"Brand homogeneity" is really a marketing disease that is sweeping the country. Whether we walk into a supermarket or turn on our mobile phones, we are faced with a number of brands that look the same. For example:

Microfinance loans are all about "low threshold" and "quick disbursement";

diapers are all about "easy to absorb, non-allergic, and anti-leakage";

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Milk brands are focusing on “milk origin” and “protein content”.

The most ironic thing is that the industry with the highest level of homogeneity of Chinese brands is the advertising industry. Advertising companies sell the same resources, offer the same prices, and provide the same services, but teach advertisers every day how to break brand homogeneity. This is really the biggest black humor in this industry.

Four erroneous theories to break brand homogeneity

When formulating differentiation strategies, brands often regard four things as differentiated values, namely: product category Treat the differentiated value; treat the user class as the differentiated value; treat the technical strength as the differentiated value; treat the market size as the differentiated value.

I want to say that these four methods are all wrong, and they are outrageously wrong:

1. Treat product categories as differential value

Many companies are When positioning their own brands, they all wrote the following words: "Focus on the ## field."

When companies describe themselves in this way, they are obviously influenced by the "positioning" theory and want to occupy the first position in users' minds in a certain field. But let’s look back at those classic positioning cases. None of them said “focus on the ## field”:

Jiaduobao, if you are afraid of getting angry, drink Jiaduobao

Second-hand melon seeds Cars, there are no middlemen to make price differences

Feihe is more suitable for Chinese babies’ physiques

Why is this? Because most companies do not use the "positioning" theory correctly. The "positioning" theory is to occupy the first place in the category, but this occupation is the occupation of the user's mind.

In other words, positioning is for users, not for the industry. Users don’t care at all whether you “focus on the blockchain field” or “focus on the early childhood education field.” What they care about is what kind of differentiated value you can provide.

Secondly, when trying to differentiate supplies, it is easy to encounter the "real fragrance" scene.

Because any growing company rarely fails to expand its categories. For example, Xiaomi started with mobile phones and later expanded to all electronic products; Heytea sells tea, but now it also sells ice cream and bread.

If we initially regard a subcategory as the differentiated value of the brand, once we encounter a market ceiling and need to expand the category, we will be forced to reposition the brand.

2. Treat user class as differential value

Many companies like to position themselves as "high-end" brands, such as these brands:

But at the same time, truly high-end brand has never mentioned the word "high-end" in its mouth. Have you ever seen Ferrari say that it is high-end? Have you ever heard LV and Hermès call themselves high-end?

This is just like Bill Gates, who cannot print "the richest man in the world" on his business card. The more truly high-end a brand is, the more it likes to keep a distance from the public; Not really a high-end brand, but a brand that wants to be high-end.

When "high-end" is regarded as brand differentiation, the biggest problem is that the direction is unclear, that is, consumers simply cannot figure out how high-end your "high-end" is.

This is a "high-end women's clothing" on Taobao. In some merchants and users' minds, it is considered high-end, but for others, Prada is the high-end women's clothing, right?

Let’s look back at the advertising copy of Bestore and Zhuyeqing:

What are “high-end snacks”? Cleaner? Tastes better? More expensive?

What is the "high-end sales market"? How is this market divided? What is the market price of tea?

Words like "high-end" and "low-end" are relative concepts, not absolute concepts.

"High-end", like "category", should be the company's internal brand positioning, and should not become the company's expression of value to consumers.

3. Treat technical strength as differential value

To regard technical strength as differential value, the most common words are "intelligence", "black technology" and "redefinition### ".

Now, more and more companies are beginning to use "smart" as their differentiated label, such as Midea smart rice cookers, 360 smart cameras, Travelmate artificial intelligence suitcases...

What’s the problem with using technology as a differentiator? Let’s take smart speakers as an example to illustrate this problem. The combination of AI and speakers not only frees up consumers' eyes and hands, but also makes it easier to search for songs. Smart speakers have also become the entrance to human-computer interaction in the future living room, which can be said to be of far-reaching significance.

But the seemingly high-tech smart speaker market has immediately changed from a blue ocean to a red ocean market. Xiaomi, Huawei, Baidu, and Alibaba have all joined the competition in the smart speaker market. The joining of the giants has given full play to their true nature as "price butchers" and shuffled the cards of small and medium-sized players. For example, Xiaomi’s “Xiao Ai Classmate Mini Edition” is only priced at 299 yuan on its official website.

So, the biggest problem with using technology as a selling point for differentiation is: technology is something that is developing rapidly but also becoming obsolete at a rapid pace.

If your technical strength is not ridiculously strong, then your biggest point of difference will become your biggest weakness. You will be easily copied quickly by powerful opponents and then eliminated quickly.

4. Treat market size as differential value

This method is common among giants in various industries in China. Commonly used branding terms are "leader" and "sales leader".

Referring to "leader" is based on the herd mentality of users. When more people choose something, it generally means that its quality and service are more reliable.

But have you noticed? Foreign leaders rarely claim to be leaders. Let's recall, Procter & Gamble, Nike, KFC, Coca-Cola... have they ever emphasized their sales problems in their advertisements? Why don’t big foreign brands do this?

Because as with anything, the more people who choose it, the worse its personality perception becomes. And personality, in a sense, is synonymous with niche.

Many companies that do this may have misunderstood users’ reactions to the concepts of “large sales” and “popularity”.

High sales = more people choose it, so this product is very safe

Popular = this thing is very popular, I want to be fashionable too

So, strengthen "Sales volume" and "leader" are more suitable for some categories with weak "spiritual consumption" attributes. Just imagine, if we change Nike's advertisement to "One out of ten people in the world wears Nike", will Nike's fans go crazy? Therefore, Guazi used cars may be more suitable for emphasizing "sales", while Wanglaoji is not suitable.

Once a brand becomes a leader, its biggest crisis is that consumers think it is not cool anymore and it is bad on the street. For example, when WeChat became an application with 1 billion monthly active users, we began to escape from the circle of friends and look for social circles and private social interactions. In the past two years, everyone feels that entrepreneurial opportunities for social APPs have emerged again, which is why APPs such as Duoshan and Soul have emerged.

Therefore, large and mature foreign brands are trying their best to get rid of their status as "leaders" and are constantly creating differentiated perceptions, developing more personalized products, and doing more pioneering cultural promotion.

In many cases, the more a big brand claims to be a "leader" and "sales leader," the more it deviates from brand differentiation. At the user level, the more opportunities you create for new brands.

03

Four correct postures to break "brand homogeneity"

The four mistakes I listed in the previous section are actually all mistakes. Made the same mistake: only from the perspective of the enterprise, but not from the perspective of users to do differentiated positioning. We must always understand one thing: brand equity only exists in the minds of users, so brand differentiation must be created from the user's perspective.

Next, we will create the differentiated value of the brand from the user's perspective:

1. Concrete a product value point

George is a blender in the United States The marketing director of the company. The selling points of his company's products are "durable" and "strong mixing force". If you only look at these two core selling points, it is basically no different from other brands on the market, but George thought of a way to completely amplify the selling points of the blender.

He bought a bunch of marbles and put them into a blender to stir. The marbles were jumping violently in the blender. After 15 seconds, George opened the lid of the blender and the marbles had turned into A cloud of white dust. George recorded it all on camera and uploaded it to YouTube, where it became a huge hit.

Later, George also tried smashing lighters, game controllers, and even iPhones. This series of videos is called "Will It Blend?" 》, with more than 300 million hits. Within 2 years, the mixer business increased 6 times.

What George did was to concretize and even dramatize the abstract selling point of a product.

In fact, many products have differentiated selling points, but the problem is: your selling points are not clearly perceived by users. Note that I used the word "perception" once. The value selling point of a brand is not for users to "think" or "judge", but for users to perceive.

Because "thinking" and "judgment" are just rational decisions of the human brain. If it is a rational decision, the most common reaction of users is to compare prices, compare various parameters, and do various evaluations. Except for high-consumption decision-making products such as cars and real estate, as well as general consumer goods, users simply don't bother to spend time to "identify" your value.

Therefore, the differentiated value of the brand must be perceptible and touchable by users. If your brand fails to arouse the user's desire to consume within the first three seconds of paying attention to you, then the user will be lost.

So, there are two practical tips to amplify user perception. Let’s explain some common methods:

1) Use numbers to create value perception.

The most typical case is OPPO’s “5 minutes of charging, 2 hours of talk time”. The two figures "5 minutes" and "2 hours" create a huge value impact.

2) Use vision to stimulate user perception.

We all know that tea is a big market now, but at the same time the competition is also fierce. Heytea, Nayuki’s tea, Lele tea, Yinwei tea, Zhuye, Lujiaoxiang, 1Diandian... …The circuit is already pretty crowded.

One of the new brands entering the market is called "Wei Mi Model Tea". The color of the store draws on the color system of the Victoria's Secret show, blending dark black and sexy pink. The whole store creates a Victoria's Secret show. Show off your fashion sense.

For another example, Belief Maojian makes the word "信" infinitely large, like a seal. This word "faith" is not only the brand's values ????but also a visual symbol that attracts consumers. This is the case of Hua and Hua Company in 2018.

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Now there is a new term called "sensory brand", which means that your brand should give consumers enough stimulation in the five senses, so as to achieve sufficient brand imprint. In today's world of dazzling brands, if you want consumers to initiate consumption behavior, it is often just because they "looked at you one more time in the crowd."

2. Strengthen one of the value points

There are many reasons why we consume a product. Quality, price, taste, service, packaging... these may be the reasons for purchasing. But no matter how complicated the reasons are, they can be divided into two major categories:

1. Intrinsic practical value: taste, quality, price...

2. External added value : Service, packaging, experience...

When a market enters homogeneous competition, it means that the "practical value of the product" is no longer the decisive factor. What we fight for is often the "add-ons of the product" value".

If you can magnify the added value of a product to a level that exceeds users' expectations and exceeds the imagination of your competitors, then you will have stronger competitiveness.

For example, many people like to visit IKEA, not only because IKEA’s furniture is easy to assemble and deliver, cost-effective and attractive, but also because IKEA’s restaurants are delicious! Many people even go to IKEA for a meal and buy some small furniture.

I want to tell you that IKEA Restaurant is already the sixth largest catering company in the world. Its signature dishes of Swedish meatballs and ice cream alone have a yearly turnover of more than 1 billion.

Another example is Haidilao, which everyone knows. The delivery boy dances with noodles, provides manicure services while waiting for a table, and puts a bear on the opposite side of you while you are eating hot pot. This is to realize the value of service. Extreme.

At that time, competition in China’s home appliance market was fierce. How did Haier win? It depends on the considerate maintenance service in the later period. If you ask the older generation why they bought Haier back then, their reasons are almost always "it's in charge of maintenance and the service is very good."

How to find the added value of a product? We need to carefully observe all aspects of the user's consumption of the product to see which points make the user "uncomfortable" and where you can solve the problem with your own resources. That point may be a breakthrough.

For example, it is now popular to "roll hems" when wearing jeans. As for how to curl hems, many fashion influencers will teach "rolling hems" strategies. If I were the owner of a newly founded jeans brand, I would do three things:

1) Train all shopping guides, and provide professional training to everyone who comes to the store to try on jeans. Hemming guidance, on-site demonstration of different styles of hemming methods;

2) Once the customer purchases, he will be given a guide for hemming the jeans. There is a paper guide in the packaging bag, and there are also two-dimensional guides on it. After scanning the QR code and following the brand’s official account, you can watch the video tutorial;

3) Let designers address this phenomenon and design several jeans that will reveal special patterns and patterns when the trouser legs are turned out. , to make customers prefer "curled hems". Once these styles become popular, they will position themselves as "the best-looking rolled hem jeans".

3. Make up a new value point

Morning Stationery is a well-known brand in the domestic stationery industry, and its core product is writing pens. However, a writing tool pen is a product that does not have a high technical threshold and is highly homogeneous. How can an ordinary writing tool pen be made unique?

The first thing Chenguang Stationery did was to define its pens as "examination-specific pens." In a paperless era, the main group of people who use pens are students, and the biggest scenario where students use pens is in exams.

Which pen cannot be used in the exam? All pens are acceptable! But just such a product naming that seems to charge an IQ tax has directly increased market sales by 30%.

But then, I encountered imitations from various opponents, and everyone took out their exam pens. In order to increase brand differentiation, Chenguang Stationery has developed another product called "Confucius Temple Blessing Exam Pen".

There is also a "Confucius Temple Prayer Lot" in the product package. If the "Prayer Lot" drawn by the candidate is the top one, there will be certain rewards. They held a "Confucius Temple Prayer Ceremony" in Qufu, Shandong, the Confucius Temple, the hometown of Confucius, and obtained the authorization from the Confucius Temple. Is this very similar to the current popular IP crossover? But this was a case ten years ago.

At that time, before the college entrance examination, this "Confucius Temple Praying Exam Pen" was snapped up by candidates across the country. Many candidates wanted to take this illuminated instrument to take the college entrance examination.

Is there any difference in physical properties between the Chenguang pen and other exam pens? No. It just cleverly takes advantage of the Chinese people's mentality of doing things for good luck and finds a highly differentiated value point for an originally homogeneous product.

When we complain that our products have no special features, we might as well try to "retreat" and find out whether it is possible for the product to have a new sense of meaning attached to it, so as to stand out in the homogeneous competition.

4. Redefine the entire value

Nowadays, the term "redefinition" has been played badly by major brands.

It seems that as long as a certain brand's product has a slight technological or commercial breakthrough, it can redefine its industry. But it is undeniable that "redefining" your brand value is especially suitable for brands with innovative business models.

Every time I turn on my LeTV TV, there is a sentence on the screen: "I am not a TV, but a large-screen Internet ecosystem...". LeTV does not define itself as "television", but as a "big screen ecosystem". This "life-saving" positioning puts itself in the "future" and its opponents in the "ancient times", especially Can arouse people's desire for the future.

This marketing idea comes from Apple, because Apple in the Qiao Gangzhu era has been "redefining" the technology industry. Apple has redefined music players, mobile phones, and personal computers. Now, companies with the same temperament as Apple include Tesla, Google, Hema, Luckin Coffee, etc.

KK, the famous futurist and author of "Out of Control", once said to Google founder Larry Page: "I am not optimistic about the future of search." Larry Page replied: "Oh, actually What we do is artificial intelligence. "So, whether it is Google Maps, Google Glass, or AlphaGo, these are not expanding the search business, but the in-depth development of artificial intelligence.

The anxiety of being eliminated by the times, coupled with our imagination of the future, always makes people look forward to the emergence of new things and breaking the old traditional order. If your company has such a gene, then you can use the "redefinition" method to think about the differentiated value of the brand.

But if your company is just a small step further than its predecessors, using "redefinition" to build a sense of brand value may become an industry joke. For example, when teacher Luo Yonghao introduced the "TNT Workstation" at the press conference, he used such a PPT.

It is also a smart TV. Hisense also "redefined" smart TV at its 2017 new product launch conference. Hisense's new "Brilliant" series "comprehensively upgrades the artificial intelligence experience, realizing intelligent voice interaction, face recognition, video sharing, smart home and scene-based content services..."

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These advantages sound like just upgrading an intelligent system, but cannot be called "redefinition". When a company tries to package a brand instead of seeking truth from facts, the brand value you describe is like "the king's new clothes" in the eyes of consumers.

5. Change the perspective and create a real value fulcrum

First, let me tell you a story in the Bible. This story has been quoted in many business books, such as "The Tipping Point" and "The Tipping Point". Good Strategy and Bad Strategy”.

The Philistine army led troops to attack the Israelite army. There was a general in the Philistine army named Goliath. He was a 3-meter-tall giant. He wore heavy armor and carried an iron spear and came to the Israelite army to challenge him.

This scene is somewhat similar to the confrontation between two teams in "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". A general walked out of the array and shouted: "Who will fight me?"

Israel The soldiers were very afraid of this giant who was armed to the teeth, and for a while no one challenged him. Only a shepherd boy named David volunteered. The army general allowed David to leave the station and gave him a battle suit, but David did not wear it. Instead, he walked to the river, picked up five stones, picked up the sling string and went to challenge the giant Goliath.

When the giant Goliath saw a child coming to challenge him, he mocked him, but David was not affected in any way. He stopped at a certain distance from Goliath and threw a stone with his machine string. Hitting the giant Goliath's unprotected forehead. Goliath fell to the ground, and David ran forward and cut off his head.

I think this story is suitable for every entrepreneur to read, because if almost every entrepreneur wants to win the final victory, he has to face the Goliath in the industry and find a way to defeat him. !

The focus is different from that in the Bible. In the field of strategy, the reason why the shepherd boy David was able to defeat the giant Goliath had nothing to do with God or courage, but with David's unique judgment of the competitive situation.

Let’s take a look at how the public views the competitive relationship between the giant Goliath and the shepherd boy David:

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Let’s take a look Let’s take a look at how the shepherd boy David himself viewed the competitive relationship with the giant Goliath:

From the two tables, we can see that once we change the perspective of looking at the world, advantages and disadvantages appear. Subversive changes allow us to discover potential value points in ourselves. This value point is somewhat different from the first four value points. It is a key value point, the fulcrum of leverage, and the winning hand in Go.

Let’s look at this perspective in the business field. There are many articles that attribute Pinduoduo’s victory to “rural areas surrounding cities”, which is a shallow perspective. There are so many companies surrounding cities in rural areas, why can Pinduoduo break through the blockade of JD.com and Alibaba?

We return to the fundamental issues of an APP application to study this matter. The core problem that all growing APP applications need to solve is the cost of customer acquisition. There are two ways for traditional APPs to acquire customers:

1) Traffic purchasing, pursuing immediate effect conversion.

For example, JD.com invests huge amounts in search advertising every year.

2) Through external advertising, build brand reputation and create independent user searches and downloads.

For example, Tmall, Suning.com, and Vipshop have huge budgets for outdoor advertising, product placement, and content marketing all year round.

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As the "growth hacking" theory enters the country, domestic companies begin to focus on creating the third method of acquiring customers, that is, using technical means within the product, Use user subsidies and other methods to acquire customers without advertising.

If Pinduoduo follows traditional ideas to acquire customers, it will definitely encounter traffic blockade by several giants, and it will not be able to afford it no matter how much financing it raises. The reason why Pinduoduo can rise lies in its core customer acquisition methods: group-building technology and user subsidies.

This self-driven growth method stimulates the spontaneous acquisition of new users within the product, thereby eliminating competition in a sense and avoiding the pressure of giants. Later, it will assist in traffic procurement and brand advertising, thus quickly becoming a new e-commerce upstart.

Re-examine the advantages and disadvantages of you and your opponents, change your perspective and rediscover your value fulcrum. This is an idea that all companies should have when facing homogeneous competition. The differentiation caused by the value fulcrum is actually the greatest differentiation. If expressed in a formula, it is:

Differentiated value fulcrum = your strongest point - the opponent's weak point

This method of changing perspectives and finding differentiated value fulcrums has jumped out of brand theory and been promoted to strategic theory.

To summarize

Today, we have rethought the topic of "brand homogeneity". The core content includes the following three levels:

01 Why others " Brand homogeneity" but still living well?

02 Four wrong theories to solve "brand homogeneity"

03 Five correct postures to establish "brand differentiation"

When you and your opponent When products are highly homogeneous, what consumers buy is not the product at all, but brand information. How we encode this information determines how many copies the product can sell and how many years it can be sold.