De-branding: Brand Marketing Reform in the Internet Age

As e-commerce gradually erodes the traditional offline share, online has become an important channel that no brand can ignore. However, the brand operation on the Internet is very different from the traditional offline brand operation.

Three Characteristics of Brand Operation in Internet Era

The first is the different ways of brand communication. In the first half of 20 15, the number of netizens in China reached 668 million, with an average online time of 3.7 hours/day, but the average attention time of users in social occasions was only 8 seconds. In this situation of fragmentation and short attention, the traditional brand multi-channel large-scale advertising, massive information, one-way push and undifferentiated communication mode is gradually losing its function. Internet brands tend to promote social platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. The natural gathering of users and spontaneous social groups in social networks essentially realize the classification of potential consumers, and the classification method is more accurate and scientific than the traditional classification.

Secondly, in the era of rapid consumption and personalized e-commerce, the product life cycle is greatly shortened. In view of the adjustment of product series, traditional brands need to invest a lot of energy and cost to communicate and maintain offline channels, product marketing and brand promotion. New Internet brands can focus on key links such as design and interaction with consumers to enhance the user experience. Taking the clothing industry as an example, it takes several months for traditional brands to design, produce and put on the shelves, while it takes only ten days for Internet brands to complete. The direct effect is that the product update frequency and inventory turnover rate are greatly improved. At present, typical Amoy brands have new models on the shelves every day, and Handu Yishe has 70-80 new models on the shelves every day.

Thirdly, the Internet platform in China is a vicious competition market, which leads to a sharp decline in brand value. On the one hand, the revolution of information dissemination mode has eliminated the opacity of product information in the traditional offline market, and consumers can obtain product information through home evaluation, drying orders and expert comments. When consumers are exposed to more comprehensive information, brand perceived quality and loyalty are no longer all factors that affect purchase decisions. Therefore, consumers are more sensitive to price and no longer pay for brand premium.

On the other hand, the e-commerce market in China is flooded with counterfeit goods, and consumers pay too much attention to the price after it is difficult to distinguish the authenticity. Vicious price competition leads to the decline of corporate profits and can not cultivate customer loyalty. Moreover, all major e-commerce platforms are profitable by selling traffic. From their point of view, the intensification of market competition will increase the value of their traffic. So every time Taobao adjusts its search algorithm, it is always the big brands that are most affected. All these factors make the Internet channel become a market with extremely high price sensitivity and serious vicious competition, and it is difficult to cultivate brand value. This is why it is difficult for Internet channels to produce high-end brands. In my opinion, most large Internet brands are only channel brands, that is to say, the role of brands is mainly to attract traffic, while customers' recognition of brand personality and emotion is not high.

Internet brand marketing trend

Based on the above factors, there are some unique trends on the Internet that are different from traditional offline brand marketing.

First of all, where does the brand come from? Big and complete? Where to? Small and beautiful? Transformation. With the development of the Internet, the demand for niche commodities that were difficult to be tapped and satisfied in the long tail market has gradually been realized. Alibaba data shows that in the past three years, the proportion of small and medium-sized brand goods transactions has increased by 10%. Small and medium-sized brands are favored by the market with more personalized and appropriate consumer demand attitudes.

Secondly, the brand operation mode based on interest socialization and fan economy is popular. Social interests can generate user stickiness and loyalty. When there are a group of people with certain skills? Opinion leader? At that time, interest groups may evolve into fan groups. And then what? Opinion leader? We can accelerate the accumulation of fans through experience sharing and interaction, and finally combine interests with products to turn fans into huge potential consumer groups. What has happened over the years? Internet celebrities? Shops are a good example of this model.

Internet celebrities? Refers to people who become popular because of an event or behavior in real life or online life. What are the top ten Taobao women's clothing stores on 20 15 and 6 18? Internet celebrities? Can a shop, or even a case of five diamonds in just two months after opening a shop, be called Taobao? Miracle? . The new turnover in the store exceeds10 million yuan, which is no less than the traditional first-line brand. Behind the hundreds of millions of sales is the support of more than one million fans on social media. The data shows that there are more than 1 0,000 online celebrity shops on Taobao platform, of which 7 1% are women, and most of them are young women aged 18-29.

What is the internet celebrity doing? Spiritual leader? Taking socialization as a breakthrough, we will integrate Internet brand marketing with the pain points of consumers' interests, break the boundaries between traditional business and socialization, and let consumers subtly accept brand implantation in social interaction. Unlike traditional brands, which choose stars as endorsements to gain popularity, online celebrities are themselves a brand. Shops encourage fans to share shopping experiences (such as buyer's show), which increases consumers' sense of participation and emotion, and also allows more potential consumers to understand products more intuitively, thus enhancing their popularity and reputation through word-of-mouth communication. Socialization greatly reduces the long accumulation process of traditional new brands, and word-of-mouth communication is more convincing than commercial advertisements. Foreign studies have also proved that after sharing comments through LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, the conversion rate of Internet channels is 2% higher than that of the industry, and the conversion rate of Twitter is as high as 6%.

The strong relationship links established by interest groups in social networks have great influence on the cost structure and operation mode of shops among network celebrities. The data shows that the cost of offline brands to acquire new users is 4-6 times that of retaining old users. Every 2% reduction in the turnover rate of old users is equivalent to a 10% reduction in costs, while typical? Internet celebrities? The proportion of old customers in the store is usually as high as 70%. In addition, Redskins can accurately and quickly obtain cross-platform consumption data and understand fans' preferences. Which picture has high click-through rate, wide spread coverage, high traffic and high purchase conversion rate? ? Internet celebrities? With the help of quantifiable data indicators, the brand has achieved unprecedented precision marketing, quickly positioned the needs of fans, adjusted products in time, and optimized operational strategies.

The future of the brand

However, Internet brands also have many problems. For example, the network celebrities mentioned above, shopkeepers usually lack the ability of supply chain management, and the team is mainly marketing personnel. The main consumer group is fans, and the model is relatively simple. In addition, the network's red man effect also has limitations. How to deeply bind consumers, extend the time limit of "red man effect" and enhance brand strength is an important topic for the long-term development of online celebrity stores. In addition, the problem that vicious competition makes it difficult to establish brand value is also common on the Internet.

The fundamental difference between the Internet and traditional offline channels will have a great impact on the brand management model in the future. Big and complete? Our brand business model will even disappear. Existing big brands often rely on a large amount of marketing investment to establish brand image, and then rely on this brand image to develop vertically differentiated product lines to meet the needs of high, medium and low-end consumers. In this business model, low-end products make up the cost and high-end products contribute profits. However, the Internet channel has strongly impacted the profit rate of low-end products, making it difficult to maintain the existing business model, which is very similar to the model of Wal-Mart and Costco impacting small retailers. The profit margins of small retailers are very narrow, and Wal-Mart and Costco get a small share of SKUs from them by using low prices and large packaging, which makes it difficult for these retailers to maintain.

In the future, we will see the influence of big brands gradually weaken, replaced by many small and medium-sized brands with great personality under one brand. Consumers' understanding of brands is achieved through different sub-brands and personalized experiences, while parent brand's influence is relatively weakened. Multi-level brand structure will still exist in the market. The bottom layer is the brand with extremely low price and high cost performance, and the middle layer is the personalized brand hierarchy in the form of sub-brands of big brand groups, which can reduce operating costs by enjoying the supply chain and financial system. The top level is composed of high-profit brands, with the ultimate experience and tonality. On the whole, except for a few industries, the bottom and middle-level brands will bear the impact of de-branding.