On November 24, the 2023 Great Consumption Forum was successfully concluded in Shanghai.
Wang Xiaobo, general manager of Best brand BG and senior brand strategy expert, brought a wonderful speech entitled "Brand Change Potential Energy to Win", and the new brand change concept resonated with all the guests!
In recent years, it can be seen that the customers served by Best, such as Moutai, Anta, Feihe, Ideal, etc., have a very important word in all their public reports"Brand potential energy".
For 18 years, I was creating"New Consumption and New Marketing".For this book, we researched brands in e-commerce businesses. At that time, the term "brand potential energy" has been widely circulated in the e-commerce industry, "don't talk about ** without potential energy", because talking with e-commerce channels ** often faces high discounts. If the brand only has awareness, only some awareness is not enough. Without potential energy, the bargaining power in the e-commerce channel will be very weak, and they will often sacrifice their bargaining power at a three- or four-fold discount on the supply price. Nowadays, the common context of the leading brands in China's business community has also shifted to brand potential energy, and brand potential energy has become the consensus of the industry.
At present, the changes in the business environment we are facing are very terrifying, and the amount of information we are exposed to in a week is equivalent to the amount of information that may be in the past few years in feudal society. At the same time, the user's attention has become particularly distracted, so it is very difficult to rely on a single advertising communication to affect the consumer's mental cognition.
The changes we encounter are not just the changes of a few competitors, but the overall environment. Many mature companies and brands may still be Xi to using the past expressions to serve the post-generation, but the main group of new consumers today is the post-70s, post-80s and post-90s.
Another typical feature is the question of dynamic versus static. With the advent of the 5G mobile Internet era, people's access to information and purchase payment methods have undergone earth-shaking changes. When consumers in Europe and the United States are still reading newspapers in the subway, domestic Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, WeChat and short ** live broadcast technology have long surpassed foreign markets. When European and American countries still use credit cards as the main means of payment, supermarkets and convenience stores as the main shopping channels, the domestic channel fission and mobile payment have made great changes in the soil of the business environment. The business environment in Europe and the United States is relatively static, while the domestic market is a highly dynamic environment. In this case, the underlying thinking of the business will be different. The current environment is defined as a "new era".
Why is it called "a new era"?
Because at present, China has taken the lead in Europe and the United States in many aspects, but we do not have the confidence to express it. We emphasize cultural self-confidence, but the entire business innovation, brand play logic, marketing landing path, and product technology innovation have been ahead of Europe and the United States. It's just that in terms of brand side and model, many mainstream parties have been introduced in the past 20 years, and we have not properly chosen the party that is suitable for our own business, because European and American brands are divided into genres.
Japan's influential brands in the global rise are all started with consumer products, and Japan's consumer products companies naturally have a model for building consumer products. Europe is a luxury product, and the United States is a fast-moving consumer product. Therefore, when introducing the brand, you need to evaluate the applicability with your own business.
So far, we are a new era. In just a few years, the ideal car served by Best has surpassed Lexus's 20-year growth in China, with sales of nearly 400,000 units in 2023. In the middle of the year, our country's prime minister visited Germany, and German Volkswagen BBA and other auto brands are studying and discussing China's new power brands, which is the best praise for the innovation of Chinese brands.
Although the Chinese pay attention to collectivism, in this new era, the domestic consumer group has also undergone great changes in the past two years.
Post-90s, post-00s
They are anti-PUA, anti-workplace, and dare to express themselves individually, not only in the workplace, but also on the self-leading platform, giving them a broader and more free space to play. They seek beauty, they pursue freedom, independence and self-fulfillment, they have a wide range of interests, they enjoy time at home, and they are happy to travel with friends from different communities. They are playful and hedonistic, self-challenging and adventurous, and they believe in cultural self-confidence and self-reliance. It is this group of post-90s and post-00s generations who gave birth to China's own two-dimensional and animation culture, and promoted the popularity of Hanfu and the return and development of the national trend. The new consumer group has given birth to a new popular consumption trend, and the personalized aesthetics and emotional expression of young consumers have been released due to technological progress and media diversification, which is completely different from the group characteristics of the post-80s generation who advocate collectivism, take the mainstream aesthetics of the group as their personal aesthetic standard, suppress their own individuality, and are not good at self-expression. If the touchpoints between the brand and these young people are not deeply integrated, they are likely to ignore, resist and resent them.
Post-70s, post-80s
After the collectivist generation, the aesthetic style tends to be a collective aesthetic, not good at personality expression after becoming an important member of the consumption upgrade army, they pursue the style of exquisite quality life, pay attention to the realization of self-worth, willing to enjoy light luxury and prefer cost performance, pay attention to product services and experiential consumption. They pay more attention to quality consumption and are more sensitive to the sense of consumer sovereignty. In online and offline stores, the highest complaint rate is this group of people. Because they have their own consumption judgment standards, they have higher requirements for quality and service. Especially.
People in first- and second-tier cities, who have been cultivated by foreign brands and enjoyed the quality and service of foreign brands, will not lower their standards when they choose domestic brands in turn.
Post-50s, post-60s
The elderly group has also given birth to new consumption options. The elderly population is also changing, and a large number of post-50s and post-60s are retired cadres and public institutions, who do not necessarily watch TV, but will brush Douyin, and use traditional brand communication methods to communicate with these customer groups is often ineffective, so at present, the entire "old, middle and young" consumer group level has undergone great changes.
That's why a large number of brands, although they play well and are very self-congratulatory, have limited actual performance results. Behind the change in consumer groups is the birth of its own consumer culture in China as a whole. In his book, Kenichi Ohmae gave a detailed description of the population structure and consumption upgrading in Japan, an M-shaped society, and the changes in consumer culture in Japanese society are related to the changes in the population structure. The same is true in the United States, where true globalization can become a strong brand from the beginning of the era, represented by Starbucks. After World War II, the baby boomers grew into a new consumer group called yuppies, which was the early main consumer group of Starbucks, a new generation of consumer goods brands in the United States, who highly identified with American culture and values, and were willing to choose trust and actively support their country's new brands. In the past five years, it is the Z generation people who are more willing to support domestic brands, and their cultural self-confidence and sense of national identity are stronger. Therefore, behind the change of talking about the crowd, the core is because of the birth of its own mainstream consumer culture in China. We have seen the rise of the entire Chinese automobile and mobile phone brands in China, especially in terms of technology, experience and configuration, which are not lost or even far surpassed by foreign brands.
The changes in the entire consumption level have made it difficult to sustain the original brand building method of establishing cognition and image through one-way communication. It turns out that when building a brand, there is a very popular word called "mind". At present, the word "mind" has been flooded, is it possible to build a strong brand, influence consumers to choose a certain brand only rely on one mental element!Is brand reputation important?Is it important to symbolize the status and status that the brand brings?Is the perception of the experience brought by the brand important?Is it important to have the attitude of the crowd behind the brand?Is it important to associate with the brand?Is the brand's history, legend and cultural concept important?In the field of FMCG, the more high-end brands go, including in the field of consumer durables and luxury goods, the more decision-making factors and competitive variables that affect consumers' choice to buy, we must start from the brand concept, additional benefits, and brand core values to build a brand with stronger potential.
In the past, when we went shopping, we would usually discuss with our family members which store we would visit today and which brand we would buy, which was planned, and in this case, it was often affected by advertising. But now with the continuous development of content, Douyin, and self-development, we will find that many things are no longer based on planning, but unplanned.
To take the simplest example, when I went to buy children's juice for our children, I had very limited choices, that is, I only knew one German brand called Guobeishuang. Although I have a long-term demand, objectively speaking, this demand has not been stimulated. In the last year, my whole shopping behavior has changed, because there are a lot of healthy children's juice content in small packages on Douyin, so I frequently go to buy children's juice, which is based on the content that stimulates this demand in me. I didn't have a plan to do it, it was an unplanned act because I saw it and thought it was good.
Therefore, some companies may have done a lot of actions when building brands, but in fact, they have not thought about the essential changes. Users are stimulated by the scene and content, rather than by advertising, which is the biggest change in marketing communication now.
A lot of changes have taken place in recent years, and many traditional brands have encountered a force to be reckoned with, which is the power of consumer awakening. In the face of the growing voice of consumers on the Internet and the many concerns of consumers, businesses need to find ways to deal with product upgrades. In addition, the power of the individual has replaced the state media as opinion leaders. It is now difficult to control through the state media, as it used to be. Therefore, it is now necessary to think more about the user side and how to do a series of upgrades around the user side.
At present, the traditional channel model that traditional marketing relies on has been disintegrated by new retail, the traditional model has been replaced by the new, and the organization association has been replaced by the KOL community. In the social environment of information flood and media fragmentation, television, newspapers, etc. are rapidly marginalized and no longer occupy the central position of content publishers. Even if it is network marketing and new marketing, if there is no high-quality content that quickly catches the attention of consumers and netizens, it is easy to be ignored in a large number of marketing information. In such an environment, it is becoming more and more difficult for companies with traditional self-congratulatory advertising methods to make a voice heard by consumers, so that it is becoming more and more difficult to stand out.
The traditional brands accumulated in the past 30 years are basically developing around cognition, image and word-of-mouth, because FMCG products are basically cognitive-oriented, while most of the consumer products are based on word-of-mouth to do business accumulation for a long time, and the gap is reflected in the final external manifestation of the brand. After summarizing, the biggest commonality of those FMCG brands that can break through 20 billion lies in the expansion of brand culture, rather than the construction of commodity culture, and the long-term output based on commodity culture will lead to the thinning of brand added value and interests, resulting in weaker and weaker brand potential.
In the past 30 years, traditional domestic brands have achieved brand development through in-depth distribution channel management, celebrity endorsements, rapid investment, and advertising bombardment, invested heavily in brand awareness and image building, and relied on one-way communication to become a leading brand in the industry. With the development of e-commerce, new retail and new **, these brands that once monopolized offline channels and markets have fallen out of favor.
There are two main modes for the rise of new consumer brands, the flow of explosive products first, and the pursuit of product efficiencyBrand potential energy first, the pursuit of two-way running. In the past five years, new consumer brands have achieved brand development through DTC e-commerce and new retail precision distribution, KOL endorsement content marketing, and starting from first- and second-tier cities. With the help of e-commerce and new retail and new dividends, it has quickly become a leading brand in various categories online in a short period of time. However, with the increase of homogeneous operations, it has led to increased competition and the entry of traditional brands. These once-smash hits are facing the risk of sluggish growth and recession, and the business model oriented by explosive product traffic is also facing changes, and new consumer brands with potential energy have more growth possibilities in the future.
Adopting a cow is a typical example of the rise of the potential energy of new consumer brands, and there are very few new consumer brands that can exceed 1 billion, but it exceeds 2 billion and approaches 3 billion. Why does it continue to grow?Because it got rid of the practice of grabbing traffic not only based on traffic, from the very beginning, it was a crowdfunding activity from the beginning, from the name of the crowdfunding activity, called the crowdfunding activity of adopting a cow. At that time, the cattle farm did not have a trademark, no brand, but did a crowdfunding for this factory, and later used the name of this crowdfunding campaign as a trademark, called Adopt a Cow. Co-creation was done from the beginning of the brand naming, and later through the continuous content output of self-communication, a brand story of a responsible father to do a good job of milk was constructed, and a good brand image and a unique personality different from traditional milk brands were established in the hearts of consumers, so that their value recognition was recognized. Later, we will work with new retail channels to co-create user activities, and good products and continuous user experience activities will further sublimate the perception of brand value experience, and then continue to bring good reputation and repurchase. The example of the rise of a new consumer brand, adopting a cow, is a typical potential energy model.
In the 70s of the last century, only 3 years of Volvo's sales surpassed BMW's. For most of the time since, Volvo has been a second-tier brand in luxury cars. When safety features become common to the entire luxury car market, it will no longer be differentiated, and it will be difficult to maintain the status of a high-end brand. Consumers' choice of luxury cars is not only a decision of commodity function and interests, but also a symbol of status, the realization of self-worth, the spirit of struggle and enterprising, etc., and Mercedes-Benz and BMW continue to output brand added value benefits to create a stronger brand potential energy.
Cadillac, Land Rover, and Jaguar are the same, after having the image of a luxury car, a certain reputation and cognitive characteristics, why are they still in a discounted situation?Because the potential energy is not strong.
"Brand potential energy".It is based on the relative height difference between consumers' cognitive expectations of brand value and perceived experience, which reflects the brand value of the brand equity owned by the enterprise in the minds of consumers. The stronger the brand potential, the stronger the sense of superiority and competitiveness enjoyed by the brand in the minds of consumers, and the greater the impact on consumers' purchase preferences. Only strong cognition, high-end image, good reputation, multi-traffic, no potential energy of the brand seems to be very strong, but in fact very weak, in the face of strong opponents can only be busy with low prices, into the dilemma of not promoting and not selling.
In the high-end luxury market, brands cannot simply achieve their goals through slogans and minds, and in the face of the new era, brands urgently need to carry out new changes.
According to Fortune magazine, 62% of enterprises in the United States have a life span of no more than 5 years, and the average life span of general multinational companies is 10-12 years, even though the average life span of the world's top 500 brands is 40-42 years, and the average life span of the world's top 1000 brands is only 30 years. Since the reform and opening up in 1979, Chinese enterprises began to move towards marketization, since the WTO accession negotiations in 1995, after nearly 30-40 years of market competition, Chinese brand enterprises are also facing the cycle of market restructuring and brand change, and it is urgent to solve the problem of growth and activation with a new brand model.
In the past, Chinese enterprises and foreign brands have gone through several stages of brand awareness, brand image, brand reputation, and traffic first, pursuing the integration of recognition, reputation, satisfaction and product efficiency, and brand marketing theories are prevalent in Europe, the United States, and Japan. In the past, the FMCG model represented by the United States pursued recognition, the popular luxury goods building model in Europe pursued reputation, the Japanese consumer durable products pursued satisfaction, and some of China's new consumer brands pursued traffic first, quality and efficiency first, and some pursued potential energy first. The Chinese market is large enough and deep enough to accommodate various models, and the rise of Chinese brands such as Huawei, Moutai, Anta, Li Ning, Hongqi, BYD, Ideal, DJI, and Biyin Levin has promoted the arrival of potential energy models.
Through the five-sex health analysis model, we can analyze and conclude that brand relevance and activity are the main reasons for the weakening of brand potential. In general, we will pay more attention to the identity, differentiation and credibility of the brand, and may not necessarily pay attention to relevance and activity. Because relevance mostly involves whether the brand should be extended, whether it should be cross-category. However, in most cases, cross-category is often more and more weak in correlation with brands, and the core value of brands is becoming more and more diluted. The other is the activity of the brand, because everyone is Xi to think that once the brand has popularity and recognition, it can lie down and earn. This is wrong, because this will be farther and farther away from the new generation of users, and the potential energy will decline more and more if they are not active in the customer's perspective.
Based on years of practice, we believe that brand potential energy is actually based on the core value of the brand. Because in the whole present, the core value of the brand is not only the simple functional benefits of the product, but also the additional benefits and social interests of the brand. Based on the brand potential energy, Best has built a "brand potential energy pyramid", the bottom of which is the brand architecture model, brand relevance, and brand model, because this determines the question of what route to take.
In addition, we propose 14 ways to build a strong brand. These 14 ways to build a strong brand are based on the core value of the brand, and at present, only Huawei can apply all 14 construction methods in China, so Huawei's brand potential energy is the strongest, and it has become a brand business card representing the whole of China to the world.
In view of the time relationship, how to accumulate brand potential energy, how to strengthen the experience perception of brand value based on core users, how to upgrade consumer goods brands with more than 20 billion yuan from commodity culture to ethnic culture and value culture with stronger potential energy, and how BYD can enhance brand potential energy and trigger organizational change through strategic public relations activities, these will be shown for you one by one in Best's new book "Brand Change, Potential Energy to Win", which is expected to be released in April 2024, so stay tuned.