At the end of this year, I made a sharing for the team's partners. In addition to introducing the next year's work deployment, it was to share 3 research and judgments on brand trends. This is an important basis to guide our work.
I summarize it into 3 words: Scenario, Ecology and Internationalization.
Why?
Scenario
More and more consumer brands are doing their homework around the "scene". Your product needs to match the consumer's interests, not "I want to sell it to you", so you must buy it.
Many brands are now transitioning from "doing a category" to "doing lifestyle".
When we shop every day, we will find that the mall covers all aspects of consumers' life scenes, such as technology, self-pleasing, home, health, sports, meta-universe, parent-child, as well as national tides, cute pets and so on.
In the past, our statistical tools and methods were relatively limited, everyone's description of consumers may be like this:
25-35 years old, then first-tier cities, then bachelor's degree, how much income and so on.
I especially remember that when we were discussing the user portrait of a brand, we mentioned that if this is the statistical method, then many of us are no longer his users.
The advancement of science and technology had made more and more statistical methods and consumer insights. Our current description of the consumer may become:
She pays attention to her figure, pays attention to health, often exercises and fitness, pursues the texture of clothing, and most importantly, she likes to share her life status.
Ecology
Around the life scenes of some consumers, brands are paying more and more attention to shaping their own ecology, that is, enclosing these consumers in their own ecology.
The relationship between brands and users, which used to be a buying and selling relationship, is now actually a relationship of friends, social relationships, and even co-creation.
You have to interact frequently. A brand cannot be made by just a few people in the company and make a huge impact, it needs more people to participate in it.
Nowadays more and more new consumer brands, including BBFresh we incubated, are using the three axes of "brand marketing", "data analysis" and "user operation".
Here are 2 examples, one is brand called Soup's Got Talent, and the other is SATURNBIRD coffees.
SATURNBIRD, which we drank a lot in our office, started from their packaging, they expanded a lot of stories, including co-creation with their users, KOLs, KOCs, artists, photographers, musicians, and so on.
The Soup's Got Talent ad of Wang Junkai, may have been seen by you guys. They released it at that time, claiming that it was "not finished yet". They invited everyone to create together.
Wang Junkai's fans had drawn a lot of different styles and made a lot of different animations for him.
It's just instant noodles! The soup is delicious, and the instant noodles are delicious. If it goes to publicity like this, they were sure wasting money to hire Wang. Now they uses this way to ask everyone to "work together" to make such an great advertisement, and the effect is much more than ordinary advertising or publicity.
Therefore, it is not only the company that creates brand recognition, but also users, customers, suppliers, media, self-media and so on.
With the advancement of technical means, more content co-creation, product co-creation, and then brand benefit sharing have become possible.
Internationalization
Next, we also encounter a problem, "Made in China" is gradually shifting to "Chinese brands".
NIO, for example, has also rumbled into the European market. At the end of December, I also participated in one of their sharings.
When Chinese car goes to Europe, standards for you may be so different. What does a brand do to truly target the global consumer and consumer market?
In the past two years, despite the impact of the Covid-19, our total export services have been increasing year by year. At this time, Chinese enterprises have really come to an era of "brand globalization".
We still have to make some brands with higher added value, so that we can truly "go overseas" and become a brand that overseas consumers will go.
It is still an old problem - How to reduce the brand's dependence on traditional sales channels and trading platforms.
And now we are facing a new challenge - how to make consumers around the world really know me, remember me, and like me?
It's cool for me to have so many interesting people, interesting ideas, and so many talented people gathered here. This thing may also change the image of Chinese brands overseas, change the business landscape, and even change some cultural communication things, which is really great for me.