Why do most startups fail at marketing?
Text / Shen Shuaibo
Everyone who has studied formal marketing theory has an obsession with brand, system, and value in their hearts. These obsessions have made them the heads of the marketing, advertising, and public relations departments of large companies, and they continue to prove that this is an effective method. Until they get into a startup (Internet or not, even a small restaurant), it seems like a lot of things are falling apart.
Next, I will explain the mistakes, misunderstandings, and pits that I have seen with my own eyes. This is not an article about standing up and talking without back pain, but a reflective article.
Most marketers of large companies are good at positional warfare and legion warfare. Only with enough guns, food, and bases can a complex, continuous, and large-scale coordinated marketing strategy be implemented. If not, please fight guerrilla warfare, do not scatter eagles if you don't see rabbits, and don't hang strings if you don't see devils. At stage 0, everything is shit because you have nothing. Everything you do is to build your company's footing. A friend who worked for a large chicken chop chain for five years. In terms of the number of stores nationwide, it is currently the first in the country. She said that when the first store was opened, the three founders borrowed money to rent a Lamborghini, deliver Ferrari, and secretly put environmental slogans with their logos and addresses on all the trash cans in the vicinity of three kilometers in the middle of the night. Sticker. Without this foundation, the franchise system, cross-border cooperation, endorsement and so on are all illusory castles in the air. Every entrepreneur must be soberly aware of:
Entrepreneurship is not a dinner party, an essay, a painting or embroidery. It cannot be so elegant, calm and gentle. So kind and courteous. Entrepreneurship is a riot. A violent action by a company to overthrow a company. It is a violent action by a company to grab a piece of the market.
The above paragraph is adapted from Mao-Chairman-Chairman's quotations, which I think is very appropriate. You have to recognize all the experience of the marketing work you have engaged in in the past, even if you are a high-profile leader, you cannot let your imagination run wild at this moment, and you must fight guerrilla warfare first. This is the foundation of everything. Don't feel low, there is no low business in the world, only failed and unprofitable businesses. Don't feel that there is no creativity. Creativity is important, but it must be effective first. Only by restraining oneself from overflowing, can it touch the golden thread of Marketing.
All renewable resources can be measured in money, and all non-renewable resources must be cherished. For example: time. A startup’s marketing plan must be launched quickly, validated quickly, and adjusted in the process. What can't afford to delay here is the time, you may miss a month, it is better to close your studies early. The significance of marketing from the perspective of time is to shorten the cycle of brand communication, speed up the speed of communication, race against time, and outperform the opponent. Therefore, all non-core things that delay time can be omitted first, and then made up later.
Wangpin Steak initially focused on first-tier cities. The owner of a second-tier city in the Central Plains saw this business opportunity and quickly opened stores in cities such as Wuhan, which made many locals think that this is the authentic fully cooked steak. This is the power of time grabbing. Of course, this case has the suspicion of Shanzhai. We must save time, save the unnecessary so-called brainstorming, go down the line, and grasp the essence. Time is a magical thing. If there were no three snowfalls in Beijing that year, making it impossible to get a car in the capital, it might not be so quick to develop the behemoth of Didi, or the pattern of rivers and lakes might not be like this.
From another point of view, we want to save consumers' time to understand us. If an advertisement cannot be read in three seconds, it is a failure. Now everyone is like an emperor, holding a mobile phone to review memorials, if you can't catch it for three seconds, then what you miss is eternity. Therefore, in the traditional marketing model, the long-term flow and good inducement are not suitable for you in the early stage. When you have a certain popularity, maybe consumers can take a closer look at what you have in it this time. You must recognize the stage you are in.
This year, there are a lot of articles analyzing how Procter & Gamble Unilever fell from the altar, and they all make sense. But the essence is actually one point. In the final analysis, the FMCG business depends on the demographic structure. If products and marketing strategies don't keep up with demographic changes, they'll be eliminated. In fact, Drucker once summed it up in the essence of the company. Marketers must raise the bar. This is what "If you want to be poor, go to the next level". Sell the product in the right way to the wrong person at the wrong time, and he will not be successful. Remember, Marketing is one part of the business, not everything.
The inherent rules and essence of each industry are different. Just as, most advertising companies fail because of the billing period, and most real estate companies fail because of too much leverage and the capital chain collapses. Most of the so-called platforms hang up because they do not have the characteristics of high-frequency repurchase. Most of the annual sales of beverage companies occur in the summer. Tea companies have to look at the policy trend and whether God has given some way to survive this year. If the fruit company can't sell it for a week, it will be rotten in the warehouse. On the surface, marketing is the same, but in fact, it must be combined with its own characteristics to formulate a plan. All established strategies, in the final analysis, are formulated in combination with their own conditions. Suppose you were successful in selling cosmetics in the past, and now you are selling steel, then you must first jump out of the past thinking path and re-understand the customer and the intrinsic nature of the current business, rather than applying past experience.
Experience is very important, but many times experience is a shackle, locking your vision and thinking depth. Share an experience that I try to get out of the existing framework, that is, when I feel exhausted, I go to experience a new service and go to a new place. Experience and experience are all piled up with money. Pianists, painters, and calligraphers are all piled up with money. In order to understand the whole way of making money for high-end cruise companies, I went to all the charging places on the cruise ship, and as a consumer, I exchanged experiences. I have memorized all their words and found that they are indeed very reasonable. They are better than the words of the roadside stores in ten shopping malls. The reason why many people go to start-up companies to do marketing and are not acclimatized is because they cannot learn from the past experience and do not supplement new knowledge.
A fitness coach told me: To look at a person's exercise level, it mainly depends on his sense of rhythm. The same is true of marketing. It is difficult for a start-up company to achieve the influence and popularity of a century-old store in just a few years. What the century-old store needs to do now is to maintain old customers and prevent the brand from aging. The marketing of startups is only about awareness, sales, and downloads. Don't try to have a plan and include everything. The perfect plan only exists in PPT. If you achieve one goal at a time, you will be a master. If you want to kill three birds with one stone, that can be hard to come by. There must be a sense of rhythm, what should be done at what time, what should be played on what user base, what should be promoted under what industry structure. A marketing executive of a beverage company came to me and said: What should I do, it will become China's Coca-Cola within three years. In fact, this is not realistic. The success of Coke also has the power of time and the habit of so many years. If you can cultivate tens of thousands of loyal addicts in three years, it is a huge success.
Marketing has completely gone out of the purely creative and emotional level, but it must not be lacking in emotion and creativity. On this basis, it must be integrated with numbers and data, (not those cookies and so-called big data in the past) without sticking to words, bold ideas, resolutely embracing changes, digging deeply into the intrinsic value of numbers, to find the real consumers. The purely emotional talents are no longer the protagonists of advertising people. Rationality, sensibility and taste must coexist. For example, Ctrip currently has 300 million registered users, and the average annual consumption of customers is as high as 15,000 yuan. For him, travel itself is a rigid demand for business travel. It is very important to increase the number of orders in all aspects of travel. Here, simply relying on copywriting, video and other means cannot solve the problem. They have adopted more technologies, such as recording your geographic location through an APP. If you are resident in Shanghai, you suddenly appear in the West Lake, then you will receive a text message and give you a coupon for a nearby hotel. If you inquired about the air ticket to Beijing tomorrow through the APP, but did not place an order, there will be a text message to notify you that there are air tickets, hotels, waiting room coupons, etc. Image social software like "in", which analyzes the pictures uploaded by a large number of users, and then combines with the brand owner, they call it the "UGCcenter" project, which has broken away from the simple hard and wide mode of the past.
This is also the reason why many start-up companies fail in marketing. They either focus too much on emotion or too much on technology. In fact, the combination of the two is indispensable.
After all, we are all passers-by of the times. In some moments, we thought we had grasped the pulse of the times, but in fact, we were just lucky to be selected by the times. All we can do is do our best and give our best. The rest is up to God's will. As Mr. Sun Yat-sen said: The world is in a great and mighty state. Those who obey will prosper, and those who oppose it will perish. In fact, there is no successful marketer, but the times have given you and me opportunities. Whether you can catch it or not depends on your own creation.
Original link: http://36kr.com/p/5055034.html