With the rise of Taobao platform, a large number of new brands emerged, such as Handu Yishe, Three Squirrels, Linshi Furniture, Mofashi Jia, Inman, Liebo, etc. They are called: Taobao brands. With the rise of WeChat platform, another batch of new brands emerged, such as Luojisiwei, DaV Store, Heytea, Luckin Coffee, and Zhiguan. I call them: WeChat brands. Of course, there are also a large number of WeChat business brands. When I say WeChat brands, I do not mean brands that are sold entirely on WeChat, but rather those that achieve user fission and growth through official accounts, Moments, and WeChat groups. The emergence of new platforms is the soil and infrastructure for the birth of new brands; the success of the internet and mobile internet lies in creating new ways of connection and new ways of resource allocation. New platforms create business opportunities for the emergence of new brands. We know that brands are a product of the industrial era, an efficiency tool created to adapt to mass communication and commercial monetization. It condenses product information into a scalable, replicable connection symbol. The value of a brand lies in improving the efficiency of connection between people and products. In the mobile internet era, due to changes in connection methods, the connection between people and products, people and information, and people and people have all undergone tremendous changes. This means that the way new brands operate will also undergo earth-shaking changes. Even the word "brand" itself needs to be re-examined and reconsidered. Marshall McLuhan, an important media theorist and thinker of the 20th century, had a classic saying: The medium is the message. Media is merely a carrier of information connection. And changes in connection mean changes in information. The development of the internet has already shown us that people have become more equal and egalitarian online, information has become decentralized and flat on the network, users have mastered the discourse power and dominance of this era, and different people form communities based on different concepts and interests, with subcultures becoming increasingly rich and mainstream. The internet has built a completely new discourse system. This new way of connection and discourse system requires a commercial response. Brands need to build new ways of connecting with consumers and new modes of dialogue with consumers. In the mobile internet era, this new brand connection method and dialogue mode is IP. IP, intellectual property, is the most basic definition of IP. Don't forget that brand master David Aaker's definition of brand - brand represents the knowledge consumers have about products and enterprises, and brand is an important asset of the enterprise. Brand is a kind of intellectual property of the enterprise. It is the most important intangible property right besides property rights such as factories and equipment. Brand is a type of IP. Many people talk about IP, but as for what IP is and how to build IP, there are many opinions, and it is all foggy and confusing. In fact, returning to basics, for enterprises, there are two most essential and important matters: one is to create products, and the other is to polish content. IP comes from these two. IP is the productization of content and the contentization of products. IP is a type of content, but not all content is IP. For example, movies are a typical form of content. The cost of producing content is quite high, and while the returns are rich, the risks are also high. A movie with an investment of over 100 million yuan may have a box office of over 1 billion yuan, or it may be less than 20 million. Moreover, for film companies, the success of one movie is completely non-replicable. If one succeeds, the next may completely fail at the box office. Each movie is an independent event, and each movie has to start from scratch. To reduce risk and increase success rates, major film companies have entered the universe mode. Marvel Studios has the MCU universe, which produces a series of movies based on superhero characters from Marvel comics publications. These superhero movies are composed of common elements, settings, performances, and characters, forming a complete system through cross-over works. This establishes connections between different movies. If "Iron Man" is a box office hit, then "The Avengers" and "Captain America" are more likely to succeed because their plots are interrelated. "The Avengers" also features Iron Man and his performance. This transcends the shortcomings of a single movie, and superhero characters become carriers for attracting fans. Seeing Marvel's success, major film companies have followed suit. Warner Bros. and DC Comics have the DC Extended Universe, with Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash forming the Justice League. Legendary Entertainment has the MonsterVerse, composed of King Kong, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. Universal Pictures has the Dark Universe, which brings together famous monsters from film history such as Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Russell Crowe's Dr. Jekyll and his Prodigium organization become the key to connecting the entire Dark Universe. From this, we can see what IP is? It is content that comes with topics, fans, and traffic. IP combines and packages scattered content, making it an organic whole. IP treats content like a product, making it replicable, iterable, derivable, and continuously re-creatable, continuously accumulating fan assets and communication momentum, maintaining content heat, creating new topics and attention points, and turning content into high-quality traffic. Those who are familiar with event planning know that planning and executing an event can be exhausting. From the initial basic strategy, researching what kind of activities consumers like, and finalizing the core idea of the activity; to the mid-term activity planning, brainstorming the activity theme, determining the activity process, and designing a large number of activity materials; to the later stage of venue, personnel, prizes, budget... The time cycle of a marketing activity can be as short as two weeks or as long as two months, but consumers' attention is fleeting. Don't fantasize that consumers will pay attention to you from the beginning to the end of the activity. It's already quite impressive if they can pay attention to you for two days. So besides executing the activity, you have to vigorously promote the activity to attract consumers' attention until the activity ends. When the next activity starts, you have to start from scratch again. With the rise of the fitness trend in China, more and more brands are participating in sports marketing, sponsoring various marathon events. Suppose the brand you are responsible for sponsors a marathon this month. You have exhausted all your efforts to promote the event and attract users. Three months later, the brand you are responsible for sponsors another marathon, and you have to do it all over again because one-time marketing activities cannot accumulate and retain fans. Now imagine if Color Run were created by your brand? You could use Color Run as a platform to convey the spirit of sports, shape the brand's enterprising and energetic image, and not worry about fans and promotion at all. This is elevating simple event planning to building an event brand, thereby stacking event effects, continuously performing, and accumulating fan assets. Sponsoring a marathon is traditional brand marketing content, while Color Run is an IP. Victoria's Secret has no advertising, but the annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show captures global attention. In 2017, the show had over 12 million viewers on Tencent Video live streaming. The famous fashion magazine VOGUE commented that the Victoria's Secret show is the most dazzling, pleasing to the eye, and pleasing to the ear performance in the world, and also the most successful brand marketing activity in the world. This is building an event brand, this is IP. Line cannot be used in China, but even without the main app, Line Friends became hugely popular, capturing the hearts of a large number of young people with just four cute characters. As of mid-2017, Line had 18 official licensed offline stores in mainland China. In 2016, Line earned 6.5 billion yen globally from derivative products alone. So, which brand doesn't have a mascot? It's very common. A mascot is just a very conventional brand communication content. But only when you continuously create, perform, shape, and iterate around this content, giving it stories and emotions, does it become an IP. Kumamon is the same. Marketing is actually helping brands create communication content. Whether it's a copy, a print ad, a video, an activity, or a mascot design, it's all content. But only when content is designed and iterated like a product does it have sustained vitality. This is the first key point of building IP: productization of content. Content should be designed like a product, and products should be interpreted like content. Products are just objects mass-produced on assembly lines. Product contentization truly gives products life and soul. Products are the basis of user shopping, and product contentization is the creation of an entry point for user shopping. Since the mid-20th century, marketing experts around the world have been shouting about the arrival of the era of homogenization. The differences between products are getting smaller and smaller, and creating differentiation has become the basic competitive strategy for enterprises. In fact, with increasingly fierce competition and deepening business exchanges, product convergence is an inevitable trend. Good innovations will be imitated by everyone, and bad designs and functions will be collectively eliminated. Products in the same category will become better and better, but the differences between different manufacturers will become smaller and smaller. Don't you see that in the era of smartphones, in terms of appearance design and main functions alone, how much difference is there between different phone manufacturers? If an enterprise only treats products as physical tools that carry functions, then the products created will have no personality or differentiation. Only by treating products as content can new commercial imagination be created. Today's product design needs to add storytelling, expressiveness, personification, values, ritual, topicality, internet celebrity power, design aesthetics, and cross-border interpretation. In one sentence, products that don't make you want to take photos and post on your Moments after buying are not good products. The great popularity of Jiang Xiaobai is to treat the product as a carrier of content, and the product is the content that connects users. In recent years, more and more brands have been writing on bottles. Coca-Cola's nickname bottles, Red Star Erguotou's World Cup, McCafé's dialogue cups, and Wei Chuan Daily C's reason bottles. After the reason bottle tasted success, Wei Chuan started making Hi bottles. The Hi bottles with lines from "Love O2O" increased Wei Chuan Daily C's sales by 90% year-on-year. Then, before the Spring Festival, Wei Chuan played with spelling bottles, opening them up for user participation and generating UGC content. Of course, if you let users play, they will mess it up, thus creating another wave of massive topics. In 2005, Ito Shingo took over his father's poorly performing Sanhe Tofu Food Factory and focused on making tofu. How is traditional tofu sold? We immediately think of the vegetable market, where housewives pick and choose, three pieces of tofu for 100 yen. Of course, tofu is white and soft, which also fits the feminine stereotype. But Ito Shingo? He created a "Men's Tofu Shop" (男前豆腐店), meaning "manly tofu shop." He turned soft tofu into a symbol of masculinity, developing product power in three aspects: raw materials, craftsmanship, and taste, around "male charm." Within a few years, it quickly became popular, turning a piece of tofu into a 5 billion yen business. This is treating the product as content to interpret, giving the product personified traits. Today, check-in culture is very popular, and more and more internet-famous stores are emerging. A coffee shop or restaurant is a product, but if you only see it as a functional place to eat and drink, then it's just an ordinary store, no different from what you see on thousands of streets. If you treat the restaurant as content for consumers to read and experience, then you don't need to advertise to create sustained personified traffic. At this point, your store becomes an IP. AJ, Supreme, adidas Originals, Heytea, and Naixue Tea are all like this. In today's era, for enterprises building brands, IP creates three extremely important values:
A unique identification language
A personified character setting
A content platform that continuously shines and generates heat Content, content. Product, product. These are the most fundamental and essential things for enterprises to build. Traditional marketing develops products and outputs content, but relies on traffic to promote products and content. Its business logic is to buy traffic from media to obtain users. Today's marketing, however, integrates products and content, bringing its own traffic and fans. Its business logic is to achieve user fission through topics and word-of-mouth, buying users from users. Productization of content, contentization of products. Content + Product, C+P. A true brand is to become the CP of users through C+P, achieving rapid pairing with consumers. So since 2016, I have named the team I lead in the company CP Team, hoping to focus on helping clients develop products and content, being the CP of clients and the CP of consumers. From building enterprise IP to becoming user CP, this is the brand operation methodology in the mobile internet era. Source: Kong Shou (ID: firesteal13) -END-