Click to read the original article for details. Brand youthification has been an unavoidable marketing topic in the past two years. In 2018, with the advancement of Tmall's China Chic Festival, a wave of China-chic and co-branding trends emerged in the domestic marketing field. Old brands such as Laoganma, Want Want, RIO, White Rabbit, and the Palace Museum ignited social discussions with an 'internet celebrity' image, making brand youthification a key topic in major brand marketing. Behind brand youthification is naturally the youthification of users. As Generation Z matures, they represent the consumer market of the near future. Winning over the Gen Z consumer base has become a crucial battle for brand development. But how can brands achieve youthification? What are the misconceptions? Are you doing it right? This article will outline several major misconceptions about brand youthification, which may answer your questions. Brand youthification and brand renewal have become hot topics in recent years. Under the impact of mobile internet, communication paths, communication models, and cultural contexts have undergone significant changes. This is also why many traditional brands feel out of place, and brand youthification seems to be a lifeline. For many brands, youthification is necessary, but people often misunderstand its essence. Doing social media or co-branding is not the true core of youthification. Below, we have compiled four common misconceptions about brand youthification. Misconception 1: Brand youthification is needed to appeal to young users. Brands often push for youthification to attract young people and capture the young user base. This sounds reasonable, but the reality is that not all brands or industries need youthification; it may not solve the business problems your brand faces. In other words, brand youthification is a means, not an end. Overall, brand youthification needs to be industry-specific. B2B industries may not be suitable for youth-oriented renewal because for B2B companies, what matters is giving clients a sense of security and trust; the significance of brand youthification is limited. For FMCG, however, brand youthification is more important because it can solve a series of issues such as brand perception, traffic acquisition, and product sales on the B2C side. So, brand youthification is actually a pseudo-proposition. For a brand, the prerequisite for youthification is to confirm whether it is necessary, what business issue it aims to solve, and understand that youthification is only the surface of brand strategy; the core remains the brand's commercial demands in the new internal and external environment. Take Sanyuan's brand renewal as an example. Earlier this year, Sanyuan collaborated with the Palace Museum IP to launch the 'Palace Collection · Pure Enjoyment' China-chic milk, which received a positive response. Externally, users may only see the packaging renewal and some social media user engagement, but the business issue behind this entire set of communication actions was: how to increase the product premium of Sanyuan's new product by about 30%. Based on this motivation, we believed it was necessary to create a cultural IP attribute for Sanyuan, which eventually led to various operational actions. At the same time, increasing product premium is part of Sanyuan's overall brand renewal, because as a regional old brand, Sanyuan's brand image lacks vitality and is relatively traditional; the parent brand needs to gradually change this user perception. ▼Sanyuan brand youthification case, click image to view▼ So many brands tend to put the cart before the horse when doing youthification. It is not that you need to appeal to young people to do brand youthification, but rather, based on your brand's commercial purpose, you use brand youthification as a means. Misconception 2: Brand youthification is just communication youthification. For ordinary users, the brand youthification actions they can perceive are usually at the communication level, but for the entire brand, communication youthification may be the most superficial dimension. Brand youthification has three dimensions of consumer perception. The farthest level is the communication dimension. What we see today, such as content output on 'WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin' and personified external images, all belong to the communication level. The communication level is the easiest for brands to adjust, but it is weakly related to users. Your brand communication content is hard to have a substantive, close connection with users. Users will ask, 'What does your communication have to do with me?' This requires brands to produce high-quality content so that users will actively pay attention to your communication. The second level is the visual dimension, which is the attractiveness of the product. The outer packaging and various visual expressions give users an intuitive feeling. Youthful packaging can bring a different brand perception. If your brand still has packaging from fifty years ago, users will find it hard to intuitively feel the brand's changes. But visual renewal is not a visual subversion; brands need to update the product's visual experience while retaining the original brand traits. The third level is the product dimension, which is the key to whether users will buy or not. Brand youthification is not about superficial things like communication or packaging; it is about making your product more in line with the needs of new user groups. For example, in the food industry, young people need greener and healthier food. The key to brand youthification is to provide products and prices that fit the lifestyle of the current population. In fact, going deeper, youthification also involves the entire management and process aspects of the enterprise, because for the youthification of product R&D, the issue is no longer just communication or marketing. It can even be said that brand communication is only a minor detail of brand youthification; true youthification often requires major changes. It is also for this reason that when brands do youthification, they usually first test the waters at the communication level, because it is the easiest to adjust, and even if it is not done well, there is not much risk. Another way is to establish a new sub-brand for youthification attempts; these are low-cost trial-and-error strategies. Misconception 3: The target of brand youthification is young people. The target audience of brand youthification is not only young people, but all users. The motivation for brand youthification is usually changes in the external marketing environment, not just generational changes in the user base. There are young people in any era, but not every era requires brand youthification. Take the early case of Li-Ning's '90s' branding as a classic negative example. When the name 'Li-Ning 90s' was shouted out, it meant offending other user groups. If 'Li-Ning 90s' was designed for the post-90s generation, how would post-80s and post-70s users view the brand? They might think they have been abandoned by the brand. So brand youthification is not just for young people; it should target all potential users. Brand youthification is not about the youthification of the population, but a youthification of lifestyle and life philosophy, often unrelated to age. Another point is that brand youthification needs to express the original brand core in new ways. Still taking Sanyuan as an example, Sanyuan's brand perception is humane, safe, and quality. In the youthification transformation, these brand impressions that differentiate it from competitors should be preserved, rather than blindly catering to the aesthetic preferences of young groups. Misconception 4: Following the China-chic trend, have you really thought it through? Finally, let's talk about the communication forms of brand youthification. China-chic is a communication method many brands have used in youthification in the past two years, but now the routines of China-chic and co-branding have been overused. Is China-chic still effective? There are currently two main views on this issue: one believes that China-chic is a marketing dividend of the past two years, with brands like White Rabbit and Want Want constantly going viral because of it, so brand youthification needs to seize the trend; the other believes that the high frequency of China-chic has caused aesthetic fatigue among users, and homogenized content cannot stimulate freshness. If brands want to do youthification now, China-chic may not be a good choice. In fact, neither view touches the essence of the problem. China-chic itself is just China-chic; it is neither good nor bad. The key is whether the brand needs this concept and how to use it. If we treat China-chic as a channel, such problems are easily solved. For example, if China-chic is used as a communication channel like WeChat or Weibo, the brand's consideration is whether communication in this channel can achieve commercial goals and whether it can yield a high ROI. From a macro perspective, behind China-chic is China's cultural confidence, a major trend with many dividends to explore. But from the brand's own perspective, how to use China-chic, how to differentiate, and what the purpose of doing China-chic is—these are the more essential questions. Source: Shiqu (ID: SocialTouchST)