---
title: "Consumer Brand Entrepreneurship Is Not a 100-Meter Sprint, but a Marathon!"
description: "This article shares views on brand, product, advertising, learning, channels, and marketing. In the past two years, the consumer goods entrepreneurship boom has continued, with more and more brands emerging. If you are a long-termist, you must consider not only how to run fast but also how to run far. Consumer brand entrepreneurship is not a 100-meter sprint but a marathon."
author: "Keny伟"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2020-04-09"
language: "en"
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# Consumer Brand Entrepreneurship Is Not a 100-Meter Sprint, but a Marathon!

> This article shares views on brand, product, advertising, learning, channels, and marketing. In the past two years, the consumer goods entrepreneurship boom has continued, with more and more brands emerging. If you are a long-termist, you must consider not only how to run fast but also how to run far. Consumer brand entrepreneurship is not a 100-meter sprint but a marathon.

From brand, product, advertising, learning, channel, and marketing, I share my views.
In the past two years, the consumer goods entrepreneurship boom has not diminished, with more and more consumer brands emerging. Everyone needs to sell goods to survive, and various people are obsessed with traffic trends. Many brands have also enjoyed the dividends of the rise of various content platforms. **But if you are a long-termist, you must consider not only how to run fast but also how to run far. Consumer brand entrepreneurship is not a 100-meter sprint, but a marathon.**
I have always had a few thoughts I want to share with consumer brands: **-01- About Brand**
Many brands, when cooperating with any channel or account, first ask about ROI. Even when placing ads on Taobao, Zhihu, or Xiaohongshu, they ask: "What ROI can you achieve?" Everyone hopes channels guarantee ROI, and pure CPS cooperation would be best.
It is very normal for an advertising manager to think this way, but as a brand, you cannot only think about ROI. **Content is the long-term entry point for traffic and drives consumption.**
**Without brand mindshare, advertising will only narrow your path.**
> **First: Advertising techniques are becoming more transparent, and tools for monitoring yourself and competitors are widely used, causing advertising costs to rise and not be proportional to conversion rates;**
> **Second: Platforms are becoming stricter about brands exploiting ordinary users for free content;**
> **Third: Influencers and ordinary users are becoming more commercially aware, prices have risen, and they know how to make data look good;**
> **Fourth: When everyone focuses on advertising, the amount of ad content on platforms increases, and consumers become more immune.**
**The most obvious difference comes from conversion rates.** A friend once worked in search engine bidding on the client side. Their company acquired users only through search engines, and they dared not stop advertising, as users would drop. They hit a bottleneck, and no matter what techniques they used, conversion rates could not break through. Later, the company did some brand communication, and conversion rates began to rise, and users searching for brand keywords also increased.
At this point, consumers have an impression of the brand, subconsciously remembering "I've seen/heard of this brand," rather than it being completely unfamiliar. I have seen many merchants who are excellent at advertising but have not become brands in their industry. So, after solving basic survival issues, founders must change their mindset.
Recently, while driving, I often hear Wang Baobao's radio ads. The cereal market is highly competitive, and Wang Baobao's approach is correct.
**-02- About Product**
Many brands pursue marketing techniques while neglecting the product. Here are two scenarios:
**1) If you just want to make a quick buck, using channel or price advantages to sell goods quickly, then marketing techniques are indeed important, because you don't expect repeat customers;**
**2) If you are a long-termist, whether you can make money and for a long time is definitely based on the product, not marketing.**
When developing products, the fundamental standard is differentiation. If you want to do a similar product, you must offer new claims, experiences, or scenarios, and differentiated selling points; otherwise, it will be hard to succeed. At the same time, you must evaluate the market size and whether it meets consumer needs. SanDunBan, Perfect Diary, One Cow Raised by One Person, Hankou No.2 Factory, Lamian Shuo, Super Zero, and Florasis are essentially products.
The so-called product must be viewed from the consumer's perspective. A good product is not one you think is easy to use, tasty, fun, or made from good raw materials. Startup brands do not have the financial resources to educate consumers. **A good product must match consumer needs, and its advantages must be easily perceived by consumers.**
Many bosses think their products are unbeatable, and they can talk for a long time about various processes, certificates, and raw materials. There is a brand of meal replacement biscuits that are really hard to swallow and dry, but the founder is obsessed with telling me how good the raw materials, process, and effects are. This puts me in a difficult position.
**-03- About Advertising**
**If the category does not have a particularly strong brand, you must establish a leadership image in the category.**
Back then, Wang Laoji was very popular. On one hand, its positioning was good; more importantly, besides Wang Laoji, no other herbal tea brand was advertising on a large scale, so everyone defaulted to Wang Laoji = herbal tea, and herbal tea = Wang Laoji. Later, Dali Group's "Heqizheng" also advertised heavily, hiring Chen Daoming for promotion, but it still could not beat Wang Laoji.
**When you have a time window, do not advertise for the sake of advertising; instead, speak for the category, making your brand the category leader in consumers' minds, and you will gain maximum benefits. Even adding a slogan to your ads is much better than not adding one.** Also, do not think that if others have done it, you have no chance. The key is who says it first and says it loudly.
Although the fresh stewed bird's nest market is fiercely competitive, Xiaoxiandun has consistently held the No.1 position in Tmall's nourishing category sales, thanks to its slogan "For fresh stewed bird's nest, find Xiaoxiandun," occupying the mindshare of the fresh stewed bird's nest category.
Afu, is essential oil! It firmly occupies the essential oil category. **-04- About Learning**
Learn from other brands' tactics, but do not be obsessed with them.
In fact, many shared viewpoints are based on the comprehensive factors of a brand in a specific category, product, time, price range, etc. **Marketers should think and digest, not copy mechanically; it is unrealistic to use them directly.** This is why many people listen to courses they understand and read many books but still cannot learn, because without thinking, they cannot internalize it; they only see the surface.
Do not look at things superficially. Some brands seem aggressive because e-commerce platforms have given them support and empowerment.
Good students always say they scored 100 through their own efforts, not that the teacher gave them extra help.
Many brands do well in off-Tmall promotion, but what works for them may not work for you. **With limited investment and energy, it is important to choose the right platform based on product and audience.**
**Product pricing is very important!** Some products have pricing system problems, no repeat purchases, and learning various tricks is futile. For non-essential products, if a brand has not been formed, inappropriate pricing will only be seen as harvesting consumers. The key is that consumers now have many choices; if your product does not give them an irreplaceable perception, loss is inevitable.
There is a handmade soap brand in Taiwan called "A Yuan." Its Tmall flagship store closed last month. I read the comments; the product is good, but also expensive. Natural handmade soaps are increasingly available on Taobao and Tmall, and many handmade enthusiasts have created small and beautiful brands. At this time, a soap priced near 100 yuan easily leads to poor repeat purchases, and if new customer acquisition cannot keep up with user loss, the store has to close.
**-05- About Channels**
**A brand should have diverse sales channels.**
Many brands focus only on online, or even a single platform. It is already 2020; there are many channels for brand sales. You cannot just position yourself as an online brand; you should be an omni-channel brand. Some brands, you think their Tmall store is doing well, but actually they did not start on Tmall; they became popular through other channels, and Tmall is just one of them. Some brands, you see their Tmall store is mediocre and seems unable to solve basic survival, but offline channels are their main source. So, **do not position yourself only as an e-commerce brand, especially now that various channels are worth trying.** **-06- About Marketing**
As a merchant, what you should care about is the full lifecycle of goods/users, platform marketing activities, brand event marketing, PR communication, member operations, etc. There is a professional term for this: **omni-channel marketing.**
Everyone knows traffic is important; traffic represents users. But do users only exist on Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Kuaishou?
Is marketing only about advertising and ROI?
**The full lifecycle of consumers** includes the channels they are reached through and the impact on their decision-making journey. These are all marketing, and some infrastructure cannot be missed.
**For example:**
**Many people know that consumers check Xiaohongshu before buying, so Xiaohongshu is the infrastructure for influencing consumers. But is it only Xiaohongshu? Thinking through this question is key.**
The platforms consumers come into contact with in their lifecycle include Tmall, JD, Pinduoduo, etc. Do you know all the gameplay, rules, platform marketing tools, marketing activity IPs, content IPs, and support plans within these platforms? I have seen many bosses who know nothing except direct traffic, and they are not even good at that.
**-07- Summary**
**Do not use diligence in execution to compensate for laziness in thinking. If you do not want to do something, you will find various reasons to numb yourself: not understanding, no people, etc. Only by seeing farther and more comprehensively than others, and being down-to-earth, will you run better than others.**
Source: Marketing Old Wang (ID: wltx-2015)


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