In the new consumption era, with improved supply chains and evolving marketing technologies, 'involution' seems to have evolved into an industry norm, and no brand can escape such a competitive environment. To a certain extent, involution is a homogeneous, low-level competition, focusing on tactical skirmishes and losing more essential and macro-level competitive thinking. Under involution, brands' marketing costs are getting higher and higher, and the cost advantages brought by scale cannot offset the risks of overcapacity, becoming a common problem in the new consumption industry. At the same time, brands also face concerns about brand independence. New consumption brands usually rise on internet platforms. In decentralized internet platforms, although brands have to some extent broken through the channel and media monopoly of traditional big brands, they also worry about over-reliance on a certain platform or a certain KOL. How should new brands cross the threshold of involution and move towards a new round of growth? In the competitive landscape of 'involution', new brands increasingly need to return to the basics of marketing, identify ineffective marketing, and focus on key marketing. Generally speaking, in the process of a brand growing from small to large, the most core need is to establish a marketing closed loop: Precise communication content: Is your content what consumers need? Sufficient media power: Does your media have the power to ignite the market? Credible product reviews: Can your product withstand word-of-mouth verification? If your marketing has increased brand awareness but has not generated considerable sales, or has not formed a certain sustained repurchase, then you should follow this closed loop and rethink whether you are stuck in marketing 'involution' at some stage. Precise communication content: Is your content what consumers need? In the internet environment, significant changes have occurred: In 1898, American advertising scholar E.S. Lewis proposed the consumer behavior model AIDMA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Memory, Action. In 2005, Dentsu Advertising Company proposed the AISAS model based on the internet communication environment: Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share. Although these funnel models are slightly different, they basically point to a basic rule: marketing needs to formulate strategies based on the two stages of consumer cognition and behavior. Many people think that the only purpose of marketing is to promote sales conversion. Therefore, many companies fall into a self-perspective, believing that 'poor sales' is due to 'insufficient communication'. In fact, if the brand's communication content is not positioned at the appropriate stage, no amount of communication can generate considerable sales. Because consumers need to go through the process of 'awareness - cognition - identification' before transitioning to purchase and repurchase. 'Awareness - cognition - identification' is the basic process and law of human contact with people or things, and it is also the necessary process for the formation of the relationship between consumers and brands: First, understand the brand name, trademark, and category; Second, remember the brand's functional utility and differentiated advantages; Finally, form an emotional and spiritual connection. Over the past two decades, Trout and Ries's positioning theory has had a large number of followers. The greatness of positioning theory lies in being the first to clarify that the ultimate battlefield of business is to compete for consumers' minds. Only content that hits consumers' minds can achieve sustained sales. Content that can hit consumers' minds often has the power to explore high-potential positioning and help consumers reduce mental barriers. For example, Feihe is more suitable for Chinese babies' constitutions, Qiaqia's little yellow bag masters key freshness preservation technology, and Genki Forest's 0 sugar, 0 fat, 0 calories. Generally speaking, the purpose of communication is not only to directly promote sales, but also to remove consumers' cognitive and psychological barriers to the brand. If you do not solve consumers' cognitive and psychological barriers to the brand, even free products will be considered expensive by consumers. Because consumers also have to bear the transportation cost, storage cost, learning cost, identity image, and safety risks of the product. This is in line with the famous saying of 'father of modern management' Peter Drucker: 'The purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous.' That is, marketing at the communication level should reduce the resistance of product sales in consumers' minds, making brand value like a promise, becoming the basis for consumption decisions. Consumers can quickly make brand judgments based on intuitive memory. Sufficient media power: Does your media have the power to ignite the market? With a sharp positioning slogan and communication content like a nail, you need a powerful communication tool like a hammer to drive the nail of core positioning into consumers' brains. Many ineffective marketing precisely ignores the basic principle of using a 'hammer'. The threshold effect in econometrics points out an important law of marketing investment: only when marketing power reaches a certain magnitude in the market can it produce qualitative changes and achieve significant returns. This is the principle of saturation attack in business warfare. But with the development of internet and IoT technology, consumption scenarios and marketing technologies have undergone earth-shaking changes. Consumers have entered the VUCA era - Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity - and brands face challenges like waves washing sand. How can brands achieve saturation attacks in such an environment and remain invincible? In fact, only by adhering to the most basic principles can we resist the era of great change: Brand advertising should counter fragmentation with centralization In the internet environment, brand discourse is increasingly fragmented, and consumer cognition is gradually disintegrated into vague impressions, making it difficult to establish long-term brand awareness. The primary method for brands to counter fragmentation is to regain centralized marketing media power and return to the living spaces closest to consumers. In the past, CCTV was the stronghold of brand building. Gradually, the top core programs of Hunan TV and Zhejiang TV became new stars, showing more dazzling brilliance. Today, Focus Media's elevator media, with its resource advantage of 300 million urban mainstream population, has become the focus of competition for new consumption brands. More and more brands are achieving explosive growth through centralized media power. Brand advertising should counter forgetting with repetition Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, pointed out in his book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' that humans are biological beings that need to remain alert in their living environment. Repetition triggers the comfort and familiarity of cognitive ease. If a message appears repeatedly without negative consequences, it becomes a safe signal. Over time, safe becomes good, and familiar becomes likable. This is what psychology calls the mere exposure effect. The familiarity brought by repetition can increase consumer trust. Hua Shan, founder of Hua & Hua Consulting, also made a wonderful comment: 'The essence of propaganda is repetition; the essence of the audience is forgetting. Master the principle of communication, and counter forgetting with repetition. Don't create those brilliant viral articles; something an audience won't look at a second time is just a one-night firework.' Brand advertising should counter uncertainty with certainty In 2017, a set of one-shot magical ads by Pechoin swept through WeChat Moments, creating a phenomenal viral hotspot. Although questioned for having buzz but no sales, it gained 30 million reads. Later, Pechoin continued to carefully plan Chinese-style marketing events, but no more viral hotspots emerged. Brand building cannot rely on luck; it must replace uncertain investment with certain means. As competition among new consumption brands intensifies, brand advertising is gradually heating up. Brand media with higher certainty are returning to the core battlefield of marketing. As CTR's report '2020 China Advertising Market Annual Review' released at the beginning of the year showed, advertising spending in 2020 decreased by 11.6% year-on-year. However, elevator TV and elevator posters saw significant increases (23.8% and 28.9%, respectively). With the disappearance of internet traffic dividends, multi-media layout online and offline is becoming increasingly important. Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar China and Global President of BrandZ, stated at last year's China TOP100 Brand Conference that the current 'Double Micro, One Douyin, One Focus' is the optimal paradigm for brand building. Credible product reviews: Can your product withstand word-of-mouth verification? Professor John Deighton of Harvard Business School proposed that the three constituent forces of the 20th-century business model were transportation, television networks, and shopping malls. In the 21st century, the three constituent forces have transformed into mobile search, social networks, and e-commerce. These forces are reshaping consumer decision-making and the marketing environment. In the past, consumer decisions mainly relied on television media, consumer feedback was often ignored, and brands found it difficult to leverage the role of word-of-mouth among consumers. Now the mechanism for consumers to evaluate brands has evolved. Taobao, JD.com, Xiaohongshu, WeChat, Douyin, experience stores, and the digitalization of new media and traditional channels have become new ways for consumers to voice their opinions. At the same time, KOLs and KOCs are gradually gaining strength, becoming experience officers for brand consumption trends. The consumer-centric era has arrived. A famous saying in the marketing world is: Brands belong to consumers; brand owners are just operating the brand on their behalf. Correspondingly, brand building has shifted from one-way enterprise to a two-way process between enterprise and consumers. Consumer-centric word-of-mouth marketing and social seeding have gradually become popular concepts, and trustworthy product reviews have become an important means of testing brands. Under the trend of 'Double Micro, One Douyin, One Focus', consumers not only need brand ads that touch their hearts, but also actively search to understand product information and verify the reliability of communication content. Product reviews are gradually becoming a key factor in determining whether consumers move from awareness to purchase. Social seeding is essentially creating an information environment for consumers. Content about product reviews on social media is equivalent to an extension of consumer cognition, allowing consumers to understand product information in more detail. Consumer and third-party reviews increase the credibility of brand advertising. Social seeding has achieved leapfrog development in the mobile internet era. From Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu to Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Kuaishou, it has formed industrial-grade communication methods and become an important 'partner' for brand advertising. In the traditional internet marketing context, the connection between brand advertising and social media marketing is often overlooked. If social media marketing is seen as planting grass, pursuing user coverage, then brand advertising is planting trees, pursuing the establishment of deep-rooted user cognition. When the tree of cognition firmly occupies the user's mind, seeding will yield more significant returns. On the battlefield of live-streaming e-commerce, the brands that achieve top sales are basically traditional big brands. These traditional big brands' past investments in brand advertising are now yielding greater returns in the era of booming social media. Marketing involution is essentially low-level repetition and competition in local battlefields, ignoring the underlying thinking of the overall situation. Brand building requires closed-loop thinking, completing the transition from 'awareness - cognition - identification', allowing more consumers to know you, become familiar with you, generate trust and liking, and ultimately form purchases. This is the complete marketing value chain. In the past, we could achieve market coverage through a single channel or medium, but facing the current new retail environment, brand layout needs to focus on a more macro dimension, establishing a marketing closed loop from three aspects: precise communication content, sufficient media power, and credible product reviews. Brand growth is a marathon. What matters is not the immediate effect, but the pursuit of long-term investment and returns under the correct strategy. As Hua & Hua's marketing philosophy states: Advertising itself has no stage goals; it is the investment and savings of brand assets. Are you 'watching' me?