The Lesson From Adidas Flower 3 Billion: Why Is It So Hard To Make A Brand?

Last week, MarketingWeek reported a small news that, though ignored by most marketers, should be a milestone in our marketing circles.

The headline of this news is Adidas: we have over invested in the field of digital marketing.

It is called "Adidas's confession" of Adidas.

So what did the news say?

Simon Peel, global media director of Adidas, said: over the past years, ADI has invested too much in digital and effect (digital&performance) channels, thereby sacrificing brand building.

It also provides accurate figures: 77% of the budget is in effect, and 23% is in the brand.

The word "over investment" does not sound too serious. But you know, Adidas's annual budget in marketing is about 2 billion euros, even if it is just mismatched 20%, which is the lesson of 3 billion yuan buying.

What does the so-called "digital and effect channel" mean?

In essence, you can understand that this is the two criterion:

(2) investments that can be monitored can not be monitored.

That is to say, ADI put a lot of budget in the channels of information flow, SEO/SEM and e-commerce advertising. These channels can be monitored, and even pay for CPA or even CPS (purchase). ROI will get instant results.

The traditional outdoors, television, radio and newspapers are naturally dwarfed.

What is more interesting is that in the article, ADI has been referring to a Last Click attribution called "last click" in the past few years.

This model will bring pragmatism to the extreme. As the name suggests, no matter how much brand information the consumer has seen before, the model will attribute all the credit to the previous post purchase.

You should suddenly see this:

Obviously, this is contrary to the basic marketing knowledge:

The transformation of effect is not a passive water, and this source is "brand building".

From any consumer decision making journey or basic funnel model, we can see that without the cognition and interest of the source, there will be no final transformation and purchase. Data from a senior digital advertising practitioner:

In fact, users usually click on more than 20 ads to make purchases. The various ways of display include search, social networking, e-mail, exotic advertisements or TV advertisements. Benedict Hayes

Just like farmers grow rice:

Harvesting rice is the result / transformation, while planting, fertilizing and watering are brand activities. Harvest rice, of course, happy. But you can't just sow the rice. Is it difficult to expect rice to grow out of the air?

So I believe there is a bigger doubt in your mind.

Is Adidas so stupid? Why not pay attention to brand?

A mature global brand has a complete marketing system and a budget of more than ten billion. How can they ignore such important marketing knowledge?

In fact, for most of Party A,

Insisting on "brand building" is really very difficult.

This is from three aspects:

01, the difficulty of understanding: what is building in brand building?

Brand is a vague term. Its definition is too many and too complicated. This leads to the fact that everyone is easy to talk about, and it also increases the difficulty of communication and advancement.

Consider the following scenario:

Lao Wang opened a restaurant and asked a designer to make a logo. Is this a brand?

After the restaurant opened, Lao Wang threw the local public number in order to spread. Is this a brand? Lao Wang invited friends and family to dinner. Then he recommended more people with word of mouth. Is this brand?

Lao Wang invited ten famous chefs to join the company. Is this brand?

Lao Wang imitated seafloor fishing and made his service known far and wide. Is this a brand?

From the macro perspective of enterprise value, every behavior here is to make brand. But if we start from individuals with different functions, we have their own prejudices.

Build up stereoscopic thinking, never think of "making a brand", associate with apple or Nike advertising, or write a creative slogan.

What is brand doing? Our answer is that brand building is the depth and breadth of brand building. The so-called "mental saliency" is actually a common combination of these two dimensions.

Depth can be seen as a vertical axis, from the most simple recognition and memory to commitment and endorsement, and then to the level of emotional value and symbolic value, the deeper the deeper.

And breadth can be regarded as a horizontal axis. Any brand should pay attention to how to cover its category user users more comprehensively.

Lao Wang can see that sometimes he is doing depth, sometimes doing breadth, which is directly related to his career and resources.

To help you understand this three-dimensional definition more systematically, we will use Adidas's short term theory as a negative textbook.

Excessive investment in digital and effective channels limits the breadth of brand psychology.

Although digital advertising has exploded in recent years, the scene of people going to work, off duty, listening to music and watching TV has never disappeared. If excessive pursuit of high ROI and data monitoring, more television, outdoor, newspaper, audio and other channels can be easily ignored and rejected.

For mature brands, this is actually a place where they restrict themselves to their brand exposure and touch.

2. The high ROI effect consumes the depth of brand mind.

Why is there a ROI high media? First, because consumers always exist at the bottom of funnel, their demand is matched and their purchase intention is high. For example, when search engines actively search for brand names, SEO's ROI is also naturally high.

Two, because brands want to maintain such a ROI, they must sell discounts. When easy promotion becomes normal, consumers will no longer consume at normal prices, and they will become so-called "price sensitive users".

In other words, the brand premium has been severely cut. For the big brands, consumers' original attitude of looking up is gone.

As you can imagine, the ultimate goal of brand building is undoubtedly to build a rectangle, which makes the brand in the minds of the people both broad and deep, and enough consumers have strong enough memory and dependence on them.

Recalling the list of brand assets, the top brands, such as apple, Coca-Cola, Disney and HUAWEI, do not do well in depth and breadth. They have really strong brand assets.

Adidas is also such a mature and huge global brand. Now you understand better how much damage it has done to brand equity in the past.

　 02, the difficulty of implementation: how to start brand building?

The second difficulty of brand building is: Although we know that brand building is very important, what kind of brand building is there? There is no accurate feedback. How do we know if we are doing the right thing?

The most irresponsible answer is: look at the situation. But in fact, the most responsible answer is: look at the situation.

In fact, it is the bottom analysis ability of brand operators. With the ability of analysis, confidence in execution is achieved.

Generally speaking, the starting point of analysis lies in two basic aspects:

Stage and category.

At the stage, it is more about the timing of decisions from the perspective of enterprises, which determines how the leaders of enterprises decide to make brand decisions and how to divide the primary and secondary businesses.

A newly launched Internet product, reaching the PMF time, determines the importance and time of brand drainage. (a couple of cases will be discussed later.)

A good name may be the focus of brand strategy in the early stage of research and development of a fast moving product, and the definition of brand value may not be the main consideration at this stage.

The category determines the common needs of consumers, decision patterns, habits of catalysts, and determines the value structure of products / solutions.

Take net red belt for example.

The success rate of carrying goods is essentially the possibility of transaction, and the possibility of transaction actually depends on the perceived value of consumers vs the actual price:

A beautiful fashion net red. If you take Adidas, the new shoes will be very easy. Because the perceived value of consumers, besides the most basic use value of shoes, the design value of the shoes and the fashion sense of superiority (brand social value) brought by the Adidas brand can quickly make the perceived value exceed the price, even if it sells 1399, it will probably be robbed.

Even if this shoe is unique to the brand, such as coconut shoes, the design value will be integrated with brand value, which will further support the perceived value and the possibility of carrying goods.

But if you take a small skin care product, then the value of the perceived value of the original brand will be very low. At this point, it is more necessary for KOL's endorsement to help improve the perceived value of consumers. Even so, this product can not be too expensive, the more than 100 yuan is more appropriate.

The above basic analysis can help enterprises to build the focus of their product value, and is also the first step for enterprises to make good delivery.

In addition, the difficulty of execution is often related to thorough understanding.

For example, the effect of the investment is to invest in the brand. Adidas seems to tell you that the effect of advertising should not be too much, the brand should be valued.

But do we really have to stick to the concept?

There is no absolute "effect" and "brand" advertisement.

For example, at noon on weekdays, little white collar workers don't know what to eat. If you see an advertisement on the elevator banners in the shopping mall, "McDonald's luxury lunch set", will you go to eat at this time? Even if you don't eat, will someone eat it?

Although we can not say how much the specific transformation is, how much effect this delivery will play. But brand people should clearly believe that the right people, the needs and the right information will produce the right result.

Such brand advertising that can not be monitored can actually bring "effect".

For example, a girl on micro-blog brushes Estee Lauder small black bottle advertising. The purchase button on the lower left corner is straight to the cat. We can say that it is a digital effect advertisement.

However, common sense tells us that 99% of the audience will not click, and it will play a more important role in telling and strengthening memory.

It seems to be the result of the transformation of the purpose, in fact, more is the role of the brand's mental breadth.

In a more extreme analysis, even if it is a big promotion, if the usual price control is strict and the timing node is stable, the big brand will not lose the brand premium half off and cause too many sensitive users. Estee Lauder's first sale in double eleven this year is itself the result of the cash flow of brand influence.

Therefore, we believe that:

The more thorough understanding of the user mind and the objective laws of brand growth, the more decisive the implementation is.

　　 03 the difficulty of sticking to it: internal and external multiple dilemmas

The third difficulty of brand building is to stick to it.

There are many external temptations.

For example, objective channels and media dividends. 15 years of micro-blog, 16 years of WeChat, 17 years of Xiaohong, 18 years of quiver, 19 years of live broadcast. At the beginning of the rapid rise, all channel dividends were more or less proud of "taking goods".

This word is fascinating.

Take live broadcast as an example. When our customers are doing live broadcast, they often admire their super ROI. Even recently, even tens of millions or billions of cars have been sold on live broadcast.

Which Party A is not moved? Danger often occurs when you harvest first, second waves and intend to continue harvesting.

For example, the concept of iteration is constantly rising in the circle. The 17 year is the combination of product and effect. The 18 year is the growth fission. The 19 year is the private domain traffic. The rise of the new term is actually the attraction of the attention of the marketing decision-makers. Needless to say, the old and new BAT giants use their powerful data capabilities, packaging capabilities and PR capabilities to inculcate a set of methodologies.

New media, new concepts, new platforms, want to tell you too much, these external temptations can pull you from what "marketing common sense" or "long term doctrine" on the horse.

The challenges within enterprises are more severe.

Brand manager's weakness of human nature: the purpose of an enterprise is to gain profits for a long time, and the term of office of a brand leader may decide that his interest is short-term promotion and salary increase.

But the more troublesome is not managers. Personal shortsighted can rely on strong leaders to rectify. The shortsightedness of large enterprises will always be accompanied by organizational expansion.

In the confession of Adidas, the key factor is also mentioned.

"We had a problem that we were focusing on the wrong wrong,"

Our erroneous short term doctrine is because we must be responsible for the profits of shareholders.

You see, the goal of an enterprise is to create value (profits) for shareholders, but the profits of shareholders will lead to extreme short-term doctrine, which will spread from top to bottom throughout the company.

At this time, we can not say that the leaders have problems, but the system / culture has problems.

Of course, there are also successful cases, such as foreign Amazon, such as domestic Alibaba.

In a report, I saw Ali's self reform at the corporate culture level (Ali's usefulness and useless). It was impressive: when the enterprise had not grown into a big Mac, the leader began to lead the whole staff to "retreat" with his personal vision. He specifically asked external questions to build corporate culture and included KPI assessment, even though it was in conflict with the KPI of the sales performance at that time.

As a result, we saw their latest corporate values a while ago. First, they wrote: customer first, employee second, shareholder third. The strength of organizational capability is not related to this.

Extreme retreat, to some extent, is extremely pragmatic.

It can be said that making the enterprise bigger and stronger depends on the foresight and foresight of the leader, and making the enterprise evergreen depends on the system and culture that can accommodate the long term doctrine.

Finally, you can take away the point of view.

To sum up, this article hopes to enlighten more brand marketers from the confession of Adidas.

When you understand business rules more deeply, it is easier to understand that brand is more like investment than cost. We should not hook it with "retreat".

Understanding the brand building is actually different from the breadth and depth of the construction mind. Its means and purposes are different. The best brands do both very well.

According to its category rules and enterprise stage, we should plan the investment budget in brand and transformation, and know what kind of value the brand needs to build.

The middle school society refuses to seduce or refuse to create words. The top executives of enterprises know how to build systems and culture, so that the foundation of the business will be evergreen.

Speculation will not stop.

The debate on the short-term vs long-term effect, the vs brand, the sale of vs brand, the tradition of digital vs, the idea of taking delivery of VS and so on have been going on for a long time, and will continue to continue. Even online people have organized a debate table.

Our view is:

No absolute, but some things are more challenging than others, more difficult to see results, more anti human, more difficult!

Naturally, making a brand is one of them. Fortunately, on this road, you can wisely choose a more suitable partner and choose a more clear mirror instead of fighting alone.

At present, China is facing thousands of years of new consumption and new brand opportunities. We firmly believe that China's own apple, NIKE and Disney will be born in the future.

Believe that sticking to doing things that are more difficult and long-term will always bring better returns.