Brands cannot become popular, it is not the traffic that is wrong, but the rootlessness of the brand
First, let's look at how an internet celebrity brand was born.
I now give a formula: high-growth track + large traffic exposure + big net celebrity with goods = net celebrity brand.
First of all, this product must be in a high-growth track. For example, in recent years, products such as beauty makeup, new teas, coffee, low-alcohol, self-heating pot, and recent noodle restaurants, bistros and other physical stores are typical high-growth tracks. Today, a large number of Internet celebrity brands come from This kind of track.
Secondly, through Xiaohongshu, Station B, Douyin DOU+ and other channels to give the brand all-round exposure. For example, I put notes on Xiaohongshu and answered on Zhihu to expand the display volume and increase the brand's potential. This has formed a phenomenon that products are very popular.
Finally, with the addition of Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and other well-known Internet celebrities or celebrities, and B station up masters, an Internet celebrity brand was born.
This is a general formula for creating an Internet celebrity brand. Data standards are even given on the Internet. Xiaohongshu 5000 notes + Zhihu 2000 answers + get Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's live broadcast room.
But after the creation, a problem will gradually become prominent: these Internet celebrity brands are difficult to last. Because the power on which this brand is based is not on the competitiveness of the company itself, but on external forces to promote the sales of this brand, these external forces include outlets, traffic and goods.
Recently, the coffee track is a veritable outlet track. In recent years, the main ultra-instant coffee track has been very popular. It not only brought three and a half meals, but also spawned a series of coffee brands such as Sumida River and Yongpu. This track was not launched in three and a half times, and the strongest promoter behind it is actually Tmall. In other words, it is the Tmall platform that is working hard to promote the concept of ultra-instant coffee, which has promoted the rise of the entire coffee track.
Later, well-known coffee giants Nestlé and Starbucks also launched their own ultra-instant coffee, and the new consumer brand immediately encountered a very big challenge.
Then there are Internet celebrities with the goods, many brands are superstitious about sales, and they have arranged their product channels in the live broadcast rooms of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and achieved good sales. But this is because Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya are very strong, not because the brand itself is very strong.
There have been more than one example to prove that many companies have seen a sharp increase in sales during the live broadcast, but their sales dropped to one-tenth of the previous level after the live broadcast was stopped.
Now, we are going to talk about traffic.
Everyone knows that the internet celebrity small bottle of Jiujiang Xiaobai, we said that Jiang Xiaobai was able to become popular at first because of its packaging, that is, it made an envelope on the bottle, and then wrote some internet celebrity copywriting on the envelope. To create emotional resonance, Jiang Xiaobai became a popular online celebrity brand among young people for a while.
Since then, many brands have imitated one after another. Except for small bottles of wine in this industry, almost all brands of large and small have created the same packaging. Even other fields such as Nongfu Spring, Coca-Cola, SK-II, etc. have also worked on packaging. , Packaging marketing is unprecedentedly hot, forming a trend.
But let’s look at it now. At that time, Jiang Xiaobai became hot and continued. Is it really because of his good marketing?
No, it's because Jiang Xiaobai has done what a wine company should do best-shop the channels.
Marketing is the branch and the channel is the root of the brand.
I once served a wine company, which is a company with very strong channel power, and Jiang Xiaobai has dug many regional marketers and sales personnel from this wine company in the process of its rise.
In 2016, when we went to the market and went to a restaurant or shop, we would find that Jiang Xiaobai’s terminal warehousing has been very strong. Basically every small restaurant can see Jiang Xiaobai’s product posters, or Said to be some materials such as toothpick holders.
Behind these conventional materials, channel laying with high breadth, high strength and strong execution is Jiang Xiaobai's real competitiveness. Online popularity can help Jiang Xiaobai have more say in front of channel vendors, but in the end, he still has to build up competitiveness by laying channels.
The tuyere track belongs to the times, the traffic belongs to the platform, and the delivery of goods belongs to the Internet celebrity. Therefore, many companies are unable to form their own core competitiveness.
Looking at four kinds of moats from the five cycles of products
For traditional product marketing, in a product life cycle, about 2.5% of people who pursue early adopters will initially consume it. This group of people are the angel users of this brand.
Then, there will be a group of trend-following people who will follow to consume. This group of people are called early adopters. After that, the product will reach the tipping point. At this time, the product has become an Internet celebrity product in the society.
Then there is a large number of people who take the initiative to consume. This group of people is called the early masses. When the product sales reach the highest point, it will prompt many late masses who think that the brand is risk-free and have no doubts to follow up consumption.
Finally, there is a group of lagging traditionalists who do not accept new products.
Basically a new product in the past, its life cycle is like this.
In the current Internet age, when you find the first angel crowd, the brand will quickly become popular, and then a lot of competitors will follow up. After consumers’ early adopters have passed, they will stop buying this product, and this product will begin. It is no longer popular, and finally the entire brand collapses, and the life cycle of this product is over.
So for such a brand, what exactly can help it build the core competitiveness of the enterprise?
This is a theory of Warren Buffett that I want to tell you-the moat.
So what is a moat? There are four kinds.
The first is the scale effect, which is a very important barrier to competition in traditional enterprises.
I am in this industry, my scale is the largest, and my largest scale means that my cost can be very low. If other competitors join, I can beat them through price wars.
The second is the network effect, which is more in line with the product of the Internet era. For example, after social software such as WeChat becomes popular, few other social software will be downloaded because WeChat has formed its own network effect.
All your friends and colleagues are using WeChat, and you want to use other social software to communicate with them. This is called a network effect.
The third is the conversion cost. For example, if I am used to Apple, then I would not buy Android because I am not used to the Android system. This is called conversion cost.
The fourth type is intangible assets. When I build the brand, my competitors cannot imitate it.
These are the four moats that Buffett talks about. In fact, among these four moats, the third conversion cost is the most important point in all moats. The network effect is essentially a conversion cost.
Passionate exposure can't save Internet celebrities, switching costs to keep the brand evergreen
So what can help a new brand become an evergreen brand? How should it build its core competitiveness? In fact, it is just two words-cost.
Regarding cost, I want to talk about two points:
First, for companies, it is necessary to increase the entry cost of competitors. I want to make the technical threshold of the track itself very high and prevent other competitors from making similar products.
In fact, the scale effect is to increase the entry cost of competitors, and the purpose is to make new competitors have no profits.
Why is it that a high-growth track is easy to give birth to an Internet celebrity brand? Because the barriers to entry are low. Compared with the technological innovation, mobile phone technology, artificial intelligence and other tracks, the technical and capital thresholds of making milk tea, making beauty, and making coffee are much lower, and it is easy to produce explosive products.
However, increasing the entry cost of competitors in low-cost circuits can still form a moat.
Michelle Ice City is the brand with almost the lowest price among the new tea brands, but it is still difficult to imitate. It is not enough to lower the price and reduce the gross profit. Mass production is needed to ensure efficiency improvement, large-scale procurement to reduce costs, and standardization. Opening stores and sharing resources, etc., in the supply chain, procurement, store setting, personnel training, marketing, and ordering, etc., economies of scale are required to reduce costs.
Therefore, single stores and mom-and-pop stores of this model cannot be imitated, and big brands cannot lower their prices, thus forming a brand barrier for Michelle Ice City.
The second is to increase the switching cost of consumers and make consumers accustomed to buying and using this brand.
Conversion costs are also divided into the following categories:
1. Money costs. As the name suggests, when this product has established private domain benefits, and I buy another brand, then I may lose a large amount of income inherent in the original brand.
For example, when I travel on business now, China Southern Airlines would generally prefer China Southern Airlines because I have members in China Southern Airlines and have accumulated mileage. When I take a China Southern Airlines flight, I can upgrade and use its VIP lounge. When you switch to another airline, you will lose this potential benefit from the membership plan.
2. Time cost. When consumers make decisions, they need time to collect information. For example, I don’t use this brand and use other ones, which means I need to collect and research new product information again, which is consuming consumers’ time.
In order to save consumers' time and cost, consumer brands have learned a trick to take advantage of their strength.
For example, beauty products will define part of its product line as flat replacement products. When the OLAY white bottle is released, it will emphasize that it has high-concentration and high-efficiency whitening and lightening products such as niacinamide in the SK-II small bulb. The spot ingredient creates a cheap but superior quality attribute.
This saves users the time to understand a brand: "Although I don't understand the ingredients and functions, I know that the functions that the OLAY white bottle and the SK-II light bulb can bring to me are similar." Vigorous effort has opened up consumer perceptions.
3. Risk cost. There are two types of risk costs: one is to assume that a consumer buys the wrong product, which will cause the consumer to lose money. This is a potential risk. The second is that the brand is associated with the consumer's personal image and social status. Once the brand is changed, it means that the consumer's social status has changed. This is a social risk.
Let me explain with an example. For example, the first model of Xiaopeng Motors, the Xiaopeng G3, is an entry-level new energy vehicle for young people, aimed at the mass consumer market. Later, Xiaopeng launched a high-end model, Xiaopeng P7, including the Pengyi version that focused on Xiaopeng P7 in brand communication, which is a supercar-shaped product. This is to increase consumers' perception of Xiaopeng as a high-end car According to the perception of brand car companies, when consumers buy Xiaopeng cars, they are not buying cheap, not cost-effective, but a new trendy frontier, but not as expensive as traditional luxury cars. They can demonstrate their personal image and Social status.
This is how many consumer brands target the sinking market. The sinking market is not a label of low prices, but the king of low prices and high performance.
For the same reason, there are small pots of tea. The most successful point of this product is to establish user perception. When we give gifts, tea is more elegant and connotative than tobacco and alcohol.
The traditional tea industry has no clear pricing for a long time. The small pot of tea helped us solve this problem. It established a standard and price system for user decision-making to prevent us from buying expensive but unbranded things, but the other party could not perceive them, thereby increasing risks. The emergence of such situations as cost. This is why the wine table must drink Moutai, and the gift must be given a small pot of tea.
Therefore, to reduce the cost of consumer risk, we must do two things:
First, we must establish the criteria for consumer decision-making. It is very important that there is no risk in choosing this brand.
The second is to associate consumers' individual image, social status and brand as much as possible, improve brand tonality, and make it into an industry standard, so that when consumers think of a brand, they should consider whether the brand identity does not conform to their own image and tonality.
4. Learning costs. Why are there so many loyal iPhone fans? In fact, it is because many consumers have become accustomed to operating Apple systems.
The same is true in other industries. If a product is equipped with such a software and operating system to make users accustomed to it, they will not adapt when they switch to other brands for consumption, and they need to be familiar with it again. This is the cost of learning.
Zhong Xuegao’s price is about 10 times higher than that of normal ice cream. It is aimed at women from 25 to 30 years old. They use celebrity endorsements and Internet celebrity products to become popular within a period of time, but because With their high pricing and unsustainable and irregular demand, this brand's path to internet celebrity is not stable enough.
If you want a long-lasting brand, you can also make changes in three aspects: binding life scenes, creating consumption processes, and supporting service plans.
For example, the launch of afternoon tea packages, with ice buckets and ice packs that can be used for picnics during delivery, is bound to life scenes for sale. Or subdivide the target population, make healthy and palatable products for children, women, etc., and create a sense of ritual for consumption, which can effectively enhance brand stickiness and increase the repurchase rate.
To do a good job in this regard, you can refer to a foreign toothbrush brand, which uses a subscription e-commerce model to sell electric toothbrushes. It mails new brush heads and toothpaste trials to users every month. Self-built APP provides users with Dental and oral care popular science videos and online dentist appointments and other services.
The simple purchase of products has been made into a comprehensive, integrated, one-stop service solution, covering various life and application scenarios related to teeth, infiltrating consumers' lives more, and continuously enhancing consumers' brand awareness. Cognition and stickiness. Therefore, what a brand brings to users is not only product quality, but more importantly, it creates user value and arouses product demand.
5. Psychological cost. It is the emotion towards this brand.
What is the highest level of branding? It is an automatic cruise system that a good brand can have in the minds of consumers. In other words, when a consumer chooses similar products, the first reaction in his brain is your brand, so that your brand truly becomes a consumer’s psychological consumption and a custom behavior.
The most important thing for a brand is how to be sustainable. The core is cost. You have to increase the entry cost of your opponents and increase the switching cost of consumers. When these two things are in place, a truly viable one Business.
