Time hourglass, the years are shallow, and it is another year in the blink of an eye. Standing at the end of 2023, looking back on this challenging year, and then packing up your mentality to meet a more challenging 2024.
The challenges faced by marketers are closely linked, the environment and market recovery are slow, consumers are sensitive, and the development of enterprises must both and demand: on the one hand, they must maintain growth, and on the other hand, they must reduce costs and improve efficiency;Management says they want to rebrand, but executive struggles with resultsIf you want to be long-term, you should also take into account short-term performanceI want to invest in a depression of value, but I am reluctant to give up mainstream channels;I want to measure and evaluate ROI across platforms, both in the long and short term, but also based on platform rules.
The 2024 edition of the "China Digital Marketing Trend Report" jointly released by Miaozhen Academy of Marketing Sciences, GDMS Global Digital Marketing Summit and M360 points out that marketing is becoming more and more intelligent, but there seem to be more and more questions, and the answers to many questions can be resorted to technology and data, but more importantly, it is to return to the basic common sense of marketing.
With economic growth slowing down and marketing budgets tightening, how can brands break the game?
According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, China's GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2020, that is, the early stage of the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, fell to the lowest, -68%, with the control and recurrence of the epidemic, by the first quarter of 2021, driven by anti-epidemic substances, reached 183% until 2023, with the growth stabilizing to 6 in the second quarter3% and 4 in the third quarter9%, which can basically stabilize at about 5%.
However, the consumer confidence index has been slow to recover since its sharp increase in April 2022.
The overall investment trend in the marketing industry shows a state of declining confidence, with 43% of respondents believing that overall investment will decline next year, and 36% believing that it will increase. Advertisers with small and medium-sized budgets are more negative (more than half believe it will decline).
According to the survey, corporate marketing investment, both actual and expected, continues to decline. The actual growth in 2023 is comparable to the first year of the pandemic in 2020, and the expected growth rate in 2024 is the lowest in nearly four years. The expected growth of social marketing investment has slowed, but the growth forecast of 13% is still 2 percentage points higher than the overall growth forecast (11%).
How to deal with the decline in marketing budgets?
If marketing budgets are declining, the accepted mainstream response is to improve efficiency and innovate. As for reducing the input, increasing the pressure of the **, optimizing the department and other helpless measures have a low degree of recognition.
The mainstream countermeasures can be roughly divided into: 1Choose to deliver a higher ROI**2Innovate products & add new products, look for market breakthrough opportunities;3.Enhance performance ads and reduce brand ads.
Jiang Qingyun, a professor at Fudan University's School of Management, believes that countercyclical brand investment can be carried out. When the economy is bad, more people will choose to improve themselves and invest in themselves. Investment in performance is likely to decline due to lower sales volumes, while investment in brands will increase because of the long-term benefits. While brand investment does not necessarily have absolute returns, it has the opportunity to bring benefits, because if the situation turns bad, other brands may stop investing, while powerful companies have the opportunity to enhance their influence by investing in brands.
Liu Peng, co-founder of CARTX, believes in refined operations. Many businesses used to adopt an extensive business mode, thinking that as long as they could make a profit, but traffic is getting more and more expensive, making it more and more difficult to make a profit, and the demand for refined operation has arisen. For example, many consumers add an item to their cart and forget to buy it, sending them a reminder email the next day with a coupon is likely to lead to a purchase. Although this method seems simple, it contributes greatly to the growth of the customer's business.
Zhang Jihong, chief cooperation officer of OMG, believes that the introduction of "digital employees". Whether it's a brand or a brand, there is a lot of pressure to work internally, and we are using artificial intelligence to improve and change our workflow. One of the ways to increase efficiency in the case of existing staff is to introduce a digital workforce.
In fact, in the current environment, the problems faced by enterprises can be attributed to "survival" and "development". You might think it's a nonsense, but the two words correspond to different businesses. It mainly depends on the ability of the enterprise, and of course, the most important thing is the capital chain.
Sufficient funds can choose "development", and should pay attention to brand building, and the cohesion of brand power, because the ultimate competition of enterprises is brand, is culture.
For those small, medium and micro enterprises whose enterprise capabilities are not very strong and lack of funds, the fundamental problem they face is survival, and the key is to survive this "harsh winter". For such enterprises, even a series of helpless actions such as optimizing departments and replacing biological employees with digital employees are sympathetic. Approaching survival is fundamental, followed by the pursuit of long-term development and planning a better life in the future.
According to the fluctuation curve of the "quality efficiency" target, in 2024, the overall marketing campaign target may rebound compared with 2023, and the effect may decrease. Advertisers highly recognize the importance of brands from their point of view, but in the face of budget and market pressure, they still choose to "reduce products and increase efficiency" in action, and there is a big difference between management and executive. Many people say that they want to be a brand and increase their brand budget, but in fact, they are reducing brand advertising and increasing performance advertising to improve ROI, which is a typical embodiment of the separation of left brain and right brain, upper body and lower body. People say they want to be a brand, but they actually do what their bosses ask them to sell, which reflects the reality that in the current economic climate, brand budgets will still be constrained and small and medium-sized companies will invest more in performance advertising.
The brand returns in thought, and the quality and efficiency are synergistic in action
Fang Jun, the founder of Shujian Consulting, proposed that the brand power goes through the cycle. Historically, in Europe and Latin America, large brands that have been able to maintain high brand budgets during economic crises have tended to gain market share after the crisis because they have been able to hold on to their minds during the crisis, while smaller brands have reduced their brand budgets and invested more in performance advertising in order to survive. This strategy is particularly evident in the FMCG category, showing a Matthew effect. This is a rule that proves that the effects of brand investment are not obvious in a normal year, but when it is challenged, its advantages can be highlighted. Big brands gain a larger market share and higher operational efficiency through brand advertising, while smaller brands may be hit harder by the economic crisis. Chen Chen, head of consumer insights at Nestlé Health Sciences, said that LTV is becoming more and more important. More and more companies are realizing the importance of building brand power, as the LTV of target users is becoming more and more important in the context of crowd strategies and more alternative strategies. In order to take into account both short-term and long-term growth, enterprises will tend to balance the investment in quality and efficiency in stages, and even if it is "effect marketing" that focuses on short-term growth, it can also appropriately increase its contribution to the long-term sales of the brand. For example, in the past, we created a single product explosion, paid attention to the transmission of the interests of a single product, appropriately increased the keyword transmission of the overall product line and brand level, occupied the minds of the target group, and formed a brand consensus.
Quality is combined through content. Human behavior is determined by cognition, and content is the most effective way to influence human cognition. After three years of the pandemic, many global brands are increasing their investment in content marketing, believing that product and effectiveness can be combined through content marketing. Because content is broadly defined, including **, audio, **, etc., it can be used as a medium to convey brand information and value. In these broad senses, we can integrate short-term, medium-term, and long-term demands.
Alence Lee said that seizing the structural opportunity and returning to the roots of marketing. As China's GDP and consumer goods as a whole have entered a period of slow development, e-commerce no longer brings super-fast growth, and Party A's internal marketing and e-commerce discourse power has begun to readjust. Since the beginning of this year, many enterprises' requirements for marketing management have returned to the "roots", that is: the head FMCG management training background, understand insight, innovation, category development, brand building, media management, channel construction, digitalization, research and development, chain, value chain, etc., and have the ability to systematically integrate these capabilities inside and outside the organization, and lead the team to achieve sustainable brand growth and business development.
Overall, advertising** is migrating from effect to brand, the traffic space is shrinking, the reach rate is saturated, and the positive impact of brand advertising on conversion is highlighted. This trend has been validated overseas, especially in the United States. In the United States, although performance advertising is very mature, companies still have to put a lot of brand advertising, one is because bidding advertising is expensive, and the other is that there is no conversion without brand perception.