Click↑****“FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting” for more marketing and distributor internal management content. For FMCG companies today, not only is the integration of e-commerce and traditional channels an urgent matter, but re-understanding changes in the market and marketing methods is also necessary. Among these, changes in the market environment, advertising forms, and dialogue methods are the main contradictions that FMCG companies need to address. Facing a market environment completely different from the past First, consumers are constantly changing. They no longer watch TV or read newspapers; the successful brand marketing model of the past can be summarized in one sentence: "Drive a Santana into CCTV and drive out an Audi." But the era when TV advertising alone could make money is over. Second, consumers can no longer be segmented by time and place; previously, consumption had fixed locations and times, but now consumers can shop anytime, anywhere on various terminals. Second, shelf advantage is being deconstructed. In the FMCG market, good distribution used to be an absolute advantage; for a brand without channel strength, consumers had no chance to see you. Now a small brand doesn't need to painstakingly "fight for shelf space" step by step; they can use online marketing to gain consumer acceptance. This is not good news for traditional brands because the shelf advantage carefully built by traditional FMCG giants is being dismantled. Third, traditional PR methods are failing. In the past, a product appearing on TV ads or home shopping was considered reliable. Now the consumer's purchasing power is increasingly weakened; consumers can scrutinize your product through price comparison, word-of-mouth, and reviews, access comprehensive information online, and ask others for opinions on various platforms. The core driver influencing consumer purchases has shifted from advertising to consumer self-authority. Brands also need to be more careful in maintaining their image because if you hurt one consumer in the past, you could compensate them individually, but now any consumer dissatisfaction can create a "butterfly effect" online, leading to a bigger storm. This means traditional PR is now failing. We see that today's consumer base and market are undergoing drastic changes, but most people in this industry are still living in a dream, thinking the advantages of the past 20 years can continue. This is dangerous. Saying traditional marketing is dead may be radical, but in some ways it's not without reason. One-way internet advertising is equivalent to traditional advertising Building a brand is essentially a process of spreading word-of-mouth, and truly effective word-of-mouth is rare. Before the internet and mobile internet, brand building relied on face-to-face word-of-mouth, celebrity endorsements, or outstanding product strength. Examples include "Xinghuacun" and "Moutai" for the former, and "Laoganma" for the latter, which never advertised. Why did Xinghuacun take 1,000 years to become a national brand? Because even though it was famous due to Du Mu's poem, it needed the continuous printing of the "Complete Tang Poems" to spread, and later generations gradually verified the product. But in the internet age, dissemination should be much easier. If you still rely solely on strong product strength for word-of-mouth, or create brand stories and culture to become famous, it's naive. Even comparing large-scale traditional advertising to digital marketing is like a "broadsword" against a "nuclear weapon"—you can't fight that battle. But from my understanding, most traditional brands' internet advertising budget is generally no more than 5% of total marketing expenses. The best companies reach 15%, and digital marketing is not taken seriously. Their main marketing force is still TV ads. In reality, this landscape is being overturned. When consumers face explosive information, they gradually develop a habit of automatically blocking "useless information." The reading habits of the post-80s and post-90s are hard to understand; for example, bullet comments (danmaku) in videos make traditional readers dizzy. But these young people's brains process multi-linearly; they can quickly read multiple lines of information they need. So many one-way advertisements are almost ineffective for them; they automatically block what they don't want to see. Consumers no longer passively accept information; they prefer interaction. So simply placing ads on the internet is essentially repackaging traditional offline ads; this is not true change or the future. Consumers want lively brands that engage in dialogue with them. For example, consider COFCO's e-commerce practice: by placing e-commerce ads outside Taobao to drive traffic to Taobao, one yuan invested only yields two jiao in sales; in-site ads have a return ratio of about 1:1.5; keyword ads can reach up to 1:3. How to do effective word-of-mouth marketing? Word-of-mouth is important, but you don't know how it happens. Analyzing word-of-mouth from advertising inertia: the most traditional model is investing one billion yuan, spending ten yuan on each of 100 million people to make them aware of your brand; a more advanced model is membership marketing, investing ten million yuan on 100,000 people, spending 100 yuan each, with the effect that each of the 100,000 generates 1,000 yuan in consumption; the essence of social marketing is investing the same ten million yuan on 100,000 people, 100 yuan each, but not to sell 1,000 yuan more products, but to make each person identify with your brand and spread word-of-mouth to those around them. Example: Community relationships increase trust in dissemination. An experiment compared two groups: one directly read news on news sites, the other browsed news shared by friends on Facebook and Twitter. The ratio of opening news was about 1:10, with the latter being 10 times more likely to open. The same news might not be opened on a news site, but when a friend shares it in your circle, you open it. Why? Because there is a trust multiplier, which is the core foundation of social media marketing today: trust leads to brand trust and consumption. This at least proves that good social marketing can bring effective word-of-mouth. The core of future marketing is social influence, not completely abandoning advertising, but clarifying the proportion of investment. Each brand's core movement in the internet era comes from media interaction, not just ad placement. Find the opposite of your brand or establish brand temperament I suggest you have a basic hierarchical understanding of social marketing: The first level is using social media for one-way information dissemination, publishing brand information and corporate activities; the second level is forming a brand community; the third level is forming a fan base of a certain scale; the fourth level is the highest level—brand religion. The connection dimension of a brand community is like: ordinary community dissemination is like dandelion seeds; all connections occur only between the brand and individual consumers, with no interaction among consumers. Kevin Kelly wrote in a book: The measure of a community's quality is not how many people it has, but the average number of connections. Community stickiness should be reflected in more connections among consumers, beyond the single line between brand and individual consumer. It's like living in a neighborhood: knowing 20 people makes you less likely to move than knowing just one. To increase community stickiness, use brand emotion and color to engage fans, gradually forming broader brand recognition. The top brand religion is undoubtedly the result of deepening fan power, where people form a similar shared belief, love, and worship for a brand. People will choose brands that match their temperament and that they like; this is the future consumption trend. In this situation, a brand without an opposite is a failed brand because its face is blurred. The inherent characteristics of FMCG brands make it difficult to form any opposite, but it doesn't prevent them from forming their own brand characteristics. Note: Originally published in "Successful Marketing" magazine, original title "Not Only P&G Needs to Wake Up from Dreams" -------------------------------------- Like this article? 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