Brand Boundaries

Everyone in front of the rumors to enter the furniture industry, on micro-blog caused heated debate.

From a marketing point of view, this is a very interesting topic. They not only challenge traditional sales methods, but also to traditional brands.

Focusing on, emphasizing the unique selling point and positioning theory, these traditional brand marketing concepts emphasize on occupying the minds of consumers in a very short time or giving consumers a strong impression, or selling unique selling points.

Positioning theory says that "becoming the first is better than doing better", the reason is that in the traditional media era, consumers have no time or even channels to understand more deeply why you are doing better than others. Consumers will only remember the most memorable ones: first,

However, the way of communication in the Internet era has changed a lot.

First of all, what information will be "recorded", consumers through search, web browsing can understand a lot of brand information, which greatly affected their purchase decisions.

If the traditional media era, consumers pay more attention to the brand's external image, then, in the era of Internet media, consumers will pay more attention to the internal details.

It is not hard to see that today's consumers pay more attention to the detailed description of products and pay more attention to the KV of products. Everyone knows that selling products on the Internet, relying on a poster or TV advertising video is not feasible. Consumers need to read a lot of text descriptions and products from various angles.

The 1.5 meter principles of Taobao's two marketing techniques are to emphasize the detailed description of the inside pages of the product, which is actually a subversion of traditional marketing: if consumers are interested in your brand, they will spend enough time to understand you and become a product expert.

Another notable feature of the Internet is whether becoming the first to enter a particular field is not so important, but becoming better is becoming more and more important. This is another principle that Taobao and all B2C follow: single product wins.

The essence of this principle is to become better because consumers still have enough interest to know whether your product is better or not.

Therefore, the purchase logic of the Internet age is that consumers want to buy a certain commodity, and they spend a lot of time searching, researching, analyzing and comparing, which makes your product very important.

From another point of view, competition has made it hard for brands to make great efforts to push the products with excellent performance to price ratio. The shirts of 29 yuan and 49 yuan canvas shoes are just a reflection of the marketing way. Consumers first accept your product and accept your brand, which is actually contrary to the traditional brand marketing.

Now the problem arises. In the Internet age, in order to give customers good products, good experience and sell their star products, it often leads to high fixed costs, which compels brands to expand their categories and sizes. If they are only concerned about niche markets, even if they are the first ones, they will always be dead end.

Fortunately, from the consumer habits of the Internet age, the expansion of categories is just acceptable to consumers.

In traditional sales channels, subject to shelf and shop area, category expansion will often encounter physical obstacles, and even if brand extension, the cost of marketing communication is not low.

Channel's influence on brand

The simultaneous change of marketing communication channels and sales channels has made corresponding changes in the logic of marketing strategy in the Internet era.

The traditional media era pays more attention to the cost of thousands of people, while the Internet media age pays more attention to the conversion rate. The former emphasizes the capture of consumers' minds and deepens their impression. The latter emphasizes the immediate purchase, because the advertising on the Internet also has the characteristics of brand advertising and sales advertising, especially the latter.

At the same time, the brand's urgent expectation of sales will eventually lead to the cost of traffic - the cost of getting customers is getting higher and higher. So, most B2C will focus on the "cash flow", the scale and category expansion, and also become the most B2C approach.

Whether it is vertical B2C or brand B2C, it is also a positive attitude towards expanding categories and products.

The Internet has changed the traditional purchase logic from brand to product evolution, from product to brand. This logic reversal has also made the brand very strong plasticity, and a large part of the process of brand building is also a consumer's participation.

In this interactive channel of communication, the brand is no longer as high as ever, and the brand has become a Wikipedia that can be written by consumers, and the niche market that professional marketers consider themselves to be in vain.

Brand extension only depends on whether the consumer accepts you, rather than what your brand represents.

"What to represent" is a variable that can often be changed.

Sales channels and communication channels also have a great impact on brand extension. Rational brand extension will mostly revolve around the original channel. Its essence is to enhance the efficiency of the channel and drive the joint rate of the channel. At this point, the traditional channel and the Internet channel are interlinked, but the cost of the Internet is lower.

The trend of the new century

The development trend of brand marketing in twenty-first Century is from top to bottom. This column has been said many times. In such a change, the way of brand building will also become more free and faster.

Although traditional marketing methods need to learn, it is not necessary to follow. The reason why the Internet has made the society more rapid is that the cost of communication has been reduced, the number of communication multiplied has increased, the information dissemination has been wider, and the feedback speed has been quicker.

The boundaries of the brand will become more extensive than ever before, and its essence is determined by communication.

Perhaps marketing will also be rewritten, which is very likely.

Any 1P in 4P has changed a lot in the new era. There is no reason why marketing should not change.

In the "marketing revolution 3", Kotler put forward the era of humanistic centralism, driven marketing pformation with values, and the value concept is precisely based on the idea of "human consumer" as the core, and the pformation of marketing is based on the changes of human society.

The marketing that we will face for many years is the change of network to human society.

In this sense, not only the brand extension is not at all wrong, but also the scope of the extension may become wider and wider. The future great brands and boundaries may exist only in the human society itself.