Click the image above for details Source: Liang Jiangjun (ID: liangjiangjunisme) "Traffic is a drug, traffic is drinking poison to quench thirst, traffic is just a heart pill, traffic is a painful lesson..." These are the descriptions of traffic from brand people. In the eyes of most brand people, traffic is a one-time consumable, while brand is a durable good. But strangely, whether it's a successful company or a mediocre one, everyone buys more consumables than durables. Rather than believing that "most people are fools," I prefer to believe that "what exists is reasonable." Traffic is prevalent, and naturally, there is a reason for its prevalence. I, a typical brand person, would like to act as a defender for "traffic" and share with you how I view "traffic." Today, the concept we will digest together is—traffic. -01- Traffic business is the profitable business Several entrepreneurs have told me the same viewpoint when discussing operations: We don't do traffic business; we provide greater value to users. Every time I hear this, my heart tightens. Because people who say this often lack practicality and haven't fully understood the value of traffic. I want to tell you: Profitable businesses are often traffic businesses, not value businesses. A few days ago, I watched "Thirteen Talks" where Xu Zhiyuan interviewed Wang Xiaochuan, the founder of Sogou. He recalled an event that had a huge impact on his values. In his early days at Sohu, he wanted to see which channels users came from. After statistics, he found that one-third of users came from a website called "Hao123." When he entered, he saw it was full of links, and the page was ugly. But upon further inquiry, many employees' hometown folks used this site, and at that time, its monthly revenue was 3 million yuan, while Sohu, as the first portal, was still not profitable! In Wang Xiaochuan's own words: "At that time, I felt my graduate studies were in vain." Hao123 is a typical traffic business, looked down upon by elite entrepreneurs, but it is indeed the most profitable business. There are many similar cases. For example, take news and information. NetEase News is considered a youth attitude map, while Toutiao was once considered a traffic poison. In its early days, Toutiao did not produce any news content, nor did it emphasize media news attitude; it was a typical traffic distribution business. But Toutiao's revenue is several times that of NetEase News, and its commercial value is vastly different. Why do I say traffic business is a good business model? Because all enterprise competition ultimately comes down to business efficiency. If a business can obtain maximum profit at the lowest cost, then purely from a business perspective, without any moral judgment, it is the best model. The biggest characteristic of traffic business is its simplicity; if you master traffic, you can achieve "minimum input, maximum output"; In contrast, value businesses are often very complex; you need to invest great effort to reap considerable benefits. For example, Liang Jiangjun provides brand consulting services, positioning brands, and developing macro strategies and tactics. Serving a brand requires a lot of time and effort, but the return may only be equivalent to a few soft articles on the Miao Meng public account. Would you choose to make money in a simple way or a complex way? Interestingly, many businesses that are actually traffic businesses are mistaken for value businesses. Let me ask you, was the original Logic Thinking (I mean before it became "Dedao") more inclined to do traffic or value? At that time, Logic Thinking sent you a 60-second voice message every day. You replied with a keyword to see an article by someone else. Note: someone else's article! That is to say, the original Logic Thinking seemed to be a knowledge service public account, but in fact, it did not create any content; it was just a knowledge distribution platform, another form of Toutiao! I say this not to criticize Logic Thinking, but to affirm its business model. As a knowledge service account, producing original content and creating new value every day is hard to sustain. Many knowledge gurus only produce one book in their lifetime. To leverage WeChat's dividend and become a leader, the best strategy for Logic Thinking was to curate good content, not produce it. I use this example to tell everyone to learn to view brand issues from a business perspective. Once you add a business perspective, you will have a different understanding of users, brands, and traffic. The fast-food restaurants near airports and train stations that are both bad and expensive are traffic businesses; Putian hospitals that do plastic surgery and treat STDs are also traffic businesses; accounts on Xigua Video that summarize a movie in five minutes are still traffic businesses. These businesses may not have value, but they are profitable. It feels like those who play traffic are all bad guys, but it is precisely because we good people don't understand traffic that we give bad guys an opportunity. Just now, we understood "traffic" from a macro business perspective. Next, let's see whether those who claim to do brand are actually doing traffic or brand. -02- 80% of brand people turn brand into traffic What is traffic? What is brand? Brand is stable traffic; traffic is instant brand. Traffic, in plain terms, is flowing users. These users come and go, don't stay long, and have no high expectations. Buying Baidu keywords, doing Toutiao's bidding feeds—these are all traffic. What about brand? If a company has a brand, it means users want to come back after visiting, and have more fantasies and expectations about the product. So, any way that communicates with the user's mind is what we call brand building. Let's explain it in a more engineering way: Traffic = See → Buy; Brand = See → Remember → Buy In fact, traffic promotion methods just omit one step—memory, commonly known as "not taking it to heart." Since your promotion doesn't take it to heart, you can't expect users to think of you when they have needs. But precisely because it doesn't take it to heart, users' purchase behavior is more immediate, and the impact on sales is more direct. If brand promotion always "takes it to heart," then you will naturally be slower in everything, and market results will come slowly. Will users be loyal to Hao123? Will they have feelings for the site? No, they just find it convenient. If the telecom operator's pre-installed site is Hao256 but with the same functions, users won't mind. But if you're used to watching Hunan TV and suddenly switch to Zhejiang TV, you'll find it hard to accept. After explaining the definitions and relationship of brand and traffic, let's see what those who claim to do brand are actually doing. We said that compared to traffic, brand has an extra "memory" step. For Chinese people who went through "3 years of high school, 5 years of mock exams," the technique of memory is not unfamiliar; the core principle is "repetition." But many brands have "ADHD"; they are changeable, not persistent in "repetition." Take brand endorsements as an example. Many brands, like today's fans, divide idols into yearly, quarterly, and monthly types. Brands that constantly change young idols—are your endorsement campaigns doing brand or traffic? Isn't finding a quarterly idol just washing fans' traffic and consuming the short-term influence of young idols? This is a typical case of doing traffic under the guise of brand. Another example is frequent cross-border activities. For brands, cross-border should be a collision of different brand values, making each brand's proposition sharper, more intuitive, and more likely to shake users' consumption concepts. But many cross-border activities are just mutual fan-washing between two brands, just traffic promotion. The two brands don't exchange ideas; they just use each other. So I say, 80% of brand people are actually doing traffic, just without realizing it. In fact, in the early days, there was no distinction between brand and traffic; everyone built brands to find traffic. For example, Shi Yuzhu mentioned something in "My Marketing Insights." He said that in the early years, the Nao Baijin advertisement was frequently reported because it aired often and the old man in the ad was effeminate. So, one year they upgraded the ad, hiring famous crosstalk performers Jiang Kun and Da Shan as master and apprentice. The result? Sales kept declining, so Shi Yuzhu switched back to the original vulgar ad. Today, Nao Baijin's ads insist on the "gift-giving" concept, which is typical brand advertising. But the dimension Nao Baijin used to measure ads was traffic thinking: any ad that doesn't sell goods immediately is not a good ad! Contemporary brand people, don't be confused by concepts. Brand and traffic are two sides of the same coin, the palm and back of the hand, the yin and yang of things. -03- Traffic can evolve, brand can degrade The biggest criticism of traffic in the industry is: "The cost of traffic is getting higher and higher." How high? In 2011, getting a customer lead cost a few yuan. But in 2020, the cost might be 200-300 yuan. On the other hand, the industry's praise for brand mainly stems from the belief that "the cost of brand will get lower and lower." How low? There is a thermal underwear brand in China called Nanjiren. Many young people may not know that this brand was established in 1997 and was the number one thermal underwear brand in the early years. In 2019, Nanjiren's e-commerce net profit reached 1.206 billion yuan, but many people don't know that the company has already stopped production! Now all revenue comes from "brand licensing"! Dealers only need to pay a 100,000 yuan licensing deposit to open a Nanjiren "certified" store. Let's not discuss whether Nanjiren's approach is advisable, but it at least proves one thing: when your brand equity is thick enough, you can indeed sit at home and count money. "The cost of traffic is getting higher, the cost of brand is getting lower." So, many people say traffic is speculation, brand is investment. But we can also say it this way: "Traffic has early dividends, brand has late dividends." Many times, a thing is not a question of "right or wrong," but "whether it is right within a certain period." Running a marathon at age 12 is definitely wrong, but at age 32 it's definitely fine. Many business problems have a certain periodicity, and we need to make decisions with a dynamic perspective. For example, many companies are traffic businesses in their early stages, but once they grow big, they naturally transition from traffic thinking to brand thinking. Some plan early, some act late. But keyboard warriors often only stand at the current moment and curse them for being "short-sighted." For example, brands like Fanmiline, TST, and Mageline are cosmetics brands that started as WeChat businesses. They succeeded through a series of traffic methods like recruiting people, distribution, and communities. When they want to continue growing, they hit growth bottlenecks, so the industry naturally begins to emphasize brand building and accumulate social reputation. Toutiao is a more typical example. Toutiao initially didn't create content, only distributed traffic. But when Toutiao became a national-level app, it iterated its corporate strategy. Toutiao shifted from simple traffic distribution to "smart social," using algorithms + social to distribute content, and subsidized a large amount of capital to attract content creators, hoping to "let information create value." If Toutiao and beauty WeChat businesses had started with brand instead of traffic, they would never have stood out. On the other hand, brand power is not something that grows infinitely with investment; competition creates "zero-sum games" between brands. Simply put, if the brand power of homogeneous products grows faster, your brand power will shrink. For example, Pechoin rose by waving the banner of "domestic beauty," positioning its brand culture as "Eastern aesthetics." But the rise of brands like Florasis has been a significant impact on Pechoin. The impact is not that Florasis has taken market share, but that Florasis's Eastern aesthetics are more extreme than Pechoin's, which invisibly lowers Pechoin's brand aesthetics. Traffic can evolve, brand can degrade. Doing traffic doesn't necessarily get worse; doing brand doesn't necessarily get stronger. The key is how to balance the relationship between traffic and brand in different cycles. -04- The evolution of traffic is a super opportunity for brands Brand is the art of the mind; traffic is the science of behavior. Observing changes in traffic is essentially understanding changes in consumer behavior. Therefore, the rise of any new traffic is an opportunity for brand iteration. Let's look at the history of traffic changes and brand development over the years. First, changes in traffic platforms: From offline to online: Sina, Sohu, NetEase; From PC to mobile: WeChat, Weibo; From central to local: Dianping, Ele.me; From big media to self-media: Shidian Reading, Yitiao. Then, changes in traffic forms: From text and images to video: iQiyi, Youku; From long video to short video: Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili; From short video to live streaming: YY, Huya. Next, changes in traffic distribution: From manual recommendation to active search: Baidu, Sogou; From active search to social distribution: WeChat, Yunji; From social distribution to intelligent recommendation: Toutiao, Douyin. Finally, and most practically: The rise of new traffic is a major opportunity for brand marketing. All marketing, no matter how sharp your brand positioning, how strong your product power, or how sufficient your budget, ultimately must land on a specific medium. We said, "Traffic has early dividends, brand has late dividends," so brand marketing must have enough sensitivity to discover early traffic dividends in media. For example, in the era of PC search, Putian hospitals were born; in the early years of Weibo, brands like Durex, Haier, and Xiaomi captured a lot of attention; the growth of Douyin and Kuaishou gave opportunities to many factory stores and individual merchants. Without traffic changes, how could there be opportunities for new brands? Without traffic cycles, how could old brands rejuvenate? Sometimes, these traffic changes are very obvious, like short video traffic. But sometimes, they are very subtle, requiring us to pay attention to media traffic trends as closely as we follow Two Sessions policies. For example, in my article "Why Can't You Always Do Content Marketing Well?" I wrote about a past traffic trend: content is becoming the traffic entrance for the entire internet. Whether it's Taobao, Ctrip, Dianping, NetEase Cloud Music... many non-social apps are building content social relationships. Because everyone has found that traditional traffic has hit a bottleneck, and only content can be produced infinitely, breaking the traffic ceiling. If brand people smell this traffic change, they should understand: your advertising investment should shift from media platforms to content individuals. Because platform traffic is saturated, it will only become less and more expensive; while content individuals are seen by platforms as growth points, so they will only be more supported by platforms, and their traffic has overflow. Genki Forest, Wangbaobao, Zhong Xue Gao, Florasis, Adopt a Cow... The rise of this wave of new domestic brands actually relies on the traffic of content individuals. At first glance, their marketing model is just finding KOLs to plant grass, but the logic behind it is that they stepped on the incremental point of traffic in a specific business cycle. When we identify a trend or an opportunity, if we only observe changes in user psychology, we turn a science into metaphysics. No matter how turbulent the user's psychology, "the body is always honest." The important thing is to keep an eye on changes in user behavior. And traffic fluctuations are fluctuations in user behavior, the strongest market signal. Conclusion: People who play traffic are not stupid enough to not know the power of brand; but people who play brand often don't understand the value of traffic. High-level traffic players can turn a company into a hundred-billion market value. Low-level traffic players just shout every day, "Don't lose your brand." The problem is not traffic, but people who don't understand traffic.