ADI Rethinks Over Digital Marketing Brand Building What To Do?

01

　 Upgrading of brand building mode suitable for digitalization in China

Against this background, brand building in China is at a very delicate crossroads. Many enterprises are looking for new ways to establish contacts with consumers in order to achieve further growth.

The brand management theory originated from the West and the best practices of multinational companies seem to be difficult to continue to effectively guide the development of brand in the Chinese market, especially when the brand is facing the rapid growth of China, which is leading the new consumer group of China which is different from any other country's digital ecosystem. At the same time, in the Chinese market, quite a few companies ignore the role of the brand, by abusing digital marketing tools, and at the expense of brand assets, hoping to quickly understand and promote sales growth.

In short, brands need a new brand building model to succeed in today's China.

Some of the core components of the new brand building model are derived from the traditional brand building rules. But at the same time, some construction modules need to evolve, and some modules must be comprehensively reformed. We describe this upgraded brand building model as META, which means Maintain (Evolve), Transform (Approach), and expounds and demonstrates the need to change the way of thinking and construction of brand building in China in the digital age. In the Chinese market, marketers can change the way of brand building through these steps to successfully cope with the challenges and opportunities in the market at present (Fig. 1).

02

　 Maintain: a clear brand positioning still needs to be maintained.

Brand positioning fundamentally defines what the brand is, why it exists and what value it can bring to its customers. This is a strategic foothold for all brands to be clear. Whether in the Chinese market or in other markets around the world, whether traditional manufacturing enterprises or new Internet Co, new technologies should not and will not change the necessity of defining brands from a strategic perspective.

The same thing will not be changed is that brand positioning must be based on deep insight into the needs of the core target audience, both emotional and functional, and continue to define and deepen the relationship with the audience. The presentation of brand positioning must be clear, real and trustworthy.

At the same time, international brands need to be highly correlated with the local cultural world outlook when they are rooted in the universal human needs. When the brand maintains a globally unified brand gene, its positioning should be adapted to the needs of China's unique local market and target population, and is more dependent on the in-depth insight into demand.

As a luxury brand started by travel bags, LV has always rooted the spirit of "travel" in brand positioning. This core positioning has been adopted for many years in LV's brand communication and product delivery. Not only did the digital age not weaken the original brand positioning, but it provided the opportunity for LV to better use the new social media or to cooperate with new partners. Such as providing personalized travel badges for consumers through WeChat, and using geographically positioned technology to better promote the meaning of travel to consumers.

03

　 Evolve: evolution of how to select "target audience".

Identifying "who" is the most important target consumer group. What is its main demand? It is the foundation of all brand positioning and construction. Traditional definition of target consumer group includes insight into market opportunities, clustering according to the data collected from consumers' demographic characteristics, behavior and attitude, giving priority to the size and value of different groups in order to conduct a series of targeted brand building.

In the digital age, the consumer data can be very different in depth and breadth, and has great empowerment effect on brand identification target consumer groups. In terms of breadth, online sales already occupy more than 50% of total sales in some consumer categories, bringing a comprehensive and accurate capture of consumer data at different stages, such as awareness, consideration, past purchase, recent purchase and loyalty. From depth, through tag tracking and multi-dimensional data integration, it is possible to capture the omnidirectional behavior data in a single individual's life.

At the same time, the choice of traditional consumption target group is mainly based on its "purchasing power value". However, in China, the influence of "network opinion leaders" is far greater than that of other parts of the world. Consumers are more willing to trust the recommendation information from the network, and the more concentrated social platform further amplifies its influence. For brands, it is essential to identify and cultivate potential brand advocates and influencers in an early stage, not just focusing on the potential of buying at this stage.

Although there is no revolutionary change in identifying and selecting the core audience of the preferred brand, it needs to evolve to a certain extent in China in the digital age. From identifying only one or a few small target customers, it will evolve into "crowd differentiation" in a broader target consumer group, and tailor customized brand experience including different promotions, dissemination of information and even products.

It should be noted that this does not mean that the higher the value of differentiation is, the higher the value of differentiation, the more balanced the degree and quantity of differentiation, and the most meaningful way to define the target group.

In addition, when the brand is making business and brand decisions and investments, it should advance the role of opinion leaders (though not within the target consumer group) in the scope of thinking, and expand the focus from "rapid promotion to purchase" to "consumer life cycle value".

Through working with Ali mother, Dyson uses big data to make clear crowd differentiation for "10% tonal families", and further tests and adjusts the communication effect, product category and corresponding services to further optimize crowd differentiation. Consumer differentiation is established through continuous early data collection, mid-term tracking and long-term insight. This work also helps Dyson capture the potential consumer data extensively, and effectively divide it into several stages, including interest, purchase and loyalty, based on the relationship with consumers. The definition of subdivision consumer group will take a year or a few years as a period and evaluate and adjust according to data insight. Through the "improved" target customer identification and definition, the popularity of Dyson has rapidly increased in different levels of cities, and a high brand correlation has been established in different gender and income level consumer groups.

04

　 Evolve: evolution of the "execution plan" approach.

Execution planning is a bridge linking brand strategy and landing execution, including periodic consumer experience, marketing, content and other aspects of planning. It is a high-level refinement of target audience and brand positioning.

The digital age brings about changes in the path of consumer experience. Facing the trend of online and offline convergence, the Chinese market is leading this trend. Consumers no longer move on the linear experience path, bringing complex and multi touch jumping behavior patterns. This has an impact on brand experience planning, path contact and so on.

In all planning work, content is one of the major challenges of many brands nowadays. The contents of many brands are scattered and single point, only to serve a single marketing activity, but lack of strategic level of co-ordination. The value of brand building is not large. In today's target audience's accuracy of differentiation, content planning needs to change as well.

Execution planning must evolve with the target audience. Brand needs to be based on complex nonlinear consumer path and all channel consumer behavior, to plan and integrate the online and offline contact. At the same time, in terms of content, brand needs to evolve from isolated, random distributed content planning to target audience and business needs, and strategically select the best content planning model as guidance for implementation.

In order to better adapt to the more complex and dynamic consumption path of tourists in the digital age, the Marriott adopts a broader perspective to link consumers from the inspiration, search, booking, planning to post travel sharing and planning and landing. For example, the Chinese "WeChat concierge" serving outbound tourists, and a joint venture with Alibaba's flying pigs to provide a better travel experience for consumers in the new era.

05

　 Transform: Reform of brand activation and interaction

In traditional sense, brand activation and interaction is the execution of brand after the strategic and planning stage, and is the daily master work of marketers. The implementation includes effective contact with target audience, brand positioning and product dissemination, and further deepening communication with consumers through communication and interaction, and gradually deepens consumer relations from "knowing" to "buying" or "loyalty".

Today, when the Internet has eliminated the information asymmetry, brand is no longer the one-way transmission of "who I think I am", but "consumers think who I am". This has revolutionized fundamentally the transformation of brand building execution mode of thinking. Brand is no longer just the transmission of vision, language and concept, but the perception and experience of consumers. In the digital age, consumers participate in brand building and have the ability to share a brand quickly through digital platform in a short time.

The rapid development of China's digitalization brings a new way of experiential marketing. Combined with the "differential" trend of the target audience, the brand needs to interact with consumers in an accurate and innovative way. Brand activation and consumer interaction should focus on "brand co creation", maximize relevance, and focus on consumer life cycle value. By providing a positive, experiential and highly shared experience, it gives consumers "freedom in the framework", and uses the voice of consumers to liberate the individual's self-expression, but at the same time helps to strengthen the information that the brand wants to convey. Experience and content can be created together with consumers and transformed into social circulation, shared and amplified. Such brands provide creative templates for people to create their own brands.

At the same time, we can effectively use the platform of data enabling technology to achieve precise touch and new brand interaction to achieve real-time, personalized and conversational interactive consumer communication, so as to achieve maximum relevance. Combined with the evolution of target audience, brand also needs targeted interaction between brand advocates and opinion leaders, maximizing the value of consumer lifecycle.

As a brand without advertising funds and relying solely on user marketing, Le pure yogurt has invited users to participate in brand building through a series of innovative methods. Through the "pure pure lab", consumers are allowed to participate in ingredients, material selection, production and even packaging and publicity. With the theme of "refusing to commit suicide", 30 days of breakfast and punch card activities have been taken to occupy the office consumption scene, and the role of "Le pure chat officer" has been set up, so that ordinary users have the opportunity to communicate directly with the brand KOL directly, and even finally make consumers recommend themselves as brand KOL. All this has made consumers a co creator and co owner of Le pure brand, helping Lok to open up a new development path in the already saturated yogurt Market.

06

　　 Transform: Reform of the use of data insight.

Data penetration is the foundation of all the key modules of brand building, and the support from data strategy is required from brand strategy setting to execution planning. In the traditional way, the brand tries to establish its own consumer management database, and collects market consumer data through external research.

Data is a strategic asset owned by an enterprise. Through effective integration and sorting of data, every decision of enterprises will be greatly empowered. In the past, due to resource constraints, data collection was dispersed and lagged behind. Every consumer behavior of marketing activities and consumers' data acquired in various channels were difficult to integrate systematically, making it difficult to dig meaningful information. However, in the digital age of China, Internet Co highly concentrated on the high concentration of consumer data. The development of big data platform and cloud processing technology made it easier for enterprises to get through the barriers of internal data, which made data integration and real-time analysis possible.

The brand should have an integrated view of its own consumer data and third party data, and be able to use these data to support every decision made by the business and brand building. As data volume continues to increase and path contact data get through, quantify and connect consumer needs to support brand decision making. Through the highly integration of data with third party platforms, we can achieve continuous data flow and real-time data access, gradually replace the lag and fixed time data snapshots, and better support the timely decision-making and adjustment of brands. The reform in this field will bring about the change from short-term investment return to long-term consumer value.

Of course, this reform is feasible, but not easy. At present, there are obstacles to track and measure consumers' purchase path behavior and marketing activities, which is why most marketers are currently tracking data only at transaction level. Marketers should reshape the organizational structure and allow data scientists, engineers and e-commerce experts to join the team to optimize the potential for releasing data.

China's digital market can more accurately measure contacts from interest to purchase, so as to better guide the setting of indicators. The vision of Alibaba's "new retail" (integrating online, offline, logistics and data into a value chain) means a new and comprehensive view of the consumer path (unlike the isolated, scattered data and third party monitoring in the US). Every aspect of consumer behavior is measurable and traceable. Each brand decision is supported by data analysis, and the return on investment will be redefined. Fundamentally, this represents the need to identify and apply new brand indicators.