The Ambiguity of Brand Whether professional or not, most people can say something about brands, seemingly with reason. For channels, only professionals or those with experience dare to speak. The threshold for talking about brands is low, but the ceiling is extremely high, beyond the reach of ordinary people. When we talk about brands, what exactly are we talking about? In my view, there are four contexts for brand: 1. When treating brand as a marketing concept, we are talking about its definition. I quite agree with Kotler's definition in "Marketing Management": A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors. The reason I agree is that this definition is neutral enough; it indicates two points: first, a brand is a "symbol"; second, the purpose of a brand is to "differentiate" from competitors. This is the scholarly context of brand. 2. When referring to a specific brand, we are talking about the degree of awareness of that brand. For example, Haier, Lenovo, Huawei—immediately we think: What is it? What does it represent? What is its position in the industry? What is its relationship with me? This is what brand owners hope to achieve, i.e., user awareness. This is the consumer's context of brand, and also the brand value that brand owners wish to convey. 3. When talking about brand theory, we are talking about the cognitive logic of brands. How are brands formed? Some propose the "positioning" theory, some the USP theory, some the conflict theory. This has formed a "theoretical jungle" of brands, each with its followers. This is the context of brand for experts, media, corporate brand departments, and brand managers. 4. When comparing brand with IP, we are talking about brand as a cognitive symbol of an era. The widespread use of the concept of brand did not exist in the agricultural era, nor in early industrial society; it only became widely used after the Second Industrial Revolution. Although it still exists in the Internet age, it is no longer mainstream. As a cognitive symbol of an era, brand is a cognitive model matched with mass media and advertising communication. Mass media, advertising, and brands form a business ecosystem. When mass media advertising declines, brand as an era-specific cognitive symbol will also decline. Words (concepts) carry the imprint of the times. Living in this era (environment), one often cannot feel the existence of the background (environment) because we are accustomed to it. Only during major transformations of the times can we feel the existence of the background. 5. When elevating brand to the cultural level, we are talking about its additional meanings. This treats brand as a value symbol in the sociological sense, particularly favored by cultural figures. When a person assumes a high position, there are always those skilled in beautification. When a brand succeeds, there are always those skilled in sociological embellishment. Brand and the Mass Media Ecosystem Speaking of brands, we must mention P&G. P&G was founded in 1837. In 1882, P&G first invested $11,000 in a weekly magazine called "The Independent" to advertise Ivory soap. In 1890, P&G placed color advertisements in national newspapers. However, what truly had a significant impact on P&G's brand building was the invention of radio in the early 20th century. P&G's advertising triggered a trend among soap companies, becoming the "soap opera" phenomenon (prime-time programs) of that time. Later, when television became the main advertising medium, P&G was always the first to follow. Before the widespread use of national newspapers (late 19th century), radio (early 20th century), and television (1960s), there were no efficient communication media, nor national or global brands. Brand, advertising, and mass media constitute the business ecosystem after the Second Industrial Revolution. Brand is one part of this ecosystem. Because it has lasted so long (over 100 years), we have forgotten the ecosystem on which brands depend and that they should change with changes in the business ecosystem. As a phenomenon, brand has a history of about 120 years. As a theoretical system, it has only about 80 years. The survival environment for brands is the mass media ecosystem after the Second Industrial Revolution. Advertising is the Primary Form of Brand Awareness Mass media is the primary carrier of advertising, and brand is the memory symbol formed by advertising communication. In Kotler's "Marketing Management," he lists the "Nine Prescriptions for Brand Awareness":

  1. Develop creative advertising; 2. Sponsor well-known events; 3. Invite customers to join clubs; 4. Invite customers to visit factories and offices; 5. Create your own retail institutions; 6. Provide good service; 7. Provide assistance to certain social institutions; 8. Become a value leader; 9. Establish a strong spokesperson or image representative for the company. If we summarize the "Nine Prescriptions," there are roughly three methods: advertising, public relations, and creating retail institutions. The reason for listing retail institutions separately is mainly that Walmart rarely advertises. For commercial institutions, being "visible" everywhere is the best advertising. When Walmart has long occupied the top of the Fortune 500, it is certainly a brand. So, there is another brand logic, which McKinsey calls "absolute sales volume creates absolute brand." This is another brand logic outside the communication logic. China's channel brands follow this logic. Public relations as a "prescription" for brands also relies on mass media. PR creates events that attract public attention, then spreads them through mass media. If advertising is "hard advertising," PR is "soft advertising." There is no way around it. When mass media becomes the main source of information for the public, mass media advertising becomes an efficient tool for commercial awareness. Advertising becomes the main source of revenue for mass media. Mass media operations thus go through three stages: the first stage is "selling content" to attract readers; the second stage is "selling readers" for advertising; the third stage is still "selling readers" but operating derivative products, such as the "Fortune Forum" hosted by Fortune magazine and the "Fortune Global 500" published by Forbes magazine. Brand, advertising, and mass media have become a symbiotic business phenomenon for 100 years. The Branded Business Ecosystem Brand is the peak of the industrial society's business ecosystem. The characteristics of the industrial society's business ecosystem are: mass production, mass communication, and mass distribution. This model is also known as the HBG model. First, industrialization gave rise to mass production. The two industrial revolutions brought not just the machine age, but industrialized mass production. The industrial revolution focused on productivity, while socialized mass production focuses on production relations. Second, industrialization gave rise to urbanization, and urbanization gave rise to mass distribution. Industrialized mass production brought population concentration, sparking a wave of urbanization. Urbanization, with high population concentration, gave rise to modern channels and modern retail. In developed countries like Europe, America, and Japan, marketing has long moved from 4P to 1P (product, brand), with channels becoming independent third parties. China has always been a dual-structure market. In cities, modern retail develops, with manufacturers supplying directly to terminals; in rural areas, urban-rural fringes, urban villages, and even city convenience stores, there are still many independent small shops. Therefore, China still has a distribution market, relying on manufacturers' deep distribution to reach terminals. Western developed countries have well-established modern channels that isolate brand owners from consumers. Similarly, they do not have China's deep distribution, terminal relationship management, terminal interception, or (brand owner) terminal sales guidance phenomena. These marketing practices are interventions by brands on consumers' terminal purchases. In some special product areas in the West (such as the automotive industry), this is allowed, but basically not in the FMCG industry. China has 80 million salespeople doing B-end channel development, while the US has 10 million salespeople doing terminal sales. For example, Joe Girard, the former "sales king" in the US. Third, mass media spreads mass awareness, resulting in brand formation. National newspapers in the late 19th century, the rise of radio in the 1920s, and the rise of television in the 1960s made mass media powerful. Mass media facilitated advertising communication. P&G's Ivory soap became a mass brand based on this. Without mass media, brands could not achieve national awareness. For mass products, mass communication has almost become a standard business practice. When channels become third-party platforms in Western developed countries, channels are both a pathway for products to quickly reach consumers and a barrier for brand owners to contact consumers. Mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication are interdependent and interactive. The result is that brand owners, channel providers, retailers, and mass media all form oligopolistic patterns. Enterprises that do not rely on mass production, mass communication, and mass distribution may survive, but becoming an industry leader requires these as basic conditions. In Europe, America, and Japan, production can be outsourced, mass media and modern channels are third parties, and companies basically have only two major options: First, product R&D to differentiate from competitors; second, mass media investment to gain consumer awareness and qualify for bargaining with channels. Of course, not all industry giants have invested in media advertising. For example, Walmart gained consumer recognition through "everyday low prices." However, not investing in mass media does not mean there was no mass media communication fueling the fire. In short, either directly advertise or communicate in the form of PR. Either way, mass communication is indispensable. Brand Keywords Brand has two major keywords: one is the advertising slogan; the other is the advertising budget. First, the advertising slogan. The slogan tells users "who I am" and "what I am." The so-called brand connotation is all in the advertising expression centered on the slogan. Brand theory tends to make brands sound very complex. After all, mass media is "a second costs a fortune" and "an inch of space costs an inch of gold." For example, TV commercials are usually only 5, 10, or 15 seconds. How to convey richer information in the shortest possible time? Hence, LOGO and SLOGAN were born. LOGO is a visual cognitive symbol, and SLOGAN is a cognitive symbol combining visual and auditory elements. SLOGAN condenses the information to be conveyed into one sentence and repeats it. Of course, it's not that advertising information is only the slogan, but that the slogan is the main memory point of the communicated information. There are many brand theories: positioning, conflict, USP. No matter the theory, the final implementation must pass a test: how to express it with a SLOGAN? That is, different brand theories have similar final expression paradigms. The differences in brand theories are only in the understanding of consumer cognitive psychology. The connotation of brand value is also in the SLOGAN. Second, the advertising budget. LOGO can be spread across channels, but how does SLOGAN reach users? The most efficient means is through mass media. Unless funds are insufficient to reach the effective threshold for mass communication, companies generally choose to invest in mass media. Teacher Shi Wei said that mass media communication creates an "information field," forming a "ubiquitous" confidence field, making consumers "nowhere to escape." No matter what brand theory or how powerful the SLOGAN, they are all "free gifts" carried by mass media. Therefore, continuous information reinforcement—repeat, repeat, and repeat again—is the first law of mass media communication. This also conforms to the pattern suggested by the forgetting (memory) curve: regular reminders, never forgotten. To understand mass media, one must understand the basic law of the mass media ecosystem: oligopoly. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations have national and local (city) levels. Oligopoly is the same at home and abroad. But in terms of influence, it is still national. In China, the influence of CCTV is unmatched by any other media. The oligopolistic pattern of mass media inevitably leads to fierce competition for media attention resources, resulting in increasingly high thresholds for media placement. Except for leading brands, long-tail enterprises have to give up. The result is that industry share concentrates toward the top, which is one reason why most modern enterprises (excluding industries inherited from agricultural society, such as liquor, catering, and tea) exhibit oligopolistic patterns. As a cognitive symbol, the communication logic of brand is: because of the advertising slogan (SLOGAN), information is easier to remember; because of the advertising budget, the slogan must be remembered. The advertising industry used to say that half of the advertising budget is wasted, but never knew which half. Undifferentiated advertising placement indeed seemed wasteful in the past. However, now with precise internet placement, results are not as expected. In hindsight, it is the information field formed by undifferentiated placement that influenced customers in niche markets, drawing them out. The Last Dividend of Brand Since 2010, brands communicated through mass media have become rare, while IPs have continued to emerge. From 2006 to 2009, those brands that concentrated on CCTV advertising enjoyed the last dividend of mass communication. A boss once lamented that in 2009 he wanted to invest in CCTV advertising, but the funds were used for other purposes. Later, there was never another opportunity. Recently, someone in my circle of friends said that positioning has not had successful new cases for many years. Our discussion concluded: positioning communication heavily relies on mass media, and positioning does not have the ability to spread on self-media. The book "The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR" by Ries, the proponent of positioning theory, already sensed this trend; the first part is about "the decline of advertising." PR is more topical than hard advertising and more suitable for self-media communication. For example, in the liquor industry, the leading brands in recent years have been thriving on their own PR topics, not advertising placement. After 2010, it was the time of large-scale smartphone adoption and the formation of the WeChat ecosystem. The dividend of self-media moved from first-tier cities down to small-town youth, and then to rural areas. The attention resources of the entire society flowed to self-media. The emergence of IPs is the inevitable result of the shift in mainstream communication platforms. In the face of major environmental changes, survival of the fittest, with no more choices. Of course, the marginalization of mass communication does not mean its complete disappearance. Self-media fermentation and mass media communication remain an effective combined communication model. Just as commercial revolutions do not replace but coexist, so does media change. During the transition period, the boundary between brand and IP is difficult to define. Channel Brands Strengthen What I discussed above is about communication brands. China also has a special type of brand—channel brands—which not only will not weaken due to the internet but will strengthen. An important feature of Chinese marketing is that the importance of channels often exceeds that of brands. In 2004, Professor Chen Chunhua proposed this idea in an article "Channel-driven or Brand-driven?" and it was recognized by many practitioners. Unlike Western countries where channels are independent third parties, in China, channels are controlled by brand owners, and distributors are an extension of brand owner functions. In China, those who do marketing well must be driven by both brand and channel; second is channel-driven alone; last is brand-driven alone. Of course, in the short term, a brand explosion without channel power can be popular for a while, but it is hard to sustain. According to Teacher Shi Wei, China's channel-driven approach is actually a "trinity" of awareness, transaction, and relationship. The channel chain is actually a human chain, and the endorsement of interpersonal relationships helps lower the threshold of awareness. Therefore, channel "guanxi" (relationship) is crucial. China has had two major channel revolutions. One is channel sinking, from "provincial agent" to "city agent" to "county agent"; the other is deep distribution, where brand owners' control reaches directly to terminals. These two channel revolutions determined brand owners' control over channels. Now in first- and second-tier cities, some leading brands even focus on direct operation, with distributors only responsible for financing and warehousing. We call brands formed through C-end communication "first-choice brands," and brands formed through channel control "first-push brands," meaning terminals recommend them first. "First-choice" is user awareness; "first-push" is terminal awareness. The reason community marketing is now booming is that community users and store owners are both acquaintances and regular customers, with dual identities. Because of channel-driven approaches, many startups and SMEs in China use China-specific channels to first build channel brands. When resources are sufficient, they then build communication brands. Does the internet weaken channel brands? No, it strengthens them. This is reflected in three aspects: First, control over offline channels is stronger. Teacher Shi Wei proposed two new concepts in "Connection": first, business is divided into three dimensions—offline, community, and network—called three-dimensional space; second, marketing is divided into three modules—awareness, transaction, and relationship—called the trinity. Traditional channel deep distribution only had one spatial dimension; now it can be done through three spatial dimensions. This is multi-dimensional deep distribution. Traditional channel interpersonal relationships converted into awareness and transactions are inefficient. Now, with three-dimensional space, offline interpersonal relationships are amplified through communities. At the same time, cloud stores give channels more convenient transaction tools. Offline strong relationships, community strong interaction, and cloud stores enable transactions. The combination of offline human chains and internet tools is more powerful. Second, channels extend from B-end to C-end. In deep distribution, the terminal is the terminal. But now, with community and live-streaming tools, it can extend from B-end to C-end, achieving BC integration. From Mousse mattress's "store + KOC" channel live-streaming, to Dong Mingzhu's 618 all-channel mobilization live-streaming, to Wu Xiaobo and TATA Wood's live-streaming combined with "channel training," we can see that with internet tools, channels have stronger mobilization capabilities. The originally fragmented channels can now be mobilized centrally, and through live-streaming tools, channel momentum is clearly visible. Third, channels have the ability to guide C-end. Offline channels, by connecting communities and networks, have the ability to divert online traffic. This is different from the past when e-commerce continuously diverted offline traffic. Stores with multi-dimensional traffic guidance capabilities are called new store merchants, unlike traditional stores that only have offline traffic capabilities. China's total retail sales of consumer goods, more than 3/4 still occur offline. Communication brands are replaced by IPs, but channel brands can be strengthened by the internet. Communication Brands Decline Channel Brands Strengthen Because the influence of mass media in public life has declined, the cognitive model relying on the mass media ecosystem is also affected. This is an inevitable result of social development. As part of the traditional business ecosystem, brands will naturally be affected. The cognitive model in the self-media environment is now called IP. It is different from brand, and that is correct. Of course, some people infinitely expand the concept of brand, saying that all cognitive models form brands. Even equating brand with a synonym for awareness is incorrect. Now is a transition period, with unclear boundaries and connotations of various concepts, which is normal. In fact, names are just memory symbols. What we truly need to understand is the change in the business ecosystem.