Building brands and achieving results is not the whole picture of marketing

Building brands and achieving results is not the whole picture of marketing! If we use a simple and easy-to-understand sentence to explain the definition of marketing, "understanding and meeting customer needs" is believed to be the consensus of most marketing practitioners. Because the essence of marketing is customer demand management, companies need to first understand and explore customer needs, and then design corresponding products and services to meet customer needs, so as to form a benign business closed loop. However, if you ask what marketing specifically does? And how to understand and meet customer needs? The answers you get should be varied. As the marketing environment becomes more complex and marketing methods become more abundant, the work content of marketing has gradually become segmented and specialized. For example, market insight, brand building, public relations, spokesperson cooperation, variety show naming, advertising communication, event promotion, event marketing, live streaming, social media operation, talent cooperation, user and traffic operation, etc. are undoubtedly all within the scope of marketing, but each of them is a highly specialized field, and they even have completely different requirements for capability models and marketing knowledge. If we classify marketing work based on the goal, the mainstream view in the market is to build brands and achieve results. By building brands, we can occupy the minds of customers to create influence and trust, and by achieving results, we can bring about performance conversion and achieve the ultimate business goals. However, brand and results are only the work that marketers show on the stage. There are still many research and hidden work behind them that are not included. In order to reveal the full picture of marketing to everyone, Lao Pao will systematically introduce the main templates of marketing work and the specific work content included in each module based on his own experience in the second party, Internet giants and the top 500 first party. Following the complete path of marketing work from front to back, marketing should include five modules: market research, market positioning, brand planning, marketing mix, and hacker growth. Among them, market research and market positioning are the stages of understanding customer needs, while the main goals of brand planning, marketing mix and hacker growth are to meet customer needs. Understanding customer needs: market research For many companies with a small budget, market research is a job that is easily underestimated or even ignored; because market research is not a necessary item in marketing management work, and marketing management work can still be carried out without market research. Some more confident senior teams of companies will even directly judge the market based on their own experience. However, in the fiercely competitive business world, nothing is completely certain and controllable. What companies can do is to try every possible way to increase the possibility of success; and market research can enable companies to understand more information and make more accurate hits, which is one of the most effective means for companies to increase the probability of success. Market research work usually includes four parts: macro-environment insights, industry insights, competitor insights, and user insights. At the same time, we need to use some professional analysis models to carry out insight work. For example, the PEST model can be used to analyze whether the current and future macro-environment is suitable for doing business? Porter's Five Forces Model can clearly see our survival space in the industry and what competitors will there be in the future? SWOT analysis model teaches us how to play to our strengths and avoid weaknesses and how to seize opportunities to defeat competitors? The Persona user portrait model allows us to be familiar with the portrait of target customers in a specific, vivid and scenario-based way. Data collection and organization are also the focus of market research work. Using desk queries to collect literature is undoubtedly the most mainstream and efficient method at present, which allows us to find a large amount of second-hand data and make a preliminary understanding and judgment of the market. If the second-hand data cannot meet the needs, it is necessary to use two data collection methods, qualitative survey and quantitative survey, to obtain more and deeper first-hand data; use qualitative survey to explore the unknown and depth, and then cooperate with quantitative survey to measure and express the findings in qualitative survey. Understand customer needs: market positioning In the era of insufficient supply and insufficient competition, companies can produce the same products and sell them to all customers because of limited productivity and customers have no choice; but in today's highly competitive world, companies must take into account the diverse needs of customers and segment customers with different needs in the market to gain greater survival opportunities. Positioning is praised as one of the greatest inventions in the history of marketing methodology, and has become a mustlearn skill and a catchphrase in daily work for domestic marketers. At present, there are many different understandings and application methods of positioning in the market, but the essence remains the same. It is still necessary to find a certain market segment and occupy a certain differentiated mind. Therefore, regarding the specific implementation of market positioning, I still recommend the most classic STP target marketing model: Segmenting market segmentation - Targeting target market selection - Positioning positioning. Market segmentation is to divide the market into different customer groups using one or several dimensions, and target market selection is to select the most suitable customer group from them. Positioning is to occupy a differentiated position in the customer's mind. Here we will focus on introducing several effective and commonly used positioning methods. The most common one is USP positioning, which requires the company to have a unique differentiated selling point, that is, I have what others do not have; there is also a competitive positioning, in which the company has a stronger advantage in some aspects in the game with its competitors, claiming to be better than others; The last one is more suitable for the field of extremely competitive red ocean, called dimensionality-upward positioning, because the original market is extremely saturated and has to create a new track to achieve dimensionality reduction. Meet customer needs: brand planning Brands mainly help companies solve the problems of identification and trust. Any company that wants to achieve long-term development and build a strong moat cannot do without hard work in brand building, and brand value proposition, brand association and brand symbol are the focus of companies in brand building. Brand value proposition refers to the brand's promise to provide consumers with certain benefits or help consumers solve certain problems; it is mainly composed of three parts: functional value, emotional value and personal self-expression value. Through the core value proposition, an effective relationship is established between the brand and the consumer, thereby driving purchase decisions. Functional value is the most common consumer benefit, usually provided directly by the product, and is related to the consumer's life pain points and usage experience. Emotional value means that consumers can obtain a positive emotional satisfaction through the products or services provided by the brand. When a brand or product can become a social currency and provide people with a way to spread their self-image, it has the value of self-expression. Luxury goods can be sold at high prices because consumers obtain the value of self-expression through luxury goods to show their high-end taste or identity. Brand association is the consumer's cognition and understanding of the brand's connotation, driven by the brand image that the brand hopes to establish in the minds of consumers. The composition of brand association mainly includes product association, brand personality association, usage scenario association, corporate culture association and other forms. Through associations from different perspectives, the brand becomes more concrete, full and unique in the minds of consumers. Establishing a unique and memorable brand identification symbol is an extremely important goal for enterprises; American linguist Alberta Merribin once proposed that the total communication effect is equal to 7% language, 38% tone, and 55% visual information, indicating that visual information is the most important and effective channel for receiving external information, which can quickly seize the user's golden attention. This is why visual symbols become the core part of brand identification. Commonly used visual symbols include brand logos, brand visual systems and visual hammers. Meeting customer needs: marketing mix The core goal of the marketing mix is ??to solve the problems of market competition and sales. There is no doubt that the competition for the market is the most critical and fiercest battlefield in the marketing campaign, which will directly affect the sales performance of the company. The marketing mix can be fully interpreted by the 4P theory, which are Product strategy, Price strategy, Place strategy and Promotion strategy. Product strategy is to conduct in-depth research and insight into consumers based on the changes in the market environment and technology, and finally design products that meet market demand and put them on the market; it should be noted here that the company's product strategy is not static, and it must be continuously iterated with the changes in the market environment and consumer preferences, so that its products can always maintain strong market competitiveness. Price strategy is to formulate prices that meet consumer psychological expectations and corporate profit targets based on factors such as product cost, market positioning and competitive product pricing. Many people mistakenly believe that product pricing depends entirely on cost and profit targets, and the pricing is calculated based on these two, but it is not that simple. Although cost is one of the important factors to consider when deciding pricing, real experts often price products based on the sense of value they bring to consumers. There is a very classic pricing principle called "price targeting", which is to associate your products with higher-end products so that consumers think that the two types of products belong to the same level, thereby enhancing consumers' perception of the value of their own products and being willing to pay more for them. Channel strategy is not only about which channel combination to choose to sell products, but also about the channel's ability to accurately cover the consumer's reach scenarios and meet the merchant's requirements for traffic. Therefore, the magnitude and accuracy of channel traffic are the two most important criteria for judging whether it is a high-quality channel. In addition, the cost of acquiring traffic, the fixed cost of the store (such as rent, property fees), the welfare policies given by the channel, and even the strength of the channel itself are also the criteria for choosing a sales channel. The framework of the publicity strategy is relatively clear, and it is inseparable from which group of people is the target audience? What is the content of the publicity? What kind of publicity method is used? What kind of communication media combination is selected? And other questions. Meeting customer needs: Growth Hacker In the classic book Growth Hacker by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, they define growth hacker as: doing everything possible to tap the growth potential of a product or service, and this is a set of methods to drive growth through high-speed, cross-functional experiments, ultimately improving marketing productivity. In actual combat, growth hacker emphasizes the five stages of AARRR throughout the user life cycle, which represent the growth of species types: Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral. The basic operation process behind growth hacking is also relatively easy to understand, and has successfully helped many companies get results: 1. Propose some ideas that may bring growth 2. Prioritize these ideas 3. Quickly test 4. Analyze the results and quickly iterate based on the results 5. Quickly and infinitely loop the above four steps When the five types of growth, AARRR, come together, the value of the user's entire life cycle can be maximized; this is why many companies now require that every department and position have a growth mindset and goal. Market research, market positioning, brand planning, marketing mix and growth hacking are the five main modules of marketing. Each of them can form a complex system. Therefore, this article does not provide too many explanations and examples for each module. But I hope that through this article, everyone will have a more comprehensive understanding of marketing, recognize the complexity of the marketing system and the limitations of their own cognition, so as to avoid the short-sighted phenomenon of seeing everything as a nail when holding a hammer in actual marketing.