, is not only to make more money, but also to protect enterprises.

The icing on the cake for large companies, although the role may not be so significant, but it is relatively easier and more stable.

Of course, the most beautiful cases that Ye Maozhong did are still the stories of those who were small and broad, and finally turned the tables against the wind and created miracles.

But he certainly didn't want to do it again, because the uncertainty was too great.

If you want to win a headwind battle, you need not only ability, but also a little indispensable luck.

But luck won't always be on your side.

Even if he himself returned to that point in time, he might not be able to win the second time.

What's more, Ye Maozhong didn't need to fight a headwind battle.

After standing on the high ground in the industry, he can finally calmly select those customers who have achieved the top in the industry.

These companies have a good marketing budget, can afford it, and have patience.

Such a rich battle, even if it is handed over to others to fight, will not necessarily lose.

Essentially, it's a selection strategy.

However, before he can completely go down the path of the Selection Master, fate will arrange for him to fight another headwind battle.

5

In 2003, Ye Maozhong went to Xibei Noodle Village for a meal, felt quite distinctive after eating, and took the initiative to find Jia Guolong, chairman of Xibei, to give Jia Guolong a consultation.

Jia Guolong encountered Ye Maozhong after the price increase, and he opened his mouth to ask Jia Guolong for 3 million.

This price was exactly the profit of Xibei's most profitable Beijing Liuliqiao store for one year at that time.

Jia Guolong rejected Ye Maozhong.

In the same year, two farmers in chang'an town in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, found Ye Maozhong, who wanted Ye Maozhong to turn his restaurant into a hegemonic brand of Chinese fast food.

The two of them are brother-in-law and brother-in-law, and the two have opened a restaurant together, called Double Seed, and the anthropomorphic image is a thick and honest old farmer.

It sounds particularly earthy, and the demand is particularly unreliable.

But under Ye Maozhong's planning, the "Double Seed" will be renamed "True Kung Fu" and become a young man in a yellow tights, resembling "Bruce Lee".

Before coming to Ye Maozhong, Double Seed actually had 9 branches and opened stores in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

However, in Dongguan, the double seed of business prosperity, to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where rents are more expensive, consumption power is stronger, and the passenger flow is greater, it is frustrated everywhere, whether it is the profitability of a single store or a single turnover is not satisfactory.

In the face of the bottleneck of expansion, they thought of Ye Maozhong.

In fact, when Shuang Seed first asked Ye Maozhong to make a plan, Ye Maozhong refused.

Because at that time, the scale of double seeds was still too small, and his planning cost was too high. Ye Maozhong calculated that the profits earned by their 9 stores in a year combined were not enough to pay him the planning fee.

In order to persuade Ye Maozhong to take over the single plan, the boss of Double Seed said, you don't have to worry about the planning fee, we can borrow it from the bank.

Since he has talked about this, he is not good enough to refuse, and he can only take this job hard and fight the last headwind battle in his career.

The reason why Ye Maozhong was willing to violate the principle of "not fighting against the wind" and do a thing of sending charcoal in the snow was largely because the boss of the double seed passed his screening criteria.

The reason why he offers a high planning fee and does not negotiate the price is because this threshold itself is a sieve, which can not only screen out small enterprises with weak anti-risk ability, but also screen out bosses with low willingness to make progress.

Giving up this money to do the planning of the enterprise, no matter the size, at least the boss will not be a person who does not intend to change at all, is keen to eat and wait for death, and such a person will not come to Ye Maozhong.

Even if it is a small business, but insists on paying a large amount of money to come to him to do planning, it means that the owner of this enterprise must not be a mortal.

Later, in some public speeches, Ye Maozhong mentioned a very chicken soup sentence many times:

The size of the entrepreneur is not determined by the size of the enterprise, the entrepreneur with a big ideal is a big entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur with a small ideal is a small entrepreneur.

This view of his may also be derived from the boss of true kung fu.

More than a decade later, Ye Maozhong summed up his life's learning into a set of "conflict" theories, and published the marketing methodology "Conflict" in August 2017.

And his understanding and use of conflict is largely honed from this battle.

As a township enterprise, the status of Double Seed at that time was not to say that compared with McDonald's KFC, it was uncomfortable with Wallace.

But Ye Maozhong believes that since the ultimate goal of Double Seed is to be the hegemon of Chinese fast food, it should be the hegemon of Western fast food, McDonald's and KFC, from the beginning, and use its own conflict with McDonald's KFC to strengthen consumers' impression of the brand.

McDonald's and KFC are portrayed as typical American cultural symbols of Uncle McDonald and Colonel KFC, so Ye Maozhong chose Kung Fu, a typical Chinese cultural symbol, to create a conflict between American culture.

McDonald's KFC is mainly Western-style fried food, and Ye Maozhong asked Zhen Kung Fu to cut off the original french fries and chicken wings and concentrate on developing Chinese-style steamed foods.

At that time, the impression of Western-style fast food in China was junk food and unhealthy, so he let Zhen Kung Fu focus on the concept of nutritious fast food, linking steaming and nutrition, and at the same time created an advertising slogan of "nutrition or steaming is good" for double seeds.

Even the price, Ye Maozhong is trying to create a conflict with McDonald's KFC.

At that time, the average customer unit price of McDonald's was 19 yuan, and Ye Maozhong asked Zhen Kung Fu to adjust the pricing principle to "always 1 yuan more expensive than McDonald's".

If consumers ask why kung fu is more expensive than McDonald's, the unified word is that "nutritious fast food" should of course be more expensive than "fast food without nutrition".

All in all, it is to open real kung fu stores next to McDonald's and KFC, but everything that looks like it is on the opposite side of McDonald's and KFC, and it seems to be of better quality, so that consumers subconsciously think that this is the same amount of brand as McDonald's KFC.

As for whether the steamed fast food is more nutritious in the end, this is not a question for Ye Maozhong to consider.

This is the basic information that the company tells him, he can only ensure that all marketing is played on the basic information, but the authenticity of the most basic information, he has no obligation and no ability to verify.

His only job is to create conflict and exploit it in order to convey in a more explosive way what the company wants to say.

After the second year of changing its name to True Kung Fu, the number of directly operated stores of True Kung Fu has exceeded 100.

Later, McDonald's and KFC were numbed by the strategy of real kung fu, and when signing contracts with property companies, they often attached a clause that did not allow the surrounding properties to be leased to real kung fu.

When he heard about this, Ye Maozhong was very happy, and he told the boss of True Kung Fu that this showed that True Kung Fu had reached the level where he could really clash with McDonald's KFC.

While becoming a competitor with the hegemon of Western-style fast food, Zhen Kung Fu itself has actually achieved the head of Chinese fast food.

Of course, at this time, Ye Maozhong could not have imagined that at this time, the brother-in-law of the true kung fu boss had divorced his brother-in-law's sister, and the rapid expansion of true kung fu would also stagnate as the brother-in-law sent his brother-in-law to prison a few years later.

In the operation of a business, the efforts of advertisers account for only a very small part of it, and more importantly, the process of history.

Even marketing that had a positive effect at the time may have a negative impact in the future.

Just like Ye Maozhong let True Kung Fu rub Bruce Lee's IP, at the time his view was:

This idea once again made our blood boil, and we competed for the best image resource for real kung fu.

But in 2010, bruce Lee's daughter Li Xiangning began to sue True Kung Fu for trademark infringement, and this good idea when it first started became a big trouble that True Kung Fu could not get rid of.

No one knows, if the original double seed did not meet Ye Maozhong, today will not also become a national large enterprise, but the name of the restaurant may not be called true kung fu - maybe called twins.

Of course, business does not allow ifs, nor does it allow control variables and double-blind experiments, so Ye Maozhong is still a great contributor to the rise of true kung fu.

On the other side of true kung fu, Sibe's story has also undergone several twists and turns.

After going through the two major consulting agencies of Trout and Reese, and paying tens of millions of consulting fees, the village of Xibei Noodles was renamed Xibei Northwest Cuisine, and then changed to Xibei Cooking Expert, repeatedly jumping between different positions, but never towards the outbreak.

Until 2013, Jia Guolong changed the name of the store back to Xibei Noodle Village at the suggestion of Hua and Hua.

In fact, a year before Xibei cooperated with Hua and Hua, Jia Guolong once went to Ye Maozhong, and the advice given by Ye Maozhong at that time was also to let him change the name of the shop back to Yingmian Village:

Don't engage in any fancy stuff like a northwestern cuisine sheep cooking expert, just focus on a noodle and penetrate it.

This line of thinking coincides with the plan given to Jia Guolong by Hua and Hua a year later.

Unfortunately, Ye Maozhong did not earn Xibei's money.

As for Hua Yi, in the future, he and Ye Maozhong will have many heroic encounters, and Ye Maozhong's "conflict" theory and Hua and Hua's "super symbol" theory will become the two major advertising marketing concepts that cannot be avoided in China's local advertising industry.

But that's all an afterthought.

Interestingly, Ye Maozhong, who can harvest everyone, met Jia Guolong, who can be harvested by everyone, and as a result, Ye Maozhong may be the only time he violated the principle and took the initiative to come to the door after becoming famous, but he could not harvest Jia Guolong.

Since then, he has become more determined not to take the initiative to find customers.

This is his last hurdle before he becomes a wizard.

At that time, he was still too young to know how to sell for a price, and he did not fully understand human nature.

After eating here twice, Ye Maozhong never violated any of his principles again.

Ye Maozhong finally became Ye Maozhong.

He completely got rid of Ye Shijin, who was an ordinary person, and became a real advertising wizard.

6

When we fish the perspective back from the long river of time and space and return to Sany Heavy Industry, we will find that Ye Maozhong's marketing strategy has once again been verified by reality.

And the rate of return this time is very, very high.

In January 2010, after using Ye Maozhong's tailor-made marketing strategy for one year, the market share of Sany excavators reached 12.3%, 0.3 percentage points higher than That of Komatsu, becoming the first in the industry for the first time.

At the larger group level, from 2009 to 2011, Sany Heavy Industry's annual revenue increased from 16.5 billion yuan to 50.8 billion yuan.

Even Ye Maozhong may not have lied, because the Q&A of the Engineering Network activity did not indicate the date.

We can also understand that he just wrote out what would happen in the future in advance.

From this point of view, his identity is actually that of a prophet.

But he's still not bold enough.

Because after many years, in 2020, the sales volume of Sany excavators reached the first place in the world.

If his forecast had been a little broader, the question would have been global rather than national.

It is difficult to say how much direct relationship there is between the transformation of Sany Heavy Industry and Ye Maozhong's shot, and the order of time before and after does not explain the logical causal relationship.

If too much is attributed to Ye Maozhong, it is undoubtedly too much emphasis on the power of marketing, and underestimates the role of the enterprise itself and the general environment of the times.

During that time, Sany Heavy Industry originally had to concentrate on expanding in the field of excavators, and in the context of large infrastructure, it was common sense to lose big and win big, whether there was Ye Maozhong or not, this battle was to be fought after all.

Trinity's victory over Komatsu and Ye Mao's tripwire is only a very small factor, and it may even be useless except for disgusting people.

The key to competition is also because Sany has eaten through the technology of this industry, and the quality of excavators can be comparable to That of Komatsu.

After all, consumers are the smartest group, and hating Komatsu does not necessarily mean buying Sany.

In the large expenditure of excavators, emotional marketing can only be a lead-in, and the real cost performance seen in person is the key to placing orders.

As for the rise of Sany's performance in 2009, it is not so much because of the lie Ye Maozhong told on the engineering network, but because of the huge industry demand brought about by the new rural construction and counter-cyclical infrastructure construction in China during that period.

From a welding material factory in Daotong Village, Hunan Province, to the huge Sany Heavy Industry Group, Sany has experienced too many transformations, the path is too long, and Ye Maozhong is only a very short encounter on the Road of Sany.

But there are many enterprises with technology, industry demand will not favor one over the other, it appears fairly in front of every enterprise with supply capacity, why is it Sany Heavy Industry that has become the first?

Ye Maozhong was not so important, but it was not so unimportant.

When di qing of the Northern Song Dynasty was recruiting Nong Zhigao, he threw copper coins in front of the soldiers, saying that as long as these hundred copper coins were all positively upward, it would indicate that we would win this battle.

After the copper coin landed, it was all upward, so the soldiers excited the soldiers to use their lives, and the battle was a great victory.

After the war, Di Qing counted the copper coins, and it turned out that these copper coins were frontal on both sides.

From a military point of view, the size of the Northern Song Dynasty and the height of Nong Zhigao are not at all a level, the army equipment, the quality of soldiers and daily training are all hanging, and winning the war is only a matter of course.

But Di Qing still had to use this way to increase the winning rate, because he was a real military expert.

On the battlefield, the ultimate winner is not necessarily the stronger one, but it must be the one that goes to great lengths to capture every favorable factor.

From the moral point of view, did Di Qing lie?

Sprinkled.

But because of his lies, the Song army won the battle, killing fewer people, spending less money, and conscripting less of the people's servitude.

So this lie is not a lie, but a prophecy.

When talking about the classic case of Ye Maozhong in the advertising circle, many people will tell the story of Ye Maozhong and Sany Heavy Industry.

In the story, Ye Maozhong received five million from Sany Heavy Industry, and only gave a PPT, which read:

Sany excavator, the first sales volume in the country.

Five million in a word, this is a very exciting and legendary story, and the audience either admires Ye Maozhong's amazing rate of making money, or morally criticizes him for just collecting money and lying.

But few people realize what exactly these five million are buying.

The five million that Ye Maozhong harvested was equivalent to the Bu Jin who had started a tribute for Sany Heavy Industry.

Whether this triumph is a prophecy or a lie depends only on whether you become a winner in the end.

But just as divination was always required before expeditions in ancient times, human nature always needs such prophecies.

It may seem useless, but sometimes it is indispensable.

Because we are not confident in the future, because we are unknowable about fate, we need a firm promise to strengthen confidence.

When people are particularly confident that they will win, the probability of winning sometimes increases a little.

7

We can't see another timeline, without encountering Ye Maozhong's true kung fu, will not go down a similar path with another name;

We also don't know if Sany Heavy Industry did not play the banner of the first sales in the country under the planning of Ye Maozhong, whether it would still be able to achieve the first place in the industry in the next year.

Therefore, the success of the enterprises that Ye Maozhong has served has nothing to do with his planning, and if so, it is not a key factor, and these questions are all difficult to give a definitive answer.

As John Warnermaker said:

I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half.

I don't know which half it is, so I can only spend it, and I don't dare to give up.

Untrustability, this is the biggest weakness of marketing, but it is also the value of marketing.

But one thing we can be sure of is that these enterprises may make money, but Ye Maozhong must not lose money.

Many years ago, Ye Maozhong said a sentence that caused great criticism in the circle:

To measure whether an advertising person is successful or not, it depends on whether he has money in his pocket.

From this point of view, Ye Maozhong has reached the extreme of domestic advertisers in his own definition.

Although he did not make memorable brands in many different fields like Du Guoyao, another marketing ghost of the same era, nor built a team-based and institutionalized system for his marketing company, when it comes to the ability to make money, Ye Maozhong is almost unmatched among Chinese advertisers.

Even one accepted saying in the circle is:

Ye Maozhong is the only marketer in this industry who really makes a lot of money.

In 2011, a CCTV talk show called "Struggle" invited Ye Maozhong to be the main guest of that issue, and the president of The Gathering Network personally accompanied him.

That year was the year when Ye Mao's reputation rose to prominence.

The planning he did for Sany Heavy Industry two years ago has jumped from the second first in the industry to the first in the industry with the Sany excavator in only one year, which has become the best proof of its spirituality.

In the 2011 Spring Festival, Ye Maozhong let Yao Chen ride on the animated donkey and read a large string of advertising words, coupled with the magic BGM, successfully brainwashing the people of the whole country.

To this day, people who watched this advertisement may still remember the piercing cries of the little donkey ten years ago, the children's BGM of "I have a little donkey I never ride", and Yao Chen's shout of "Hurry up the market".

As a result, the second year after this advertisement was broadcast, the industry began to circulate rumors that the catch-up network was about to collapse.

This confirms the saying:

Digging gold does not make money, and selling water to people who dig gold makes money.

Although he has served countless modern companies, Ye Maozhong does not like the business model of modern companies that use resources to eat compound interest.

He has a reckless atmosphere in him, likes to call employees "brothers", likes to drink in large bowls and scales to distribute money, and when planning, he is not waiting for employees to hand over ABCD several plans but rushing to the front by himself.

In fact, Ye Maozhong has been using the method of opening a workshop to open a company.

He was the most skilled teacher in the workshop, and all the employees were his apprentices.

In front of the CCTV camera, Ye Maozhong once publicly explained the second article of his marketing guidelines, if there is no good idea, go to death.

He said this from a manifesto he wrote in his early years to his first company in Beijing:

We reject mediocrity, we refuse to domesticate, and we die without good ideas.

This sentence was hung by him at the door of the company's entrance, powered on, flashing 24 hours a day, and every employee who came to work would definitely be flashed.

For Ye Maozhong, this is not a propaganda slogan, but a guidebook.

In the early days of his business, he rented a semi-underground office space at the Beijing National Olympic Center, and the daily working environment was like going to prison.

Every time he wanted to be creative, he sat down at the conference table with his employees, and when the time came, if he couldn't think of an idea, or if the idea he came up with was too bad, then everyone slapped himself en masse.

Privately, there may be more murderous entrepreneurs than Ye Maozhong, but that is also in private.

It is indeed rare for someone like him to care what others think, and to say such a thing as corporal punishment so bluntly on CCTV.

Legally speaking, corporal punishment is definitely a violation of the Labor Law, but since he not only smokes employees, but also smokes himself first, and even smokes himself more fiercely, it is difficult to say that he is a bad person.

He will make it clear before new employees join the workforce that the Labor Law does not allow corporal punishment, but in this company, if you can't make a creative idea, you need corporal punishment, and you can choose yourself whether to come in or not.

According to his own words, when he couldn't think of a creative idea, he often slapped his glasses with one slap and flew his hat with the next slap.

There is also a creative person in Japan who holds himself in the water to think creatively, and when he can't think of it, he holds it back.

Ye Maozhong did not hold his breath in the water, but he would hold back urine in the conference room, take the lead in holding back, and drink water before the meeting, so that it would be more sour.

In his eyes, creativity can only be forced out in extremely cruel environments.

It seems beautiful, but it makes sense.

When you are faced with the possibility of slapping yourself if you can't think of a good idea, and you have to pee your pants in front of everyone in the conference room, you will definitely throw away all shackles and all ideological constraints and give the strangest and most unlikely ideas.

The screenwriter of the well-known "Black Mirror" series, Charlie Bullock once said something similar to Ye Maozhong.

Don't talk about talent, luck, you need a deadline, and a person who can blow your dog's head off without handing in the manuscript, and then you will be intimidated by your talent.

The same end.

Ye Maozhong's approach determined that he could not open a modern company that obeyed the law, but a kind of handicraft workshop that prevailed before the industrial revolution and was not impacted by the production of large-scale industrial machines.

In that kind of handicraft workshop, the craft is taught by master and apprentice, and the teacher will use the strict corporal punishment system and personal charm to manage, advocate personal genius and personal exquisite skills, and naturally dislike the batch products produced on the industrial assembly line.

As a business model, this model is crude, rudimentary, and extremely dependent on the leadership of a certain soul figure.

When this soul figure is there, this workshop can create miracles.

But once the most central character leaves, ages, or is no longer ahead of its time, the company loses its fighting power and cannot even survive.

So Ye Maozhong is not a good company founder, nor is he a good CEO.

But whether it is his series of marketing cases or the way he opened a company, it proves that his grasp of human nature has reached another extreme:

Not only the humanity of consumers, but even the humanity of employees and themselves.

There is a sentence in the "Zuo Chuan/Cheng Gong/Thirteen Years of Cheng Gong", "The great affairs of the country are in the worship and rong".

The character of Qi corresponds to a wizard.

The wizards here do not refer to the kind of wizards who do have magic in the Harry Potter story and can fly in the sky, but the witch blessings in the primitive religion who are in charge of turtle divination and divination.

Wizards often don't fight wars, they don't strategize and win battles.

But so what? To be a military master, you need to understand astronomical geography and marching.

To be a wizard, you only need to understand human nature.

A qualified wizard will use all the characteristics and commonalities of human nature to increase the success rate of his own side and the failure rate of the enemy.

It's a profession that understands the play of human nature.

Ye Maozhong may not be a good person.

But he must have been a good wizard.

It was not Ye Maozhong who was born to be a wizard, but the general environment of that era created one advertising wizard after another who took advantage of human nature.

Ye Maozhong is like this, Shi Yuzhu is like this, Du Guoyao is like this, and Hua Shan is like this.

Born to be a witch, I'm sorry.

8

The evaluation of Ye Maozhong in the advertising circle is particularly polarized.

Except for a small number of people who are ye maozhong's fanatical fans and fans, most people are particularly disgusted with Ye Maozhong, and there is almost no middle camp.

Many people who look down on him in their mouths actually have some recognition of him in their hearts, and may even be learning and imitating him in some links.

After all, his approach, although earthy, did work, and he did make money.

This is the most tangible thing.

Whether or not they are really so disgusted with the soil, few people will refuse to pick up money from the soil.

Even when picking up money, you need to bend over.

Ye Maozhong was ostracized by the mainstream advertising circle, and the biggest problem was not what he did, but that he said everything he shouldn't have said, and it was too blunt.

You just do it yourself, why say it?

In fact, the advertiser resented Ye Maozhong, because he tore off the mask of all the warmth that the literati loved.

What articles are carried, what excellent advertisements should be enlightening rather than brainwashed, in Ye Maozhong here is all.

You have collected millions of advertising fees from customers, turned back to realize your cultural vision, you are idealistic, the customer's money is smashed into the water, do you not burn your hands with this money?

For those advertisements that are more artistic than marketing, Ye Mao has a very accurate description: the aircraft draft.

It means just being cool.

Ye Maozhong never shoots airplane drafts, and his positioning of himself is extremely clear and realistic:

Whoever is a soldier and who eats whose food, since it is the customer's budget to feed, then be a gun in the customer's hand.

Shoot and you'll see blood.

His attitude is very direct, and advertisers should collect money to do things.

The customer gives you money, that is, to sell, to sell, to sell.

Customers come to you to shoot advertisements, that is, to make money, to make money, to make money.

The third rule of Ye Maozhong's marketing guidelines is to take people's money and eliminate disasters for people.

What is the truth of advertising people?

Truth is to take money from others and eliminate disasters for them.

What is the professional ethics of advertisers?

Professional ethics is to take people's money and eliminate disasters for people.

If you can't do it, you can make independent films without making this money, or simply make literary films, and no one will demand you from the standards of advertising.

But since you have eaten this bowl of rice, you must do this well, give up some of your own pursuits, and desperately meet the needs of customers.

In 2005, Huaxia Publishing House published a book about Chinese local advertisers, called "Advertising Gangster", and the first advertising hero in this book was Ye Maozhong.

In the introduction to the content of the book, there is this passage:

Advertisers exist to create miracles. If advertising can't help customers create the miracle of "selling well", then all those who work in this profession are denigrating and insulting this profession.

Hua & Hua's founder, an advertiser of Ye Maozhong's contemporary, Hua Yi, said something similar:

To evaluate whether an advertising creative is good or not, there is only one hard indicator, that is, whether it has reduced the marketing cost of the enterprise.

For example, Hua and Hua and Mi Xue Ice City.

Ye Maozhong and Hua Yi are probably the same kind of people in the advertising circle, but at the same time they are all outliers in the circle.

The advertising circle has obvious regionality, such as Taiwan advertisers are more grounded, and there are more plans for catering and fast-moving consumer goods and mass consumer goods;

Hong Kong advertising personality is relatively high, do luxury brand luxury car watch advertising is handy.

From the perspective of business model and market, most advertising and marketing companies can also be classified into four categories: local marketing consulting companies, international marketing consulting companies, local advertising communication companies and international advertising communication companies.

Ye Maozhong, from Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, himself, could not integrate into any geographical circle.

His advertising agency does not belong to any of the above camps.

He and his company do everything from marketing to advertising, the methods used are not local or international, as long as they are easy to use, there are no taboos, all kinds of theories are mixed together, and even many theories do not belong to the advertising marketing industry at all.

In all his books, the master of "Conflict", the core concept in it is clearly derived from "Contradiction Theory".

And his favorite communication strategy, from the countryside encircling the city to concentrating on a little breakthrough, is a military art.

Compared with those academic schools and "foreign affairs schools" in the advertising industry, Ye Maozhong, a self-taught local advertising tyrant, seems to be a bit out of place.

This incompatibility is reflected in all aspects:

Ye Maozhong does not look at the reservedness of advertisers, and all advertising people who are still self-conscious about their identity will also subconsciously and busily break off their relationship with him, and even shame in the same profession as him.

It is like an axe that has become a ceremonial weapon, and it is not willing to be equated with the spear that is stained with blood on the battlefield.

The axe is noble, the spear is humble;

The axe is sacred, and the spear is rude.

But on the other hand, axes are not practical, while spears are practical.

Ye Maozhong should not be noble and sacred, he is an extreme pragmatist.

In his 1996 debut book, "The Handbook of the Advertiser", he has already made a clear mock of the advertisers who flaunt themselves professionally:

Advertising has no professional to speak of, only success to speak of. Advertising cannot exist without marketing – never a client has come to an advertising agency for the purpose of doing professional and elegant advertising, and they only need one need for advertising: to 'successfully' sell the product. Therefore, advertising must fundamentally help customers solve problems.

He ruthlessly tore off the disguise of the axe and shouted that the axe and the spear were essentially the same thing.

He blurs the line between the coarse and the sacred, killing the noble with humility.

What's even more frightening is that it turns out that he seems to be the right one.

Open today's B station, Weibo and Zhihu, what can be handed down will always be those advertising films that are extremely saturated with colors and constantly repeat and reincarnate.

Those fresh, Western-style, elegant, gentle, cinematic texture and ingenuity, but lack of strong views and impact, under the wash of ruthless time, have been forgotten without a drop, not even qualified to be turned out by the UP master to be a ghost animal.

If Ye Maozhong is willing to do some boring but tasteful planning, and shoot some literary and art advertising films that ordinary people can't remember at all, but can win the praise of critics, with his wealth and status, he may also be able to climb the so-called elegance hall and get some good feelings from insiders.

However, this is actually easy, was there still less inexplicable literary and artistic advertisements on TV back then? But where are they today?

It is useless to have connotations alone, and it is even more useless to understand connotations that need to be interpreted.

Who gives consumers more stimulation and more deep memories, who can retain their traces in the torrent of the times.

When the river washes away, the mud will flow down with the sand, and time will not treat pearls and gravel differently.

You say you are pearls and he is sand, and that must be remembered before it makes sense.

What's more, time is not actually water, time is more cruel than water.

The time is the sun.

Everything that is dull will be evaporated by time without a trace, and only the most greasy and viscous and closest to solid things can be tenaciously left under the baking of the blazing sun.

Take asphalt, for example.

Everyone knows that shangshan is like water, but Ye Mao chooses to make asphalt.

That gesture may not be beautiful, it may be ugly, but it is tenacious enough.

"Everyone on the earth knows", "how can you catch a cold at a critical moment", "30-year-old people have a 60-year-old heart", "how long do you want to take off", "wash more healthily", and even the top work in the history of Chinese advertising, "this year's festival does not receive gifts, and only receives brain platinum", which has been lingering in the minds of Chinese since twenty years ago, and has been looping singles to today.

The sound of heaven can be around the beam for three days, but the sound of heavenly demons can fight for another thirty years.

Ye Maozhong left the era of the open book examination, the answer is that there is no point in doing heaven, it is not as good as the heavenly devil dancing.

Of course, no one knows if these two options will be a trap in Ye Mao.

As in 2009, he deliberately asked netizens to choose one of the first or second Trinity excavators.

Whichever he chose, it was actually expected by him.

9

In 2013, Ye Maozhong publicly apologized on Weibo.

In that Weibo, Ye Maozhong said:

I have been doing marketing and advertising for 24 years, and the saddest thing is to make up too many concepts for the promotion of products, no lack of flickering, and passing on a lot of negative energy to the society.

Shame to the extreme, repentance to the extreme. From today on, pick the enterprise, pick the product. Tap the real good products recommended to consumers and output positive energy to the society.

That session of advertisers was very happy, and Ye Maozhong, who was the most unsightly but helpless in the circle, actually repented of himself, which was simply the apparition of the god of advertising.

It is not the god of advertising that appears, but the authorities.

In that year, a new judicial interpretation was introduced, and the number of online rumors forwarded exceeded 500 or browsed more than 5,000 to be sentenced.

With the number of lies Ye Maozhong pulled in the advertisement, today, the court can hold a court for him alone for a whole year.

The law is not retroactive, and the successful case in Ye Maozhong is still a successful case, and it will not become a crime file overnight.

Even his Weibo is like an apology, and it is like showing off.

However, many of his means are finally retired.

In recent years, because of physical reasons, perhaps because he has made enough money, Ye Maozhong rarely personally handles the advertising business, only in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Zhihu, Mafengwo and Yiche.

In 2018, among the three major earthy advertisements of the World Cup, Ye Maozhong was the only one.

As soon as the advertisement of Zhihu and Ma Honeycomb came out, everyone exclaimed that the soil exploded, and they did not know that Ye Maozhong only used three points of force.

However, the most earthy and most topical advertisement of that year was not a honeycomb, but a Mengniu that made Messi lie on the green field and panic.

Many people think that this advertisement is also Ye Maozhong's handiwork, because the style is really too Ye Maozhong.

But this advertisement is actually made by Shanghai Juxin Culture.

The marketing company in the new era not only understands technology and the Internet, but even understands Ye Maozhong more than Ye Maozhong.

In the imitation of Ye Maozhong, Ye Maozhong himself only won the second place.

The marketing he made is still excellent, but it is difficult to reproduce the original miracle.

On the one hand, his extremely wild means could no longer be used, and he lacked three points of ability out of thin air.

On the other hand, it is also because times have changed.

In the past, the information dissemination channel was single, and after having a sufficiently amazing idea, then grasping the core channel - translated is actually grasping CCTV - can create miracles.

But in this era, people's attention is distracted by a short, medium and long video platform, a graphic community, and an independent and non-interoperable app.

Gone are the days when a single channel could cover half of China, when no channel could capture more than half of the traffic.

Even if you have money, you can't open it, the world has become an island, and no one can build a railway on the sea.

So now all we are engaged in is circle marketing, a little penetration in a small circle, with water milling to do communication, looking forward to quantitative changes caused by qualitative changes.

No one has the luxury of creating a national-level advertisement like Ye Maozhong in that year, relying on a divine advertising slogan and a core channel delivery.

Even Ye Maozhong himself could not do it.

The era of distant, barbaric, but also full of incredible personal legends is over, the marketing of the new era is no longer bustling, and there is only an undercurrent on the Internet.

Ye Maozhong needed to hollow out a different idea at that time, but today's algorithm recommendation can change the minds of tens of millions of people silently.

A vast information cocoon as large as dyson's ball, and accurately enveloping everyone, has been born.

When everyone sees the crooked-mouthed Dragon King advertisement on the home page recommendation at the same time, humming together that you love me and I love you, honey snow ice city sweet honey, this is not the victory of a genius advertiser, but the memetic effect brought by the algorithm and the second creation.

There is no eye-catching surprise, but it is like a virus that reproduces silently and spreads to everyone's eyes.

Good warriors have no meritorious deeds.

In this era of big data, the most powerful marketing is to make you not realize that you are being marketed.

There will be no myth in marketing, because technology will kill all epics and legends.

The golden age that belonged to Shi Yuzhu, Du Guoyao, Ye Maozhong, and Hua Yi was over.

In 2016, in an interview with the media, Ye Maozhong once confided a slight fear of algorithm technology:

Everyone sees today's headlines differently, it's scary... How much can I meet in one leaf? How much incrementalness can the machine bring?

The advertisers of the new era have more and more hidden magic, they are familiar with algorithmic recommendations, and they can use technology to create advertisements with thousands of faces.

These advertisements are like the heavenly demons in the Buddhist scriptures, drilling into everyone's heart and illusioning the sound and color of the deepest desire in your heart.

This is the best era of marketing, and it is also the last era of marketing.

Advertisers in this era still despise Ye Maozhong and no longer need Ye Maozhong.

Because the algorithm makes everyone ye Maozhong.

He is an advertising wizard who has created marketing miracles, a wall-breaking man who tore off the sacred mask of the advertising man, and an old god who is no longer suitable for this era.

Generation after generation of gods, generations of versions to catch up with the old people.

10

Of course, Ye Maozhong's level can still detonate the world, and the case of Zhihu and Ma Honeycomb is also beautiful enough.

But he seemed to be caught in the circle he had once despised the most:

Efficacy cannot be combined.

In the past, the most classic cases he made, whether it is neptune group medicine or Zhen'ao nucleic acid health care products, or zhen kung fu and Xibei's restaurant dine-in, are all products that can be sold physically, and the effectiveness of the product occurs after the transaction.

In other words, as long as enough people see the advertisement he plans, believe it, and buy it, it can bring real sales and make customers money.

As for whether you will be deceived after you buy it, whether you will not have repeat customers, this is the brand's own business, and has nothing to do with Ye Maozhong.

So these ads may be nonsense, they may not be worthy of the name, they may be false propaganda, but at least in the first wave of communication, he can sell the customer's product to the consumer.

When Ye Maozhong shows successful cases to the outside world, what he always shows is how much sales his planning has increased.

He would say that with my planning, the annual sales of the Red Golden Dragon went from 170,000 to 1 million boxes, and the sales of Yake Candy increased by 7 times, not like some of its peers, how many people saw the ad.

The communication without conversion is nothing more than throwing money on the channel, perhaps some people will argue that I am doing a brand, but Ye Maozhong's pursuit has always been the unity of product and effect - my advertisement cannot make your brand last forever, that is not the work of advertising people, you should go to God to worship Buddha.

But the money you pay me, I can make you earn it back, so you will never lose money when you look for me.

And what about the advertisements he made for Zhihu and Ma Honeycomb?

It is successful in terms of spread, and it does bring a certain increment to these two platforms, which can be seen from the growth of user data released by Zhihu and Mafengwo:

During the World Cup, Zhihu rushed to the first place in the Apple social list, rising from 119th in the overall list to 11th in the overall list;

Horse honeycomb downloads have risen sharply, becoming the first hot search in the Apple App Store for several consecutive days.

If Ye Maozhong is not Ye Maozhong, just an ordinary advertising person, this must be two classic cases that can blow for a lifetime.

But he is Ye Maozhong.

What he does is not only advertising but also marketing, not only to advertise but also to sell, so where is the sales brought by these two advertisements?

The answer is that it cannot be quantified, or even whether the impact is positive or negative.

Because the advertising of Zhihu is too different from the original community style, it has aroused great dissatisfaction among old users and major community content creators;

Ma honeycomb became famous overnight, but gradually disappeared in the case of suspected data fraud.

This is not because Ye Maozhong's creativity is no longer powerful, but it is a problem from the selection stage.

Unlike the traditional enterprises that Ye Maozhong has served, the Internet has no physical products, and what it lacks is not icebreaking, but the retention of new users.

Advertising can bring new, but it cannot solve the stickiness problem of the platform.

What should marketing do when customers no longer need sales for a specific product, but for continuous user time?

Not only did Ye Maozhong from the old era not know, in fact, no one could give a firm answer until now.

The old rules are no longer good, the new laws have not yet been established, and at the dividing point between death and new life, everyone is at a loss.

There may also be the possibility that the life cycle of Internet products has been decoupled from marketing.

Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the uncrowned king of a social field who has no one to challenge has spent several years instilling huge amounts of traffic and cannot support a short video platform of his own.

If you want to increase the length of your users, you may not be able to do it with over-the-counter marketing.

No matter how well you market, users still have to use it in person, people have cheated you into it, whether you can keep it, in fact, it has nothing to do with marketing.

Pulling new can rely on marketing, stickiness can only rely on itself.

This is an era that is not friendly to Ye Maozhong, and the new era not only has a completely different communication medium, but product and marketing are no longer two things that can be separated.

At least in the field of the Internet, marketing has become the extension of the product, the product has become the connotation of marketing, and the connection between the two has never been so close.

That's good for users, but it's disastrous for advertisers, who can no longer rely on a brilliant idea to bring a dying product back to life.

Miracles are not welcome in this era.

Of course, even before the Internet era, Ye Maozhong could only guarantee the marketing effect of the first wave.

Those enterprises that are not contentious on their own, even with ye Maozhong's blessing, will eventually die out.

Some people have counted the products that were eventually eliminated by the market in those advertisements done by Ye Maozhong: Zhenao nucleic acid, Neptune Golden Bottle, Neptune Ginkgo leaves, Neptune Silver Defi, Arctic Velvet Thermal Underwear, Ant Lishen, and finally came to the conclusion that Ye Maozhong "did a dead one".

Of course, this conclusion is unfair, because Ye Maozhong has done so many advertisements that no matter what kind of conclusion you want to draw, you can find a lot of examples from it.

It is illogical to deify him with real kung fu and the success of Sany Heavy Industry, and it is not advisable to demean him with the failure of these products.

But these cases illustrate at least one indisputable truth:

No matter what era, the life cycle of the enterprise is ultimately up to itself.

If you are bent on marketing, it becomes "poor night half empty front seat, do not ask the heavens to ask the ghosts and gods."

If a company does not ask about products, only about marketing, even if it is as strong as Ye Maozhong, it will not be able to continue to live.

11

Ye Maozhong's latest marketing is not to serve a big enterprise and a big brand, but to his own exhibition.

The exhibition was held from October 2020 to February 2021, and the curator is Liu Yiqian, one of the founders of the Long Museum in Shanghai.

At the Long Museum, Liu Yiqian held up a microphone and said to the semi-open-air audience below the stage:

I think Mr. Ye Maozhong fully possesses the title of artist and painter of contemporary traditional Chinese painting.

In the decades since entering the advertising industry, Ye Maozhong has helped countless brands do marketing, helped countless companies to brag about cattle, and has also written books for himself and bragged about marketing.

But it may be the first time that such a large-scale marketing of others for themselves, artists and painters, which does not help his company attract customers, may be the first time.

In November 2020, cartoonist Gu Ye went to the Long Art Museum to see Ye Maozhong's painting exhibition, and saw Liu Yiqian's preface to Ye Maozhong's album at the exhibition.

The preface says that at the end of July last year, Ye Maozhong called Liu Yiqian and said that he might have cancer.

Old age and illness, resentment and hatred will be inevitable for all sentient beings.

Ye Maozhong, who was in chemotherapy, did not know whether he would remember that in his first book published in 1996, "Advertising Man's Handbook", he repeatedly emphasized that the body of the advertiser must be good:

You can't be young forever, and if you want to make a difference in advertising, you must have a healthy and strong body as a strong backing for your career.

The more you emphasize something, the more it shows that the industry is prone to lacking.

The destruction of the body by the advertising industry is well known, and in the high-intensity working environment, Ye Maozhong's body has not been very good.

Nearly twenty years ago, when Ye Maozhong was planning for the Holy Elephant Group, he once had vertigo caused by staying up late for a long time, and fainted on the sofa of his company two days before going to Shenzhen to meet customers.

When he woke up, he continued to work non-stop, and continued to run, like a wild wolf chasing him behind him.

From entering the industry in 1989 to falling ill in 2019, Ye Maozhong, who had been running wildly for thirty years, finally could not run.

Many years ago, when Ye Maozhong was still very young, when the author of huaxia publishing house's "Advertising Gangster" went to interview him, he said with great enthusiasm:

When I was young, I didn't have ideals and didn't know what I was going to do in the future, but I was self-motivated. I didn't like to fight, but the rules of the game at the time were for you to use your fists to strengthen your strength.

From childhood to adulthood, Ye Maozhong has been waving his fists, opening his teeth and dancing his claws, refusing to domesticate.

He had thought he would always be so fierce that nothing would be able to beat him.

But he couldn't refuse time after all.

Time is not afraid of fists, not afraid of genius, not afraid of money.

Time is time, and it doesn't change because of anything, because of anything.

Ye Maozhong was born in 1968, belongs to the monkey, strictly speaking, he is a post-60s.

By this year, he was also 53 years old.

In the Analects, it is said that fifty and knowing the Mandate of Heaven means:

Knowing the difficulty of realizing the ideal, so do things no longer pursue results.

In all of Ye Maozhong's past marketing, he has pursued a strong pursuit of bringing a result to the customer.

But even knowing that it was almost impossible to actually market himself as an artist and painter, he still held the exhibition.

In the year of knowing the destiny of heaven, Ye Maozhong suddenly ascended to another realm of marketing:

Don't seek results, don't ask the way forward, it's hard to buy me willingly.

Everyone thinks that Ye Maozhong is an advertiser, but his first ambition in life has never been advertising, but painting.

As early as when he was not Yet Ye Maozhong, but Ye Shijin, at the age of four, he was fascinated by a boat that his father casually painted on the back of a cigarette shell.

After graduating from middle school, Ye Maozhong visited Wu Junsheng, a disciple of Master Baoshi, at the local cultural center in Taizhou, and at the age of 18, he was admitted to the stage art major of Jiangsu Drama School, and continued to study under another disciple of Fu Baoshi, Tai Qiyou.

His first job was as an artist in Taizhou Television, and after entering the advertising agency, he also started from art design, but later he worked in the advertising industry for thirty years.

The bright-faced Ye Maozhong is a talented marketing genius, a school of masters who pioneered the "conflict" theory, and a madman whose professional ethics trumps personal morality.

Ye Maozhong, who is good at painting landscape paintings with bouldering stones, has been pouring out his family funds to buy works of art since 1997, and has collected a large number of paintings by Qi Baishi, Huang Binhong, Zhang Daqian, Xu Beihong, Fu Baoshi and Wu Guanzhong.

Both the yin and yang sides are the real him, but some belong to the public and some belong to the private.

After learning that he was suffering from cancer, Ye Maozhong did not use an earth-shattering plan for a large enterprise as the end of his career, but chose to hold a painting exhibition for more than 150 works he created.

Sometimes life is a cycle, and after a big circle, you will return to the thing that fascinated you in the first place.

Probably because I didn't forget my original intention, I remembered my dream of painting.

It may also be that you feel that this is already the case anyway, and it is better to be at ease.

The person who was once the most obsessed was also the most free in the end.

In the end, life is like a dream, and everything is empty.

12

At the age of 25, Ye Maozhong wrote a novel of more than 6,000 words, the name of the novel was "Solution", and the protagonist was himself.

At that time, he was struggling with whether to stay on Taizhou TV or leave the advertising industry, so he combed through his true inner thoughts in the form of an autobiographical novel.

But when he was about to write about the point in time when he was facing a choice, he wrote the protagonist to death:

Since Ye Maozhong in the story is already dead, in reality, let's live as if he had already died once.

After writing this novel, Ye Maozhong firmly believed in leaving from Taizhou Television.

Even though the welfare house he had been thinking about for a long time had been decided at that time, and his name was on the distribution list, he still gave up the house in his hand, and walked hesitantly and without hesitation.

It was 1993, and after another three years, he could wait until the publication of the "Notes on Advertisers" that made him famous and become a madman in China.

But he didn't know anything at the time.

The tide of the times rises and falls, and hundreds of thousands of enterprises and brands are about to be destroyed in his hands.

He thought it was just an ordinary day.

He pushed open the door.

Disappeared into the river of destiny.

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