How to break the brand growth under the involution of marketing?

In the new consumption era, with the improvement of supply chain and the continuous development of marketing technology, "involution" seems to have evolved into an industry norm, and no brand can escape such a competitive environment. To some extent, "involution" is a kind of homogeneous and low-level competition, which focuses on the tactical level and loses more essential and macroscopic competitive thinking. Under the "involution", the marketing cost of brands is getting higher and higher, and the cost advantage brought by scale is difficult to offset the risk of overcapacity, which has become a common problem in new consumer industries. At the same time, the brand is also facing the anxiety of brand independence. New consumer brands usually rise on the Internet platform. In the multi-center internet platform, although the brand has broken through the channels and media monopoly of traditional big brands to a certain extent, it is also worried about over-reliance on a certain platform and a certain KOL. How should new brands cross the threshold of involution and move towards a new round of growth? In the "involution" competition pattern, new brands increasingly need to return to marketing fundamentals, identify ineffective marketing and focus on key marketing. Generally speaking, in the process of brand development from small to large, the core needs to establish a marketing closed loop: ● Accurately disseminate content: Is your content what consumers need? Sufficient media power: Does your media have explosive market power? ● Credible product evaluation: Can your product stand word-of-mouth verification? If your marketing improves your popularity, but it doesn't form a considerable sales volume, or it doesn't form a certain continuous repurchase, then you should rethink whether you are caught in a certain link of marketing involution according to this closed loop. First, accurately disseminate content: Is your content what consumers need? In the Internet environment, significant changes have taken place: 1898, American advertising scientist E.S. Lewis put forward the AIDMA model of consumer behavior patterns: attention, interest, desire, memory and action. In 2005, Dentsu Advertising Company put forward AISAS model based on Internet communication environment: attention, interest, search, action and sharing. Although these link models are slightly different, they basically point to a basic law, and marketing needs to formulate strategies according to consumers' cognition and behavior. Many people think that there is only one purpose of marketing, which is to promote sales transformation. Therefore, many enterprises will fall into a self-perspective and think that "poor sales" is due to "poor communication". In fact, if the brand's communication content is not positioned at the right stage, no matter how much communication, it is difficult to form considerable sales. Because consumers need to go through the process of "cognition-cognition-re-cognition" before they can transition to the link of purchase and re-purchase. "Cognition-cognition-re-cognition" is the basic process and law of human contact with people or things, and it is also the necessary process for the formation of the relationship between consumers and brands: ● First, understand the brand name, trademark and category; Secondly, remember the functional utility and differentiation advantages of the brand; ● Finally, form an emotional and spiritual connection. In the past twenty years, trout and Reece's positioning theory has attracted a large number of fans. In fact, the greatness of positioning theory lies in taking the lead in explaining that the ultimate battlefield of business is to compete for consumers' minds. Only content that hits consumers' minds can get sustained sales. Content that can cut into consumers' minds is often positioned to tap high potential and help consumers reduce mental obstacles. For example, flying cranes are more suitable for China's baby's physique, qiaqia Xiaohuangbao has mastered the key preservation technology, and Yuan Qi Forest has 0 sugar, 0 fat and 0 card. Generally speaking, the purpose of communication is not only to directly promote sales, but also to eliminate consumers' cognitive and psychological barriers to brands. If consumers' cognitive and psychological barriers to the brand are not solved, the free goods will be too expensive for consumers. Because consumers have to bear the transportation cost, storage cost, learning cost, identity image and safety risk of this product. This is in line with peter drucker's famous saying that "the purpose of marketing is to make sales redundant", that is, marketing at the communication level should reduce the resistance of product sales in consumers' minds, and make brand value as the basis of consumption decision-making as a promise, so that consumers can quickly make brand judgments with intuitive memory. Second, sufficient media power: Does your media have explosive market power? With the positioning slogan and communication content as sharp as nails, a powerful communication tool like hammer is needed to drive nails with core positioning into consumers' brains. Many ineffective marketing just ignore the basic principle of using "hammer". The threshold effect in econometrics points out the important law of marketing investment. Only when the marketing power reaches a certain order of magnitude in the market can it produce qualitative change and obtain remarkable benefits. This is the principle of saturation attack in commercial warfare. However, with the development of Internet and even Internet of Things technology, the consumption scene and marketing technology have undergone earth-shaking changes. Consumers have entered the era of VUCA-volatility, uncertainty, complexity and fuzziness, and brands are facing the same challenges as waves and sand. How to make the brand achieve saturation attack in such an environment and be invincible? In fact, only by adhering to the most basic principles can we resist the era of great change: 1. Brand advertising should focus on opposing fragmentation. In the internet environment, brand words are becoming more and more fragmented, and consumers' cognition is gradually disintegrating into vague impressions, making it difficult to establish a long-term brand cognitive relationship. The primary way for brands to fight against fragmentation is to regain the power of centralized marketing media and return to the living space closest to consumers. Once upon a time, CCTV was an important town for brand building. Gradually, the head core columns of Hunan Satellite TV and Zhejiang Satellite TV have become new stars, showing more dazzling light. Now, Focus Elevator Media has become the focus of competition for new consumer brands by virtue of the resource advantages of the mainstream population of 300 million cities. More and more brands are experiencing explosive growth through concentrated media power. 2. Brand advertising should use repetition rate to combat forgetting rate. Daniel Kahneman, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, pointed out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow that man is a creature and should be alert in the living environment. Repetition will bring the comfort and familiarity of cognitive relaxation. A message that appears repeatedly without bad results will become a safety signal. After a long time, what is safe is good, and it will be easy to like when you are familiar with it. This is the psychological pure exposure effect. The familiarity brought by repetition can enhance the trust of consumers. Huashan, the founder of Huahua Consulting, also had a wonderful comment: "The essence of propaganda lies in repetition, and the essence of the audience lies in forgetting. We should master the principle of communication in order to fight against repeated forgetting. Don't engage in that wonderful screen-brushing article. What the audience won't watch for the second time is fireworks night. " 3. Brand advertising should face uncertainty with certainty. In 20 17, a group of advertisements of Baique Ling with a mirror swept through the circle of friends, creating a phenomenal hot spot. Although it was questioned that there was no sales volume, it gained 30 million readings. Later, Baiqueling has been carefully planning the marketing events of Guofeng, but there is no hot spot at the screen level. Brand building can't rely on luck, and we must use deterministic means to replace uncertain investment. With the intensification of brand competition among new consumers, brand advertisements are heating up gradually. Brand media with higher certainty is returning to the core battlefield of marketing. Just like the report "Annual Inventory of China Advertising Market in 2020" released by CTR at the beginning of the year, the cost of advertising in 2020 decreased by 1 1.6% year-on-year. However, elevator TV and elevator posters have increased greatly (23.8% and 28.9% respectively). With the disappearance of Internet traffic dividend, online and offline multimedia layout has become more and more important. Wang Xing, CEO of Kaidu China and global president of BrandZ, pointed out at the TOP 100 brand launch conference in China last year that "two micro-brands, one shake and one focus" is the best paradigm for brand building. 3. Credible product evaluation: Can your product stand word-of-mouth verification? Professor John Dighton of Harvard Business School put forward three components of business model in the 20th century: transportation, TV network and shopping center. By the 265,438+0 century, the three components of business model have been transformed into mobile search, social network and e-commerce. These factors are reshaping the consumer decision-making and marketing environment. In the past, consumers' decision-making mainly depended on TV media, and consumers' feedback information was usually ignored, so it was difficult for brands to communicate with each other. Now the mechanism of consumers' brand evaluation has evolved. The digitalization of Taobao, JD.COM, Xiaohongshu, WeChat, Tik Tok, experience stores, new media and traditional channels has become a new way for consumers to speak. At the same time, KOL and KOC are gradually striving to become experience officers of brand consumption trends. The era of taking consumers as the center has arrived. There is a very popular motto in the marketing field: brands belong to consumers, and brands only operate brands on behalf of consumers. Correspondingly, brand building has also changed from a one-way business to a two-way business-consumer process. Consumer-centered word-of-mouth marketing and social grass planting have gradually become popular concepts, and trustworthy product evaluation has become an important means to test brands. Under the trend of "two micro, one shake, one focus", consumers not only need direct brand advertising, but also need to actively search product information to verify the reliability of the spread content. Product evaluation has gradually become a key factor in determining the transition from cognition to subscription. The essence of social grass planting is to create an information environment for consumers. The content of product evaluation on social media is equivalent to the extension of consumer cognition, which allows consumers to know more about product information. The evaluation of consumers and even third parties will increase the credibility of brand advertisements. Social grass planting has made great progress in the era of mobile Internet. From Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu to Xiaohongshu, Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, it has formed an industry-standard mode of communication and become an important "partner" of brand advertising. The traditional Internet marketing background often ignores the relationship between brand advertising and social media marketing. If social media marketing is regarded as planting grass and pursuing user coverage, then brand advertising is planting trees and pursuing deep-rooted user cognition. When the cognitive tree firmly occupies the user's mind, planting grass will achieve more significant benefits. On the battlefield with live broadcast, the top brands in sales volume are basically traditional big brands. The brand advertisements invested by these traditional big brands in the past have now gained greater returns in the era of hot social media. It is concluded that marketing involution is essentially a low-level repetition and competition in local battlefields, ignoring the overall underlying thinking. Brand building needs closed-loop thinking to complete the transformation from "knowledge-cognition-recognition", so that more consumers can know you, get familiar with you, generate trust and love, and finally form a purchase. This is a complete marketing value chain. In the past, we could form market coverage through a single channel or media, but in the face of the new retail environment, brand layout needs to focus on a more macro dimension, and establish a marketing closed loop from three aspects: accurate communication content, sufficient media power and credible product evaluation. Brand growth is a marathon. What matters is not the temporary effect, but the pursuit of long-term investment and income under the correct strategy. Just like the marketing ideas of China and China: advertising itself has no stage goal, but the investment and savings of brand assets. (CIS)