Not to win customers just to meet demand

Author: Shang

A good book will allow me to do two things: one is to write a reading notes, deepen understanding, and the second is to buy a few to send friends, share good things.

According to the understanding of the horse, there are three stages in life: The first stage is the profit, the material, because you need money, to live, as long as it does not violate morals and law; the second stage is the name of the person, the material has to want to have a reputation, social status; The third stage is decided, fame and wealth have, found that people die what also can not take away, only to soothe their hearts , to settle the soul.

The second stage of the name, not necessarily to achieve how high social status, but everyone wants to get more recognition: self-recognition and recognition. In the stage of the trend, people are more inclined to buy a "brand" of goods, but also the category of No.1 brand. No.1 brand as a public recognized "tag" frequency is now in every aspect of consumer life. Although taking a table, driving a good car, reading a prestigious university, does not mean that you must be a person with social status, but for users, he would think he should be so, I am No.1. "No.1 label" affixed to their own body, not only to meet the needs of people's self recognition, but also allow themselves to increase the opportunity to be recognized (birds of a feather flock together). Therefore, No.1 brand is the consumption just need!

Today, the average U.S. consumer advertising year has reached 200 dollars. If you spend 1 million of dollars a year on advertisers, the average advertising fee for every consumer is less than half a day. And each consumer has been exposed to more than 200 dollars of other advertising bombing. Becoming a No.1 brand has become an incredibly difficult business.

Landing Alibaba China, I found 502,909 women bag products, 21,845 juicer products, 4,607 mosquito-repellent incense products, 30,848 hot water bag products. American households have an average of about 50 channels to choose from, but ordinary consumers usually watch only five or six channels, and when you find a show you want to watch, it's over. A copy of The New York Times, which may contain 500,000 words, is calculated at an average speed of 300 words per minute, and it takes about 28 hours to complete (so the title party is important). Today, an ordinary supermarket can display 40,000 kinds of goods, by contrast, there are only about 8,000 words per person. There are now more than 175 brands of cigarettes in the market, and to build a vending machine to hold all these brands of cigarettes, it has to be 9 meters long. In the past, professionals (lawyers, dentists, accountants, etc.) had always regarded advertising as a loss of identity. But money is more important than dignity, so in order to make money, all kinds of professionals are starting to sell themselves.

The cruelty of competition is self-evident. "People have lost their way so much that they stop worrying about getting sick and worry more about where they can get better treatment," he said. -Jack Trout & Steve Rivkin. Although "better products, more excellent service" emerge in endlessly, but not too many businesses because of the production of better products in a category of hegemony. "Positioning" statistics on the United States since 1923 to sit on the first brand (selected 25 categories), to 77 years after the turn of the century, only 3 of these brands have lost the leading position. The president of a large consumer goods manufacturing company recently said: "Stick out a few new brands that have successfully penetrated the national market in the past two years, not even the pinky." ”

Why is that? Because consumers have their own plans! How consumers look at you determines how long your business will live! "He's the one who sells ordinary popcorn." He is a common microwave "," he sold mobile phones, televisions, computers, home theater, everything to sell, consumers today to buy your popcorn, microwave ovens, tomorrow can buy someone else, today to buy your mobile phone, tomorrow will not necessarily buy your TV, He will be more inclined to specialize in the brand of television (he is excellent, more inclined to consider No.1 things). Do you have a word in the consumer mind? Is he firm and first? A cognitive survey of blenders was conducted in the mid 1980s. The customer was asked to name all the mixer brands they remembered, and GE was ranked second. Surprisingly, GM has not produced a blender for nearly 20 years.

of business

How consumers look at you leads to deep thinking: what do consumers use to look at you? The answer is that consumption uses the "mind" to see you. Everyone's mind is not the same, some people tend to the first line of brand, some people tend to the second-line brand, which has a great relationship with people's life stage, but the mental work is the same law.

"Positioning" summarizes the mental 5 working laws:

1: The mind is tired of coping

What you see is always what you want to see, the information we transmit is increasing every year, but the information that is accepted by people is decreasing. In Britain, when a child is 18 years old, he has contacted 140,000 television commercials. The weary mind is actually a closed door!

2: The Mind hates chaos

When your brand cannot be clearly described and shared by consumers, you are in big trouble. The best way to cope with the spread of society is to simplify information as much as possible. Communication is as simple as architecture. You must "sharpen" your message so that it can be cut into the human mind.

3: Mental Insecurity

If your product has been in the market for a long time, people will trust you more and feel more secure when buying. There are many reasons for mental insecurity, one of which is the perceived risk of doing basic activities such as buying:

L Money risk: I can lose money by buying this thing.

L Functional Risk: This may not be easy to use, or step into the imagination so easy to use.

Personal risk: This looks a bit dangerous and I may get hurt.

• Social risk: What do friends think if I buy it?

L Psychological Risk: If I buy it, I may feel guilty or feel irresponsible.

This explains why people always sympathize with weak brands, but buy the leading brands. If everyone else buys it, I should buy it too.

4: The mind cannot be changed

"My heart has decided, do not confuse me with the fact!" "This is the way most people live. Consumers only accept new information that conforms to their state, filtering out everything else. The key words here are "in accordance with their status", "New information."

5: The mind loses focus

The more Products a brand represents, the more likely it is to lose focus, like a Chevy car, which is gradually losing its meaning in people's minds.

How big is the mind? That's a little pathetic! The mind is like a dripping sponge, full of information. Only when the existing information is squeezed out can space absorb new information. Dr. Miller, a Harvard University psychologist, studies that the customer's mind can only leave seven brand space for each category. So, if you want to go to what university study, want to buy what car, the answer is often Tsinghua University BMW Mercedes-Benz, tomato sauce is Heinz, razor select Gillette, mysterious washing powder, toilet six God. "Positioning" in this also summed up a "two Yuan rule", in each category, the end will only have two brands dominate the entire category. such as: Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Gold overlord and strength, Sotheby's and Christie's, McDonald's and Burger King, China Mobile and Unicom, God and the devil.

In the course of human development, the consumer's mental characteristics have never changed, the change is this era, its change has never violated the mental work law.

Early in the product era (less media, technology underdevelopment), you have to do is to introduce better products, and focus on the characteristics of products and customer interests. But this time has not lasted too long, the development of technology to allow a large number of imitation products into the market, the end of the product era, and soon there are two other and you as good products appear, all claimed to be better than the first. Therefore, the image of the times came into being, the company needs a good reputation and image to help open the product sales situation. One of the most important representatives of the image era is Ogilvy founder David. However, just as the product era was destroyed by the copycat products, the copycat companies also destroyed the image of the times. When every company tries to build its own image, it interferes with each other so much that few companies can achieve success.

"Positioning" will now and future times call the era of positioning, emphasis on winning customer choice of positioning, rather than meet customer needs is what you have to do everything. Let them consider you at the choice stage, remembering that your goal is not to advertise or build a reputation, but to build a position in the mind of a potential client.

This book gives me another revelation is that the way to measure the decisive performance of the business has shifted from the traditional financial profitability to the position of ownership (mental resources) or not. This also explains why in the TMT industry, investors value the number of users, user viscosity, as for the profitability of the problem, slowly.

I like this book, mainly because the author from the bottom to think about the problem, cautioned that people do not blindly do publicity, business to think clearly before, or die do not know how to die, once a person left a first impression, will never have the opportunity to change it. Any brand that has no place in the customer's mind will eventually disappear from reality, and the disappearance of the brand directly means the disappearance of the brand behind it. But how to use "positioning" as a production tool in China? It may be that the book does not give much thought to (after all, the translation of Things). After reading the "positioning", we continue to read the "commercial War", "relocation" of the two books, the order of three books should not be reversed.

I think three main factors will hinder the wide application of positioning theory in China:

1: The domestic demand for quick vs. The agency counted the distribution of work hours per day for PR people, and the strategic planning work was only assigned to poor 10%. This makes people worry about the overall effectiveness of the work, even if the PR people can not represent all.

2: "Speaking" Cannot equal "do". My understanding is to position more "speaking" level, and whether the user and enterprise stickiness is not entirely dependent on the effectiveness of positioning work. When a user decides to buy a product, it is even more important that his purchase experience and after-sale experience be consistent with your position. The real experience of the brand must be closely combined with the virtual experience. This is difficult to do in China, many entrepreneurs to sell to first, after the sale. Easy to locate, difficult to execute.

3: Like all-inclusive mentality, in short focus. When you want to meet the needs of everyone, you can not be satisfied, because at the beginning of the product design to adapt to different scenarios you will make a variety of compromises, this compromise makes the product become mediocre.

Although positioning can not solve all the problems encountered by enterprises in the competition, but positioning to help enterprises learn the basic rules of business game, get tickets to the game. The competition of marketing is a competition about the mind, the ultimate battlefield of marketing competition is not the factory nor the market, but the mind. The mind determines the market and the success or failure of marketing. Entrepreneurs need to always think about how to make you unique in the minds of potential customers, is the premise of company survival!

I have also recently applied the positioning theory to my daily observations, for example, when I saw Van Gogh announcing that I was positioning myself in the integrated mall, my first counter is his future will not be very good, online integrated mall The mind of the "vacancy" has been occupied by Jingdong, a shop, where the goods sold by customers more miscellaneous, The more customers do not know what it is (it should not sell shirts). Lenovo launched a new mobile phone, I have a hunch will not sell very well, who buy mobile phone will be the first to think of Lenovo?