Source: BrandLaoBai (ID:BrandLaoBai)
Omnichannel growth is a path every brand must take. This article will analyze the omnichannel growth model for brands through 4 stages and 16 modules. The entire growth process also tests different capabilities of the enterprise, which I summarize as 4-In-Power. Let's discuss them one by one.
Stage 1: Brand Strategic Positioning - Insightful This primarily tests insight and decision-making capabilities. If the path is chosen correctly, there is no fear of distance.
Overview: After track selection, conduct user insight and demand analysis for brand strategic planning.
I. Track Selection This is a matter where choice outweighs effort.
First, observe the macro market. It is essential to combine dynamic and static perspectives: from a dynamic perspective, observe the gap between the domestic market and mature markets, the growth rate of the domestic market in recent years, and the key drivers of track development. From a static perspective, observe market size, and predict the future market size of the track by combining current market size and growth rate with key drivers. Because market size equals the track's ceiling, a higher ceiling brings a higher valuation. Why combine dynamic and static perspectives? Because you must not be carried away by short-term high growth and ignore market size. Always choose a macro market with significant development opportunities.
Second, gain insights into market segments. Three conditions must be considered: the size, potential, attractiveness, and structure of the segment, as well as your own goals and resources. Choose a segment that "fits your own scale and growth rate." For example, small enterprises may find it difficult to serve larger markets directly due to limited personnel and technology, or because competition is too fierce, ultimately choosing smaller segments. These markets may seem unattractive to large enterprises but hold profit potential for small ones. Additionally, consider structural factors affecting long-term attractiveness, such as whether competition is healthy and whether products are substitutable. Even if a segment meets the first two conditions, you must consider your own goals and resources. Choose a segment where you can create significant user value and have a competitive advantage.
Finally, survey competitors. The first step is to identify competitors. In a narrow sense, competitors are other enterprises offering similar products and services to the same users at similar prices. In a broad sense, competitors may include all enterprises that can provide the same services. The second step is to evaluate competitors, clarifying what goals each competitor pursues in the market, their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Learn as much as possible about competitors, such as their relative emphasis on current market share, technological leadership, service leadership, profitability, cash flow, and other goals. Even assess competitors' reactions, as each has its unique business philosophy, internal culture, and development direction. The final step is to formulate an overall competitive strategy based on the analysis. The strategies of market leaders, challengers, followers, and nichers will differ vastly.
II. User Insight Users in any market differ greatly in purchase desire, attitude, behavior, and resources. Factors influencing user behavior are complex, including cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors. Therefore, precise targeting of the intended users is essential.
User positioning can be done in two broad ways. Based on demographic factors such as geographic location, age, gender, education, income, occupation, family structure, and housing, users can be divided into different life stage segments. Based on lifestyle, i.e., activities (work, sports, socializing), interests (food, clothing, entertainment), and opinions (about self, society, products), users can be divided into different circle segments. In summary, precise targeting of the intended users is necessary to better find, understand, and attract them.
III. Demand Analysis First, let's discuss the process from "need" to "want" to "demand."
A "need" is a state of felt deprivation, including basic physiological needs for food, clothing, and safety; social needs for belonging and affection; and personal needs for knowledge and self-expression. These needs are not created by anyone; they are innate.
A "want" is a form of "need" shaped by culture and individual personality. Wants are determined by one's social background. When supported by purchasing power and resources, "wants" become "demands."
Therefore, as the foundation of consumption, demand is most importantly about two words: authenticity. Demand analysis must start from the most fundamental needs and trace back to the source.
Identify the pain points or unmet needs of the target users as the primary breakthrough for future development. Never fantasize about creating demands; demands that can be created are false demands, all bubbles.
Next, based on target user positioning and demand analysis results, predict future market trends. For example, users in first- and second-tier cities in China have basically completed the transition from "durable goods plus daily necessities" to "optional goods and branded products." Future consumption will continue to upgrade, with four major trends: Healthier (fresh, raw materials, wellness), better (appearance, functionality, fashion), more convenient (simple, portable, time-saving), and higher spiritual added value (individuality, environmental protection, social interaction). Only by predicting trends well can you be a friend of time, achieve breakthrough growth, and sustain development. Otherwise, you will only be an imitator and follower, ultimately abandoned by the market and users.
IV. Strategic Planning First, establish a clear positioning for the brand in the minds of target users. Define the brand's mission and vision for what the brand must become and do. Because the brand is a promise to deliver specific features, benefits, services, and experiences to target users, and this promise must be concise and sincere.
Brand positioning can be summarized with four key questions: Who does this brand serve? Why believe in this brand? What benefits does this brand offer? Who does this brand compete against?
Next, determine the brand's value proposition. A brand's value proposition is the set of benefits or values it promises to deliver to satisfy users' needs. The value proposition makes the brand clearly differentiated and clearly answers why users should buy your brand rather than a competitor's.
Finally, name the brand. A good brand name can greatly promote product success, so it must be carefully considered. A good brand name should have the following attributes: 1. It can indicate the product's quality and benefits. 2. It is easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember. 3. It is distinctive. 4. It facilitates brand extension. 5. It can be registered and must be strictly protected.
Stage 2: Brand Infrastructure Building - Inplantable This primarily tests the ability to implant products and content, which is the stepping stone to brand success.
Overview: After scenario identification of user needs, conduct product development, then start the brand through content seeding and traffic acquisition.
I. Scenario Identification The user's purchase decision process can be broadly divided into cognitive decisions, habitual decisions, and collective decisions, with the first two mainly targeting individual users. The cognitive decision process has five stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior.
The purchase process begins when the user recognizes a problem or need. Needs can be triggered by internal stimuli; when a basic need like hunger reaches a certain intensity, it becomes a drive. Needs can also be triggered by external stimuli, which is precisely what brands should focus on researching. Identify user problems, needs, and their causes, and how to guide users to pay attention to your brand's products. The key is that external stimuli must be introduced from appropriate scenarios to better stimulate demand; scenarios make users more engaged.
Additionally, many decisions people make are collaborative. Collective decisions typically involve two or more people who contribute to the outcome to varying degrees. In collective decisions, there are several roles: the initiator is the one who proposes the purchase need, the influencer is the one who can affect the final purchase, the decider is the one who controls the decision outcome, the buyer is the one who actually makes the purchase, and the user is the one who actually consumes the product or service. Starting from scenarios is also the easiest way to involve all decision participants.
Therefore, identifying the user's real product usage scenarios is very important, because scenarios are both the premise for product development and the core of product marketing. It can be said that products without scenarios have no soul.
So what exactly is a scenario? Simply put, it is a narrative describing the cause and effect of an event, focusing on typical events and typical people, and showing the participants' environment and inner activities. A good scenario makes people feel vivid and immersive.
II. Product Development In the product development process, brands cannot rely on luck. Instead, they must formulate a strong product development plan and establish a systematic, user-oriented product development process. It can be divided into 8 stages:
Stage 1: Idea generation - systematically search for new product design ideas. Main sources include internal resources (all personnel from executives to sales), external resources (distributors, suppliers, even competitors), and open crowdsourcing resources (users, independent researchers, even the general public). If a brand truly focuses on product innovation, it cannot rely solely on a single source for ideas. It will establish a broad innovation network from employees to users to various external innovators, brainstorming from all possible sources.
Stage 2: Idea screening - retain as many good ideas as possible. Basically, verify from three aspects: Is it a real need? Will it have an advantage? Is it worth doing?
Stage 3: Concept development and testing - attractive product ideas must be developed into effective product concepts, then test these new product concepts.
Then come marketing strategy development, business analysis, product development, test marketing, and commercialization.
New product development is not just completing these steps. Brands must adhere to a user-centered product development philosophy from start to finish, emphasizing finding new ways to solve user problems while creating better user experiences.
At the same time, the characteristics of new products affect their acceptance.
- Relative advantage: the degree to which the new product is superior to existing products on the market. 2. Compatibility: the degree to which the new product matches potential users' values and experiences. 3. Complexity: the difficulty of understanding and using the new product. 4. Trialability: the degree to which the new product can be tried at low cost. 5. Communicability: the degree to which the benefits of the new product can be observed or described to others after use.
If effective product development is the seed of success, effective pricing is an important harvesting tool; the two are interdependent and inseparable. Price has long been an important factor in purchase decisions. And price plays a key role in creating user value and building user relationships.
Product prices have upper and lower limits. Users' perception of product value determines the upper limit, and product cost determines the lower limit. Brands need to set prices between these two extremes while considering other internal and external factors, including competitors' strategies and prices, the brand's own marketing strategy and mix, and market and demand characteristics.
The best pricing method is value-based pricing. First, evaluate users' needs and value perceptions, then set a target price based on users' perceived value. Then, use this target value and price to determine target costs in reverse, guiding product design and development. Therefore, product development and pricing are interdependent and inseparable.
It is important to note that users do not give the same product a second chance, so the product must maintain a good image from the start.
In the final stage, whether users are satisfied and their post-purchase behavior should also be a key focus for brands. What determines user satisfaction? The answer depends on the relationship between user expectations and product perception. If the product falls short of expectations, users are disappointed; if it meets expectations, users are satisfied; if it exceeds expectations, users are delighted and may even actively spread the word.
III. Content Seeding When users are interested in a product, they may search for more information. Users obtain information from several sources: personal sources (family, friends, colleagues), commercial sources (advertising, salespeople, websites, packaging, and displays), public sources (mass media, review organizations, online searches), and experiential sources (handling, examining, and using the product).
Generally, most product information users receive comes from commercial sources, but the most effective information channel is actually personal sources. Commercial sources generally serve to inform, but personal sources serve to judge or evaluate products. Especially when it comes from actual buyers or users similar to oneself, users are more likely to trust the brand.
Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), as the most well-known content seeding platform in China, operates on this logic. Through content, users feel as if they heard about a product's evaluation and judgment from a friend (personal source), thereby building trust in the brand. This is also why Xiaohongshu recently banned 29 fake marketing brands; without authenticity, how can there be trust?
In a purchase decision, most of the user's effort is spent in the stage of choosing among available alternative brands.
We call the set of alternative brands the user knows the awareness set, and the set of alternative brands the user actually considers the consideration set (because due to price, negative experiences, etc., users do not seriously consider all brands in the awareness set). Data shows that the awareness set typically contains surprisingly few brands, so if a brand is not in the target user's awareness set, it is very awkward. Moreover, if a user has considered and rejected a product, it is unlikely to re-enter the awareness set, which is also an opportunity for new brands to enter the user's awareness set.
The main purpose of content seeding is to build consumption scenarios, implant the product, and thereby add the brand to the user's awareness set.
IV. Traffic Acquisition Good wine also fears deep alleys; good products need to be seen by users. When product development is complete and content seeding begins, acquiring traffic becomes a top priority. Traffic can be broadly divided into two types: organic traffic and paid traffic.
Organic traffic refers to users who actively interact with the product daily. In offline scenarios, organic traffic is more about brand positioning; location is resource. If the product appears in stores around users and in accessible positions, there will be more opportunities to be chosen, i.e., the battle for limited shelf space. In online scenarios, organic traffic is partly related to track positioning, i.e., whether the position after users search track keywords is prominent, but it is also strongly related to content seeding, i.e., users directly search brand-related keywords after being seeded. This part of traffic is free and cannot be snatched, making it truly advantageous traffic.
Paid traffic refers to users acquired through paid advertising. In offline scenarios, it includes ground promotion, pop-up stores, exhibitions, etc. In online scenarios, it includes performance advertising, agency distribution, live streaming sales, platform activities, and other forms.
Since traffic is already paid for, the most important thing is to ensure the precision of traffic. Whether online or offline, if the actually reached users do not match the target users, all paid traffic is like opening a floodgate; nothing is left.
Additionally, even for the same type of paid traffic, users' willingness to try new products is far lower than for products with memory. Therefore, good content seeding can not only educate users but also help brands reduce customer acquisition costs and improve conversion rates.
Furthermore, for multi-brand marketing activities initiated by platforms, while actively hugging the platform's thigh, brands must differentiate their communication through products and content; otherwise, they will only become a wedding dress for other strong brands.
Regarding traffic precision, let me add: why do new products need precise traffic? Because people's willingness to try new products varies greatly, and they can be roughly divided into five categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Innovators are adventurous and willing to try new concepts. Early adopters pay attention to whether others respect them; they are opinion leaders in certain fields, accept new ideas earlier, but are cautious. The early majority is more cautious; although they are not leaders, they accept new ideas earlier than the general public. The late majority is often skeptical and only accepts after most people have tried. Finally, laggards are constrained by tradition, often skeptical, and accept last. Therefore, an innovative enterprise should focus on innovators and early adopters.
Stage 3: Brand Asset Consolidation - Intelligent This primarily tests marketing and data capabilities, which is key to the continuous accumulation of brand assets.
Overview: Through marketing and channel penetration, build valuable relationships with more users, then deepen relationships through the construction of user systems and data systems.
I. Marketing Marketing has two purposes: attracting new users by providing superior value and retaining and developing users by creating satisfaction.
The marketing process can be divided into five steps: understanding the market and user needs, designing a user-driven marketing strategy, constructing an integrated marketing plan that delivers superior value, building profitable relationships and creating user delight, and capturing value from users to create profits and user equity.
In the first four steps, brands strive to understand users, create user value, and build strong user relationships. In the final step, brands are rewarded for creating superior user value. It is precisely by creating value for users that brands receive value in the form of sales, profits, and long-term user equity.
In marketing, besides being good at "marketing," brands also need to value "marketing management." The marketing management process requires four marketing management functions: analysis, planning, implementation, and control.
Brands must first analyze the market environment, formulate an overall marketing strategy plan, and then break it down to each department. Through implementation, brands turn plans into actions. Control is measuring and evaluating the results of marketing activities and taking corrective action when necessary. Finally, marketing analysis provides information and evaluation for all other marketing activities.
A typical brand marketing plan should include the following main contents: The first part is an executive summary, briefly stating the main goals and direction. The main body is a detailed SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the current marketing environment and potential opportunities and threats. Then state the brand's main goals and explain the specific marketing strategies to achieve them.
II. Channel Penetration Intuitively, sales revenue equals sales volume times price, where sales volume is the product of reach, conversion rate, and repurchase rate.
Continuing to break down, reach mainly depends on the breadth and depth of channels, i.e., how many users can buy the product anytime and anywhere; conversion rate mainly depends on the brand's product matrix and product strength itself, higher shelf presence, and marketing, design, and other factors that give users brand awareness and the impulse to try; repurchase rate mainly depends on the richness of the product matrix and the ability to innovate and iterate, to achieve sustained repurchase even when users face a large number of alternative products and services.
In summary, sales revenue is strongly correlated with channel strength, product strength, marketing strength, and innovation strength, but channel strength is the first priority because channel penetration represents the foundation of everything: reaching users.
New products naturally have weak sell-through, so channel push is particularly important. The most representative beverage track: convenience is an inevitable attribute of track growth, so the importance of channels is especially prominent. This often manifests as a higher proportion of circulation channels, more terminal outlets, and a greater focus on deploying retail equipment such as vending machines to further meet users' outdoor immediate consumption needs, and also giving channels thicker profits to enhance channel push and seize track shelf share. Beverage circulation channels account for over 90% of sales. Among them, giants have terminal outlets exceeding 4 million. Moreover, users' taste needs for beverages are relatively changeable, so brands need to continuously occupy more channel share through innovative products and a rich product matrix. This applies offline and online. Multi-channel penetration can reach more users.
III. User System Customer relationship management can be broadly understood as the entire process of building and maintaining valuable customer relationships by providing superior user value and satisfaction. It involves all aspects of acquiring, maintaining, and developing users.
Attracting and retaining users is a difficult task. Users often face a large number of alternative products and services. They will choose brands that offer the highest user perceived value. User perceived value refers to the difference between the total benefits and total costs of owning or using a product compared to other competitors.
Importantly, users often cannot accurately or objectively judge value; they act on perceived value. For example, for some users, value may mean buying a product of acceptable quality at a lower price, but for others, value may mean buying a high-quality product at a higher price.
Therefore, user satisfaction depends on the comparison between the user's perceived value of the product and the user's expectations. The ultimate goal of customer relationship management is to generate high user equity—the total lifetime value of the brand's current and potential users.
So it is essential to manage user equity carefully, treat users as assets, and build appropriate relationships with appropriate users.
Brands can classify users based on potential profitability and manage them accordingly. Highly profitable but not loyal users can be attracted with promotional means to fully capture their value. For loyal but low-profit users, you may be able to increase profitability by selling them more products, raising prices, or reducing services. Even if they cannot bring huge profits to the brand, they can expand sales scale.
The most important users to focus on are those who are highly profitable and long-term loyal. These are the key targets for brand private domain operations. Brands need to continuously delight these users, cultivate, retain, and increase them, and even turn them from brand friends into brand believers. In this way, they not only frequently purchase themselves but also share their good experiences with others.
IV. Data System Achieving omnichannel digitalization through a data system is an important infrastructure for brand omnichannel growth.
User digitalization: Users are the most important asset of a brand. Brands must always maintain insight into users. Using a CRM system, they can conduct comprehensive digital management and analysis of users, capture consumer needs and pain points, and adjust their products and services in the first place.
Product digitalization: Products are an important connection between the brand and users. Comprehensive digital management and analysis of products enable brands to continuously optimize and iterate key elements such as product appearance, functionality, and quality to enhance competitive advantage in the market.
Production digitalization: The backend production of products needs to be deeply bound with frontend demand. Brands need to digitally analyze various data to build a flexible supply chain. Especially as brand products continue to increase, it is necessary to better balance inventory depth of each product and achieve better fulfillment capabilities.
Marketing digitalization: Use digital means to mine users' interests, preferences, and consumption habits, then make targeted content through marketing means, enabling the brand to enter the consumer's demand awareness set. Marketing digitalization can also ensure the precision of advertising.
Scenario digitalization: Whether offline or online, through digital management of scenarios, brands can achieve omnichannel data collection and analysis. Regardless of the channel through which users interact with the brand, they can enter the internal database, and finally, through data, reversely influence the connection and interaction between external channels and consumers.
A multi-dimensional data system not only improves the operational efficiency of existing brands but can also guide the brand's future development direction by building AI models and other means.
Stage 4: Brand Culture Communication - Influential This primarily tests brand appeal and influence, which is key to making the brand bigger and stronger.
Through cross-circle communication and social diffusion, continuously expand the user base, then through mass popularity and social marketing, bring about cultural continuity and brand growth.
I. Cross-Circle Communication A brand's own users will always reach a stage bottleneck. Reaching different users and entering different circles through marketing activities such as cross-border co-branding is an important way for brand growth.
On the one hand, cross-circle expansion can expand user assets and attract new users; on the other hand, it can refresh old users' inherent perceptions of the brand, making the brand image and expression more three-dimensional.
For brands, cross-circle expansion not only expands new users and consumption scenarios but also brings new topics for discussion and ignites new word-of-mouth marketing. It can be simply divided into four stages.
1. Find the connection point, fit the brand culture The purpose of cross-border is to accumulate brand image value assets, so fitting the brand culture core is the first principle of brand cross-border marketing. Even if the intended partner's communication power and influence are strong, if the tone is too different from your own brand, it will have a negative impact on the brand.
2. Co-create new content, convey brand proposition Cross-border marketing is not simply putting the two parties' products together; cross-border content is the important medium that resonates with both parties. Therefore, it is essential to fully co-create new content that is different from existing cognition, and the content must convey the brand proposition.
3. Integrate communication resources, mobilize user emotions In an increasingly decentralized era, users face information bombardment. Cross-border content needs to better integrate communication resources, form multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, multi-way communication, fully leverage cross-border influence, and go wherever users are, whether public or private domain.
4. Interact with cross-circle groups, expand user scale Communication will attract the attention of target users. Next, design interactions with cross-circle groups to deepen relationships; otherwise, it is just a false carnival. Users who recognize the brand after interaction will become new growth sources.
II. Social Diffusion Social diffusion can help brands grow exponentially, provided that the brand and users reach a symbiotic relationship.
It is not just a communication tool; it should become a strategy and mindset, infiltrating the fission gene into the entire brand operation chain. All employees are "peacocks," all users are "ambassadors," allowing users to integrate into brand building, actively spread, everyone participates, and everyone benefits.
Co-create products: To make products meet user needs as much as possible, users can directly participate in product concept and design, maximizing absorption of user feedback, thereby promoting users to become co-creators of the product. At the same time, through this social production method, brand marketing is front-loaded, making product production part of interactive marketing.
Co-propagate content: Creative content is entering an era of a thousand faces for a thousand people. Facing huge and complex content needs, brands indeed cannot rely on themselves. Content produced in batches through service brands is efficient, but content cannot achieve qualitative change through quantitative change.
Let users produce and spread content together. Not only is it rich and colorful, but it can also break through the user's circle, and can also convert core users into promoters of brand marketing and defenders of brand reputation.
Financial writer Wu Xiaobo believes, "In the offline era, no matter how strong a person's social mobilization ability is, they can probably only find dozens of users; but on mobile internet platforms, as long as there is an opportunity to gather like-minded people, the crowd effect and scale effect can achieve an order of magnitude improvement."
Share benefits: Brands are rewarded for creating significant user value. It is precisely by creating value for users that brands receive value in the form of transactions, profits, and long-term user equity. If brands are willing to share part of the profits with users, they will get deeper and longer-term connections, such as membership benefits for new users and sharing commissions for old users. As there are no eternal friends, only eternal interests.
Co-build persona: Brands can shorten distance through interaction with users, enhance trust, and create differentiated social persona images. They can also help users build their own social persona images—cute, funny, aloof, trendy, etc. When brands and users share common persona labels, it is easier to spread within the user's circle.
III. Mass Popularity With the rapid growth of brands, mass popularity rises, and opportunities and risks coexist. Public relations plays an increasingly important role in brand content management. Public relations, or PR, consists of activities to build good relations with various publics of the brand.
Public relations handles some or all of the following tasks: Press relations: creating and placing valuable information in the news media to attract attention from opinion leaders and the public; product publicity: publicizing specific products with certain values and meanings; lobbying: building and maintaining good relations with the government to influence relevant legislation and supervision.
Brands can build good relations with users, investors, news media, and government associations through PR. Moreover, PR can have a strong impact on public perception at a much lower cost than advertising.
If you come up with an interesting story or event, it may be selected and reported by multiple media outlets. Moreover, PR can attract users well, making them part of the brand story and actively spreading it.
In today's digital age, the boundaries between PR and advertising are increasingly blurred. It should work alongside advertising in integrated marketing communication programs to jointly build brand-user relationships.
The core advantage of PR is the ability to tell stories and trigger mass popularity discussions, which perfectly matches social media.
In addition to news media, brand identification materials also help establish a brand image that is easy for the public to identify. Packaging with distinctive logos, flyers, clothing, various peripherals, etc., as long as they are attractive, easy to distinguish and remember, can become PR tools.
Finally, brands can also invest money and time in public welfare activities to improve the brand's social reputation.
IV. Cultural Continuity Responsible brands must consider whether their actions are sustainable in the long run. Brands must follow the principle of sustainable development, that is, meeting the current and future needs of users, the brand itself, and society through socially and environmentally responsible attitudes. Sustainable development is not only the right thing to do but also beneficial to the brand's long-term development.
It is mainly reflected in two major development directions: One is user-friendliness: strengthen user rights, ensure user privacy, guarantee product safety, control the ingredients and packaging of certain products, and reduce the degree of advertising interference. The other is environmental friendliness: prevent pollution, use new environmentally friendly technologies, such as "eco-design"—designing products that are easier to recycle, reuse, and recycle after use, or safely return to nature as part of the ecological cycle. This not only helps protect the environment but also enables brands to obtain higher profits.
The above is the entire omnichannel growth model for brands. I hope that friends who read carefully can master 4-In-Power and become the most In brand!
Are you "watching" me?