2021-10-14 10:31:51

"Integration of product and efficiency", that is, to achieve the dual goals of brand building and sales effect at the same time in the advertising process, has always been the ultimate pursuit of brand owners.

As the cost of acquiring customers on China’s mobile Internet is becoming more expensive, the complexity and fragmentation of channels continue to increase, brand owners’ trial-and-error and management costs are becoming higher, and companies need to adapt to the rapid changes in the traffic environment more than ever and increase investment in brand building. Output ratio.

This article will analyze the four major trends in the pursuit of "integration of product and efficiency" and related successful cases, and discuss how companies can break the three barriers of channel, organization and cognition , and achieve sustainable performance growth with the blessing of digital technology.

1. Realizing the "Integration of Product and Effect": Three Difficult Questions

The importance of "combination of product and efficiency" is self-evident, but there are many challenges in the process of realization.

First of all, as the traffic dividend fades, the development of leading Internet e-commerce platforms has stabilized, and traffic resources continue to show a trend of decentralization and fragmentation. The strong rise of emerging traffic fields such as private domains, live broadcasts, and personalized content recommendation puts forward higher requirements for enterprises to continuously acquire new capabilities.

Secondly, it is difficult to balance "goods" and "effects", and one-sided pursuit of direct effects is often counterproductive.

The extremely popular live broadcast has created a "myth" of the brand's rapid popularity and sales growth. While the head anchor brings massive exposure and efficient conversion to the brand, it also endorses the brand, achieving several minutes of brand education in the process of oral broadcast and product display.

However, small and medium-sized brands quickly discovered that if the brand has not established a certain reputation and user base before, it is almost impossible to gain the favor of the top anchor, and a single anchor recommendation is often not effective.

Thirdly, the mobile Internet certainly makes the advertising effect more traceable, but the "effect" mentioned here usually refers to exposure, browsing, clicking and additional purchases, which is far from realizing the "sales effect". From social platform "planting grass" to e-commerce platform "crawling grass", there are already complete marketing conversion strategies. However, in space, there are often data barriers between the two; in terms of time, there are often "fermentation and water storage". Interval. Multiple variables make the "effect" confusing and difficult for the brand to distinguish.

2. Breaking the game "Integration of product and efficiency": Four major industry trends

Fortunately, with the in-depth development of China's digital field, the marketing model and tool system of e-commerce platforms have become more and more perfect, and there are more mature solutions in the "integration of product and efficiency". The four major industry trends that have emerged are: Especially worthy of the brand owners' attention.

Promotion IP technology

For a long time, e-commerce platforms have been the world of "performance advertising." Whether it is the precise placement of daily sales or the deep discounts during the promotion period, behind it is the ultimate pursuit of effect.

However, there are many ingenious ways to play in large-scale promotions. From Tmall’s “Little Black Box”, JD’s “Super Product Day” to Pinduoduo’s “Ten Billion Subsidy”, e-commerce platforms continue to launch IP-based activities. On the one hand, this is because users naturally have a strong buying mind in sales channels; on the other hand, IP-based activities can also provide massive exposure and brand endorsement.

Take JD’s "Super Box" as an example. The event will be launched on the special node "6.18" starting in 2020. It will provide users with an exclusive co-branded custom gift box created by JD.com and other brands. During the event, users on the site actively searched for this IP and reached 4.5 million. Second-rate. Super Box once cooperated with a leading video game company to launch a joint pre-sale of cartoon characters, and 2000 boxes were sold out in 10 seconds; it cooperated with a well-known international cosmetics brand to launch a star single product joint gift box, which will become the "6.18" period in 2021. Top brand sales.

Private domain of public domain traffic

Traditional e-commerce platforms are called "public domain e-commerce platforms", and users who are deposited in the brand's own official website, mini programs, and CRM system are regarded as the company's own traffic, which the brand can repeatedly reach.

However, major platforms are leading the private domain of public domain traffic, helping brands capture the long-tail value of users. Whether it is Tmall’s data bank AIPL model, JD’s GOAL marketing method tool, or Douyin’s FACT methodology, they are advocating and supporting brands to establish private positions within the site and carry out long-term user operations.

These methodologies and their supporting solutions provide three weapons: the first is "quantification", that is, the measurement of the full life cycle of the harvested traffic; the second is "segmentation", that is, the precise distinction between the crowd and the refinement through massive tags Preferences, to help brands match more suitable customer groups and more optimized communication methods; the last is "management", that is, to increase the brand stickiness and repurchase effect of the platform by increasing the on-site community, membership system, personalized customization and other tools.

For example, Yili’s new plant protein beverage brand selection, which was launched in early 2021, relies on the user operation tools of the e-commerce platform to compare the purchase trend, penetration rate, and loyalty of the top ten groups with competing products at the level of brand, category, and SKU. Analyzed, customized the "private domain target group" of plant selection, and systematically reached it many times in the e-commerce site. During the launch of new products on the JD platform from March 4 to 10, the cost of new customers of the brand dropped by 55%, and the repurchase rate of regular customers increased by 232%, successfully precipitating a set of private domain methodology for the new brand.

Brand Explosive Driven

We have also observed that brand marketing is applying "explosive product-driven" logic.

This trend has been around for many years. The reason is that new consumer brands that are constantly emerging have found it difficult to confront the brand equity formed by large brands' advertising investment for many years. Therefore, they seek to make in-depth breakthroughs in certain single products and advantages, starting from the aspects of ingredients, functions, scenarios, and user experience. Carry out a comprehensive and in-depth interpretation of the product characteristics, in order to seize a place in the minds of users.

For example, emerging brands such as Ulike, Ramen Talk, Zhong Xuegao, Mint Health, Yongpu Coffee, etc., each started from a sub-category or single product, and quickly won the top sales of that category or single product; some brands started to open e-commerce The flagship store's turnover exceeded 100 million yuan, and it took only 1 year or even 7 months. These are all successful examples of "explosive product-driven".

Strategic single products allow consumers to have a high degree of integration of brand and product awareness, which directly drives single product sales, while popular single products deepen brand memory and provide cross-selling "initial in-store traffic", thus realizing The double harvest of brand value growth and product sales surge.

Integration of production and marketing

The pursuit of "combination of product and efficiency" is also continuously extending to the front end of the value chain.

Anchor participation in product design is a common form. Huaxizi is one of the classic cases of value chain integration in recent years. The Huayin Xingqiang carved lipstick launched by the brand has appeared in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast for more than 30 days; the product has not yet been launched, and the anchor talked about his visit to the factory in the live broadcast room. Experience, and how to help brands find design inspiration. The product became a hot product on Tmall the following month after its launch, with monthly sales exceeding 5 million yuan.

Perfect Diary also collaborated with Li Jiaqi in the front-end collaboration with loose powder, pressed powder and other single products. The brand side gave the head anchor great "product voice", using their sensitivity to fans and products as KOLs to lay the foundation for the popularity of the live broadcast room after the new product was launched.

3. Enhancing the "Integration of Product and Efficiency": Breaking down the three major barriers

Under the aforementioned four major trends, the prerequisite for establishing the ability of “integration of product and efficiency” is to completely break down the barriers between user journey, organization and collaboration, and data management and control, and achieve the effect of “integration” from the perspective of “integration”.

Break channel barriers and integrate global strategies

As we all know, it is not easy to achieve the full impact on users' online and online behaviors, and there are several fragmented ecosystems online. Technology giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, and ByteDance have built their own city pools. Due to business competition and user privacy protection among different channels, it is currently not truly open and interoperable.

"Integration of product and efficiency" requires cross-channel strategic coordination by the brand. Through the three systems of crowd labeling, product labeling, and field labeling , a hierarchical and accurate product selection pool for different groups of people in each field is constructed to improve the "people, goods, Matching degree and marketing efficiency of “field”.

For example, during the "6.18" period this year, Decathlon reached tens of millions of people through short videos on the public domain platform, and at the same time used the media buying tools of large e-commerce platforms to cover the mainstream media of the entire network. After the user data returned, it used crowd tags to pass AI performed accurate second-time access to users and achieved more than 100,000 visits to the store.

Break down organizational barriers and integrate marketing and sales teams

Under the trend of IP-based promotional activities and brand-explosive product-driven trends, we have also observed that the organizational division of labor barriers in traditional marketing activities must be broken.

Today, conflicts between the marketing department and the sales department are still common. The marketing department complained that the sales department was eager to make quick successes and ignored the long-term value of the brand spirit; the sales department complained that the marketing department was flashy, and the immediate effect was unsatisfactory.

In leading companies, marketing departments (and their advertising creative agencies) and e-commerce departments (and their docking platforms) pay more attention to the co-creation and planning of marketing activities throughout the year. The resources for large-scale IP-based promotional activities are often obtained by the brand "all-in-one". Therefore, companies need to consider cross-departmental linkage performance appraisal, and effectively mobilize the collaboration between various departments to achieve corporate value enhancement.

Break down cognitive barriers and realize data-driven whole-process integration

In traditional brand building, advertising is half science and half art, and some effects are considered impossible to quantify monitoring and data evaluation. For example, the number of fans of Weibo Big V can be seen at a glance, but the matching degree with the brand tone requires subjective judgment.

The pursuit of "integration of product and efficiency" requires breaking this "immeasurable" cognition and establishing a data-driven feedback iteration mechanism. For example, the search volume of brand keywords by users on an e-commerce platform can become an indirect indicator for monitoring the effectiveness of planting grass. Many leading companies have set up dedicated personnel to centrally manage omni-channel KOL cooperation, establish KOL files, and systematically track the reposting and interaction that KOL brings to the brand, and the short-term and mid- to long-term sales stimulation of products. .

At the same time, leading companies are also good at using platform data analysis tools. For example, with the help of Qianguaxiaohongshu data analysis platform, you can follow the data in real-time monitoring , and use the changes of data to make timely and flexible adjustments to promotion methods and marketing strategies.

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In recent years, China's digital ecosystem has continued to evolve, promoting enterprises to accelerate capacity building. Only companies that can realize full-scale, intensive cultivation, and sensitive iteration through data and collaboration can embrace the bright future of sustainable development. Facilitating corporate capacity building is also the original intention of McKinsey's "Brand Winning Strategies in the New Media Environment" series of articles. In the previous article, we discussed how brands use effect media to precipitate user assets, and the essence of "product is king, content is king". Next, we will focus on sharing the "people and goods" two-wheel drive product creation, through sorting out "precise crowd label portraits, insight into new product trends", "full link feedback collection, iterative optimization of new product launches", and "reverse customization, The three-step approach of "flexible supply chain" analyzes the magic weapon for winning new products.

About the author:

Dr. Chenan Xia
McKinsey Global Managing Partner and Head of China's High-Tech and Internet Business, Permanent Resident in Shenzhen Branch
Chenan_Xia@mckinsey.com

Qiu Tian
Executive Director of McKinsey Lan Yue, resident in Beijing Branch
Autumn_Qiu@meta.mckinsey.com

Hu Jing
Project Director of McKinsey Lanyue , based in Shanghai branch
Lanny_Hu@meta.mcKinsey.com

Cai Yue,
Project Manager of McKinsey, based in Shenzhen Branch
Kris_Cai@mckinsey.com