After speaking with more than ten brand founders at the end of 2022, Focus Media founder Jiang Nanchun summarized ten marketing lessons for 2023.
The observations were presented as both trends and common traps. Although they reflected a specific period, many address structural choices that remain relevant in uncertain markets.
1. Brand Investment Matters Most When Others Retreat
Research cited in the article argued that brand equity contributes more to sales than short-term promotion and that long pauses in advertising can reduce brand activity and eventually sales.
During uncertainty, many companies preserve cash by cutting all marketing.
Category leaders may take the opposite approach. Consumers become more cautious and often prefer brands they trust. Competitive advertising noise also falls.
A company with a clear value proposition can use that period to gain a larger share of voice and, over time, a larger share of market.
The lesson is not to spend without discipline. It is to recognize that brand-building windows can appear precisely when competitors become silent.
2. Marketing Should Do Fewer Things Better
Companies face the disappearance of demographic dividends, expensive traffic, weaker physical-store visits, slower traditional e-commerce, and difficult economics in interest-based commerce.
The common response is to add more channels, tools, algorithms, and campaigns.
That activity creates anxiety when it does not accumulate into a durable advantage.
Marketing should return to two fundamentals: create a differentiated product or service and become the preferred choice in a defined segment.
No product can be everything to everyone. A brand needs a clear function, audience, or occasion in which it becomes the first choice.
3. Consumers Buy Solutions to Occasions
People do not need products in the abstract. They need help in specific situations.
Travel, culture, education, entertainment, and other experience-based consumption can create new occasions.
An effective brand connects relevant content with a clear moment of use. The message communicates the brand's value while the occasion gives the consumer a reason to act.
4. Move from Seeding Attention to Building a Durable Brand
Product seeding and influencer content can create rapid e-commerce sales, but the advantage may be easy to copy or reverse.
When every competitor produces fragmented claims, consumers struggle to decide what the brand actually represents.
A durable brand needs shared understanding among decision-makers, buyers, influencers, users, and communicators.
Distribution and advertising can turn a short-lived digital product into a recognized choice with stronger barriers.
5. Traffic Is Consumable; Brand Memory Is Reusable
Traffic must be purchased again for every campaign, and its price generally rises as competition increases.
Algorithms belong to the platform, not the brand.
A new company may grow quickly during a traffic-dividend window, but the window eventually closes.
Brand memory is different. When consumers already know what a brand means, recognition can generate direct demand, improve conversion, and reduce dependence on paid acquisition.
The company should use temporary traffic advantages to build a compounding brand asset.
6. Conversion without Brand Building Exhausts Demand
The article compared marketing to fishing in a pond.
Brand building adds fish to the pond; performance advertising catches them.
If the company only optimizes conversion, the available demand is gradually exhausted while more competitors fish in the same place. Cost per acquisition rises.
Brand and performance have different time horizons. The company must replenish future demand while converting present demand.
7. A Small Brand Must Eventually Choose Growth or Stagnation
A company can begin with precise marketing to a narrow audience.
After finding product-market fit, it needs broader awareness if it wants to become a public brand.
Large digital impression counts can be misleading when general consumers still have little awareness.
Moving from a niche to a mainstream brand requires broad reach and social recognition, not only repeated exposure within one small community.
8. Brand and Performance Advertising Should Coordinate
Performance advertising asks for an immediate purchase. Brand advertising creates preference and affection over a longer period.
The two mechanisms cannot be reduced to one metric, but they can reinforce each other.
For example, a brand can build awareness in physical locations and then use digital data to retarget relevant consumers online.
Availability matters as well. Brand demand produces little value when the product is difficult to find or buy.
9. Pushing Products Leads to Price Competition; Consumer Pull Creates Value
Product distribution and recommendation improve transaction efficiency, but competitors can use the same methods.
When brands only push products toward consumers, competition often collapses into price.
The stronger position is consumer pull: when a need appears, people already think of the brand.
That mental availability increases active search, improves conversion, and can lower acquisition cost.
The market then competes on perceived value rather than only price.
10. Bet on Enduring Human Behavior, Not Every Marketing Fashion
Brands can gain attention by connecting with major social events, entertainment, sports, and everyday physical environments.
Specific channels and tactics will change. Human attention, memory, trust, and decision-making change more slowly.
Companies should understand new media without confusing novelty with strategy.
Traffic dividends behave like simple interest: they deliver a temporary return. Brand equity behaves more like compound interest: recognition and trust can continue producing value.
The Common Thread
These ten lessons share one argument.
Marketing should not become a permanent auction for the next unit of traffic.
The company needs a differentiated product, a clear consumer occasion, broad and consistent memory structures, and coordination between long-term demand creation and short-term conversion.
In an uncertain market, focus and cumulative brand value offer a more durable path than chasing every platform change.