Sorry! You Can't Do Business with Young People.

Companies today emphasize the importance of young people and regard brand rejuvenation as a core marketing topic. However, most companies' rejuvenation efforts are superficial, like Lord Ye's love of dragons. In their view, so-called rejuvenation is nothing more than using more popular memes and hot words in ad copy, hiring a young idol as spokesperson, cross-border with a 2D IP, and placing ads on Douyin and Bilibili... They think young people will fall in love with them this way. Don't be silly. Moreover, I have seen many companies that, when talking about the young people's market or post-90s marketing, start to appeal to individuality and coolness, picking out a few guitar players, esports players, rappers, and street dancers as typical consumers, and in their copy, they express how these people are unconventional, persist in their dreams, and are not understood by family and the world. Come on, this is just your imagined post-90s, not the real post-90s. What young people really want is to have their own hobbies and beloved work, their own life rhythm, and their own views on the world, not superficial coolness and rebellion. Moreover, post-90s, who are approaching 30, cannot be individualistic when facing the tests of 996 and high housing prices. Many brands only superficially show a posture of catering to young people, but are full of arrogance at heart. They always stereotype young people, thinking that young people should be a certain way, and in marketing, they tell young people what to do and how to think, which exactly violates the original intention of brand rejuvenation. Just like Bilibili's advertisement "Back Wave" aimed at young people, it was the post-70s who flooded the screen. On the other hand, the rejuvenation of enterprises always manifests as superficial rejuvenation, visual rejuvenation in advertising, but in product design, brand experience, and marketing promotion, it is still the old routine. Rejuvenation is incompatible with the brand essence, completely two separate skins. If this is called rejuvenation, then every bone in my body is saying: Sorry, you can't do business with young people! Wahaha launched Nutrition Express in 2005, and in just 8 years, sales exceeded 20 billion, becoming Wahaha's super single product. Many primary and secondary school students even consumed Nutrition Express as breakfast. However, after reaching a record 20 billion in 2013, Nutrition Express has been declining in recent years. In 2016, sales of Nutrition Express fell to 8.4 billion. The reasons behind the decline are nothing more than consumption upgrade and the rise of a new generation of young people. The unchanged Nutrition Express over the years has gone from being a high-end nutritional drink to being rustic and cheap. Facing the new wave of internet-famous beverage brands, Nutrition Express's product design is outdated, and consumers are aesthetically fatigued. In 2018, Nutrition Express began to rejuvenate: it also made efforts on the bottle, releasing a colorful version of packaging; cross-border launched a limited edition makeup palette; and opened pop-up stores in Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, creating a "Nutrition Express Color Refill Room." At the same time, Nutrition Express also launched an attitude video telling young people to respond to external doubts with a positive, brave, and self-attitude, changing the product appeal to "You are outstanding enough." Personalized product packaging, cross-border into areas of interest to young people, pop-up events, attitude copy, and other measures, including Nutrition Express's previous sponsorship of the online game "Fantasy Westward Journey," are all standard practices for brand rejuvenation. But returning to the brand itself, Nutrition Express's bottle shape has remained unchanged for hundreds of years, and the advertising still features the same four-line white-collar image for years. Brand communication has always focused on product functionality, repeating for years "Nutrition Express, Nutrition Express, Nutrition Express, pure juice, fragrant milk, 15 nutrients in one step, drink one bottle at breakfast, and be energetic all morning," lacking brand connotation, not establishing a personality image and lifestyle. "You are outstanding enough" is just an empty slogan. I find it hard to believe this is a brand that young people like. Especially the old-fashioned, obviously fake workplace, family, parent-child consumption scenes in Nutrition Express ads. What white-collar worker would hold a Nutrition Express and greet colleagues in the office? What mother would actively give her child Nutrition Express? And what couple would use Nutrition Express to show love and make a heart shape? I do think scene-based advertising is a very important practice, but the storylines that Nutrition Express integrates into scenes are indeed too stiff. Nutrition Express's brand rejuvenation path has a long way to go. For rejuvenation, writing social copy, cross-border play, and hiring young idols are easy, but fundamentally rejuvenating the brand and product and creating a new brand experience is a huge challenge for many companies, mainly based on four reasons: First, young people pursue authenticity, but brand marketing is mostly deliberate Today's young people know from the beginning that they are the target consumer group that major brands are competing for, and they have been exposed to media-bombarded commercial environments since childhood, so they are already accustomed to advertising. They can tell at a glance what is an ad and what is not. Many companies are clearly advertising, but they still pretend to be real consumers praising their products. This is why many ads make consumers feel fake, the plots are awkward, and they cannot touch the heart. In fact, in a commercial era, consumers naturally understand that advertising is normal and that companies have reasonable commercial appeals. So companies only need to openly admit that they are advertising and communicate with consumers in a sincere and interesting way, and consumers will accept it. If companies deliberately hide it, pretending to be consumers to emphasize "use my product and you can reach the peak of life," or are stiff and crude, still bragging like a magic pill "how good my product is," sorry, such ads will only cause young people to dislike them. So in "U Can U Bibi," Ma Dong, in a real and interesting way, read the sponsor's ad, which won the love and pursuit of young people. If corporate marketing is fake and serious, user feedback is the most ruthless. Second, young people pursue speed, but corporate processes are slow This is an era of rapid change. New topics emerge every day, and new hot spots are consumed every day. A social event will be forgotten in two or three days. In this situation, brand marketing must keep up with changes and continuously adjust and optimize. The era of one TVC for the whole year and one main visual for everything is gone. For example, during the 2018 World Cup, many brands invited Messi to endorse and shoot ads. As a result, the Argentine team was eliminated early, but the brand's Messi ads continued to air, and Messi was immediately parodied as "I am Messi, panicking like crazy." In fact, companies should have quickly adjusted their ad placements when Argentina was eliminated, or they should have thought about both outcomes when inviting Messi and prepared a plan in advance. The lag in corporate response turned a huge celebrity endorsement into an online parody. This also applies to companies chasing hot topics. When a hot topic emerges, the marketing department's executors or agencies work overtime to finish the plan, then report it to management for layer-by-layer approval and rounds of revisions. By the time the plan is finalized and officially released, the hot topic is almost over, and the opportunity is gone. Third, young people pursue the edge, but companies only want the mainstream If two post-90s stand in front of you, their only similarity is probably age, while their lifestyles, hobbies, and values are completely different. So it is meaningless to broadly call target consumers "post-90s" or "post-00s." Today's young people are being subdivided into countless small groups online and in real life. Everyone has their own social circle, unique life preferences and attitudes, and from this, countless subcultures are derived. Hanfu, Lolita, and JK uniforms are completely different; Star Wars fans, Marvel fans, Three-Body fans, and Harry Potter fans are completely different; steampunk, cyberpunk, Cthulhu, and SCP Foundation are also different. Today's young people have been differentiated, scattered in small niche and edge circles. But from a commercial perspective, companies are unwilling to choose niche content resources for marketing because such resources have limitations and cannot leverage the mass consumer group. Companies prefer to use mainstream resources and popular resources that the public likes for marketing, such as "The Big Band," where rock and punk become mainstream before companies are willing to sponsor. Naturally, companies will not invite an underground band to do marketing. This marketing logic is certainly not wrong, but when young people are differentiated, marketing based on mass popular resources lacks penetration and appeal to young people, making them feel the brand is ordinary and not cool at all. Fourth, young people pursue spontaneity, but companies only want control Today, most companies still continue the traditional centralized control approach in marketing. They treat consumers like parents treat children, accustomed to instilling information, accustomed to cramming ads, and accustomed to repeating brand information to make consumers remember and nail it into their brains. Companies are used to paternalistic style, but young people do not buy it. They prefer to play with brands in an equal and free way, follow their inner guidance and interests to participate in brand marketing activities, and create secondary content, which often leads to various parodies, bad taste, and nonsensical content. This is not what companies want to see and may affect the brand image. But for marketing to explode, it cannot do without consumer participation and re-creation. For example, the once-explosive "Fan Ke Ti" was ignited by a poster parodying Guo Degang. So companies must have an open and inclusive attitude, not be afraid of consumers playing around, and not think about deleting posts and closing comments at the slightest sign of trouble. Many companies, while shouting for consumer participation in marketing, when consumers actually participate, they worry that consumer behavior will deviate from the company's established marketing route and bring risks to the brand. So they are unwilling to open up participation nodes and set various restrictions on consumer participation, and consumers lose interest. In fact, if brand content is interesting and the social mechanism is mature, today's consumers are very willing to play with the brand. But this requires companies to have equal and sincere dialogue with consumers, not to put on a high and mighty posture that keeps people at a distance. The key point of today's brand communication is openness, not control. Going deeper, the challenges companies face in the process of brand rejuvenation have deeper and more fundamental reasons: First, companies do not truly stand on the consumer's side Many companies do not actually understand consumers. They appear to be B2C, but in reality, they are B2B. In the business process, companies do not have actual contact with consumers; it is distributors and retail terminals that interact with consumers. Traditional consumer databases are just piles of dusty A4 statistical forms with only surnames, genders, and phone numbers. Companies urgently need to obtain consumer data and achieve digitalization. Moreover, companies not only do not understand consumers but also do not truly care about them. They only focus on whether consumers buy their products, but do not care what consumers think, desire, or fear, do not know what kind of life consumers live, how they use products in daily life, and what products mean to them. This leads companies to start from the client's perspective when doing rejuvenation marketing, only focusing on how to establish a youthful image, whether to play social or create virtual idols, but not caring about how to create a youthful consumption experience and give consumers a fresh feeling and enjoyment. This undoubtedly makes rejuvenation a superficial image effort, as seen in the difficulties faced by Mannings and Watsons today. Second, limited by corporate culture and organizational structure A considerable number of companies have this personnel structure: the boss is post-60s, senior management is post-70s, middle management is post-80s, and grassroots are post-90s. For example, when an advertising agency proposes to the client, the communication during planning is with post-90s, and the plan suits post-90s tastes. But when the plan is reported to post-80s, it is rejected, and the plan is revised around post-80s preferences. Then it is reported to post-70s and rejected. After finally getting it all done, it is rejected again because it does not conform to the aesthetics and concepts of post-60s. We face a serious generational gap today. Different generations of consumers have huge differences in concepts, behaviors, and lifestyles, and lack mutual understanding. So when implementing brand rejuvenation, companies should lower their posture, listen to young people's feelings, and listen to the ideas of grassroots employees. However, many companies' internal culture and values do not support this. When a company's boss and executives are still post-50s, post-60s, and post-70s, and when a company's marketing decisions must cater to the aesthetics and concepts of middle-aged and elderly people, do you think this company can do any rejuvenation? Source: Kongshou (ID: firesteal13), Author: Kongshou If the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.