Click 'Read Original' for details. Source: Liang Jiangjun (ID: liangjiangjunisme) Why does spending heavily on advertising not yield results as before? The root cause is that in the centralized media era, the path of advertising information dissemination was point-to-surface, focusing more on 'broadcasting'; in the decentralized media era, the path is point-to-point, focusing more on 'transmission'. In the new era, 'transmission' is more important than 'broadcasting', and making users like you is more important than making them remember you.
Since I entered the advertising industry, I have encountered several 'big spenders' every year who attempt to solve business problems with huge advertising budgets within 1-2 years, but most of them die halfway.
These companies can be roughly divided into two categories: one is emerging internet brands trying to quickly establish a leading advantage with investors' money; the other is established traditional enterprises that, having succeeded before, try to replicate their past commercial miracles in the same way.
Today, I want to dissect why these 'big spenders' failed in advertising and marketing, why the more ads they run, the faster their brands die?
To explain this clearly, we need to look back ten years. Because the situation ten years ago was the opposite: the more ads you ran, the faster your brand grew.
The marketing environment back then is now called the 'centralized media' era. People's information sources were concentrated in four major media: TV, newspapers, radio, and outdoor, with TV being the most important. This basic fact has been read in various marketing articles, but many have not deeply considered what marketing model 'centralized media' created. That is, why did advertising generate sales in such a media environment?
I believe the 'centralized media' era gave rise to three marketing characteristics:
1. Media and stores were separated, so ads could not immediately trigger purchases. Since there were no e-commerce channels, people had to buy offline. Therefore, advertising aimed to make consumers remember the product, so that when they entered a supermarket, they would choose the brand based on the ad impression in their minds.
2. Media was singular, and ads could reinforce brand memory through repetition. We often say that the post-80s generation has shared memories because they grew up with single media and received single information. We grew up watching 'The Legend of the Condor Heroes', 'My Fair Princess', and the Spring Festival Gala, and naturally also grew up with brainwashing ads like Nao Baijin, Septwolves, and Hengyuanxiang. Since we had no other choices, ads could be repeated over and over to make us remember them firmly.
3. In a closed information environment, brands enjoyed discursive hegemony. Because our information sources were singular, we lacked the ability to discern right from wrong. Ads repeated in a closed environment achieved a brainwashing effect. As the saying goes, 'A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.'
It can be said that in the centralized media era, the advertising methodology was the same as the propaganda theory of the Cultural Revolution: in a closed environment, through repetition, achieve a brainwashing effect. The ultimate goal of advertising was to make consumers remember, to recall the product name and selling points when shopping in other times and places. All our previous brand theories were conceived against this backdrop.
What is a brand? There are various definitions in marketing theory, but in my view, the essence of a brand is a mnemonic technique. We condense all the complex features of a product into a slogan, depict the company's temperament as a distinct visual logo, and compress a lengthy product manual into a 15-second TV commercial—all to make you instantly remember the brand.
So-called brand awareness, favorability, and loyalty are all evolutions based on brand memory. If brand theory is a set of mnemonic techniques, then it's easy to understand various brand theories.
- USP Theory: Extract a core selling point for easy recall. For example: 'Charge for 5 minutes, talk for 2 hours.'
- Positioning Theory: People can't remember anything beyond second place, so a brand must occupy the first position in a new category. For example: Feihe, 'Milk powder suitable for Chinese babies.'
- Super Symbol Theory: Find a memory symbol shared by human society and apply it to the brand so that people instantly recognize and remember it. For example, Gu'an Industrial Park: '50 kilometers south of Tiananmen, I love Beijing,' using 'Tiananmen' as a 'super symbol' for memory.
After the internet arrived, everything changed. The internet changed the way we obtain information, and we entered a 'decentralized media' era, where the previous information dissemination trajectory completely changed:
1. Media and stores merged, and what you see is what you get. With the rise of e-commerce and new retail, after seeing an ad, you can click to link to the purchase page. After seeing a product, you can scan to learn all kinds of information. If you think the product is good, or the packaging is interesting, you can share it on your Moments.
2. Media fragmentation makes it difficult for ads to have a repetition effect. We have entered a 'screen reading' era: outdoor screens, phone screens, computer screens, tablet screens... plus countless apps within screens, and countless fragmented content within apps. Between screens, apps, and content, consumer attention is shattered into pieces.
3. Information transparency and fluidity give consumers stronger judgment. Once, advertisers loved slogans like 'For ###, choose ###.' For example, 'For gifts, give Nao Baijin.' Such slogans occupied a vocabulary field to seize a piece of consumer mind. But today, we can quickly verify whether a brand is exaggerating through WeChat, search, and e-commerce reviews. Brands are almost naked before consumers.
But these changes are not the biggest challenge for marketers. The greater change brought by 'decentralized media' is not attention fragmentation, but the change in information dissemination paths. Let's use a diagram to express this change:
We call the dissemination path in the centralized media era a 'central cluster', where ad information can radiate from one point to all people; while in the decentralized media era, the path is a 'node network', where all information becomes isolated islands, connected only by a single node.
In the centralized media era, the path was point-to-surface, focusing on 'broadcasting'; in the decentralized media era, the path is point-to-point, focusing on 'transmission'. This is why companies began to value word-of-mouth marketing, because brands rise or fall through 'word of mouth'.
In such an information context, it is difficult for companies to influence consumer decisions by managing brand symbols and increasing ad budgets. This is why some people are pessimistic about positioning and other brand theories, because these theories only work best under a single, closed communication carrier.
The information dissemination path has changed, but most companies have not changed their marketing thinking; they simply transplanted traditional media advertising theories to new media. This is the fundamental reason why 'the more ads you run, the faster your brand dies.' We naively thought: video is TV, official accounts are magazines, portals are newspapers... After paying tuition for several years, the industry slowly realized the need to change marketing thinking, and the advertising industry came up with several countermeasures:
1. Emphasize emotional communication and downplay product function. Brands hope to attract consumer attention and stimulate individual users' desire to share. Since consumers don't even look at self-serving TV commercials anymore, the first countermeasure was to reshape the power of creativity, using content itself to attract consumers, even if such creativity steals the product's spotlight.
This approach indeed fits the 'node network' dissemination path, but the biggest problem is that many creative ideas have strong communication power, yet the product does not gain direct benefits. Advertisers can comfort themselves that such creative activities are long-term brand behavior, not short-term market behavior, but the founding fathers of advertising creativity did not say that; they all emphasized the effectiveness of advertising:
- David Ogilvy: 'Either sell, or don't advertise.'
- Leo Burnett: 'Make the product the hero of the creative, not the creative.'
- Bernbach: 'The first criterion for good creative is relevance to the product.'
2. Brand IP-ization to increase brand stickiness with consumers. No matter how strong the brand power, it is ultimately a cold commercial symbol. After the IP concept became hot and companies spent tens of millions on IP collaborations, brands began to harbor an ambition: why can't I become an IP myself? So some companies hope to upgrade their brand to an IP through personified images and quality content, making their brand have a legion of fans like Disney movies.
Companies can certainly do this, but most underestimate the difficulty and time required to build an IP. To build an IP, a company needs not only a marketing team but also a professional content team. This means their benchmark will not be other competitors but other content production companies. Moreover, the content industry has always had the highest barriers, which even capital cannot solve; it requires not only favorable timing, location, and people but also time to ferment.
3. Performance marketing, where advertising purely pursues user conversion. The rise of big data and algorithms gives us the ability to target specific customer groups in the chaotic media landscape. ByteDance, with its algorithm + feed ads, became a new giant in China's internet, with about 70% of its revenue from performance marketing clients.
But this type of marketing has always had two cancers that advertisers cannot let go: one is data fragmentation and opacity. China's big data and its application capabilities have always been in the hands of media giants, and companies have been unable to integrate data across different media groups, thus unable to gain a holistic view of consumer behavior; the other is that pure performance marketing lacks long-term investment effects and can only drive short-term promotional behavior. We can achieve short-term KPIs through material optimization and bidding mechanisms, but we cannot make users continuously consume the product.
These three tactical adjustments cannot completely resolve marketers' anxiety. Clearly, we need not just tactical adjustments but strategic innovation.
We mentioned that decentralized media changed the information dissemination trajectory. Information is composed of countless node networks, and marketing focuses on 'transmission' rather than 'broadcasting'. In the decentralized media environment, the biggest obstacle is that the granularity of audiences has become smaller, and advertising cannot achieve scale effects.
The breakthrough from 0 to 1 lies in: driving nodes to connect users. Find every way to drive node self-propagation, connect nodes into communities, give communities a unique cultural core, and then penetrate the mass audience.
Let's see if the brands that have risen rapidly through internet marketing in recent years fit this logic, and we'll know if this is just my fantasy.
First, take Xiaomi, which everyone knows. In its early stage, it had no advertising budget. It relied on community operations of digital enthusiasts to complete product experience, iteration, and brand communication, gradually forming the Mi Fan effect. It was almost after becoming a first-tier brand that Xiaomi began large-scale advertising, advancing from a niche brand to a mass brand.
Then there's Pinduoduo, which used the group-buying model to drive spontaneous sharing among users in third- and fourth-tier cities, rising rapidly under the noses of Taobao, Vipshop, and JD.com. After gaining a foothold, Pinduoduo began spending heavily on ads. In 2018, Pinduoduo almost monopolized satellite TV's comprehensive variety shows and used daily spending of tens of millions on performance ads to aggressively acquire customers.
And Luckin Coffee is a typical fission marketing case. All its marketing actions, whether outdoor, Moments, or BD, induce user sharing through welfare incentives for coffee drinkers.
These three brands all completed their brand's initial accumulation by 'driving nodes and connecting users', albeit with different methods. This marketing thinking is completely opposite to traditional brand communication thinking. Traditional brand thinking is from big to small: brands initially build mass awareness through large-scale advertising, then engage in emotional communication with consumers through campaigns to build brand favorability, and finally form brand loyalty through a series of comprehensive measures like user feedback and product quality improvement.
But in the internet media environment, brand communication must go from small to big: first accumulate core consumer groups, establish brand loyalty among core consumers, and then consider mass awareness. The core consumer group is what everyone calls 'super users'. People often equate super users with high spending power, but the greater value of super users is as 'virus sources' for the brand; super users can infect more user groups, ultimately achieving scale aggregation of users.
In summary, the more ads you run, the faster your brand dies, because we still use the 'mass advertising' method for marketing. In the internet era, any brand that wants to rise must find ways to drive nodes to leverage broad user connections, rather than relying on mass media to influence user memory.