---
title: "Jiang Nanchun on Business Warfare: Understanding the Middle Class's 'Three Loves and Three Fears', Saturation Attack!"
description: "Jiang Nanchun's two competitive theories are 'absorb from the commanding heights' and 'concentrate firepower on one thing'. Jiang himself started reading Toynbee, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein at 16, which helped his later career in Chinese literature and advertising. He believes the most terrifying thing in China is that most people and companies fall into homogeneous competition, and every enterprise must answer what makes it different from others."
author: "贾林男"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2017-04-05"
language: "en"
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# Jiang Nanchun on Business Warfare: Understanding the Middle Class's 'Three Loves and Three Fears', Saturation Attack!

> Jiang Nanchun's two competitive theories are 'absorb from the commanding heights' and 'concentrate firepower on one thing'. Jiang himself started reading Toynbee, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein at 16, which helped his later career in Chinese literature and advertising. He believes the most terrifying thing in China is that most people and companies fall into homogeneous competition, and every enterprise must answer what makes it different from others.

"Absorb from the commanding heights" and "concentrate firepower on one thing" are Jiang Nanchun's two competitive theories. Jiang himself started reading Toynbee, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein at 16, though he didn't understand much at the time, it greatly helped his later path in Chinese literature and even his advertising media career.
In Jiang's view, the most terrifying thing in China is that most people and companies fall into homogeneous competition. In fact, every enterprise must answer the question: what is its unique difference from others? Whether it's a person or a company, including Focus Media with its hundred-billion market value, it can be different, provided you can master the most essential "routines". In this episode of "Key", Lin Nan tells you how a company and a person can break through and establish their own mental property rights.
**"What is the core of business warfare? Winning hearts. Capturing hearts and human nature is more important than capturing traffic."**
1
On Valentine's Day evening, Jiang Nanchun went alone to the cinema to watch "La La Land". He said the film wasn't particularly original, but as a reward for hard work, watching such a musical on Valentine's night felt warm. He said people's real need for watching movies today is "emotional repair".
The classic brand book "Cultural Strategy" analyzed Starbucks' case, saying that Schultz discovered that most consumers were more fascinated by Italian-style names like grande and barista than by the authentic Italian taste of espresso, so he decided to ensure the coffee was delicious while using a lot of marketing elements to reflect refined cultural taste ("pretentiousness" might be a real need).
Jiang believes that today's Chinese consumers not only pursue quality improvement but also psychological satisfaction; consumption becomes a process of emotional soothing.
According to The Economist's standard of personal annual income of 76,000 to 288,000 yuan, China's current 225 million middle class is growing at an annual rate of 13%, reaching 500 million in five to seven years. What do they love? What do they fear? What do they lack? Jiang gives specific insights:
Love beauty, love fun, love health;
Fear aging, fear death, fear loneliness;
Lack love, lack mood, lack stimulation.
"I think most people run not just for health, but to label themselves as healthy and fashionable; shopping is not just for a product, but an emotional release. Double 11 is like this: 'marketing' creates mental recognition to achieve 'sales' results; travel is not necessarily to see scenery, but a spiritual compensation—if your business understands the middle class's consumption psychology and embeds around one point, the opportunity is greater."
Jiang also has an important judgment on consumption upgrade: in the next 10 years, the concentration of local consumer brands will greatly increase, a batch of hundred-billion-level giant brands with world competitiveness are emerging, and most brands will be eliminated. Because:
First, people will become more "clustered". Judging from Focus Media's business, within 5 years, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen may enter 50-million-level cities (including floating population), and 10 cities like Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Wuhan are expected to enter 30-million-level cities (100-million-level cities may not increase).
Second, mobile internet has opened the information superhighway. In the past, people from county towns came to Shanghai to buy a Septwolves and were satisfied; today they all come to Tesla stores to experience.
How many brands does China need? If your brand cannot be nailed into consumers' minds like a nail, what does the "new retail era" have to do with you?
2
In Jiang's view, market competition has two barriers: one is intellectual property barriers, typical of Huawei. But for most enterprises, without strong IP protection, they must rely on another kind of property protection: mental property rights.
Jiang gives an example: for jelly, I only eat Strong. Can China make jelly better or cheaper than Strong? Yes. But not in consumers' minds, because Strong created jelly and seized the time window with saturation advertising, making jelly equal Strong in consumers' minds. This equation is sealed. On the real supermarket shelf, there are many jelly brands, but on the mental shelf, only Strong is listed, registered in consumers' minds, with mental legitimacy. Consumers are first-impression oriented; everyone remembers Yang Liwei as the first Chinese astronaut in space, but they really can't remember other astronauts.
"So, who is the fact is not important; what is important is who is the perception. I always say perception is more important than fact; perception is the real fact, and once formed, it's hard to change."
But Jiang's biggest anxiety today is that most brands haven't established their mental property rights. Don't blame homogeneous competition; blame your "nail" not being sharp enough. "I think most advertising content today is wrong." The reason is that too many new theories have emerged in the mobile internet era, dazzling people, and the business world has lost some essential thinking, lost thinking about hearts and human nature. Capturing hearts and human nature is more important than capturing traffic.
What is the method to occupy consumers' minds? Classic advertising theories still work: state differentiated positioning, establish brand conditioning. For example, "Fear of getting heaty? Drink Wong Lo Kat", "Tired and sleepy? Drink Red Bull".
In Jiang's view, advertising and marketing are not first a creative work, but a science about consumer minds; everything has routines. Classic marketing language consists of two parts: **unique positioning + trust certificate.**
1. Unique positioning: Xiangpiaopiao milk tea used to be positioned as a winter hot drink. What about after winter? Later changed to "Little hungry, little sleepy? Drink Xiangpiaopiao", creating a new conditioned reflex. Little hungry and sleepy are common states in a day, creating a new consumption scenario.
2. Trust certificate: Xiangpiaopiao's first sentence is "New Zealand milk source plus Indian black tea", using manufacturing methods to solve health concerns; the second sentence is "120 million person-times drink it a year", proving popularity, establishing trust and reducing transaction costs.
With these three sentences, Xiangpiaopiao fully established its mental property rights in consumers' minds.
"What is the core of business warfare?" Jiang believes: The Art of War says an important point for entrepreneurship: war has five elements: Dao, Heaven, Earth, General, and Law. Heaven is timing, the time window; Earth is channels; General is the team; Law is operations and management. What is Dao? The righteous cause gains support, the unjust loses it; Dao is hearts. In the end, what matters most is occupying users' hearts; those who win hearts win the world.
"Chairman Mao said, 'To move the world, first move the world's hearts.' He adopted differentiated positioning, believing the 400 million farmers were most important. What was the advertising slogan he wrote for them? 'Beat the landlords, divide the land.' It directly pointed to the reason to choose him over others. So I think when Chairman Mao wrote that 'slogan', the outcome of the war was already decided."
Jiang believes brand value is: brand positioning times awareness. Many ads are ineffective because they don't state differentiation or the "reason to choose you over others". Precise positioning is like a sharp "nail", finding the gap in consumers' minds, plus a "hammer" like Focus Media that can centrally influence urban mainstream groups, to quickly ignite.
3
Jiang believes the media industry has two major trends: on one hand, mainstream groups basically don't watch TV; they go to the internet. On the other hand, people rarely pay attention to ads on the internet.
Internet daily viewing time share is only 35.8%, but after 5 years, internet daily viewing time exceeded the sum of all traditional media. It was this inflection point that caused China's TV advertising to decline for the first time in 2015. People in big cities and developed areas rarely watch TV now; real ratings are concentrated in Gansu, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, etc. Based on a TV population of 1 billion, according to CSM data, even the strongest 4% program on a satellite TV covered 40 million people, of which only about 10% (about 4 million) had monthly income above 5,000 yuan.
So mainstream groups basically don't watch TV; they are on the internet, spending 4-5 hours on Weibo, WeChat, and news apps. In this main time, consumers watch content, not ads; what they see and remember are hot social topics and major events. Between content and ads, users mainly choose content and topics, rarely noticing ads. This requires us to do content thoroughly on Weibo, WeChat, and news apps; to ignite the brand core, we need to do PR and topics, creating content that can be spread.
Online video covers mainstream groups. About 600-900 TV dramas are launched on major platforms each year. For video pre-roll ads, there are many entrances. If you don't bet on "Descendants of the Sun", "Old Nine Gates", or "Ode to Joy", nothing happens. Only by betting on blockbusters can it be effective. Moreover, mainstream users of popular dramas often buy memberships to skip ads.
Jiang believes future media development has two directions: mobilization and passivation.
Mobilization means consumers spend most time on mobile terminals. Jiang believes consumers mainly watch content, not ads, on mobile media, so the core of mobile marketing is content and topics, including product placement in films and TV dramas, and must be in the top dramas.
Many companies are keen on chasing hot topics and creating topics on social media. Jiang says: "Consumers face countless choices every day. You think you're important to consumers, but you're not. A Northwestern University professor studied Facebook for six years and concluded that those who interact most with others on social media tend to be brandless. Topics may be hot, but does it strengthen your positioning?"
Passivation, in Jiang's view, is still one of the most important advertising methods. Passive media captures users' passive, inevitable life spaces like work, life, and entertainment spaces, penetrating brands into urban mainstream groups' daily scenarios such as elevator media in apartment and office buildings, cinema pre-roll ads, airport ads, etc., achieving forced reach. In the era of media fragmentation, it increasingly becomes the preferred way to ignite brands and achieve centralized influence on mainstream groups.
"In the mobile internet era, no choice is the best choice," Jiang says. Focus Media's core was betting on two words: elevator. The past decade in China was a decade of urbanization, and elevators are urban infrastructure. Focus Media's core value is building media on urban infrastructure. Elevators mean four words: mainstream groups, necessary path, high frequency, low interference. These four elements are key to igniting brands.
Next question: How to amplify a company's brand value?
Jiang believes there are only two types of media advertising: cognitive ads and traffic ads. Traffic ads are like Viagra; the benefit is immediate effect, but the drawback is you can't stop taking it; if you miss a day, the climax becomes someone else's. Cognitive ads are like Liuwei Dihuang Wan; take two rounds a year, but brand vitality strengthens, and after kidney function improves, taking Viagra can enhance climax intensity and conversion rates multiple times.
Jiang believes as a brand, you must do both. Once you create a new category or feature, seize the time window and saturate attack. I asked him the secret of Focus Media's continuous industry leadership. His answer was simple: first, I created this industry; second, I seized the "stupid window period" that others looked down on and didn't understand, with saturation attack, quickly building barriers, equating Focus Media with elevator media and life-circle media in consumers' minds.
4
Finally, let's talk about the trap after establishing mental property rights.
Who remembers Red Bull's current slogan? Who can remember "Your energy exceeds your imagination"? "The classic ad 'Tired and sleepy? Drink Red Bull' was so classic; why abandon it? As a result, Dongpeng Te Yin became 'Tired and sleepy? Drink Dongpeng Te Yin', giving away 2 billion in market share with one sentence."
Jiang says once you establish mental property rights, stick to it for 50 years. Mental property rights are often destroyed by yourself. The logic is simple: if a newcomer doesn't come up with a new plan, how can they prove their value?
Jiang says: "So believe one thing: the sentence users most easily say about you is right; the sentence frontline salespeople most often use when introducing products is right; the sentence competitors feel most uncomfortable hearing is right. If you add one more, it's 'the boss's first instinct is often right'."
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