Ceramic Industry Half-Month Talk·Issue 4
After I entered the ceramics industry, I often heard an anecdote: A big boss in the ceramics industry asked Dong Mingzhu how to increase brand sales to tens of billions. Dong Mingzhu replied that a consumer must spend more to decorate his house and buy ceramic tiles than to buy an air conditioner. You should consider how to achieve 100 billion.
I think colleagues in the ceramic industry must be very ashamed, because to this day, we still have only one company with sales exceeding 10 billion, and the goal of 100 billion seems to be a fantasy.
But we need not be discouraged. Because the cases of the home customization industry tell us that when capital intervenes, brand concentration becomes higher and higher, and the national layout is gradually completed. The brand quickly completes the gorgeous transformation from an industry-recognized brand to a consumer-recognized brand, and the real top ten brands The brand will occupy more than 80% of the industry's market share.
There are indeed signs of this in our industry, with mergers and acquisitions, transformation, line expansion and other phenomena happening from time to time.
But is capital intervention enough?
We know that due to the properties of semi-finished products, the application effect of ceramic tiles cannot be directly presented to consumers before post-paving. Therefore, the relationship between ceramic tiles and consumers has always been a weak relationship, not a strong relationship. In addition, basically all of our brands have not achieved nationwide distribution. We compete more in the two links of "production" and "distributors" within the industry. The brands have not reached consumers. Many of our To a large extent, when companies build brands, they want to open up the minds of dealers and attract more dealers to join, rather than changing consumers' perceptions.
Therefore, if our ceramic brands do not change their brand development ideas, even if there is capital intervention, how can the production and manufacturing end achieve national layout? If the brand does not transform from an industry-recognized brand to a consumer-recognized brand, it will be impossible Talking about 100 billion, the goal of 10 billion is just a dream.
But our brand foundation is too weak. Looking at the entire ceramic industry, it can be said that there are very few companies with a complete brand system.
Today's "Half-Month Talk on the Ceramic Industry", I will analyze how the ceramic industry can achieve a tens of billions of brands from the perspective of brand planning.
Review
Going back 15 to 20 years ago, the ceramic industry was a hot industry, making money as fast as a money printing machine. Everyone was scrambling to develop production lines and establish more ceramic brands.
That was the stage of barbaric growth of the industry, and it was common for a company to establish multiple brands. Some people even jokingly say that even their salesmen in a certain company don't know how many brands their group has; if others ask them, they will answer, oh, it seems that they opened another brand today!
This multi-brand strategy has brought sequelae to the later development of the company, and is also one of the important reasons why the industry cannot form a tens of billions of brands.
Because at this stage, the original intention of the company to establish a brand is not to build a long-lasting business, but to grab short-term benefits. Very few companies will position themselves from a strategic perspective and do complete brand planning and design, which makes brand upgrades extremely difficult in the future.
We will talk about the brand's "vocabulary cone" later, but here we can first look at the names of the brands in this period, which are basically divided into the following categories: foreign names, such as Marco Polo, Mona Lisa, Love Einstein, etc.; Geely lottery head categories, such as those with the characters Qiang, Shun, Cheng, Hui, and Jin; the "Xin" generation, there are countless brands starting with the character Xin.
These brand names cannot make an overall plan from the entire brand system, nor can they help consumers develop brand associations, and naturally they cannot reach consumers' awareness. There will be no disadvantages in the early stages of brand development, but it will be quite difficult to upgrade the brand later.
In addition, we have also found that a large number of brands that implement multi-brand strategies may have cut off some leeks in the early stages of the industry's brutal development; but today, these brands are gradually weakening and disappearing, and the road to big brands in the industry is emerging. .
Cognition
So, how to do brand planning, design or transformation and upgrading at this stage?
Before talking about this issue, let us first popularize some knowledge and unify our understanding.
In the field of brand planning, we have summarized the overall framework of Qianyi Brand and refined a formula:
Perfect product score + perfect cognitive score = breaking the market
Only by meeting these two perfect scores can you achieve a 10 billion or 100 billion brand. Because the market capacity determines the width of the industry, but the products and consumer awareness of a specific brand determine the depth that the brand can achieve.
If our brands in the ceramics industry are still solving industry awareness or dealer awareness, and not solving consumer awareness, achieving tens of billions or hundreds of billions is tantamount to being idiotic.Talk about dreams.
About product perfect scores, we will talk about them in the next issue of "Ceramic Industry Half-Month Talk". Today we will talk about cognitive perfect scores first.
The so-called recognition, simply put, means that the public has formed a consensus on a certain brand and it is the "only recognition". For example, when we mention Coca-Cola, we will think of "red, ribbons, cans, and feeling good after drinking it" and other parts that can form impressions and memories.
Cognition is an enterprise asset and the core asset of the enterprise. The main battlefield in the battle for corporate assets is shifting from traditional tangible assets such as technology, production lines, and channels to intangible assets focused on user cognition.
It is no exaggeration to say that the competition among ceramic brands in the future will be brand recognition competition.
Let’s look at a set of formulas first:
Awareness × traffic = sales conversion
10×10 million=100 million
100×1 million=100 million
The brand is the entrance to traffic, and recognition is the entrance to the brand. "Being recognized" is the tap water of the enterprise. When encountering the "traffic dilemma" where only a small portion of traffic can be effectively converted into sales, brand recognition becomes an important magic weapon for victory.
To achieve high awareness, it means to defeat one against a hundred, and to defeat many with less.
Therefore, if ceramic brands want to achieve the goal of 10 billion or 100 billion, they must first solve the problem of consumer awareness.
Playing style
So, how to achieve good brand recognition?
Everyone who does brand marketing in China knows positioning. Positioning, in short: it doesn’t matter what a product is, what matters is what it is in consumers’ perception.
When we were doing branding in the past, we focused on "language nails" and "visual hammers", but it was not systematic enough. I drew on the views of Mr. Huang Wei, a domestic brand marketing master, and based on positioning theory, disassembled user cognition into three cones:
The first cone is called the vocabulary cone. Only when a company occupies a representative word in users' cognition can the company make profits.
The second cone is called the symbol cone. Symbols are concrete expressions of words. In the visual age, symbols have the power to carry goods.
The third cone is called the experience cone. To create a screaming customer experience is to create high-viscosity customer relationships and consumption frequency.
At the same time, these three cones are not independent, but a closed loop: starting from positioning, user cognition is broken down into the three-step rule of "lexicalization of positioning", "symbolization of vocabulary", and "symbolization of experience" .
After talking about so many theories, in fact, the three cones solve the three aspects of human cognition: vision, hearing and experience.
Visual cognition →See it at a glance
Auditory cognition →Buy as soon as you hear it
Experience cognition →Love it as soon as you use it
Simply put, the vocabulary cone is the brand's name, slogan, and brand story; the symbol cone is the brand's LOGO, IP image, and spokesperson; and the experience cone is the brand's product experience. The superposition of the three is not a simple 1+1+1=3, but an effective transformation of cognition from quantitative change to qualitative change.
Looking at the ceramic industry, there are not many brands that can perfectly integrate positioning, vocabulary, symbols and experience, but there are not many. Today I will give you two examples.
Jian Yi:
When it comes to Jianyi, many people think that the growth of Jianyi brand is achieved through CCTV advertisements; in fact, this is not the case. Jianyi is one of the few brands in the ceramic industry that can capture the minds of consumers. It is impossible to achieve the goal of occupying consumers' minds by relying solely on advertising. There must be a complete top-level cognitive logic.
High-end brand (positioning) + high-end decoration, use Jianyi marble tiles (vocabulary cone) + blue visual identity (symbol cone) + tight seam paving, finished product delivery (experience cone)
Do you understand? The most important thing is that these three cones are highly unified.
Big-antlered deer:
Many people are disapproving of the rise of Bighorn Deer, thinking it is just three words: smashing advertising. In fact, this is not the case. Bighorn Deer is definitely a leader in solving consumer awareness.
Mid-to-high-end brand (positioning) + you will know whether the tiles are good or not (vocabulary cone) + red visual identity, big horned deer IP image (symbol cone) + wear resistance (experience cone)
Through the above cases, we found that the success of a brand is not without reason, but has its logic.
Looking at other brands in our ceramic industry, few brands start from the value system and organically unify positioning, vocabulary, symbols and experience.
So, no matter which ceramic tile brand wants to break through tens of billions or hundreds of billions, it must solve the problem of consumer awareness, and don't rest on its laurels and only solve industry awareness and dealer awareness!
Upgrade
In fact, many ceramic brands have also realized that they need to solve the problem of consumer awareness and build consumer awareness brands. Therefore, in the past year, we often hear about the upgrade of the LOGO of a certain brand, the SLOGAN upgrade of a certain brand, and the upgrade of the SLOGAN of a certain brand. Brand strategy upgrade.
However, some brands, due to poor early positioning and foundation, were unable to achieve organic unity when carrying out the "three-cone" design, and the road to brand transformation and upgrading was extremely difficult.
But no matter how difficult it is, as long as a brand has a dream of tens of billions and hundreds of billions, it must seriously think about one issue, which is the core issue we are talking about today: to build a tens of billions of brands, we must open up consumer awareness and rely on industry recognition. Transformation of well-known brands into consumer awareness brands.
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To achieve the tens-billion-dollar brand goal, brand layout is only an indispensable part, and there are many other important factors, such as products. Recently, the term "ceramic industry product manager" has become popular in the industry. Let's talk about the topic of ceramic industry product manager in the next issue of "Ceramic Industry Half-Month Talk".
(Author: Liu Shi)
