In 2023, which is about to say goodbye, consumption is showing a warming trend, but at the same time, many companies are still facing five major growth challenges: the disappearance of the demographic dividend, the high cost of traffic, the halving of offline traffic, the loss of traditional e-commerce dividends, and the difficulty of interest e-commerce to make profits. We have entered a counter-cycle of stock games.
As 2024 is approaching, Jiang Nanchun has written 30 predictions about brand growth in the next ten years for everyone to collect, think about and verify, hoping to help brands that are limited by growth difficulties to grasp the new diamond decade in the future with the greatest possibility.
01
About the trend of consumption
1. In the next 10 years, consumers' yearning for a better life will remain unchanged, and a gradual recovery has begun.
In the next 10 years, Chinese consumers' yearning for a better life will remain unchanged. Love of food, beauty, health, fear of old age, fear of tiredness, fear of loneliness, lack of love, lack of mood, lack of stimulation - "three loves, three fears and three shortages" has been leading China's consumption growth in the past 10 years and even in the next 10 years.
China has formed more than 470 million middle-income people, and their motivation to become a better version of themselves will not change. In the context of the gradual recovery of the market, dormant consumption enthusiasm will be gradually stimulated and become the "undercurrent" of new consumption surges in 2024.
2. This will be a time when brands are "tormented".
Consumption upgrading and consumption downgrading coexist at the same time, and the demand for high quality and low price coexists at the same time.
The pursuit of 50 million elites and 250 million new middle class for new refinement and new healthy life has fully recovered.
Generation Z, who are self-deprecating as "lazy and poor" and have to hold their money tightly, want to be healthy, fashionable, good-looking and cost-effective at the same time when consuming. This is a time when consumers are "tormenting" brands.
3. The purchase of daily rigid products tends to be rational, and the purchase of non-rigid products is more casual.
According to the 2023 China Consumer Trends Report, people don't blindly buy discounted and promotional items, and regularly clean up unnecessary items. Consumers of products that are in demand will rationally weigh their consumption choices.
According to the data, 78.1% of consumers attach importance to brands when buying, believe in the power of well-known brands, and nearly seventy percent of consumers think that they will give priority to high brand awareness when they can't make up their minds.
In the non-rigid consumption with greater consumer satisfaction, consumers have changed from need to want, from the pursuit of material functional satisfaction to the pursuit of material, spiritual and interesting triple satisfaction, which has become the most important change in consumption concept.
4. The mainstream population in the city has changed from the pursuit of cost performance to the price-to-face ratio to the heart-to-price ratio.
Brands should stimulate more interest in life consumption, and provide consumers with psychological added value and aesthetic added value on the basis of function, so that consumers can get the greatest sense of surprise, meaning, value and satisfaction in every consumption.
According to the "China Consumer Trend Report", the focus of consumers' lives has shifted to the inner small world, and the sense of atmosphere, emotional value and inner comfort have become particularly important for the consumer experience.
Consumers are increasingly concerned about their spiritual comfort, and products should not only provide functionality but also soothe the mind and emotions. According to the survey data, 52.9% of consumers chose to enjoy their body and mind and relax themselves.
5. In the post-epidemic era, everyone has a self-relief appeal in their hearts, and empathy is sales.
In the live broadcast room, it seems to be lyrical and chatty, and the stories of characters, the poems of landscapes and pastorals, and the beautiful feelings of true feelings have become people's pursuits.
Because of the beautiful imagination of the rice fields in the distance, people buy rice for a year, and because of the resonance of warm memories of the past, people buy ice cream or luncheon meat.
The inspiration of positive energy has given countless people the courage to restart their lives, and everyone wants to find instant warmth and the desire to leave in the pressure of firewood, rice, oil and salt. This also happens to prove the sales power of human heart and empathy.
02
About the growth of the business
6. The decade of China's new diamonds has begun, but only high-quality and strong brands can cross the cycle and win at the end.
Kantar Analytics, the world's leading market research firm, found that over the past 12 years, the BrandZ Top 100 Chinese Brands share price has grown by 170%, while the MSCI China Index has grown by 20% over the same period. The MSCI China Index fell 32.3% under the impact of the pandemic, while the top 100 Chinese brands remained resilient and grew by 1.6%.
At present, the epidemic is cleared, the top level focuses on the economy, China-US relations are not broken, consumption incentive policies are on the way, the middle-income group continues to expand, people's yearning for a better life continues to increase, and China's consumption has experienced the biggest trough test in 20 years, and the new diamond decade has begun. The cold winter is passing, but the era of passive growth is over, and only high-quality and strong brands in the stock game market are the core guarantee for passing through the cycle.
7. Only by creating new products and new scenarios can brands break through the dilemma, and only by changing consumer behavior can they drive growth.
The dividends of population growth have ended, and the dividends of traffic growth have also ended.
The core of brand growth is to create new products and new scenarios, and to drive the growth of new products and new scenarios, it is necessary to choose high-coverage media, high-frequency exposure, and high-quality reach to trigger consumers' Xi learning curves, enter consumers' minds, and effectively change consumer behavior.
8. The growth of enterprises should change from quantitative to qualitative, and brand marketing should change from traffic to constant quantity, and the core lies in "focus, focus, and refocus".
Focusing on core products and reducing long-tail products, the survey shows that core products contribute more than 90% of the company's revenue.
Focus on brand value, reduce promotion and traffic dependence, only the accumulation of brands can enjoy the compound interest of time.
Focusing on the change of consumer behavior and reducing ineffective delivery, only by penetrating the core group of core media with high frequency can we drive the change of consumer behavior and the change of market structure.
9. There is no media volume that surpasses the opponent, how can there be a market share that surpasses the opponent.
Most companies only think about storing grain for the winter during the turbulent period, but the leading companies in various categories should instead increase brand investment. Because in the post-pandemic era, consumers will be more cautious and will spend their money on brands that are more secure, more certain, and more trusted.
At the same time, the noise in the market is lower, the competitiveness will be weakened, and the brand dares to over-invest, which will win a larger market volume, seize a larger market share, and improve brand concentration faster.
10. What enterprises need is muscle growth, to "fatten and gain muscle".
Companies need to think about what is the real core business and the value that can bring long-term profits.
A business that does not build the core strength of the brand, and is not actively recognized and chosen by customers, must be removed, because it will only make you fat, not really strong.
Muscle growth is not to mistake obesity for growth, to find the key engine of business growth, to occupy the first or only place in the minds of customers, and to obtain the active choice or preference of customers is the growth of muscles.
11. It's not usually a better product that beats you, but an innovative category or technology.
According to Mr. Philip Kotler, today's companies are replicating each other's strengths and strategies at an ever-faster rate, making differentiation increasingly difficult to achieve. Businesses are becoming more and more alike, and profit margins are decreasing. The best way to solve this dilemma is to develop strategic innovation and imagination.
Many people think that competition is to do better quality, or cheaper price, in fact, the market leader is likely to be the pioneer of the category, even if the latecomer does better, people still think that it is to follow the trend, and the follower is naturally considered second-rate. It's not better than better.
While enterprises use technological innovation or category innovation to create the market, they should also use marketing to achieve mental connection with users. Successful enterprises often grasp marketing and innovation with both hands, any breakthrough in innovative technology, if you do not use marketing to achieve the association with customer value, and do not become the first choice in the minds of customers, your innovation is either meaningless, or difficult to keep.
12. There are no gaps in the market, but there are many gaps in consumer perceptions, and this is your opportunity.
In an era of surplus, the competition on the shelves is a red ocean whenever you look at it, but from the perspective of consumer cognition, you will find that there are many blue oceans.
There are pure water, natural water, mineral water and other kinds of water on the market, extremely saturated, everyone thinks that this market has no way to do it anymore, Liangbaikai borrowed the Xi Chinese habit of drinking cooked water, and the inertial cognition of "drinking Liangbaikai is healthy" has created a big market. Yuanqi Forest has taken advantage of people's health needs for 0 sugar, 0 fat and 0 calories to create a new market for sugar-free sparkling water.
13. What people need is not the product, but the scenario problem that the product can solve.
In an era of consumption stagnation and low desire, the most important problem for brands is to create scenarios and stimulate purchase desire in order to promote business increment.
Harvard's most famous Jobs to be done theory believes that the scene is the demand, and the creation of the scene can have a commercial increment, because what people need is not the product itself, but the scene problem that the product can solve, and their own emotions and life meaning in the scene.
What is a scene?A scene is a time, a place, a person, an event, a scene is the reason for a person to actively participate and actively engage. For example, Wang Laoji's function is to go to the fire and prevent the fire, and staying up late to watch the ball, working overtime, and eating barbecue hot pot is the scene, and there is a scene to have sales. The advantage of the unique duck neck is that it is fresh and spicy, while the tasteless travel, overtime, chasing dramas, and the tastelessness in the mouth are the trigger points for the scene.
14. The more effective it is in the short term, the more ineffective it is in the long term.
In the face of homogeneous competition, many companies will only use one trick, price reduction and promotion, and fight price wars. Short-term marketing strategies tend to use quick response and low price catering to attract consumers, but it is difficult to form the accumulation of brand value and the lasting solidification of mind.
I only want to sell products faster and spend all my energy on speed, but I don't study the core differentiation value, because the value is too slow to build, and the price war is faster, but the world comes and goes quickly, and the slow comes and goes.
Don't use the diligence of traffic delivery to cover up the lack of brand building. The traffic dividend can grow in the short term, and the brand compound interest can continue to become stronger.
15. You hit yours, I hit mine, don't dance to the rhythm of your opponent.
The best tactic against strong competitors is to go the opposite, effectively hit the innate weakness of the opponent's strength, lure the enemy to where you are best at fighting, and turn the opponent's strengths into weaknesses.
For example, in the face of the milk powder market dominated by international brands back then, Feihe's "more suitable for Chinese baby physique" hit the weakness in the advantages of international brands, or focus on a specific group of people and become the first choice of this group, such as Winona, who focuses on sensitive skin.
This is to realize "self-centeredness" and grasp the initiative on the battlefield through the transformation of the combat area type and rules. If a brand wants to succeed in the product development stage, it is necessary to ask yourself, what category is my first choice, or what function is the first choice, or what group of people is the first choice, or what scene is the first choice, if you can't say a word, it usually won't succeed.
16. Victory belongs to the side that is able to concentrate the maximum saturation blow of forces in a decisive place.
Some companies have limited budgets but prefer a decentralized style of play, with a few punches in each place. Is it the effect of casting 10 head columns equal to 4% of the ratings for a TV program with a rating of 0.4%? No, it is basically equal to 0, even if the number of people reached is exactly the same, only 4% of the head columns can detonate the brand and establish mental memory.
The limited budget needs to be detonated in a centralized manner, otherwise the amount is not enough, and the form cannot penetrate - if you want to win the business war for the minds of consumers, you must concentrate firepower and penetrate the blood-brain barrier of consumers. "Strong pressure" is to concentrate firepower, and "high concentration" is to increase the frequency of advertising to ensure high-frequency saturation attacks and repeated reach.
For example, Microcolando avoided the fierce competition in the milk industry, concentrated its firepower on cheese sticks, and used Focus Media saturation attacks to repeatedly play advertising songs adapted from two tigers in office buildings and community elevators, growing from 170 million to 4.45 billion in three years, becoming the king of cheese.
17. The market will always belong to the long-termists.
What is the dividend of long-termism? It is that when your growth comes from the game that was laid out two or three years ago, you can fully enjoy that kind of growth that blossoms and blossoms naturally.
A founder's current determination often comes from the choice he made a few years ago, and he or she enjoys the compounding benefits of that choice today.
Trying new concepts, new technologies, and new algorithms, and constantly playing games with platforms, algorithms, and uncertain markets will only get busier and more anxious, because you are not busy with the essence, and you are not busy with things that can accumulate and bring compound interest for a long time.
When companies are caught up in growth anxiety, they often spend too much energy embracing the so-called change, grasping the infinite and fluid things, but ignoring the truly scarce and unchanging things. Sticking to things that are more certain, longer-term, and truly sustainable will lead to positive value accumulation.
03
About brand marketing
18. The explosion of mobile Internet information, in the era of dust, the challenge of brand communication is that there is no certainty.
There are usually three paths for brand detonation: integration into major social events and topics, integration into major social entertainment and events, and integration into consumers' most daily living spaces such as communities and office buildings.
In the information dust society, gambling on the dissemination of major events and major entertainment, the effect is remarkable but the probability is very low, a year can really positively detonate the brand's major events or major entertainment is often a handful, for enterprises to meet but not seek.
The biggest risk in brand communication is uncertainty, and it is necessary to use certain logic to win the uncertain communication environment. If you want to put your brand name and core values into the ears of hundreds of millions of mainstream consumers, you need to look for the core living space of mainstream consumers, such as office buildings and apartment buildings that people must pass through every day.
The "attention to life scenes" represented by Focus has become a kind of scarce infrastructure, forming a deterministic link to 400 million mainstream people every day through accurate and stable links to daily life scenes.
19. Planting grass does not produce a strong brand recognition, others plant grass, you have to plant trees.
Many brands think that they can build awareness by planting grass, short videos, etc., but in essence, every company is planting grass, and now it is planting grass on the grassland. The grass you grow is submerged in it and is difficult for consumers to spot. And you're planting grass, and your opponent is planting your negative grass (negative).
What's more, planting grass requires a large number of videos with different creative ideas, racking their brains to get consumers to pay attention, but what the final consumer remembers, the message is often different each time, and it is difficult for consumers to form an effective memory of your brand and core values.
It is very important for brands to establish social consensus and social field energy, and it is necessary to establish social consensus among five groups of people: decision-makers, buyers, influencers, users, and communicators through centralized media, in order to form social field energy.
When others are still "planting grass", you should plant a big tree, planting grass can only help you from 0 to 1 at most, become an Internet celebrity brand, but enterprises can only plant trees and form a centralized detonation through centralized media (such as CCTV, Focus, and top network comprehensive titles) from 1 to 10 to 100.
If there is a potential, it is advantageous, and the big tree of the brand is the "potential" of the enterprise. The brand has no potential energy, even if it bets on the right track and seizes the traffic dividend, it will only be a small profit and a short profit.
20. To become a public brand, you must pick a big pool, catch a big fish, and cast a big net.
To build a brand, you need to hit the target audience at the largest possible scale. It is difficult to form a broad social consensus on the precision marketing of circles, and only by achieving a wide reach to large-scale people can it become a public brand. The brand that does not detonate the breaking circle is like being fluttering in the lake all the time, and has never seen the capacity of the sea.
In the start-up stage, brands can rely on point-to-point precision marketing, because this stage pursues high conversion rates, but with the development of the brand and the continuous growth of volume, precision has become the biggest obstacle. When a growing brand pursues precision excessively in the communication process, it is giving up the possibility of becoming a public brand.
21. Once you stop transmitting knowledge to the masses, you will be forgotten much faster than you think.
Kantar, the world's leading market research firm, found that media placement has a significant impact on brand activity and market share, with a 50% reduction in marketing spend in a quarter, a 19% reduction in brand activity, a halving of activity if there is no advertising spend in the whole quarter, and a 13% decrease in average sales if there is no advertising in half a year.
Traffic is often hundreds of millions of exposures and tens of millions of readings, and companies think they are popular all over the Internet, but consumers' perception of you is far less optimistic than what companies think they are. These numbers do not represent real and valid readings. Consumers are forgetful, and the brain is Xi to filter out meaningless information and remember valuable information, which is why many well-known brands are still advertising and marketing for a long time.
22. Familiarity brings a sense of security, and strangeness brings a sense of crisis.
When brand advertising has established the foundation of awareness and interest for consumers, and when the performance advertising appears in front of consumers again, you represent a brand that many people are using in the eyes of consumers, a brand with social consensus, and no longer an unknown miscellaneous or white label.
Brand consensus is the unified perception of the brand formed by consumers, the first is to know your name, and the second is to know your value. If you have a good enough product or service, but it doesn't sell as well, it's often for one reason: not enough people know you.
Professor Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, pointed out that the best way for people to remember a concept or a thing is to keep repeating it, because human beings simply can't distinguish what is familiar and what is true.
23. Spread the word "avoid greed", the more you want to say, the easier it is to fail.
Big, broad concepts are both difficult to attack and difficult to defend. With too much information, consumers will feel confused, who are you, what do you really represent? If you want too much, you will inevitably lose sight of one or the other.
The core strategy is to create a word that is unique to you, to establish a position that is unique to you, and all marketing activities should be carried out, invested, accumulated around this word, and finally have a word in the minds of customers.
For example, Mercedes-Benz is luxury, BMW is driving pleasure, Volvo is safety, Ferrari is speed, and Jeep is off-road.
24. The password for advertising slogans out of the circle is penetration and explosiveness.
Positioning is the steering wheel of brand development, but brand positioning is not directly equal to advertising slogans, the mission of advertising slogans is to make your brand have a relationship with consumers and stimulate consumers' interest in the brand.
It is necessary to translate the strategic positioning language of the brand into the communication language that consumers are interested in, so that consumers want to know you and are interested in seeing you more.
For example, the advertising slogan of empty carved pasta is "only be a mother and don't cook", the advertising slogan of Laifen's high-speed hair dryer is "celebrities are blown", and the advertising slogan of BOSS Zhipin is "You can talk directly with the boss when you find a job".
04
About quality and efficiency synergy
25. Brand advertising is fish farming, and effect advertising is fishing. If you don't keep fish, you will soon run out of fish.
In fact, the synergy of quality and efficiency is like fish farming and fishing, the brand is to raise fish in the fish pond, and the effect is to catch the fish.
Without the support of the brand, the fish in the fish pond will be quickly caught, and more and more people will fish, it will become more and more difficult to catch a fish, and the cost will become higher and higher.
Brands must continue to educate the market and create a market, so that there will be endless fish. For example, the Ulike hair removal device has reached a bottleneck of one billion, and the online accurate traffic has run out, but in fact, there are very few people in the market who really know that there is a household painless hair removal device, and there are very few people who know the Ulike brand, so in 2021, Ulike will detonate 400 million mainstream people in Focus, from 1 billion to 2.5 billion to 4.5 billion in two years, and the market share will rise from 30% to 70%.
26. If you don't spend money on the brand, you will spend more money on promotions and traffic.
Live streaming is like a concentrated monetization of brand potential. If it is a less well-known brand, the head anchor is often reluctant to cooperate, and even if the head anchor is willing to push, it may not work well.
Therefore, it is necessary to continue to "store water" in the brand pool, so that the water level of the brand pool is getting higher and higher, and then convert the brand potential energy into live broadcast sales at key time nodes, rather than blindly "releasing water".
If a user places an order just by looking at you on the traffic platform, they will buy your product because of the low price, and they will also turn around and try others tomorrow because the opponent is cheaper. Traffic is essentially a flow of users, these users come and go, without too much expectation, and ultimately it is a zero-sum game business.
Traffic can not retain the volume, let alone retain people's hearts. If you only know how to buy and sell goods, your profits will always be trapped in the cost of customer acquisition.
Ogilvy once said: If money is not spent on investing in brands, it will be spent on promotional discounts, but spending on the latter will only get lower and lower.
You can't build an indestructible brand image by relying on promotions and discounts, and only by establishing an indestructible brand image can you make your brand a part of people's lives.
27. "One Shake, One Book, One Focus" is the core media mix to enhance brand equity.
According to Kantar's 2021 China Urban Residents' Advertising Attention Study, the Internet, elevators, and TV are the three core arrival media, covering the widest range of mainstream people in mainstream cities, with the Internet arrival rate of 95%, elevator arrival rate of 79%, and TV arrival rate of 51%.
In terms of advertising attention, consumers are least disrupted in limited living spaces, such as elevators and cinemas. And because of the high-frequency reach, the number of memories left is the largest, and the driving brand purchase intention is also stronger.
Wang Xing pointed out that research shows that online social media represented by "one shake and one book" to "plant grass" to create brand content, and offline ladder media represented by Focus to trigger scenes, awaken consumers' purchase needs, and achieve high-frequency reach in a closed space, is the most effective paradigm for brand building.
At the same time, online and offline also pay attention to the collaborative strategy. Depending on the budget, industry and stage, the three media combinations can be organically integrated. If you have a limited budget, you can mainly focus on online entertainment and online social media, and if you have a budget and target a wider range of people, you can use online platforms and offline ladder media.
28. The brand voice not only affects the C-end mentality, but also affects the confidence of the team and B-end partners, and also determines the premium ability of the market.
Brand building should be guided by potential energy, as the brand voice grows larger and larger, the brand potential energy is getting higher and higher, the brand not only quickly establishes public awareness, but also has influence from the C-end to the B-end.
The strength of the brand's potential energy determines the flow of resources. The potential energy of advertising also lies in where it comes from, standing on the shoulders of the head media, borrowing the potential energy of mainstream media, such as the offline delivery of Focus Media, which can divert the store terminal in exchange for a better position and a larger layout, and can also lead to online platforms to get more traffic support.
29. Brand is the biggest Matthew effect. If you ignore the brand, you will be ignored by the market.
A strong brand brings value in any channel.
First, big brands bring their own traffic: when the brand is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, there can be continuous free traffic. Big brands come with 60-70% of their free traffic, and the remaining 30-40% is brought by traffic advertising.
Second, the conversion rate of traffic ads for big brands is higher. Big brands have high visibility and recognition, so the probability of clicking on ads and transactions will be higher than that of ordinary brands, and the conversion rate can reach several times that of others.
Third, big brands bring greater premium value. If a big brand has trust, reputation, and brand potential, it can bring greater premium ability.
30. It is difficult to integrate quality and efficiency, but online and offline data can be connected, and product efficiency can be collaborated faster.
Focus and Tmall have created the "Tianchuan Intelligent Investment", which screens Focus Buildings according to the customer's audience tags in the Tmall Data Bank, and selects the building with the highest concentration of potential customers for delivery.
At the same time, the data of Focus Advertising is returned, and users who have seen Focus Advertising are precipitated in the customer Tmall Data Bank to become the cognitive group (Group A), so that brands can pursue the investment twice on the site and continue to operate to the interest group (I population) to the purchasing group (P population). This will significantly shorten the time period between brand advertising and sales effectiveness.
When it comes to offline business, 60% of consumers' transactions occur within a three-kilometer range of life services, so Focus Advertising can be particularly accurately placed within a three-kilometer radius of the customer's terminal consumption place, and instantly guide users to nearby terminals to buy.