---
title: "Jiang Nanchun: 30 Years, 10 Billion Yuan, 99 Lessons"
description: "In 2022, marking my 30th year in brand marketing and the 20th since founding Focus Media, I've distilled insights from thousands of client interactions and my books into 99 reflections on brand building, media strategy, and market dynamics, sharing them for collective wisdom."
author: "江南春"
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published: "2022-03-18"
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# Jiang Nanchun: 30 Years, 10 Billion Yuan, 99 Lessons

> In 2022, marking my 30th year in brand marketing and the 20th since founding Focus Media, I've distilled insights from thousands of client interactions and my books into 99 reflections on brand building, media strategy, and market dynamics, sharing them for collective wisdom.

2022 marks my 30th year in the brand marketing industry and the 20th year since I founded Focus Media.
Friends who know me well are aware that I communicate with over a thousand clients each year, ranging from startups to mature companies and Fortune 500 enterprises. After meetings, I particularly enjoy jotting down notes on my phone.
On weekends, I often read books and take extensive notes. These fragments of thought gradually accumulated into several books: "Seizing Mindshare" (2019), "The Dividend of Hearts and Minds" (2020), and "Cracking Growth Anxiety" (2021). In essence, I view the ideas in these books as a record of the times and a co-creation with clients. During the 2022 Spring Festival, I paused to review my books and reading notes, summarized my experience from Focus Media's billion-yuan-level advertising investments, and wrote these 99 reflections to share with you.
**001. Different stages of a brand require different strategies:**
At the startup stage, you need to create a unique functional selling point, find and capture the original target audience through precise distribution and social seeding.
When you reach several hundred million in revenue, use brand positioning plus viral breakout to become the first choice in a new category, segment, or scenario.
When you reach several billion, continuously launch new products, create scenarios, stimulate potential demand, and generate incremental business.
When you exceed ten billion, continuously consolidate industry leadership, elevate brand momentum, export values, establish cultural identity, and become a leading brand.
**Many people fail because their methods are correct, but their stage is misaligned!**
**002.** Small and medium-sized enterprises should not over-pursue refined operations. **Tactical diligence cannot solve strategic problems.** After reaching annual revenue of 200-500 million, brand breakout becomes the core strategic priority.
Small brands that fail to break out face alarmingly high elimination rates. Over a three-year period, at least half of new brands will stagnate or collapse. Even in the new consumption track, capital chases the leading brands; the 80/20 rule always applies.
**The biggest reason for a new brand's stagnation is the failure to break out. Without breakout, there is no growth and no future.**
New brands easily fall into an "origin trap." Every new brand starts with a group of loyal fans who naturally fit the brand and show high loyalty, but this group quickly hits a ceiling.
**Many people fail because they splash around in a lake for too long without ever seeing the capacity of the ocean.**
**003.** At the beginning, promotions are effective, but later they become ineffective without promotions, and even with promotions, sales don't increase because competitors are all promoting.
Traffic-driven starts also work, but precise traffic is limited. To buy more, you inevitably get less precise traffic. Traffic is bid-based, so the more you buy, the more expensive it becomes. Using traffic bidding to achieve higher sales volumes easily erodes profits.
**What comes quickly often goes quickly; short-term pleasure does not bring long-term development.**
**004.** Five years ago, the advertising industry had a saying: "Any ad that cannot calculate ROI should not be invested in."
Now people think: "Ads that can calculate ROI are too difficult to invest in because your traffic algorithm is no match for the platform's; the platform has calculated your ROI thoroughly." Without a strong brand, you compete with rivals on promotions while striving to compete on content and traffic, ending up as a worker without profits!
Every impression, click, and conversion in internet advertising can be tracked. Because of this, many companies use ROI as the guide for internet advertising, a kind of "calculable security." However, ROI orientation makes companies prefer promotional and traffic forms that yield immediate results, gradually falling into the quagmire of volume-price destruction.
**005.** In fact, what does a company compete on? It's consumer brand cognition.
With cognition comes choice. With consumers' brand-specific purchases, you are less likely to fall into price wars, promotion wars, or traffic wars.
Without consumers' brand-specific purchases, without being the preferred or default option, you are at best earning factory profits, not enjoying the brand's excess profits.
**006.** Brand and channel should work together to form a "push-pull synergy"!
Brand pull: The brand's attractiveness to consumers, enabling them to actively choose a brand among many products.
Channel push: When consumers want to buy a product, whether it is easier to reach and obtain.
In 30 years of marketing, the 8 words I believe in most are: **Deep distribution and seizing mindshare!**
**007.** In the traditional media era, we seemed to live on Earth; then in the PC internet era, we moved to the solar system; now in the mobile internet era, we seem to live in the Milky Way.
In the Milky Way, even with 100 loudspeakers, you can't make yourself heard. If you want your advertising to be truly effective, you need to return to Earth and use centralized media to ignite the brand in the real world.
Mobile internet information explosion is like the Milky Way; even with more investment, it's easy to be drowned out. So your **brand must return to Earth and penetrate people's limited living spaces.**
**008.** Although I've been in advertising for 30 years, I believe advertising is actually an anti-human industry; no one wants to watch ads. Advertising is a disturbance, an interruption.
What we should truly think about is how to place ads in special scenarios where consumers will actively watch, so that ads gain effective attention and achieve value regression.
**009.** Effective attention is the starting point of all business activities. Its scope is not consumers "watching" but consumers actively "seeing."
The internet is highly developed, and people receive more and more information daily, but the information they truly see and remember is decreasing.
**010.** Brand advertising is not Viagra; building a brand is a process from quantitative to qualitative change.
Ads with correct positioning may initially only increase awareness and recognition. Only after crossing the inflection point will there be sustained sales growth.
**Compared with performance ads, brand ads often take effect more slowly but last longer.**
**011.** The value of a brand lies in building trust, reducing transaction costs, and creating premium.
During economic downturns, consumers become more cautious, spending money on brands that are more stable, certain, and trustworthy.
In economic downturns, leading brands should dare to act; it's a good time to widen the gap and expand share.
IPADATABANK found in a study on brand marketing effectiveness that:
When facing economic downturn, cutting brand marketing budgets may help protect short-term profits, but after recovery, brands become weaker and less profitable. Smart companies invest more in brand marketing, gain a stronger voice, and thus achieve long-term profitability.
**012.** Cases where advertising is ineffective usually have four reasons:
**First, brand positioning and ad content are wrong.** They don't state the reason to choose you over others. The core of media is reach; how to touch consumers is key to ad content.
**Second, media investment is insufficient, not penetrating.** If funds are limited, focus on core media, core regions, and penetrate the minds of core audiences.
**Third, social seeding is poor.** Consumers see the ad and think it's good, but when they search online, they find poor reviews and decisively abandon the choice.
**Fourth, traffic harvesting is poor.** After advertising, offline channel outlets are insufficient, shelf space is lacking, online omnichannel layout is limited, and traffic operation capabilities are insufficient to receive the traffic.
**013.** Mature brands already have high awareness, so marketing should be more scenario-driven. **Good ads create scenarios and induce potential demand; good scenario ads actively create purchase impulses. What does this mean? Significant cost reduction and proactive business growth.**
For example, when everyone has tasted Juewei Duck Neck, repeatedly using the slogan "spicy, fresh, and delicious" to entice users has limited effect. So they use elevator posters in office buildings saying: "Without Juewei Duck Neck, why work overtime?" and in community elevators: "Without Juewei Duck Neck, why binge-watch dramas?"
In scenarios without rigid demand, they trigger potential demand.
**014.** Why do big brands find it easier to make money on e-commerce platforms?
First, big brands bring their own traffic; many users come from the brand's own traffic, so no traffic cost is incurred.
Second, big brands buying traffic ads have higher conversion rates. Because their awareness and recognition are high, the probability of clicking ads and completing transactions is higher than ordinary brands.
Third, strong brands bring greater premium value and higher gross margins. During e-commerce promotions, strong brands have much more room for promotions than ordinary brands.
**Only strong brands with high brand power, sufficient premium capability, and high ad conversion rates can profit on traffic platforms.**
**015.** Traffic ads solve the problem of "buy it, buy it, buy it cheaper"; brand ads solve "love it, love it, why love it."
**Purchases without love are one-time and not lasting; without brand ads to accumulate and solidify brand cognition and trust, sales are unsustainable.**
**016.** Brand and performance cannot be unified; brand ads are long-term, performance ads are short-term, hard to unify, but they can be coordinated.
**017.** Social media seeding has become standard, but the dividend of seeding has ended. Now everyone is planting grass on the prairie; with a pile of grass on one prairie, how can consumers discover you?
**When others are still planting grass, you should plant a big tree.** You must raise brand volume to a level where everyone is familiar with it, so people will notice the big tree and the grass under it.
**018.** Will consumers automatically come if you have an ultimate product? Does the internet era allow everyone to voice online, reducing word-of-mouth costs and eliminating information asymmetry?
Often the opposite is true! The richer the information, the more developed the communication channels, and when the internet allows everyone to voice, the communication efficiency between brands and consumers begins to decline.
Your brand is seeding, your competitors use bots to counter-seed, and the multitude of articles and opinions leaves users unable to make judgments.
**Consumers with limited energy are overwhelmed and increasingly rely on brands to make purchasing decisions. As an information simplifier, the brand's role will grow.**
**019.** The dividend of population growth has ended, but the dividend of hearts and minds is unfolding; the dividend of traffic is ending, but the dividend of brand is unfolding.
Brand is the long-term dividend; only continuous brand accumulation can enjoy the compound interest of time.
**020.** The driving force behind China's consumption growth is the consumption upgrade of 400 million middle-class consumers.
First, the middle class seeks self-compensation and self-reward after hard work.
Second, the middle class wants to become a better version of themselves, achieving personality transcendence—a spiritual need.
**The 400 million middle class are the vane of consumption trends; whoever captures their hearts captures the future.**
**021.** The rise of new consumption brands first benefited from the dividends of the new generation (post-90s and post-00s) and new demands, then from new channels and new traffic.
New generations and new demands will give birth to a new generation of brands. But when the dividends of new channels and new traffic fade, what should new consumption brands do?
A new generation of brands can only create a moat and enjoy compound interest effects by embedding differentiated brand value into consumer minds and solidifying value cognition.
**Seizing hearts and minds and seizing offline are the biggest opportunities for new consumption brands in the next stage.**
**022.** Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar China and Global President of BrandZ, said at the 2021 Kantar BrandZ Most Valuable Chinese Brands 100 launch:
For advertisers and brands, efficiently combining online and offline, content and scenarios, and spreading the brand through "Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Focus Media" will become the most effective paradigm for future communication.
The deep seeding of social media represented by Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin, and the broad ignition of daily life scenarios represented by Focus Media, their interaction and resonance will be the core battleground for strong brand recovery and growth in the post-pandemic era.
**The combination of online content marketing on Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin and offline scenario marketing on Focus Media is the best combination of this era.**
**023.** An excellent brand strategy must simultaneously satisfy three "points":
**It must reflect the product's advantage points, reflect the differentiation from competitors, and directly hit the pain points of consumer needs.**
A good brand must combine these three points; none can be missing!
**024.** An advertising slogan is essentially a concentration of competitive strategy, the reason to choose you over others.
A good slogan has a nine-character formula: **Customers recognize; sales use; competitors hate.** Don't make ads that are too sentimental or value-oriented; that's the privilege of the successful.
**025.** Beautiful brand image ads are the halo of leading brands; followers who blindly imitate may fall into misunderstandings. **Nike didn't succeed because of "Just Do It"; it succeeded and then could say "Just Do It"!**
Nike started with technologically advanced sports shoes (functional value), then became the equipment of top athletes (label value), and later, when the world recognized Nike, it began value output (perseverance, never-give-up spirit).
Just like those with a lot of money are often qualified to say: "I'm not interested in money."
**026.** There are usually three methods to find a good slogan:
1. Pressure the boss. Ask the boss relentlessly: If you only have 5 seconds with a customer, how would you simply state the differentiation between you and your main competitors?
2. Interview the sales champion. They became champions because they said something right that hit the user's mind.
3. Interview loyal customers. Loyal customers not only buy from you but also recommend you to others. Ask them how they recommend you.
**027.** Brand-performance synergy = upward leverage + downward leverage
Upward leverage is leveraging online traffic. For example, consumer brands can include the Tmall search box or JD search box in ad creatives to drive traffic to online platforms.
Downward can drive traffic to terminals and leverage merchants. For example, maternal and infant products have higher demand for offline interactive experiences; the ad creative can include a maternal and infant store within three kilometers of the ad location to drive foot traffic.
**028.** Brand advertising is the "air force," while traffic and ground promotion are the "army." The combination of "air force" and "army" yields the lowest cost of winning a "war."
Don't attempt to rely solely on air force paratroopers to occupy positions; the air force cannot replace the army. Trying to rely solely on brand ads for a surge in sales is unrealistic.
The "air force's" job is to blast open consumers' mental defenses so the "army" can capture positions faster and at lower cost.
**029.** In an era where everyone talks about digitalization, socialization, and private domains, and everyone seeks KOLs, KOCs, and streamers, Kantar's latest research shows that marketers' perceptions and choices are not what consumers think.
Marketers prefer certain social media and online advertising media, such as influencer content marketing, but consumers are often indifferent, with net preference rates around 10% or even lower.
**030.** Remember a formula: **Brand momentum = Brand differentiation × Mental sharpness × Reach intensity.**
Building a strongly differentiated brand cognition and telling brand stories that cut into consumer pain points and itch points never goes out of style.
People's needs cannot be fully satisfied by any single brand; you can always enter a niche segment, a niche scenario, or create a new function and become the first.
Not only must you have differentiated value, but you must also become the first choice in a specific segment, like having a sharp nail and using a powerful media hammer to strike it repeatedly into the user's mind.
**031.** The best tactic against a strong competitor is to go the opposite way, effectively hitting the inherent weakness in the opponent's strength, and lure the enemy to fight where you are strongest. You fight your way; I fight mine!
Representative cases: Feihe uses "More suitable for Chinese babies" against strong international brands. Pepsi uses "The choice of the younger generation" against Coca-Cola's "Century-old heritage, authentic cola."
**032.** Some companies have limited budgets but prefer a scattered approach, throwing a few punches everywhere.
Does investing in 10 TV programs with 0.4% ratings equal the effect of a top program with 4% ratings? No, it's basically zero, even if the reach is identical. Only a 4% top program can ignite the brand.
Limited budgets require concentrated ignition; otherwise, the volume is insufficient to form penetration. To win the business war for consumer minds, you must concentrate firepower to penetrate the consumer's blood-brain barrier; only with sufficient concentration and pressure can you succeed.
Victory does not necessarily belong to the side with the most troops. **Victory belongs to the side that can concentrate the largest force at the decisive point.** That's the key.
**033.** Many internet-famous brands easily fall into a misconception: they think the brand already has high awareness, and the lack of sales growth is due to hitting the ceiling.
In reality, the internet amplifies the feeling of discussion heat. A brand with hundreds of thousands of users, plus "marketing tactics," can create the feeling of many people seeding and discussing.
However, when you actually conduct random street interviews offline, few people know about it, let alone surveys in second- and third-tier cities. The people these brands have not influenced are precisely the huge incremental consumption opportunities.
**034.** A complete marketing chain must achieve "three in one":
First, brand ads reach users at high speed, aiming at brand building (Who are you? What's the difference? How to prove it?);
Second, social seeding for content marketing (What value do you have? What advantages over competitors? What do users say?);
Third, sales guidance to harvest, guiding users to quickly make purchases at physical and e-commerce terminals.
**035.** The first to enter the consumer's mind is called first; the first to do something is never called first.
Baijifu was the first to make cheese sticks, but Miaokelannao was the first to enter the consumer's mind, and it became the first.
Don't think that just because the product is good, you will win; only when consumers think you are good can you win.
**Innovation is not as good as the sense of innovation; innovation perceived by consumers is true innovation. This is subjective vs. objective thinking.**
**036.** New brands need to break out, but mature brands also need to break out, only they break into bigger circles, from solidified life scenarios to new life scenarios.
Mature brands have their own momentum and trust. If they better connect and stimulate potential demand, they have the opportunity to create even greater incremental space.
**037.** Investment is very similar to advertising. The most important thing in investment is compound interest thinking. The same applies to brands: do something that can be accumulated and replicated long-term to enjoy the compound interest of time.
Today you might bet on a drama or a variety show, but next year, can you be sure? Today you write a viral article; can you definitely create another viral article next year?
**Find the core audience, find the core media, and accumulate brand mindshare over the long term; the compound interest effect will grow.**
**038.** Now everyone talks about attribution analysis, attributing user purchases to the last click before purchase.
But this model obviously ignores a communication rule: the influence users received before the last click.
This is like a person who eats five buns and feels full, but you can't attribute the fullness to the last bun.
Overall, from brand ads to social seeding to traffic harvesting, this is a complete causal chain. The final result is the combined effect of a series of causes; you cannot discard the causes through attribution analysis.
**039.** JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) is a concept proposed by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his disruptive innovation theory: "When (scenario)... I want (motivation)... so that (satisfy emotion and life meaning)..."
The premise of this task model is a "scenario," and scenarios are strongly correlated with consumers.
In today's era, "things" themselves are extremely abundant, and the importance of functionality has gradually given way to solutions. The problems, emotions, and life meanings of "people" in each scenario need systematic solutions. **Triggering scenario-based needs is the biggest business increment.**
**040.** People come into contact with 2000 brands every day, but brands that don't appear in scenarios are irrelevant to you.
So Mr. Wu Xiaobo said at the year-end show that only brands that appear in scenarios and make you take a second look are brands related to you.
**041.** There has never been a shortcut in this world. From selling goods to selling brands requires long-term accumulation and ignition at key moments.
Remember to do five linkages:
* **Positioning linkage**: State in one sentence the reason to choose you over others.
* **Time linkage**: Do things that can be accumulated long-term and enjoy the compound interest of time.
* **Firepower linkage**: At key nodes, concentrate firepower to break through and launch saturation attacks.
* **Identity linkage**: Break out to become a public brand, from internet-famous to public, becoming a social consensus.
* **Distribution and traffic linkage**: Convert brand power into actual purchasing power at online and offline channel points.
**042.** Everyone likes to talk about cost-performance ratio. What is the real formula?
**Tangible value plus intangible value, divided by tangible cost plus intangible cost.**
In today's business competition, tangible value and tangible costs are similar. To truly improve cost-performance, you need to increase intangible value and reduce intangible costs.
What is the biggest intangible cost? **Trust cost is the biggest intangible cost; brand is the most effective way to reduce trust costs.**
Brands can also showcase consumers' taste, identity, emotional resonance, cultural identity, and other intangible values. So the importance of brand is to reduce intangible costs and enhance intangible value.
**043.** The most famous saying in advertising is: "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half."
In fact, half of the advertising budget is invested in your target consumers; the other half may be potential customers, not buyers or decision-makers, but they may be influencers and disseminators. Ultimately, these brand communications contribute to the construction of the entire social field energy.
**044.** From the enterprise perspective, everyone wants advertising to be precise, hitting the target audience that will make purchases.
From the marketing perspective, the market chain effect is generated by five groups: decision-makers, influencers, buyers, experiencers, and disseminators.
You need to influence not only buyers but also the decision-makers behind them, and finally the disseminators. Consumer needs, purchasing power, and cognition change over time; those who are not customers now may be in the future. So big brands should dare to expand their circle and form social consensus.
**045.** Traffic tactics require high conversion rates and high ROI. The more precise the audience label, the higher the conversion rate, but the more precise, the smaller the audience.
**When internet-born brands reach the boundary of their precise audience, precise traffic tactics become a short board constraining growth.** When brands try to gain increments from larger audience pools, ROI becomes very ugly.
This is usually the time to use brand for large-scale ignition.
**046.** From exposure to purchase, consumers go through about five psychological stages: **Attention, Interest, Desire, Memory, Action.**
**Brand ads mainly play a role in the first four stages, forming the basis of consumer cognition. Performance ads focus on the last stage, promoting "purchase action."**
Brand ads and performance ads work together to shorten the consumer decision chain.
**047.** Consumer goods should master two shelf theories:
One is the physical shelf: the more terminals the product enters, the better the shelf position, the greater the probability of selling.
The second is the shelf in the consumer's mind: whether you are on the shelf in the consumer's mind and how much space you occupy.
**The penetration rate of the physical shelf × the penetration rate of the mental shelf is your comprehensive sales capability.**
**048.** 1% penetration in 10 markets is not as good as 10% penetration in one market. **Because 10% of consumers in one market will ignite the remaining 90%.** So focus on a key segment market and cover consumers with high density.
When market penetration exceeds the critical point, the entire market will be automatically ignited, achieving exponential growth.
**049.** Some brand ads do not immediately bring a surge in sales, and marketers think the investment was wasted.
In essence, the role of brand ads is not only to bring short-term sales but to block the entry of homogeneous competitors.
When you have core differentiated value, saturation attacks of brand ads will allow you to seize user mindshare first, forming entry barriers and moats, preventing involution.
**Once you seize mindshare, subsequent followers' imitation and advertising will actually remind users of you. For every 100 yuan they invest, 50 yuan is invested for you. This is the siphon effect and black hole effect of first-mover brands.**
**050.** When a brand becomes the representative of a product category, most people directly use the brand name. Some brand names are even used as verbs, such as "Baidu it" or "Shunfeng it to you."
The brand has become synonymous with the category, possessing a clear exclusive word in the consumer's mind, so consumers naturally think of you first when making choices.
**A good brand becomes the standard, the common sense, the synonym for the category, and the choice consumers make without thinking.**
**051.** People are easily influenced by the "spell" of words. Many brands, through saturation placement of a slogan, guide customers' intuition and reinforce a psychological hint.
Once a brand's slogan or concept forms, its gravity continuously acts on customers' senses, influencing perception and forming a psychological set.
**Advertising is about establishing conditioned reflexes and cognitive sets.**
**052.** Why do some products remain just goods and never become brands? Because they haven't accumulated core brand assets.
**A brand represents a trust signal, especially well-known brands, which subconsciously signal strength, reliability, and influence herd behavior.**
**053.** How to build brand premium? The core is whether users are willing to pay a premium for the lifestyle and attitude expression attached to the product.
You need to help customers become who they want to be; every choice they make and every product they buy shapes their identity.
When customers buy you for cost-performance, they will forget you when another brand offers more extreme cost-performance. So don't compete on cost-performance; instead, accumulate and solidify your identity label, emotional resonance, or cultural identity to stimulate customers' spiritual desires.
**054.** The leap from startup brand to mature brand, from fragile to solidified, often involves three aspects:
* **Scale solidification** — occupy the most market space in limited time.
* **Capital solidification** — win the most capital support in limited time.
* **Mindshare solidification** — occupy consumer minds in limited time.
Scale solidification and brand solidification are iron laws. Only with scale solidification can hot money flow in, further igniting the brand and penetrating minds. The bilateral effect of brand ignition and scale solidification will attract the next round of hot money and brand upgrades.
**055.** Today's information channels share a common feature: they feed you what you like, targeted feeding.
However, the truth is often that an article that goes viral in one person's circle of friends never appears in another's.
Algorithms improve transaction precision, but the "precise" placement of online traffic ads easily creates an "information cocoon" effect, missing many potential consumers and related actors, experiencers, and disseminators who may influence purchase decisions. Ads become narrow ads.
When brands lack effective large-scale reach and cannot form high-density, high-concentration penetration, they cannot reach the ignition point to form social consensus.
Once the number of brands in an FMCG category increases, all increasing investment and competing for precise target audience traffic, traffic prices immediately rise, making sales costs unbearable!
**056.** Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman believes that repetition triggers cognitive ease and familiarity.
People find it hard to distinguish between familiarity and truth. Familiar things are more easily believed because they don't require the brain's "slow thinking system," leading to a state of cognitive ease and comfortable, simple judgments.
**Brands should build fast thinking and become consumers' subconscious intuitive choice.**
**057.** Daniel Kahneman published a new book "Noise" in 2021: "Where there is judgment, there is noise." In a world where noise is unavoidable, how can brands traverse the noise?
**The core is to focus on differentiated value, use highly visible centralized media to ignite the brand at high frequency, and traverse the noise with sufficient energy field and shockwaves.**
**058.** "Field" is time and space; "scene" is situation and emotion. In the time and space of waiting for and riding elevators, the unique scene creates the value of users actively watching ads. Users naturally need information to fill the blank in their brains during moments of idleness.
**I founded Focus Media because I discovered a scarce scenario that hundreds of millions of people pass through daily and where they will actively glance at ads.**
**059.** Effective scenario ads are "timing, location, and harmony," fully combining time, space, and user needs.
**Timing: Find gaps in user attention, let users stay and accept; Location: The place users pass most easily and frequently, ensuring full exposure; Harmony: Create ads from the user's standpoint and emotions.**
**060.** In this era of rapid imitation, a new product is imitated within three to six months, at most within a year.
Recognizing this, you must choose the right attack timing, find differentiated positioning, and seize consumer mindshare at the fastest speed.
**Igniting a brand in the time window must be "fast, accurate, and fierce": fast in seizing the opportunity, accurate in precise positioning, fierce in saturation attacks to seize cognition.** Otherwise, competitors will quickly follow and cause involution.
**061.** In war, there are few cases of the weak defeating the strong or the few defeating the many! Zeng Guofan's core strategy was "build strong camps, fight stupid battles," essentially finding a favorable position and focusing organizational resources to firmly occupy it, accumulating advantages.
In business competition, similarly, first occupy a relatively advantageous position, then concentrate forces to form an overwhelming advantage.
**062.** Price reduction and promotion are the simplest means among all marketing strategies, as is spending money on traffic. If a company's core growth strategy is only to use the simplest means, it has no core competitiveness in the long run.
Mr. Drucker said enterprises have two core competitiveness: **First, create differentiated products and services; second, become the first choice in customers' minds through brand marketing.**
**063.** Similarly, when a media sells on "cheapness," entrepreneurs and brand leaders should calm down. Cheap ads often come at the greatest cost.
Limited exposure cannot form the ignition effect of broad social consensus; low-frequency reach cannot break through the blood-brain barrier to form memory; poor media quality and chaotic ad environments lower brand image; and you cannot obtain strong endorsement effects, making C-end users distrustful, dealers unconfident, and teams demoralized.
Cheap is often expensive, and expensive is often cheap. **When companies miss the time window, the price paid is the most expensive.**
**064.** The media environment, the medium itself, and the content message jointly influence users' perception of the brand.
**"The medium is the message" means that what the brand conveys is as important as through which medium and where it is conveyed.**
What customers receive is not only the company's ad content but also the media environment in which the ad is placed. Advertising on mainstream media implies high quality and trustworthiness.
Users' perception of a brand is essentially a comprehensive perception, focusing not only on what the brand "says" but also on "where it says it" and "how it says it."
**065.** Five major consumer mind laws: **One, aversion to complexity; two, limited capacity; three, first-mover advantage; four, lack of security; five, full of curiosity.**
So brand positioning should be concise and to the point; brand positioning should be top-two; if not, create a new category to attract attention; brand communication should be preemptive; brand content should include trust signals to build trust.
**066.** Some companies are not profitable temporarily, but why are their valuations high?
The reason is simple: they have a more valuable resource in customers' minds, more valuable than traditional production factors like capital, land, and labor. We call it mindshare resources, i.e., a unique advantageous position in customers' minds.
**067.** Leading brands often have consensus in media choices. From the consumer's perspective, it's another picture: people subconsciously think that top brands appear on equally top media.
**For new consumption brands, appearing on top media is like buying a non-transferable ticket to the top brand club. The value of this ticket lies in its strong endorsement effect.**
Correspondingly, second- and third-tier brands often appear on second- and third-tier media, and consumers will mentally categorize them into the second- and third-tier camp. As advertising budgets flow away, these brands drift further from the advantageous cognition they want to establish.
**068.** One of the biggest mysteries of this century: What is the KPI for measuring brand communication?
Pragmatic bosses mostly focus KPIs on clear customer acquisition, which has become a common problem:
KPI replaces the real growth of the brand as the performance goal pursued by enterprises, the so-called "KPI short-sightedness," ignoring the brand value that truly needs to be created. Without brand value accumulation, there is no moat. When imitators start price wars, your profits and KPIs will quickly be beaten down!
Kantar BrandZ, through 360 TMROI (Total Marketing Revenue of Investment) studies, confirmed that in real market environments, 70% of sales occur in the medium and long term, contributed by brand equity; short-term direct conversion sales account for only 30%.
**Long-term effective brand building not only increases sales but also brings higher premiums.**
Is brand advertising really "slow"? Perhaps, in the current information overload, penetrating the user's "blood-brain barrier" through high-frequency repeated reach requires some continuity in investment, but this can leave an indelible mark in the user's mind and bring longer-lasting results.
Moreover, in this way, every cent you invest is not wasted because it settles in the user's mind. Continuous repetition forms high brand momentum and mindshare monopoly, forming "brand assets," and giving you that 70% sales return.
**069.** In recent years, new consumption brands have enjoyed the first wave of traffic dividends through online promotion and social seeding.
This "goods find people" business model relies on KOLs and traffic ads to attract consumers, leading to transactions only when traffic is invested. As competitors increase, traffic prices rise, and brands become trapped in traffic, unable to see the future but unable to stop.
**New consumption must shift from "goods find people" to "people find goods" — more customers should think of you when they have needs.**
Brand ignition brings sales growth while also bringing proactive searches and a steady stream of free traffic. At the same time, rising brand awareness significantly improves conversion rates, drastically reducing customer acquisition costs!
**070.** Many companies don't understand the "enterprise perspective" vs. "customer perspective." From the enterprise perspective, every product is the life of the company, and they want to tell customers all the product's advantages. But for customers, your advantages may be irrelevant. From the customer perspective, choosing you is often for a simple reason.
Mercedes-Benz is luxury and dignity, BMW is driving pleasure, Volvo is safety, Ferrari is speed.
You only need to leave one word or one sentence in the user's mind. **Brands should avoid greed; the more you want to say, the more likely you are to fail!**
**071.** Over the past two decades, brand ignition has usually followed three paths.
1. Integrate into and create major social events and topics (e.g., Li-Ning's New York Fashion Week ignited China Li-Ning).
2. Integrate into major social entertainment and sports events (e.g., top variety shows and sports sponsorships, such as Ambrosial's title sponsorship of Running Man, JDB's Chinese Good Voice).
3. Integrate into consumers' most daily life spaces like communities and office buildings (e.g., Miaokelannao, Genki Forest).
**072.** Brand marketing is like sending signals; if the signal is not strong, it is invalid.
The signal must be strong: choose high-momentum media with enough energy to be seen and heard in a fragmented, dusty world, traverse the consumer's blood-brain barrier, and enter the consumer's mind.
Coverage must be broad: don't just focus on precision strikes; cover all consumers broadly, such as decision-makers, buyers, users, and disseminators, to form broad social consensus and social field energy.
**073.** Products are easily imitated, but differentiated brand cognition, once in the mind, is not easily imitated.
You can imitate Coca-Cola's product, but you cannot imitate Coca-Cola's position in the consumer's mind. Often, companies that win in blind tests are easily beaten by strong brands when the brand is fully displayed. Brands fully influence people's perception and experience of products.
**074.** Marketing "involution" is everywhere, essentially low-level repetition and competition in local battles, ignoring the underlying thinking of the overall situation.
Most new consumption brands only stay in the mindset of picking up money (lower traffic costs) and earning money (improving ad output), so they are trapped in involution.
Only by upgrading to brand management thinking, establishing brand differentiation value, building consumer mindshare preferences, and establishing brand momentum and premium capability can brands achieve sustainable, high-quality growth and positive compound interest from the source.
**075.** Business war is three words: steady, accurate, fierce. First win is steady, hitting weakness is accurate, and concentrating force is fierce. **Either don't strike, or strike fiercely, forming an overwhelming advantage, going all out, defeating the enemy with one move, leaving no chance to fight back.**
The principle of saturation attacks in business war corresponds to the "threshold effect" in econometrics. Only when marketing force reaches a certain level in the market can it break through the consumer cognition threshold, cross the inflection point from quantitative to qualitative change, and achieve significant returns.
**076.** If water is not boiled to 100 degrees, boiling it to 95 degrees is a waste; the heat will soon dissipate. If boiled to 100 degrees, it will keep boiling with a small flame.
The same applies to user cognition of a brand. Stopping before reaching the inflection point from quantitative to qualitative change is the biggest waste.
**077.** In retail, there is an important concept called the "three-kilometer life circle," meaning 60% of consumer transactions occur within a three-kilometer living service range, including dining, entertainment, pet care, beauty, etc.
The three-kilometer life circle is crucial for offline sales. Brands can choose communities and office buildings within three kilometers of their stores or terminals for ad placement.
Covering the three-kilometer life circle shortens the conversion path from "seeing ads" to "in-store consumption."
**078.** Deconstructing the common genes of new consumption brand rise paths reveals similarities:
They captured growth-oriented customer groups, i.e., new middle class and Gen Z with considerable numbers, strong purchasing power, and advanced consumption concepts;
They found a "unique anchor," i.e., the brand's core differentiated positioning;
They used "concentrated ignition," through high-density saturation attacks with broad audience and mandatory ads, quickly occupying minds.
**079.** Building social consensus and social field energy is crucial. Only by seizing the trend can you gain big profits and long-term benefits.
"Momentum" is an amplifier of power. "Momentum and profit" are inseparable; where there is momentum, there is profit. So don't seek profit first; seek momentum.
If a brand only focuses on immediate interests, it can at most gain small and short-term profits.
**080.** Although communication is increasingly fragmented, brand building cannot be fragmented.
Precision marketing is an effective means to reach consumers and directly hit buyers, but often one-on-one precision marketing and social seeding cannot shape brand social identity and consumption atmosphere.
Goods finding people is precise distribution to improve transaction efficiency; people finding goods is brand building. When people think of a category and think of you, that's a brand. Building a brand requires centralized media to establish group identity among mainstream groups of buyers, decision-makers, influencers, and disseminators.
One-on-one internet precision ads are like proposing in the bedroom; only you and I know, but everyone doesn't know. Only large-scale ignition is like proposing in the square, witnessed by all, becoming social consensus. Brands must become social consensus to trigger herd effects.
**081.** Consumption trends are shifting from price-sensitive to value-sensitive.
The traffic era suits rigid needs and explicit, regular needs. E-commerce platforms, while satisfying needs, build users' price sensitivity;
Scenarios disrupt traditional traffic entrances, creating and stimulating user needs, satisfying pain points, itch points, and excitement points in specific scenarios, stimulating purchase impulses, and creating business increments and premiums.
**082.** Brand is the biggest Matthew effect in the business world. In the long run, leading brands often absorb most of the industry's profits, and brand concentration will increase.
Consumers subconsciously form a priority order in their minds when facing different brands' strengths and weaknesses. Driven by this priority, they give more attention and praise to more famous and stronger brands, making them even stronger.
**083.** It's absolutely right: only by truly understanding human nature formed over the past 6 million years can you predict what will happen in the next 6 months.
**When marketing aligns with human innate behavioral patterns, brands are most likely to succeed.**
Don't always chase marketing trends, traffic dividends, or tactic changes. Focus on the unchanging essence, unchanging human nature, and unchanging brain decision models. Grasping the unchanging makes you more determined.
**084.** If you buy a product only once a year, you are highly likely to choose the first brand in the industry. This is a "natural monopoly law."
Most consumers are "lazy" and generally do not carefully calculate or repeatedly compare before making decisions; they tend to follow the herd.
**085.** Brand ads are not immediately effective. At this moment, the internal team's combat effectiveness is very important. Whether the overall campaign operations are executed properly will be a key factor in determining external customer cognition and sales conversion effects.
As the charge horn of battle, advertising greatly influences the confidence of internal and related parties. The more people have the power of "belief," the more they can see because of belief, and the more firm and resolute the charge.
So strategic cooperation between brands and top media is of great significance. The confidence-boosting effect of such strategic cooperation has a huge impact on teams, dealers, and terminals.
**086.** For leading brands, over-defense is safer than under-defense.
Facing competitor attacks, industry leaders either dismiss them or wait and see, both dangerous. They should fully block and suppress in time.
**087.** The sign for a startup to judge whether it has a future is: Can it establish an advantageous position against competition? Can it establish a dominant position in that advantageous position?
**Only by capturing the commanding heights can an enterprise master pricing power.**
**088.** Summarize the four paths of brand growth:
**1. Product breakout:** Break through the original audience circle, use saturation attacks to achieve broad-population breakout ignition;
**2. Scenario development:** Use scenarios as triggers to stimulate consumer demand and open new incremental space;
**3. Omnichannel improvement:** Online data feedback supports e-commerce sales; offline ads cover the three-kilometer life circle of terminal outlets, achieving brand-performance synergy;
**4. Regional breakthrough:** Find high-potential markets, focus resources to achieve regional breakthroughs, such as sinking to third- and fourth-tier cities, or brands mainly in East China attacking South China, or brands centered on lower-tier cities attacking first- and second-tier cities.
**089.** As James Quinn said, no enterprise has enough resources to overwhelm opponents in all aspects. Therefore, competitors must not only consciously decide which territories to cede to competitors but also minimize resources required for secondary objectives.
Only then can competitors concentrate the most critical resources on the most critical points, using resources most effectively and efficiently.
Before achieving overall superiority in force and accumulating enough strength to win the overall battle, select key core markets to concentrate firepower and establish a defensible base.
**090.** Live streaming is essentially a channel. Strong brands bring value in any channel.
Without being a strong brand, it's hard to be selected by top streamers; without being a strong brand, it's hard to negotiate reasonable profits with mid-tier streamers; without being a strong brand, platforms are unlikely to give you good resources in major events; without being a strong brand, self-broadcasting is unlikely to get big traffic.
**Strong brands make traffic and live streaming more effective and reduce traffic costs.**
You must build a brand. Without a brand, traffic channel costs will rise and erode your profits.
**091.** The so-called "strike weakness" means, from the overall situation, selecting and using the opponent's key and fragile links as strike targets.
**From a market strategy perspective, break through in market gaps and at the points most sensitive to consumers;**
**From a competitive strategy perspective, break through when the opponent is weakest and at their most vulnerable links.**
The opponent's weakest point is often the opposite of their strongest advantage. Striking this weakness is attacking what they cannot defend.
**092.** Traditional management has the "barrel theory": the amount of water a barrel can hold depends on the shortest plank.
But Charlie Munger believes: "No enterprise or system that achieves great success uses the barrel theory. Winning systems often maximize a single element to an almost absurd extreme."
From a marketing and communication perspective: **The extreme absurdity from maximizing a single element most easily triggers strong user memory and liking, most easily builds awareness and mental connection.**
**093.** Why do most internet-famous brands fade quickly? The core reason is emphasizing trends over long-term trends.
New brands with development potential must align with major trends and be able to traverse consumer preference cycles, not just cater to current fads and fashions.
**Entrepreneurs should not stare at short-term trends but grasp long-term trends.**
**094.** The full brand path is from awareness to cognition to identity to purchase. For example, the purpose of brand ads on Focus Media is to let more people know you, become familiar with you, generate a sense of security, and recognize the brand's differentiated value and become interested. Then consumers will go online to check related reviews, which is identity. Finally, they will encounter you offline or buy on e-commerce channels.
Broad awareness relies on brand ad ignition; deep identity relies on social media content seeding, deeply explaining product advantages; faster purchase relies on online precision ads, offline sales guidance, live streaming, etc., to sell at the last moment.
To grow big, no element can be missing. **This is the complete marketing value chain. Without brand seeding and content seeding, expecting direct sales is unrealistic.**
**095.** Many people frown at long-termism, thinking the primary goal is to survive; how can you not make money?
True long-termism does not mean not making money now, but not chasing the last copper coin of the moment. Those who plan great things do not pursue small profits. Long-term thinking is not the opposite of short-term inaction but a business model based on compound interest.
**096.** When a founder spends 90% of their time on traffic and promotions with immediate visible effects, they will only become more anxious and busier.
Because you are not busy with the essence, not busy with things that can accumulate value. **Short-term promotions and traffic may help you complete next month's sales tasks, but they can never help you break out of price wars and promotion wars, never help you enter consumer minds and achieve due profits.**
Don't use the diligence of traffic investment to cover the lack of brand building.
A founder's true certainty comes from the choices made years ago, enjoying the compound interest of those choices today. So management is not managing results but managing causes and effects.
What is the dividend of long-termism? In romantic terms, when your growth comes from the layout laid two or three years ago, you can fully enjoy the growth that blooms and naturally unfolds.
Brand is the continuous traffic; the longer the time, the lower the cost, and the richer the compound interest of time.
**097.** How should founders build their persona? Become a trustworthy industry expert, clearly distill the essence of things, and output insights based on the industry.
**098.** In extraordinary times, dare to act and turn crises into opportunities.
I often communicate with many excellent entrepreneurs. The biggest takeaway is their consistent view: crises and winters are not scary because they also clean the market. Every crisis is a time when brand concentration rises.
In all competitive markets, ambitious companies always race ahead of peers, seizing market share, building brands, and capturing share ahead of time.
**099.** The essence of business should be determined by right and wrong, not by short-term gains and losses.
Right and wrong determine success and failure. Doing right things leads to success; doing wrong things leads to failure. Anxiety arises from short-term gains and losses: doing right things may not bring short-term gains, and doing wrong things may not bring short-term losses.
But only by judging decisions by right and wrong, not gains and losses, can you achieve ultimate success.
Image source: Visual China
Text source: Zhenghedao (ID: zhenghedao)
Author: Jiang Nanchun (Founder and Chairman of Focus Media)
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