In the new business era, strive to become a scene brand

 　　What is a scene brand?

　　This is what "New Species Explosion · Wu Sheng Business Method Release 2022" tries to explain. Wu Sheng's definition of a scene brand is: subscribe to a life and experience an era. In his view, now is an important node for the upgrading of the business world, and the barbaric growth of relying on PPT, speculation, and rapid financing has ended.

　　Instead, brands that can quickly respond to the real needs of the digital age—scenario brands.

　　Scene branding is not a new commercial species, but is closer to a new commercial discovery. Because there are quite a few brands that have become scene brands unknowingly, and enjoy the unique development dividends brought by scene brands. Among them, there are not only "small and beautiful" brands like "Duku", but also a century-old factory like Yunnan Baiyao; there are unmanned driving scenes that can only be seen in science fiction movies, and urban culture and A new consumer landmark that stands out among regional features.

　　Finding commonalities among these brands with very different sizes and business models is an incredible thing in itself. What is even more incredible is that the value system of "scenario brand" can maintain vitality in a huge time span.

　　It is necessary to ask again: what is a scene brand?

Shield Noise and Find Effective Competitiveness

　　The scene brand is a collection of effective competitiveness.

　　For a long time, the business world has regarded two sentences as the golden rule - "scale determines economy" and "product strength determines sales conversion rate".

　　But in the process of implementation, problems persist. For example, a lot of resources have been invested in the field of marketing, especially in many new tracks where the future is not yet clear, there has been a situation where life-threatening subsidies are exchanged for the market. The actual situation is that the scale obtained by burning money is useless, and the subsidies will quickly disintegrate as soon as they stop. For another example, in order to improve product strength, some market participants continue to develop new functions and create "new parameters" that highlight product strength. However, after such products are put into the market, they are often lost.

　　Why does "scale is king" fail frequently? Why are the functions and parameters that shine in the PPT stage far from playing their due role in practical application scenarios?

　　In effect, this is the brand falling into the trap of ineffective competition. Market participants mistakenly invest resources in the direction that cannot create value for users, and fail to continue to explore demand scenarios, so naturally they cannot get positive feedback from the market. In contrast, scene brands tend to target a scene bullseye first, and then act.

　　Taking "Du Library" as an example, when self-media entrepreneurs share traffic dividends in information flow advertisements, obtain algorithm recommendations through hot writing, and obtain attention and resonance by combining virtual and real, "Du Library" always focuses on non-fiction. Writing, operates under the "three haves and three nos" principles of being interesting, informative, kind, and regardless of cost, space, and regrets.

　　What's even more amazing is that in the context of the traffic shortage that many big V fans with millions of fans are unable to make ends meet, "Duku" successfully "crossed the bulls and bears" with the subscription scale of tens of thousands of people. In Wu Sheng's words, "Reading Library" "does not pursue the scale of users in the traditional sense, but cherishes the trust of a few people more".

　　In fact, "Reading Library" is not selling content, nor a premium for opinions, IP and feelings, but a "filter" in the era of information explosion. In essence, "Reading Library" is to provide a filtering mechanism that is not disturbed by the outside world for the precious reading time of high-quality content consumers.

　　Facts have proved that this focus on "in the house" brand can turn resources into effective competitiveness. When market participants strive to build themselves into a scene brand, they will force the team to pay attention to the scene itself and find the right direction. Once the mindset shift is achieved, both start-up and established brands have the opportunity to find new growth points.

Replacing "pulling seedlings to grow" with "self-growing"

　　The scene brand is the source of enterprise vitality.

　　To build a brand, traders all want to make the brand have a long life cycle. But the reality is that many of the operations that try to prolong the life of the brand have become slaughter and encouragement. The mobile phone giant Nokia once tried to save itself time and again on the eve of the outbreak of Android and iOS, trying to open source Symbian into a more open and rich ecosystem; it teamed up with Intel and Microsoft to build a new system and mobile phone.

　　Why did these ambitious plans ultimately fizzle out?

　　Because Nokia's original intention in launching these plans was never to change the "inside the house", but to try to change the trend "outside the house" with the help of external forces. Therefore, people see that Symbian failed to become Android, and cross-border giants such as Intel and Microsoft failed to find a point of strength in cooperation, which led to the rapid decline of co-created brands such as MeeGo and Windows Phone.

　　If you understand Nokia's high opening and low walking, you can understand Wu Sheng's sentence "It is not only new brands that promote digital business, but those brands that can always create new scenarios."

　　In fact, the vitality of a brand has nothing to do with "new" or "old", but only with the realization and iteration of the scene. If there is no ability to continuously create scenario solutions, the first-mover advantage of large manufacturers will eventually be exhausted. On the contrary, if the output value of the scene can be continuously found, even the smallest business entity can grow into a towering tree.

　　The Carrot Run unmanned vehicle, praised by Wu Sheng as a "giant silent object", is very representative. At the beginning of its invention, autonomous driving technology was a technology used to solve traffic accidents. At that time, some experts believed that this was a technology that would never be realized—no company would not use drivers with an hourly salary of tens of yuan, and “do public welfare” for this cause with a very high technical threshold and R&D investment.

　　Unexpectedly, with the continuous maturity of this technology, participants such as Carrot Run have seen a new possibility of Robotaxi - a business scenario that fully releases the cost and safety advantages of autonomous driving. Not long ago, Robin Li also publicly stated that in the future, the price of an unmanned car will be half cheaper than that of a taxi now. Not only that, but the data accumulation and algorithm optimization brought by Robotaxi can in turn promote the advancement of autonomous driving technology, giving autonomous driving the ability to “create blood”.

　　From an "impossible technology" to an imaginative business closed loop, this is the vitality that the scene injects into the brand. There is no tactical game strategy, and there is no deliberate and vigorous promotion of capital. From the beginning, the Carrot Run unmanned vehicle has been deployed around "in-house" parameters such as cost, safety, and urban efficiency, and it is logical to harvest the fruits of Robotaxi.

　　Similar cases include Focus Media. In the context of the four major portals, search bidding, direct trains, and short video marketing that continue to erode the share of offline advertising, Focus Media can become a brand-breaking channel alongside "two micro and one shake". The logic behind it is that Focus Media firmly adheres to the elevator room scene. Through the iteration of new infrastructure, the media value of the elevator room has been continuously strengthened. As a result, from the original traditional brands to FMCG brands, as well as the most popular new economy and national trend brands, all of them have discovered the irreplaceable value of Focus Media, and the small elevator room has achieved a market value of more than 80 billion yuan of Focus Media.

　　It can be seen that the vitality of the scene brand stems from its self-growing development trajectory. With the deepening of thinking about specific scenes, each scene can be subdivided infinitely, creating new scenes and values ​​like nesting dolls. This is what Wu Sheng said, "The product solves a problem, and the scene continues to solve the problem."

The only way to conquer the "chaotic era" of business

　　Scenario branding is a certainty against uncertainty.

　　At present, the global business world has entered a stage of "chaotic era", especially after the failure of "subsidy for the market" and "crossing the river by feeling friends and businessmen", market participants must get rid of the shackles of empiricism, in a situation full of uncertainty. find certainty in a business environment.

　　The question is, how can one find a deterministic growth code?

　　One view is that deterministic growth can be achieved by choosing the right track. However, from local life to smartphones, pan-entertainment, and new energy vehicles, under the market capacity of trillions of yuan, there are only a handful of well-known brands. There is also the view that embracing capital can reap certainty. However, the waves of venture capital that were once regarded as the darlings of capital have mostly failed, and the capital investment of hundreds of billions of yuan has been wasted.

　　The lessons of the past are vivid, and certainty seems to be a luxury in the business world. However, in Wu Sheng's view, "the era of high brand certainty" is coming. He believes that the rhythm of new business is shifting to scenario-driven, mean-reversion, predictable and linear innovation.

　　There are many scene brands that have found a deterministic high-growth password by virtue of the scene when the track and capital are not dominant.

　　For example, the three-winged bird, at a time when the traditional home appliance industry is highly saturated, collects the list of pain points in the user's lifestyle with a list of questions, provides full-process customization services, and iterates the assembly-line home appliance production and sales model into a thousand-person, thousand-faced scenario wisdom. In this way, the three-winged bird gave up the small profits but quick turnover, turned to non-standard products with more flexible performance and premium space, and became a small giant in the customized home solution track.

　　The first case of LAUNCH in Scene Lab is also instructive. As early as 10 years ago, many well-known MOOKs began to disappear from the public eye. The rise of online reading has also made MOOK worse, and it is even rarer to have stable profits. LAUNCH’s debut, however, did the opposite. Taking MOOK as the brand’s starting point, around the launch of new concepts and new products, LAUNCH derived product forms such as curatorial space, live broadcast of scenes, and new product planning. From building circles to breaking circles, LAUNCH The starter is further proof of the importance of the scene.

　　Atoms are the smallest particles of chemical change, but under a high-powered electron microscope, there is a universe within each atom. In the same way, even a tiny scene can have the potential for a grand narrative.

　　I believe that in the near future, more and more brands will proudly say: "We are a scene brand."