Where should marketing go

Guide: Generally speaking, advertisers have more discourse rights, the more conducive to guide consumers to buy their own products and services.

The discourse market has always been the target of the advertisers ' pursuit, and it helps to improve the living environment of the brand in the commercial market and make the products easier to enter the mainstream market.

For example, the brand of marketing activities is to create a good brand or product discourse capabilities, including through a good product reputation to form a market effect, all belong to this category.

Generally speaking, advertisers have more right to speak, which helps guide consumers to buy their own products and services. So overall, the entire commercial market is made up of "discourse" gatekeepers. However, under the new media environment, the discourse environment is undergoing a great change, and it has also brought tremendous changes to the commercial market.

How the market is turning

In the traditional media period, the discourse power is the media monopoly, the audience "can only listen to but can't say", the public discourse place is basically the media "Yiyantang", essentially belongs to "the authoritative discourse".

Therefore, the commercial market of that period can also be regarded as the media keeper. Big brands generally as long as the media, in a sense can handle the market. As a result of the purchase of media discourse channel cost is very high, compared to small brands, have the capital advantage of the big brand undoubtedly more advantage.

So in the traditional media era, big brands can buy out the right of speech with big budget, and make the biggest possible market possession by preventing the sound of small brands. This is the traditional media period big brand maintains the market position begotten. For example, the market for "CCTV King" flocking is a typical example.

Procter and Gamble is also very representative, operating on a long-term reliance on marketing, through advertising bombing and a large number of marketing activities has been a huge success, but also for a long time the root cause of the global marketing expenditure.

For small brands without adequate budget, it is easy to be excluded from the mainstream commercial market because of the lack of sound ability.

But under the new media environment, because everyone can speak in the public discourse position, the traditional media has gradually lost its role as the mainstream voice-producing place. The most typical is the rise of Weibo's public opinion field.

So we often see the scene: The first scene of the news is often "passerby a", through the mobile phone upload a short period of time to cause widespread transmission, and newspapers and television stations are estimated to be still in the office.

The gradual formation of this open and free speech environment not only disrupts the traditional media's monopoly on "discourse power", but also causes the big brands to dominate the commercial market by monopolizing the "right to speak", which will undoubtedly become more and more difficult.

This is why Procter and Gamble has suffered a crisis in recent years, and nearly tens of billions of dollars a year of advertising and marketing bombing has not brought about real performance improvement. It is not hard to understand that Lafley soon restructured his entire operation.

Because everyone has the ability to speak, small brands thus have a full opportunity to speak, big brands of public opinion control is greatly weakened. To some extent, weakened the once big brand and small brand between the serious wrong, so that small brands have more equal opportunities to participate in the market competition.

For example, such as Millet brand, if in the "Authoritarian discourse" stage, only after three or four years of development to achieve the current achievements is very difficult, and the current stage of open discourse environment, undoubtedly gave it the opportunity to rise rapidly.

Where should marketing go

The traditional media period of "mass communication", mainly from the spread of media coverage. But in terms of the dissemination of content, the basic media is the boss, so "mass communication" instead became the elite spread.

And the true meaning of the content level of the "Mass Communication", in exactly what happens to everyone to get the right to speak and everyone can participate in the current, no doubt it seems very ironic.

Therefore, from this perspective, users in order to maintain their rights to speak, continue to provide for individuals to speak video, social and other public opinion platform transfer is a logical choice. In order to pursue the right to speak, the budget continues to tilt to a new position of discourse, of course, it is not surprising.

But the transfer of the right of discourse is not so simple as from A to B, but from a to a, B, C, D, E ... The flood of channels, and the proliferation of channels brought about, the right to speak is constantly diluted and dilution.

Therefore, under the new media environment, the brand's struggle for the right to speak has begun to evolve into a reorganization of the right to discourse.

However, also need to see that, the proliferation of discourse channels, although let the brand into the blind, but these discourse channels of composition and organization, most of the current in the social, video and other platforms completed.

For example, if we will "micro-bo" or "video platform", as a large channel, then a variety of micro-blog accounts or video accounts of countless channels, is a large channel under the small channels.

Therefore, although the discourse power tends to disperse, but overall, still be included in a limited number of sound positions above, more representative of a few major video positions and micro-blog, friends and other mature platform. This also means that these platforms also have the possibility of reorganizing the fragmented discourse. But this integration is not the channel level of coverage and buyout.

Samsung spent 14 billion dollars in marketing in 2013, although it also invested a lot in digital marketing, but in the three quarter of 2014, the global market share of smartphones dropped 1.7%, 7.1% and 8.7% respectively.

Samsung has almost no corner of the carpet bombing, essentially not out of the advertising coverage of the play. Using the big budget advantage, although still can buy the channel at this stage, but does not mean that can buy the speech right. No doubt the marketing bombing failed to maintain Samsung's market dominance, the Chinese market has also been overtaken by millet.

Therefore, although the brand has already realized that the mainstream discourse position is transferring from traditional media to new media, it often fails to pay attention to the two-way communication and strong interactivity of the new discourse environment. Although you can advertise the user on any audible channel, it doesn't prevent me from spitting the quality of the Samsung phone.

Therefore, a pluralistic discourse environment requires advertisers to guide the direction of discourse, to require advertisers and new mainstream voice positions to enter a deep level of cooperation, to find a way to balance the free public opinion, and the two sides no longer is a simple transaction or agency relationship, or even condescending coverage of all vocal positions.

For example, more and more programs seek cooperation with micro-blog, this cooperation from program planning to production, and even to the follow-up spread, the whole chain of reintegration. The relationship between the brand and the media has become more tactical and strategic than before.

Concluding remarks: A big brand that doesn't change

Large advertisers tend to act slowly because they are limited to volume or deep-rooted traditional ideas.

Kantar Media data showed that the top 100 advertisers in 2013 made 45% contribution to overall advertising spending, spending increased by 3.3%, while the remaining small advertisers (1001) overall fell 6.6%, and their advertising spending fell by about 23.4% last year.

In the face of a turning point in the media environment, large companies accustomed to maintaining the market through monopolistic discourse do not seem to have made any changes, trying to use a larger budget to achieve the greatest possible share of existing discourse resources to slow the pain of market transitions. But does this approach really work? The answer is obvious.