The 2021 Central Economic Work Conference held in December 2021 pointed out that China's economic development is currently facing three pressures: demand contraction, supply shocks, and weakening expectations.
Reflected in the numbers, retail sales of consumer goods in November totaled 4,104.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.9%; after deducting price factors, the actual year-on-year growth was only 0.5%, close to zero growth, showing the weakening of actual consumer demand. Moreover, the two-year average growth rate of physical online shopping in November dropped sharply from 15.9% in October to 9.7%, the first time it fell to single-digit growth since data became available. E-commerce, which was previously seen as growing rapidly, is also starting to hit a ceiling. "Growth anxiety" will become a lingering shadow for entrepreneurs and executives in the coming years. "Stock competition" has replaced "land grabbing," and the market will inevitably move towards differentiation. Some companies cannot achieve growth even by selling below cost, while others can maintain healthy growth against the trend, even raising prices calmly in the face of rising upstream costs, while maintaining reasonable profit margins: Bosideng has maintained double-digit revenue growth for three consecutive years, exceeding 10 billion yuan, and in 2021 won the world's number one in both sales value and volume of down jackets. During the 2021 Double 11, the discount not only improved from 71% off in the same period last year to 84% off, but also achieved a year-on-year growth of over 50%, reaching 2.78 billion yuan, ranking first in China's apparel brand sales list. Feihe achieved revenue of 11.544 billion yuan in the first half of 2021, a year-on-year increase of 32.6%, with market share climbing to 19.2%, leading China's infant formula market. Genki Forest achieved sales of 2.7 billion yuan in 2020, a three-fold year-on-year increase. In 2021, overall sales continued to maintain ultra-high-speed growth, expected to exceed 7 billion yuan. China Resources Snow Breweries continued to promote its high-end strategy. In the first half of the year, sales of premium and above beer reached 1 million kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 50.9%, with corresponding market share reaching 22-25%, achieving better-than-expected growth. Biohyalux achieved 20-fold growth in four years since its founding, and in 2021 became Huaxi Bio's first tech-skincare brand with annual sales exceeding 1 billion yuan. Ulike defended its title as the champion in the beauty instrument category during the 2021 Double 11 online shopping festival, with sales more than double the combined sales of brands ranked 2-10 in the category, maintaining the number one online sales position for six consecutive years. Milkground cheese business sales have doubled every year since 2017, from 190 million to 460 million to 920 million yuan, reaching 2.07 billion yuan in 2020. In the first half of 2021, sales reached 1.522 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of over 90%, with market share reaching 30.9%, becoming the leader in China's cheese industry. These brand cases are all from the Focus Media Top 100 Cases recently released by Focus Media. Over a hundred brands have deeply cooperated with Focus Media in recent years and achieved sustained growth. Among them are both billion-level consumer giants and hundred-million-level emerging brands. Today, the market size of China's advertising industry has reached one trillion yuan, and Focus Media, with an annual revenue of less than 20 billion yuan, has produced over a hundred cases of sustained brand growth in just two to three years, demonstrating its media advantages in today's fragmented information era. Unlike traffic advertising and live-streaming e-commerce, which rely on discount promotions, or the uncertainty of PR explosions, these Focus Media cases have achieved stable communication effects and brand-driven growth that does not depend on discounts. As the pioneer and absolute leader of elevator media globally, Focus Media has covered over 200 cities and more than 2.5 million terminals, reaching 400 million urban residents daily. By using elevator media in office and residential buildings with high frequency and low distraction, brands can widely increase audience memory of brand information and build a deep cognitive moat. From the Focus Media Top 100 Cases, we can see four typical brand-driven growth logics: Logic 1: Product Breakout Many newly established brands first rely on leveraging the core audience, because the core audience is more likely to trigger conversions, and the precise reach of traffic advertising is also very effective. However, when the reach of the core audience approaches saturation, brand sales will hit a ceiling. Only by making more people outside the circle aware of the brand can further sales growth be possible. But using traffic advertising to break out of the circle makes ROI unsustainable, putting companies in a dilemma. Many brands even fall into a misunderstanding here, thinking that the brand already has high awareness, and the lack of sales growth is because it has hit the ceiling. In reality, the internet amplifies the feeling of discussion heat. A brand with hundreds of thousands of users, coupled with "marketing tactics," can create a sense of many people planting grass and discussing. However, when actually conducting random street interviews offline, not many people know about it, let alone surveys in second, third, and fourth-tier cities. The people these brands fail to reach are precisely the huge incremental consumption opportunities. To influence a person to become interested in a brand, understand it, and eventually make a purchase, it is necessary to continuously expose them to the brand and form memories. However, the ROI-oriented internet advertising mindset finds it difficult to accept the investment-production relationship brought by this long-term influence. More importantly, internet advertising formats are not conducive to repeated effective exposure to form memories. Consumers use their phones with a strong purpose of reading content. Internet ads interspersed within are more likely to be swiped away or skipped. Brands find it hard to ensure their content is received by consumers. If the content blindly tries to please consumers, the information the brand wants to convey may be obscured. So the first unique growth logic in the Focus Media Top 100 Cases is that after a brand validates its feasibility within the core audience circle, it uses Focus Media's explosive advertising to achieve saturated coverage of 400 million people, using proactive, high-frequency media advantages to help the brand break through circles and form cognitive memory. We can see a large number of new consumer brands achieving continuous doubling growth for many years through this path. Ulike hair removal devices, as an innovative category, initially used KOLs, streamers, and other methods to quickly open the market, achieving the number one sales position for five consecutive years in the blue ocean market. But when reaching the scale of 1 billion yuan, Ulike's growth hit a bottleneck: although the core audience had been fully reached, many consumers still did not know what Ulike was. At this point, the ROI of traffic advertising was declining, but without it, there was no traffic, so they had to continue investing to maintain scale. In 2021, Ulike chose to cooperate with Focus Media, using nuclear-bomb-style explosive advertising to break out of the circle and increase awareness. After several rounds of advertising, Ulike experienced a sales explosion. Not only did it win the double championship in hair removal device sales on Tmall and JD.com with 462 million yuan in sales during the 618 shopping festival that year, but it also ranked 6th on Tmall's beauty ranking list, becoming the only Chinese company in the top ten. During Double 11, it defended its title as the champion in the beauty instrument category online, with sales more than double the combined sales of brands ranked 2-10 in the category. Revenue in 2021 is expected to exceed 2.5 billion yuan. What Ulike CEO Pan Yuping values more is that the second largest search term in the hair removal device category became "Ulike hair removal," and other Ulike-related terms like "sapphire hair removal" and "Ulike ice-point hair removal" also saw continuous increases in search volume. Consumers not only saw Ulike but also began actively searching for Ulike. This is a shift from "goods finding people" to "people finding goods." Brand explosion brings sales growth while also bringing a steady stream of free traffic, greatly reducing the investment needed for traffic advertising and significantly improving advertising effectiveness. Genki Forest entered the market with the positioning of "sugar-free sparkling water," initially using precise internet distribution to attract a group of fan users, iterating products through communication and interaction with these fans. Sugar-free sparkling water is not a new concept; leading brands had already laid out plans, and emerging brands followed quickly. To defend the achievements from 0 to 1, it was necessary to quickly go from 1 to 100. To enter the broader offline market, it was necessary to have the support of large-scale brand breakout, breaking through the original internet fan base and truly becoming a mass brand. Wang Pu, Vice President of Genki Forest, once said publicly: "In May 2020, we decided for the first time to conduct a nationwide media campaign. The media standard was high frequency, and we chose Focus Media. From the subsequent data feedback, whether it was support for distribution or sales improvement, Focus Media played a very important role." Founder Tang Binsen also told the media: "In 2020, we mainly did one Focus Media (advertising) and one Bilibili (evening party). Advertising was to compete head-on with opponents. In doing business in China, if you don't make key efforts at key times, you will miss opportunities. These ads helped achieve large-scale channel distribution and the establishment of consumer mindsets." In the end, Genki Forest achieved over 300% growth in 2020, proving with facts the power of Focus Media's high-frequency reach of 4 million trendsetters to break out of circles. In 2021, Genki Forest continued to explode on Focus Media. Besides rapid business growth, more importantly, it secured a solid perception for itself, becoming the preferred brand for consumers to buy sugar-free sparkling water, allowing it to calmly deal with countless imitators. According to the "2021 China Sugar-Free Beverage Market Trend Insight Report" released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, among all sugar-free sparkling water brands, 82.1% of consumers tend to choose Genki Forest, which is four times the total of other brands. Logic 2: Expanding Scenarios Both new and mature brands sometimes face a dilemma: the product is good, awareness is decent, but promotion repeatedly fails. In desperation, the brand continues to increase publicity about how good the product is, but still cannot move consumers. Here, it is essential to think clearly: is it really because consumers don't know how good your product is that they don't choose you? Consumers first have a need, then choose a category, and then choose a brand. Some brands have already become the first choice in a category, but if they can better connect with and stimulate demand, there is an opportunity to create huge incremental space. For consumers, scenes in life are the best way to trigger demand, because scenes are states that consumers inevitably encounter in their lives, and appropriate scenes can imply opportunities for brands to leverage consumption needs, such as "May 20th festival," "late-night overtime," and "eating with kids." The second growth path in the Focus Media Top 100 Cases is to expand more scenarios to stimulate consumer demand. Focus Media's media resources are generally located in urban office buildings and communities. These two locations can better connect with consumers' work and life scenes. Combined with different demographics, times, and other dimensions, they can associate with more scenarios to stimulate new consumer demand for brands. 1. Awakening demand at specific times: Florasis took advantage of Valentine's Day and launched "Sending flowers is not as good as sending Florasis" in Focus Media elevators, creating a new business increment of men buying cosmetics. During 520 and Qixi, Florasis continued to push, launching a locked lipstick with the slogan "Love of a lifetime, forever united" and a "Heaven-made gift box" on Focus Media, using couple festivals to stimulate male users' demand for buying cosmetics as gifts. Xiaoguan Tea launched its longest-ever "One-Hour Thank You Letter" advertising video before the Mid-Autumn Festival. The ad used the line "This road is long, and you have many people to thank" to evoke consumers' gratitude towards important people during the Mid-Autumn Festival, touching consumers' hearts with ultimate sentiment and stimulating the demand to buy Xiaoguan Tea as a thank-you gift. This ad sparked heated discussion on Weibo with 550 million views, and Xiaoguan Tea products on Tmall were almost sold out. 2. Triggering demand at specific locations: During the pandemic, people paid special attention to hygiene, and many elevators even placed disposable toothpicks specifically for pressing buttons. Safeguard seized the opportunity to place ads in elevator lobbies: when people turned around, they would see Safeguard's elevator posters reminding them that touching buttons increases the risk of infection, and they should wash their hands frequently with Safeguard when they get home. This strategy quickly linked "scene - consumer pain point - product feature." Juewei Duck Neck launched a series of ads based on office building and community home scenarios, with slogans like "What's the point of working overtime without Juewei Duck Neck" and "What's the point of binge-watching without Juewei Duck Neck," repeatedly appearing in elevators in residential areas and office buildings, which are main daily life scenes. When consumers working late at night or returning home see these elevator ads repeatedly, it stimulates them to think of Juewei Duck Neck in specific scenarios, driving purchase demand. 3. Triggering demand for specific groups: Deepure Tea focused on young people in office buildings. In 2021, Deepure Tea partnered with Focus Media to heavily advertise "Removes grease and relieves greasiness, no effort needed" in office building elevators. When young people in office buildings, who are in a sub-health state due to irregular lifestyles and excessive diet, repeatedly see the ads in elevators, it can evoke their anxiety about their sub-health, thereby stimulating their demand to buy Deepure Tea to "remove grease and relieve greasiness." Xibei's ad at elevator entrances, "Have a baby at home? Eat at Xibei," targets children in families, becoming a typical example of triggering demand through people. When consumers are looking for a place to eat with their children, Xibei becomes one of the first choices that come to mind. Milkground cheese sticks target the scenario of children's nutrition, proposing "one after school, one for exercise, one for happy sharing." On the basis of becoming the leader in cheese sticks, it continues to push cheese sticks from low-frequency snacks to high-frequency, achieving three consecutive years of doubling revenue and becoming the leader in China's cheese industry. Logic 3: Omnichannel Enhancement Kantar's 360 TMROI (Total Marketing Revenue of Investment) research confirms that in real market environments, 70% of sales occur in the medium to long term, contributed by brand equity; while short-term direct conversion sales account for only 30%. The brand equity built by brand advertising is the core driver of medium to long-term growth. The importance of brand advertising is self-evident. However, there is a certain "lag period" between investing in brand advertising and achieving revenue growth, which makes it difficult for many companies to make up their minds. Or when they invest in brand advertising, they have a core demand: to achieve "brand and effect integration." Of course, "brand and effect integration" is a false proposition. The logic of brand advertising and performance advertising is completely different. However, behind this demand from companies is their hope to shorten the "lag period" for brand advertising to take effect as much as possible. In response to this demand, Focus Media proposed that while brand and effect cannot be "integrated," they can be "synergized," and has created multiple solutions in the Top 100 Cases - "Omnichannel Enhancement." This growth logic lies in connecting brand advertising with channel terminals. While brand advertising builds C-end awareness, offline and online channels can also resonate with consumers and channels through resource exchange, data integration, life circle linkage, and other means, greatly shortening the time from consumers seeing ads to purchasing conversion: 1. Channel resource exchange Focus Media's coverage of 400 million urban residents is a considerable traffic resource for many e-commerce platforms and offline channel providers. So we see many brand ads with Tmall, JD.com elements, or offline terminal elements like Walmart and Kidswant. By directing traffic to these platforms/terminals, brands can also exchange for platform/terminal resources. For example, we see many Focus Media milk powder ads with the logos and addresses of nearby terminal stores. When consumers go to these terminals, the brand's milk powder display is prominently placed in the store. By using brand advertising to drive traffic to channels, brands increase their bargaining power with channels, and under win-win cooperation, strengthen the brand-effect synergy of advertising. 2. Advertising data return Focus Media not only can accurately select buildings through data analysis of over 200 building group labels but also has achieved integration with Tmall Data Bank. Based on audience insights and re-analysis, brands can conduct more effective secondary operations within the e-commerce domain. Taking Darlie toothpaste as an example, in cities where advertising was placed, the consumer action index (search, browse, favorite, add to cart, order, etc.) increased by 64% compared to cities without advertising. In the advertised cities, consumers exposed to the ads had an action index more than double the city average. The omnichannel linked marketing chain enables offline brand advertising and online performance advertising to achieve a broader and more efficient closed loop. 3. Three-kilometer life circle There is an important concept in retail called the "three-kilometer life circle," which means that 60% of consumer transactions occur within a three-kilometer living service range. Eating, entertainment, pet care, beauty, etc., are common scenarios. Based on Focus Media's backend big data, brands can choose communities and office buildings within a three-kilometer radius of their stores or terminals for advertising. Covering the three-kilometer life circle shortens the conversion path from "seeing ads" to "visiting stores to consume." Taking Feihe organic milk powder's Focus Media elevator poster campaign as an example, Focus Media's FPS system, based on LBS and Focus Media's big data precise point selection system, selected high-end communities within a three-kilometer radius of Feihe's core maternal and infant terminals, with higher maternal and infant concentration and higher organic purchase rates, forming an efficient "traffic linkage" between target consumers, strategic products, and three-kilometer terminals. Logic 4: Regional Offensive When we surveyed entrepreneurs about their views on advertising with Focus Media, we found that many entrepreneurs have such doubts: "Advertising with Focus Media requires a large budget, which is a lot of pressure for my small/medium enterprise." "It seems that if it's not a nationwide campaign, Focus Media can hardly produce results." With their questions in mind, we paid special attention in the Focus Media Top 100 Cases to brands that did not use large budgets or nationwide campaigns, and indeed found many highlight cases of regional strategies. In fact, the nationwide saturated approach is the best way to ignite consumer awareness, but the nationwide saturated attack strategy may not be suitable for all brands. For example, growing brands may not have the financial strength and channel carrying capacity to support nationwide advertising. First, with limited funds, a "sprinkling flour" nationwide campaign is difficult to form awareness among consumers and cannot fully influence them; second, if a city's channel carrying capacity is weak, consumers cannot find the corresponding products after advertising, and the advertising investment is wasted. There are also regional brands, such as local restaurants, that aim to deeply cultivate the local market and do not need nationwide advertising. Even some brands whose core task is to focus on attacking a specific city do not need nationwide advertising. So the growth logic of regional offensive is born for brands that do not need or cannot do nationwide advertising. Focus Media currently covers over 200 cities and more than 2.5 million terminals. With such a large resource base, Focus Media has the strength to thoroughly penetrate any city. Therefore, brands can choose to focus resources on one or more cities to form a regional offensive. This approach has two advantages: 1) Use less capital to form regional popularity and awareness, maximizing resource utilization; 2) After creating a model city, the strategy can be replicated in more cities. Mengniu's Shine Fresh, as its high-end fresh milk brand, wanted to solidify its high-end fresh milk position, and leveraging the mainstream trendsetter group was key. As a first-tier city, Shanghai has huge consumption potential for high-end milk. Taking Shanghai would not only make Shine Fresh's granary and base but also a benchmark for brand momentum. However, Shanghai already has strong local brands occupying the market, making it difficult for Shine Fresh to attack Shanghai. After Tang Wei became the spokesperson, Shine Fresh and Focus Media co-created a unique Shanghai dialect ad, inviting representative Shanghainese to tell Shanghai consumers in Shanghai dialect: "Today's stylish Shanghainese all drink Shine Fresh." This innovative regional expression based on the regional offensive strategy is more attention-grabbing, repeatedly reaching Shanghai consumers, deeply implanting Shine Fresh = "high-end fresh milk" in consumer awareness. Since its launch, Shine Fresh sales have doubled for three consecutive years, continuously maintaining the number one position in the high-end fresh milk brand, further consolidating its position as the new benchmark for high-end fresh milk. In 2019, although Feihe topped China's milk powder brand ranking with "milk powder more suitable for Chinese babies," changing the long-term suppression of Chinese milk powder brands by foreign brands, in first-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, Feihe's market share and brand awareness were still lower than foreign brands. For Feihe to become the number one milk powder brand in China, it cannot just be the leader in second and third-tier cities; it must also become the leader in first-tier cities. But in these first-tier cities, consumers prefer foreign milk powder. Feihe can only break through the cognitive barriers of foreign brands with stronger firepower. In 2019 and 2020, Feihe used Focus Media as its core media to launch an attack on Beijing, with explosive advertising far exceeding competitors' firepower, combined with mature channel tactics, successfully becoming the number one in Beijing's milk powder market sales in 2020, conquering the first-tier city where foreign milk powder had stronger awareness. Finally, let's summarize the four growth logics that Focus Media excels at: ** 1. Product Breakout**** : Break through the core audience circle, use saturation attacks to achieve explosive breakout among the general public; ** 2. Expanding Scenarios**** : Use scenarios as triggers to stimulate consumer demand and open up new incremental space; ** 3. Omnichannel Enhancement**** : Use unique advertising methods such as resource exchange, data return, and life circle radius coverage to achieve brand-effect synergy for brand advertising; ** 4. Regional Offensive**** : When the budget is limited or there is a clear target region, focus resources through Focus Media to achieve regional saturation attacks. ** Today, companies inevitably face drastic changes in the environment and growth anxiety, but the more so, the more important it is to find the right methods. Brand communication is the focus of corporate growth, but it is also a difficulty. Many companies have not clearly thought about the relationships between brands and consumers, brands and media, and media and consumers, nor have they returned to fundamental thinking. Instead, they like to chase "trends" and "dividends," which amplifies potential business risks. The four growth logics pointed to by the Focus Media Top 100 Cases are one of the models for growth in the new era. This kind of relatively certain and healthy growth is precious. We also look forward to every brand finding its own path to crack the growth anxiety. Are you "watching" me?