Brand Battle Must Be Fought, But Must Be Fought Rationally.

Why can Nike's "just do it" ring all over the world?

Why can the logo of McDonald's be pasted to the outer walls of the world?

The only answer is only one brand.

After the era of "made in America" and "made in Japan", the era of "made in China" has become the mainstream of the world today.

However, compared with "made in America" and "made in Japan", the current "made in China" is mostly based on the OEM production of the small processing fee.

In such a situation of extreme lack of private brands, China has become the world's sweatshop and brand power.

As a member of the Chinese corporate phalanx, in the face of this embarrassment, do you choose to rely on the marginal processing fees of other people to live on their own, or to catch up with them and show your brand to your world-class competitors?

The answer is self-evident.

Then, as an enterprise, how should we develop our own brand strategy? How can we establish our brand in daily operation and win the victory of this brand breakthrough?

In this series of questions, the reporter interviewed the famous Chinese brand marketing practical experts, the State Food and Drug Administration Training Center guest expert, City University Hong Kong guest professor, Mr. Zuo Liang, general manager of Guangzhou Zuo Liang Marketing Consulting Co., Ltd.

Reporter: Hello, Mr. Zuo Liang.

Zuo Liang: Hello!

Reporter: in recent years, BusinessWeek has launched the list of the top 100 global brands in recent years. Half of the list is American brand, but Chinese enterprises have no chance to enter the list.

In fact, Chinese business has been absent since business week launched the list.

What do you think of this phenomenon?

Zuo Liang: I think, first of all, this is very intuitive to tell you that our country is a weak brand country.

Although we have many national brands at present, we lack the global brand that the world consumers agree.

Secondly, this list has also awakened to our Chinese entrepreneurs. In the past, we focused on producing others, and now we should change our minds and make some efforts to brand ourselves.

Reporter: why do you think that in the current increasingly fierce market competition, why should enterprises pay more attention to brand building?

Zuo Liang: as we all know, after our country joins WTO, the market competition we are facing is not only from China, but also from abroad.

Therefore, this will make us spend more energy and energy in marketing, and look at some problems in a more comprehensive and all-round way.

There are four levels of competition in the market. The first level is the competition of technology, that is, whoever possesses the technology can win in the competition.

At present, many products in our market have basically been out of this stage, but there are also some high-end products exceptions, such as Intel's Pentium series microprocessor, Airbus Company produced aircraft, and so on, are currently at the technical level of competition all over the world.

Because it grasps the core technology, competitors can not compete with it.

The second level of competition is quality competition, that is, who produces good quality products and who can win in competition.

For example, the German car was famous for its quality and durability.

The third level of competition is price competition. When everyone can produce and the quality is good, what should we do?

It depends on whose price is the lowest, so the price competition is the third level.

At present, many industries and products in our country are at this stage. What we produce is very much the same, so everyone is making a hard price.

But we must know that the price is definitely not the ultimate competition means, because enterprises must earn money to survive, and must rely on profits to support them.

No profit, any business strategy is empty talk, so this time depends on the last level of competition - brand competition to reduce consumer sensitivity to price, to achieve product profitability.

In the domestic Nike OEM OEM company, the same quality sports shoes can be sold for more than 600 yuan with Nike brand, and only sell less than 100 yuan with factory brand.

Guangdong produces about 1100000000 watches and clocks annually, and the world market share exceeds 50%, but the total value is only 1 billion 60 million dollars, averaging only 1 US dollars. In the same period, the Swiss watch industry represented by "SWOT" has 27 million kinds of clocks and watches annually, with a gross value of 6 billion 200 million US dollars, with an average of 229 US dollars each.

This is the biggest difference between brand and non brand: consumers no longer care about prices, they are willing to pay more for their brands.

The same thing, consumers are more willing to buy brand products.

Why is that?

Take food for example. First, because the brand represents commitment and quality is guaranteed, I don't have to worry about having diarrhea when I buy it; second, because the brand is famous, I eat the biscuits, my country's second uncle knows what to call; third, because the brand represents the reputation, everyone says it is good, I drink this coke, George W. Bush says very good!

Therefore, the highest level of market competition is brand competition.

Our world's daily chemical giant, Procter & Gamble, has sales of US $51 billion 400 million in 2004, with 13 products selling over 1 billion US dollars a year.

It's brand!

Countless facts show that enterprises in the development process for their products to establish brand is a very important means of competition.

Reporter: then how do you think the enterprise should make its own brand strategy?

Zuo Liang: brand strategy is the enterprise's overall action plan based on the analysis and study of its own conditions and external environment at the core of the brand's construction, use and maintenance.

Therefore, when the enterprise is formulating its own brand strategy, I think first of all, your strategy must have "personality", and it must be differentiated from your competitors.

Michael Potter once said, "the perfect competition strategy is not to be the first, but to make ourselves different and difficult to reproduce."

Therefore, when enterprises are formulating this strategy, we must think about how I can form differences.

How to be different?

How can it be difficult for competitors to copy?

Secondly, I think we need to have a global perspective.

China has been in the WTO for many years, so we are now facing a globalized market, facing the competition from the world level. Therefore, when formulating our brand strategy, we must analyze and deal with the problems with the global and global perspective, and we must never use the old limitations of the past to analyze and deal with problems.

Otherwise, it will be easy for you to halve your strategy and let you miss the goal of global brand.

Thirdly, the brand strategy must be reasonable.

The construction of brand, especially the construction of global brand, is a huge and long-term project for enterprises.

This is full of all kinds of complicated variables, so when you formulate your brand strategy, you must combine with the actual situation of all aspects, and you can not be divorced from reality.

Otherwise, enterprises will easily be dragged down by blind brand strategy and get into trouble.

Of course, when formulating brand strategy, we should be good at learning from international competitors, learn how they can develop from weak brands into strong brands, and how to develop these successful experiences from domestic brands to global brands, so as to avoid any unnecessary detours.

Reporter: how do you think you should build up your brand in daily operation as an enterprise?

Zuo Liang: I think the brand management and management matters need to be analyzed in detail.

Because the actual situation of each enterprise is different, so the measures to be taken in daily operation must be different.

But here I would like to remind you two points: first, the top management of the enterprise should directly participate in the management of the brand and attach great importance to it.

At the top of the enterprise, brand management must be regarded as the most important thing, and brand management should not be regarded as the general function of the marketing department, but should be promoted to a strategic level.

At this point, the experience of successful brand enterprises abroad is to set up a brand strategy management committee, which is mainly composed of top leaders of the company. The main responsibility of the brand strategy management committee is to carry out brand strategy management, coordinate and integrate the relationships and resources among various departments and brands.

Second is in the daily brand management, brand image and slogans and other basic things must be able to adhere to.

The phenomenon of brand image and slogan changing rapidly is a common phenomenon in many enterprises in our country. It is a common disease.

Many enterprises often change to a market or brand manager. "Three fires" overthrow all previous things and burn them all down, and come back again. It is hardly known that the initial investment of enterprises will go to the sea, and brands will always linger in the 1.5 stage of immature life in the minds of consumers.

It is a very complicated and long process to build a brand. If you change like this, the process will surely be even more remote.

Therefore, we must bear in mind that your brand image, brand slogan and other basic things must never be changed or changed arbitrarily.

Enterprises should keep repeating them day after day, year after year, and brimming a deep impression in the minds of consumers, so that he will remember you wherever he goes.

Reporter: how do you think the domestic enterprises can win the victory of the brand breakthrough war in the end?

Zuo Liang: what I want to say most is that we must maintain a rational attitude. We must fight this brand war to safeguard national dignity. But we must fight rationally, and we must not ignore the reality of our own situation and engage in the great leap forward and deceive ourselves.

Rome is not built in a day. Brand is not built up if you want to build it. Let alone build a global brand.

Nowadays, many enterprises in China are having a bad time. Our enterprises should not only face the challenges of domestic competitors, but also resist the attacks of international brands.

At this critical juncture, it is possible to get rid of competitors by being a little unmindful.

Moreover, many enterprises in China are not very strong in terms of financial strength at present, and their profitability is very low. Technically, many of our enterprises are still taking liberalism, which is very bad for brand building.

To know how to build a global brand without saying how rough the process is, this brand advertising fee is a huge investment every year.

The advertising budget of some international brands is even more than a billion dollars a year. Such a big investment may be equivalent to the advertising of one brand in one industry in the country.

So if you don't do it, you don't know. If you do it, you will find that many of them are not as simple as you think. Therefore, we must maintain a rational attitude and step by step. This is the first point I propose to you.

Second, I think our enterprises can learn from the experience of Korean and Japanese enterprises and innovate in imitation.

On the Asian market map, Japan and South Korea's experience in building global brands through technology leadership is worth learning.

Carefully studying the secrets of their rise, we will find that at the very beginning, they only made a small improvement in the external technology, and the fashion design made their brands stand out immediately; and after the accumulation of funds to a certain extent, they continued to expand to the outside world, and quickly gained advantage in technology by investing a lot of money in research and development, purchasing research patents, or directly digging up core researchers from foreign competitors. Then they launched new products more than several times faster than foreign competitors, and the brand was naturally far ahead. At this time, a global brand that was ahead of other competitors naturally surfaced.

Japan's TOYOTA and SONY, South Korea's Samsung and LG all rely on this way to become global brands.

Third, for enterprises with short capital, we can obtain capital through overseas listing, investment from international investment companies or fund companies, and we can cooperate with companies who channel resources abroad through joint ventures and equity participation.