The first observation is that in the past, 99% of marketing books were written for 1% of enterprises, but marketing theory should be available to all enterprises.
Why? Because the research objects and cases of these marketing books are the top 500 brands in the world, the directors are all great gods, the spokespersons are world-class, and the budgets are all billions. These marketing cases and methods are really good, but the problem is that most enterprises don't have so much budget and the influence of that brand, so we don't do marketing?
Of course, it is impossible not to do it, because 99.99% of the enterprises in the world are small enterprises, and the annual marketing budget is hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands. So how do we do marketing?
My client asked me such a question.
I have to answer this question.
The answer is yes, even if your marketing budget is only one dollar, we still have a one-dollar approach.
For example, if you are a restaurant on the street, you don't have much money to promote it. You just need to make a mobile luminous light box with the name of your restaurant printed on it, put it on the roadside at the door and draw a big arrow pointing to the door of the restaurant. It doesn't cost much, but after testing, this kind of light box can increase the number of customers passing by and then eating in the door by about 20%. If you draw that arrow bigger and draw a curve, you can also increase the number of customers.
For example, if you are an e-commerce product, your packaging box can print your logo a little bigger, so that your brand will become the most beautiful express box on the express cabinet, but you can get more exposure for your brand without spending a penny more.
We have a customer who makes milk tea. My God, the average price of a cup is 6-8 yuan. At present, there are more than 6,000 stores in China. When we consulted for it, we found a trick, that is, after the customer ordered tea, you asked the customer whether to add coconut, so most customers would choose to add coconut. If you ask customers if they want to add small ingredients, most customers will choose not to add them. Why? Because there are many kinds of small ingredients, such as cold weather, meaty, pearls, coconuts, taro, Explosicum red beans and so on. Customers don't know that there are so many kinds and they can't tell, so it is very useful to ask directly if coconut is added. A coconut 1 yuan can increase the customer unit price 15% or so. This is a pricing technique and pricing is an important part of marketing. A little pricing skill can increase your turnover, but it doesn't cost money.
These situations I mentioned are all the design and marketing schemes that our company has done for customers. You see, we will not only help customers like Yuan Qi Forest make overwhelming advertisements, but also help customers like Banriyao Grilled Fish make very simple material improvements, but all of them can promote sales.
My second observation is that marketing is not a life-saving straw, nor is it the only factor for the success of an enterprise.
In the actual business operation, marketing is indeed very important, which can effectively help enterprises to obtain business development, establish long-term brand assets and help enterprises to prosper.
But we can't go too far. We can't exaggerate the role of marketing indefinitely. It is not a scientific attitude to think that good marketing will have everything. In fact, the success of all brands is the success of enterprises. The success of enterprises is attributed to the success of enterprise management, and marketing itself is only a part of enterprise management. If enterprise management itself is a sailboat, then marketing is a sail, and the implementation of marketing activities is your operation on the sail. If your boat is well built, just in time for the strong wind, and you are good at sailing, you will sail faster.
But if you only know how to sail, there is nothing you can do if the ship breaks down. If you have knowledge of shipbuilding, maybe you can build a rowing boat to travel when there is no wind.
Let me give you an example. We have a customer of milk tea brand, 1000 stores. They launched a new flavor of milk tea, and we also helped customers design various materials to promote new products, including light box posters, promotional videos, event prizes and so on. Finally found that the effect is not good. Why not? It's not because there is something wrong with the design of publicity materials, but because their execution efficiency is too poor. A month passed, and more than half of the shops didn't even put up new posters. Why is the implementation efficiency poor? That is the problem of management system and training system.
This seems to be a marketing problem, but it is actually a business operation and management problem, and finally it is an execution problem. If the execution is not solved well, it is useless to do marketing design well.
For another example, many people will think that Jiang is doing well because his expression bottle is well written.
Of course it's right to think so. However, there are actually many people who can write this kind of expression bottle copy in China, so why can only Jiang achieve the scale of several billion? I have a friend who writes well. He thought he could make this kind of small wine, so he went to make a brand of small wine, and for several years, he made a multimillion-dollar business, which was nothing compared with Jiang.
Why? Because Jiang was successful at that time, in addition to the spread of expression bottles, he also had an important ability to spread wine to millions of restaurants across the country. This is a very, very rare ability that few companies can do, and my friend can't.
Another example is a brand of baby milk powder named He Fei. They have a famous slogan: It is more suitable for China baby's physique. Many people will naively think that Feihe has succeeded because of this sentence. In fact, the truth behind this is that when the melamine incident occurred, only two brands of domestic milk powder did not add melamine, and one of them was He Fei. He Fei has made enough efforts in dairy farming, forming barriers to upstream milk sources. He Fei Online has more than 80,000 promoters, and He Fei conducts more than 1 10,000 activities for customers every year, which means there are 3,000 activities every day. Most enterprises can't do these things, but some entrepreneurs simply believe that a simple brand positioning enterprise can succeed.
Of course, you can also look at Coca-Cola's ability to penetrate the countryside and streets of China like a capillary, which is really not an achievement that can be achieved simply by branding.
If the success of an enterprise is really that simple, the fees charged by our marketing consulting company should be ten times higher, right? Unfortunately, this is really not the case. I advise you not to have such illusions about marketing.
The third observation is that advertising is a marketing activity, but marketing is not just advertising, or even advertising.
I have asked many people: What do you think is marketing? Most of my friends' answers are advertisements, event marketing, little red book planting, live broadcast and so on.
Let me give you an example. You should know that there is a hotel brand called Atour. Excuse me, have you seen the advertisement of Atour? No, and almost all hotels have not advertised. You should have never seen hotels like Shangri-La, Peninsula Hotel and Ritz-Carlton advertise, nor have you seen accounting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers advertise, so why are the so-called Big Four so famous? Don't these enterprises need marketing?
So our understanding of marketing is too one-sided.
In fact, the most classic marketing textbook at present, that is, kotler's Marketing Management, has already said that the marketing framework consists of four parts, that is, what we usually call 4p, product, pricing, channel and promotion.
If we can understand marketing from these four parts, some problems will suddenly become clear.
For example, some new brands go to the big anchor to bring goods and sell a lot, but they lose money and have no profit. This is a problem of promotion and channels, but it does not solve the problem of products and pricing.
If the value of the product is not enough, the customer will not buy it again. Only when there is an advertisement can there be sales. When the advertisement stops, the sales will stop. Besides, in order to go live, you pushed the price too low, and you made no profit. The more you sell, the more you lose. This is not the logic of going concern.
We usually have the illusion that there are many brands that can be circled by the so-called "marketing", but if you take a careful inventory, you will find that there are very few brands that are really circled after one year. But what you need to know is that there are millions of brands in the country, and the probability of winning the lottery is similar to that of winning the lottery, so you can't expect this effect.
Real marketing is to provide customers with value in a down-to-earth manner, gain customers' trust and grow steadily, which is the right way for most brands to succeed.
So much for my three-point observation.
Although I am engaged in marketing, my biggest feeling and honest suggestion is that you can't expect marketing to help you succeed quickly. Because quick success is almost everyone's nature, there will be many so-called experts to promote this quick and successful marketing method. There is no way. If there is demand, there will be products that meet your needs, even if the products are fake. In fact, many popular cases and sayings on the market are packaged and screened, but many people will pay for this quick method. Finally, people find that success requires honest work.