Brand System And Supreme'S Success

We have been doing the Internet before. When we first saw Supreme, it was quite a shock. But I did not regard it as a brand, but as a new form affecting consumer decision making, because Supreme showed super cross category and cross brand capability.

After studying Supreme, what I want to share with you today is my personal research on tide cards.

Because there are so few public information, these studies are basically what we find out by friends, or some data in books, so we can not share them with you. We can discuss them further.

　　 The status quo of Chinese brands

First of all, in the consumer industry, I talked with many friends in the industry before. The conclusion is that China's consumption has been in a state of having channels and no brand in the long run.

Like bulls plug board, morning stationery, Hai Lan's home are channel brands. This phenomenon has something to do with the foregoing era and the way of playing. The predecessors basically rely on TV advertising marketing, which leads to buying domestic consumer goods and buying brands.

The final result of this channel brand is a low premium, and the added value of goods can not come out.

This has been going on for many years. The only change we see now is that traffic has changed. From 2004 to the PC Internet, to the mobile Internet, to the current social networking business, traffic is changing.

However, there seems to be no big breakthrough in doing the brand.

As the main audience of the tide brand, after 90's 00, the crowd demands higher brand, and they pursue group identification and spiritual cultural identity.

　　 Two brand fire is not fire, it is not in the system.

First of all, tide brand is the product of the rise of street culture, so we think that tide card is a product of street culture, and the following contents are under this great logic framework.

So why is the brand of foreign tide brand, and China's tide brand is just a name? What is the difference between the two?

It's hard to answer the question directly, so let's look at the art industry next door.

In the book "formula of success", the author used various data to study various industries dominated by the consumer industry, one of which talked about the art system. In fact, the analogy of this system to consumption will probably help us understand what is most important to a brand.

First of all, let's take a look at the following "Dai Jinkui's man". The painting was originally priceless, because it was said to be painted by Rembrandt, but its value dropped from the sky to the ground in 1985, because later it was discovered that it was actually an unknown disciple of Rembrandt.

Take a look at the next Savior. In 2005, the price of the painting was 10 thousand dollars, but in 2017 it was photographed 450 million dollars, because it was suddenly identified as Da Vinci's painting.

From this example, it can be seen that the attributes and values of commodities seem totally unimportant, and the most important ones are the labels.

So how do we decide?

How much is a picture worth?

How much does a pair of shoes cost?

How much is a dress worth?

From the brand point of view, these three problems are actually a problem.

The author of the success formula uses a set of data to analyze what determines the value of a piece of art.

The author surveyed 14000 galleries, 8000 museums, 500 thousand painters and 3 million paintings, and concluded that:

The galleries and museums that the works once entered determine how much the painting can be sold.

Of course, a painter can still be a great artist without entering a top Gallery, but this is a small probability event.

The author found that only 227 of the 5 million artists turned from the periphery to the top artists, and those 227 were either teachers who had a very good relationship to bring him to the top galleries, or they were lucky enough to go to the top galleries by chance.

And the key is that in this art system, there is no relationship between the top galleries, the two level galleries and the three level galleries. It is not like sports competition, can enter the first division from the Serie B, and then enter the Super League.

Therefore, in the field of art, there is such a system, from galleries to museums, artists to works, and closely followed the author to come to the brightest conclusion in the book.

Business performance is easy to quantify the performance of the industry, business performance is not easy to quantify the industry depends on the system.

With this conclusion, you can see that VC is also hard to brand, because the brand is in a state that may not be easy to quantify.

As a category of consumption, tide card is also an industry which can hardly be quantified by business performance, and its dependence on the system is very large.

As a result, we can see that the relatively mature brands of Europe and America are in their own trend system.

The so-called tidal current system, which is dismantled, is a linked node. As shown below, there are rapper singers, modern artists, top fashion magazines, sports stars, top brands, Paris and Milan fashion week.

Basically, the trend of Europe and the United States is based on these artificial nodes, forming a linkage tidal current system. Moreover, there is no organization similar to the central manager, and the whole system is formed spontaneously and semi closed.

That's why we often see NBA stars, black rapper and fashion stars from abroad.

This system is the same as the underlying logic of the art system we talked about before. If a brand can enter the system, the brand will be popular.

At home, we do not think that this trend system has yet been formed. This is the biggest difference between the trend industry at home and abroad.

We all look at fashion in China, but there is no so-called trend circle. Before this system came out, there were still many people who did not even understand what tidal card was. Just like someone told me that Gundam is a tide play, can I say happy sheep?

But fortunately, this system is slowly taking shape, including Shanghai fashion week and so on. I think the system will come out.

　 Three Supreme= street culture

If your brand does not enter the system, can you do it?

It is still possible that Supreme is an example.

First of all, it is a bottom-up approach, which has nothing to do with the system.

I understand that the fashion industry has done two times from bottom to top, one is hippie culture, the other is street culture.

Hippie culture has brought jeans and T-shirts to the fashion industry, while street culture has worn sweaters and sneakers. The rise of street culture is basically the rise of black culture. You will find that the rise of black people's influence on style is compatible with the time point of black people's right to be equal. At that time, they had an influence on the culture and sports industry.

As a representative of street culture, Supreme's practice is a completely new way, which has nothing to do with channels.

The following is the specific action of Supreme. You will find that Supreme spent a lot of effort in running brand culture symbols in the early, middle and late stages.

In the early days, they regarded skateboards as a stronghold for street youth, which was also filmed in 1994. And when we were still playing seven dragon balls, Supreme was already cooperating with modern artists. He co worked with KAWS in 2001.

And those artists, to put it plainly, are many of the KOL we have fry today.

By the middle of the year, with the rise of mobile Internet, Supreme began to operate ins accounts, and accumulated 6 million fans in four years.

From the data point of view, the turning point of Supreme's rise on Google is in 2015, and its first INS was issued in 2013.

So many friends of the fund came to tell me that supreme was a company of twenty years. It seemed that the last round of LV investment was only 1 billion dollars, too slow.

I said maybe you didn't study it carefully. In my opinion, the supreme after the turning point in 2015 is not a company before.

In my experience, I can almost judge that this company is running its own INS on the community, relying on the ins to generate word of mouth and fission.

But is Supreme doing things for traffic and for channels?

Not at all.

For example, supreme has only 7 stores worldwide today.

An important reason behind this is that the boss himself is very tight with street culture. He said that Supreme wanted to express the living conditions of the American urban youth. He also liked skateboarding himself and put the crowd and culture higher than the salesmen, including Supreme.

Supreme almost did not do anything related to traffic and channels, but rather a complete culture of death. So in the end, Supreme equals the street culture of the United States directly, so the brand becomes a symbol and even becomes a social currency.

Once a brand becomes a symbol and is linked to a certain culture, the tension of the brand is invincible.

Now that Supreme has been so successful, is there any way to copy it to China?

I think there will be many differences for two reasons.

First, scattered Internet communities in China, short videos, little red books, micro-blog, WeChat circle of friends, each of which provides different functions and requires different means of operation.

And the American community is relatively concentrated. Just now that picture says that Supreme operates on ins and reddit. Reddit's status in foreign countries is equivalent to a monopolistic post bar.

Second, the domestic street culture stage is different from that of the United States. It is at a relatively early stage. Supreme cuts through skateboards, but perhaps skateboarding is not the best option in China. However, the street culture category exported by domestic variety shows has strong localization characteristics.

Of course, despite Supreme's culture and brand, not doing channels and traffic, in fact, making channel traffic and making brand is not in conflict. The problem is that we only focus on doing channel traffic, or part of our efforts to make brands.

Summed up, Supreme is actually through online and offline users and content to form word of mouth, and finally the brand and street culture painting equal sign.

This is back to the problem we discussed at the beginning, and the flow of domestic channels is changing, and there is no breakthrough in the way of making brand.

So what we spend more time thinking about is what we should do when we want to be a brand in China.

Finally, using our SoulSense example, our actions and everything we do point to one goal: equate the brand with the street culture and form the word of mouth.

Therefore, for the way of brand innovation, we conclude that:

Doing brand is an operation, and simple and crude way of operation can not pour the brand into the soul. Meticulous operation is the only way to make brand.