stay On the axis of "product consumer", all kinds of brand theories and concepts are either left leaning or right leaning. Brand is like a balance, brand shaping swings back and forth between products and consumers, and category can be regarded as the fulcrum below the balance.
Brand building in the traditional era comes from the packaging of things. For example, a symbol, a trademark, and a name for the product packaging; Package one selling point and one positioning; Packaging is an image that endows the product with attitude, personality and emotion, so as to make the product produce premium and win user recognition.
Brand building in the digital era comes from the operation of people. The starting point of various concepts and marketing methods we often talk about today, such as scenes, communities, interactions, fans, private domain traffic, and growth hackers, is how to form connections and relationships with users.
The brand starts from the product, but is defined by the user. User image determines brand image, and customer cognitive value determines brand value. Understand the brand -Consumer relations can help us grasp the essence of the brand.
Consumer relations determine what kind of brand you are and how you should build a brand. Brand marketing must start from user ecology. This requires us to understand a biological concept, niche.
Niche refers to the spatio-temporal position of a population in the ecosystem and its functional relationship with related populations. If we introduce the concept of niche into the business environment. Then it refers to the market space and user groups occupied by an enterprise and a brand.
The brand strategy should match the ecological niche of the enterprise. The enterprise brand should match the ecological niche from product development, channel promotion, brand communication, content, media selection and other aspects. In particular, brand definition and brand communication must be based on niche. The width of the niche determines the width of the brand.
To be the core of brand is to manage the niche, because the enterprise should ultimately let users define what kind of brand they are, and the brand is owned by consumers. Among various brand theories, there is a famous brand power pyramid（ Brand Dynamics Pyramid) model. The core of this model is to divide the relationship between brands and their consumers into five levels: existence, correlation, performance, advantage and binding. Only by understanding the level of the brand in this pyramid can enterprises develop appropriate brand strategies and implement them.
We don't need all customers to have the same understanding of the brand and the same feelings for the brand. From the perspective of customer acquisition, all consumers in the market can only be divided into three categories for a brand: existing customers, potential customers and non customers. Among existing customers and potential customers, we can divide the user structure into important customers, general customers and marginal customers according to the customer demand intensity and recognition degree of the brand.
For brands, it is necessary to establish connections with important customers. On the one hand, it is user operation that allows customers to participate in brand action and create a sense of belonging to the brand. In operation, it is also necessary to strengthen the participation of brand founders, brand teams and user opinion leaders. On the other hand, through the emotional and spiritual content of brand values, brand stories, and brand concepts, customers can have a strong psychological identity with the brand and make the brand become the belief of customers.
For ordinary customers, the most important thing of brand is to establish user awareness. Brands need to create brand labels, convey brand value through advertising or content, and form a wide range of user perceptions to promote user purchase.
Marginal customers are those who buy very infrequently. Their purchase behavior is accidental or tentative. From a cognitive perspective, if you don't continue to promote the brand to them, they will forget your existence. For this group of people, the brand only needs to give them a preliminary impression and know that the brand exists.
In the past, brand communication was aimed at broad-spectrum people, and the same brand information was output to all people through mass media. Then, among all of them, some people have developed a habit of buying, and gradually become important customers of the brand. Re pass of enterprise brand CRM conducts customer relationship management for this group of people.
Now do brand, brand communication mode is reverse. The enterprise brand first needs to catch a group of important customers, stick to them, and take them as the origin to spread layer by layer to the surrounding public, expand the brand, and gradually enter the mass consumer market. In the past, it was differentiation screening, but now it is hierarchical diffusion. This reversal of play means the transformation of business logic.
Today's brand building is not to first create symbols and advertising words to define what kind of brand you are, but to first operate users and clarify the definition of brand in the process of user operation. For today's booming new generation of brands, content and user operations have become the first choice of brand marketing, not only as a means of brand acquisition, but also truly define who their own brand is, why it exists, and how to build it. Understanding the relationship between brands and users is crucial for building brands today; Understand the niche and user ecology, and strengthen the brand -User relationships are critical.
