---
title: "Traditional Marketing Is No Longer Effective; Product Strength, Connectivity, and Operational Capability Are the Future!"
description: "In recent years, numerous innovative consumer brands have emerged, such as Genki Forest, Zihaiguo, Danyuanliang, Zhongxuegao, Wangbaobao, and Haomaiduo. Unlike traditional brands, they have not followed conventional marketing methods like TV advertising and offline distribution, but instead use new marketing models to quickly gain consumer recognition. The competitive barriers of traditional enterprises, built on the 'three marketing forces' (product, brand, and channel), are disappearing due to excess marketing resources, changing consumer cognition, and improved technology and infrastructure. The article argues that the marketing force triangle must shift from product, channel, and brand to product, connectivity, and operational capability."
author: "赵波"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-09-06"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OK41mtwIxHd8dScBxy1Wvw"
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# Traditional Marketing Is No Longer Effective; Product Strength, Connectivity, and Operational Capability Are the Future!

> In recent years, numerous innovative consumer brands have emerged, such as Genki Forest, Zihaiguo, Danyuanliang, Zhongxuegao, Wangbaobao, and Haomaiduo. Unlike traditional brands, they have not followed conventional marketing methods like TV advertising and offline distribution, but instead use new marketing models to quickly gain consumer recognition. The competitive barriers of traditional enterprises, built on the 'three marketing forces' (product, brand, and channel), are disappearing due to excess marketing resources, changing consumer cognition, and improved technology and infrastructure. The article argues that the marketing force triangle must shift from product, channel, and brand to product, connectivity, and operational capability.

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In the past two years, a large number of excellent innovative brands have emerged in the consumer goods industry, such as Genki Forest, Zihaiguo, Danyuanliang, Zhongxuegao, Wangbaobao, and Haomaiduo.
What distinguishes these innovative brands from traditional ones is that **they have not followed the traditional marketing model of advertising on TV and recruiting distributors offline, but instead have used entirely new marketing models to enter the market,** quickly gaining consumer awareness and recognition.
This situation was rare in the past. Analyzing the reasons, **the competitive barriers of traditional enterprises come from the construction of the three marketing forces (product strength, brand strength, and channel strength). Enterprises build an efficient, low-cost marketing system through large-scale production, large-scale communication, and large-scale distribution.**
This scale barrier was extremely difficult to build and break in the past, but judging from the development paths of today's innovative brands, these scale barriers seem to be disappearing. The advantages of big brands are no longer present, and the underlying logic of marketing in the entire consumer goods industry has undergone structural changes.
**The structural changes in marketing come from three levels:**
> **1. Excess marketing resources: products, communication, and channels are no longer scarce resources; 2. Changes in user cognition: trust endorsement shifts from the brand side to the channel side; 3. Improvement of new technologies and infrastructure drives an exponential increase in the efficiency of new marketing.**
Let's first discuss the first level: the problem of excess marketing resources.
**1. Excess communication resources: brand barriers disappear**
In the past, the threshold for companies to advertise on media was actually very high.
For example, in 2005, if a company wanted to run a 5-15 second ad during the prime time after CCTV's News Broadcast, the starting bid per airing was about 200,000 to 230,000 RMB. Running it continuously for a month would cost about 6 to 7 million RMB, and a year of airing would cost at least nearly 100 million RMB!
Before the advent of the internet, companies without substantial strength were not qualified to place large-scale, long-term advertisements on television and in newspapers.
Moreover, this kind of advertising was essentially a gamble: if successful, the brand would become famous overnight; if not, the company might go bankrupt. In those days, brands like Taizinai, Xurisheng, Qinch, and Sanzhu Oral Liquid, as well as many successful brands, basically became household names through this path. Today, the threshold for advertising has been greatly lowered. Even with just 100 RMB, you can place an ad on Toutiao, and you can choose exactly who sees it, even paying per click.
Furthermore, you can spend nothing at all and simply post a message on your Moments to spread information. **In the past, communication resources were centralized and scarce; now they are fragmented and excessive. This means that national media campaigns that only large enterprises could afford are now accessible to all. The excess and fragmented media resources have caused the communication barrier to disappear, creating opportunities for small brands, especially in consumer goods. Media is the core of marketing, so when the threshold for communication is lowered and media resources are no longer scarce, small brands can leverage dispersed communication resources to promote their products.**
**2. Channel resources are no longer scarce; barriers disappear**
In the past, to sell products to consumers nationwide, brands needed to place their products on shelves in millions of retail outlets. However, individual supermarkets have limited floor space and scarce shelf resources. To get products onto limited shelves, brands had to face strong resistance from competitors.
**In the past, there was a very important concept in marketing at the channel level called 'channel is king,' meaning that whoever could control terminal shelves and lock down the terminal, whoever had better product displays and more attractive packaging on the shelves, could determine what consumers bought.**
For example, the five major beer giants blocked small and medium brands in the catering channel by buying up outlets, essentially monopolizing limited channel resources to gain a competitive barrier and complete market consolidation. However, China has about 12 million catering and retail terminals, meaning consumer goods companies must build a very large distribution system. Without a strong terminal sales service team, they would have no chance of large-scale display at the terminal.
Today, an entrepreneur wanting to launch a new product can open a store on Taobao, Tmall, or JD.com, complete transactions, and deliver products quickly to consumers via express delivery. The emergence of e-commerce has made channel resources no longer scarce. The efficient e-commerce + logistics system helps small and medium enterprises complete transactions and deliveries instantly, without needing to compete with big brands for limited offline shelf space. **So, the pain point for big brands today is that the competitive barriers built on channel advantages are no longer advantages. In other words, the channel is no longer king.**
**3. Product barriers are lowering**
Not only communication and channels, but the threshold for product production is also significantly lowering. For example, before 2014, if a startup wanted to produce diapers, purchasing a production line would cost at least $20 million, so it was always a game for big companies.
After 2015, the cost of a production line with the same capacity dropped to $2 million per line. New technology made diaper production almost as easy as cooking at home. A large number of entrepreneurs flooded into the maternal and infant industry, and diaper brands blossomed after 2015, quickly distributing through social e-commerce channels.
Not only diapers, but with technological progress, production equipment in almost all consumer goods fields is becoming smaller and smarter, with prices dropping significantly. Increased production flexibility and customization allow entrepreneurs to produce quickly in small batches at low cost. Big brands with large factories and equipment cannot flexibly and quickly meet consumers' changing and picky demands like small brands can. Innovative brands gain a relative competitive advantage through low-cost, rapid production and iteration.
Now let's discuss changes in consumer cognition:
As mentioned earlier, in the past, marketing resources were scarce, and information asymmetry existed between manufacturers and consumers. Consumers had no choice but to trust big brands. After receiving information, because transactions were delayed, consumers had to remember brand information.
But human mental resources are limited; in each category, only the first and second are remembered. So marketing at that time focused on influencing consumer cognition and memory, whether through slogans or positioning theory, to improve advertising efficiency.
**The goal was to make consumers remember with one sentence, like 'Drink Wanglaoji to avoid getting heaty.' When consumers went to the supermarket, they would prioritize buying brands they remembered.**
Today, consumers can see information and place orders immediately without delay. Moreover, faced with massive amounts of information, people's memories become very short. If consumers cannot order immediately upon seeing something, they will quickly forget. E-commerce allows products to be displayed in excess.
**Consumers have become 'smarter,' increasingly valuing quality and cost-effectiveness.** To save time, they prioritize looking at other users' purchase reviews, KOL recommendations, or word-of-mouth from friends.
The reason why Li Jiaqi and Viya's live streams are so popular today is essentially because this recommendation model helps users save a lot of time and 'beat down' prices for good products, reducing users' cognitive costs.
Let's also discuss the structural changes brought by new technologies and improved infrastructure:
China's advanced communication infrastructure greatly enhances the efficiency of connections between people, between people and information, and between people and products. Now you can sit at home, pick up your phone, connect to anyone in the world, and purchase any product available globally.
China's rural transportation infrastructure has further improved, greatly enhancing logistics efficiency between urban and rural areas. Even in remote rural China, it does not prevent Li Ziqi from becoming a world-class internet celebrity.
In the past, we talked about first- to sixth-tier markets in marketing. In fact, today's market is already a binary, or even a unified, market. When many big brands face growth difficulties, the first thing they think of is market sinking, and there are no physical obstacles to sinking.
Therefore, the future Chinese market will definitely be an integrated super market. However, the efficiency improvements in connections between people and information brought by the internet will inevitably lead to fragmentation of Chinese consumer demands, which will also make brands diverse and unprecedentedly prosperous.
How should brand owners restructure their marketing models to adapt to today's market changes? I believe that a company's marketing barriers must be built on the effective occupation of scarce resources!
**Based on this, I believe the traditional marketing force triangle must shift from product strength, channel strength, and brand strength to product strength, connectivity, and operational capability!**
**1. Product Strength: The basic premise of marketing work**
Undoubtedly, you must make product quality the first element of word-of-mouth. In the past two years, many new products have emerged on e-commerce platforms, and from a cost perspective, their cost structures have changed significantly.
Genki Forest, which has been extremely popular in recent years, uses a sweetener called erythritol, extracted from corn stalks. It is a natural sweetener with zero calories and is very healthy, but its price is six times that of sucrose.
Coca-Cola Zero uses aspartame as a sweetener, which is about 18 times the price of regular sucrose but 200 times sweeter.
If we take white sugar's sweetness as the standard, under the same volume and sweetness, the cost of aspartame is only one-tenth of sucrose, but the cost of erythritol is nine times that of sucrose! Many consumers do not pay much attention to ingredient lists. To make Coke affordable for more people, the company has to lower raw material costs to reduce the selling price.
In the past, companies spent 80% of their energy and time on promotion, and the product was not the most important.
Now, 80% of energy must be spent on the product itself, and promotion has become less important because a sufficiently good product will naturally bring organic traffic through user word-of-mouth.
**2. Connectivity: Marketing actions shift from pushing to recommending**
In the past, marketing was about pushing; now, marketing is about recommending. Pushing is a persuasive action toward consumers; recommending is a satisfying action toward consumers. If a product can be recommended by KOLs, influencers, and friends, whether the product quality, packaging, or service satisfies users is the prerequisite for recommendation.
**Consumers' ability to discover product strength is far greater than your ability to promote. When a good product and a bad product are launched simultaneously, the results in this era will be fundamentally different.** The underlying traffic logic has changed. In the past, traffic came from purchasing actions; now we need to lay the pipes and wait for traffic to flow like tap water.
So we need to return to the origin and think: Why do consumers recommend your product to friends? Why do they like, comment, and share your product? Why do many KOLs and KOCs voluntarily promote you without pay?
**3. Operational Capability: From traffic to retention**
In the past, in an incremental market with scarce resources, once a brand became the first in a category, big brands could earn more profits through scale. So the core of business for consumer goods companies was to grab: grab traffic, grab terminals, grab mindshare.
But today, it has become a stock market, and incremental growth has disappeared. If brand owners still focus on acquiring traffic as the core of marketing while neglecting user management, and if consumers are dissatisfied with your product or service, they will immediately find alternatives.
**Technology makes it easy for companies to reach users, but retaining users is very difficult. The ability to build sustained, deep relationships with users will be the true core barrier for enterprises in the future.**
Let's return to the origin again: What reasons can make users continuously consume our products? Where does user loyalty come from?
If in the past consumer loyalty came from trust in the brand, today consumer loyalty must come from something higher than brand trust. Is it consistently exceeding expectations in experience? Or resonance with brand culture and values?
In the future, consumer needs will change faster and faster, and it will become increasingly difficult to continuously meet them. As an enterprise, it is impossible to satisfy whatever consumers demand; we must lead consumers' consumption habits, lifestyles, and values.
Our products should be built on partial consensus of diverse cultures, and through efficient connectivity and continuous operational capability, we can establish sustained, deep relationships with users. Marketing solves the problem of new acquisition; only truly good products can solve the problem of retention.
I particularly agree with Tang Binsen's statement: **The product with the strongest new acquisition capability in China is Tiananmen. Everyone wants to go once, but no one wants to go a second time. From a mathematical perspective, what truly solves long-term user growth is retention, not acquisition.**
**Are you 'watching' me?**


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